Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed. We have all laid aside disguise except for you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla (beside Cassilda): No mask? No mask!
- From The King In Yellow. Act I, scene II.
Why is it that painting opens the mind to such new, and unreal realities? Artist, those who can create worlds with a mere swing of a paint-dipped brush across a pallid canvas. Such talent is seen as both a blessing and a curse to many, as the artists of aristocracy and monarchy days are far less prominent than they once were. In the modern world, it is only those who can adapt their mind's eye to the realms ruled by the Gods of Egypt; designing the Monsters for the ever-popular Duel Monsters card game.
Constance splashed her canvas with shades of flesh-pink, and tints of gold as she carefully adapted her model from the real world into that of portrait. Her messy, tomboyish hair was covered in a few specks of blue paint, with her tanned skin contrasting to the rainbow of the stuff that had been spilled over her; an apron looking like it had taken a walk through a rainbow being tied to her chest. She looked back and scanned her progress with those brown eyes of hers. She noticed the colour of the flesh was the opposite of her intended vision; sickly, and with a hue of green to it, instead of making her model's skin appear radiant. She let out a growl out of frustration, and gestured for her guest to give her moment.
The women beyond the canvas ceased posing, and stepped into out of the studio to smoke a cigarette. Constance went to her window, opening it to get a taste of the warm, summer air. Her apartment complex overlooked the school district of Miami City, with a rather intimidating presence of the LDS tower looming in the centre. Below her were a few students of the elite academy were Duelling. The tentacles of an Evagishki Gustkraken slithered across the road, quickly grasping for the opposing Samsara, Dragon of Rebirth, which had been snared by a Fiendish Chain. Constance watched the Duel from her window, flashing a smile as she watched the students become enthralled in the Duel; an art in its own right.
Her eyes, however, did move from the Duellists and towards the ally just beside them. Standing, in the shadows was a figure draped in what looked like a yellow hood, and spinning something in its hand. Constance looked at the person, an expression of fascination on her face as she placed her cigarette in her mouth. The sound of her lighter must have caught the ears of the yellow-clad figure, as they looked up to meet Constance's gaze after she lit her smoke. It was a girl, around the same age as those enrolled at LDS, but her appearance was anything but normal. She reminded Constance of a sickly, almost corpse-like piece of art from her days studying abroad. Hair so white and skin so grey, she was like a walking grave worm. However, it was her eyes that really made her stand out; yellow, like the tattered hood pulled over her head, and pupils that gave more of a reptilian feeling than human.
The girl made Constance change her expression from curiosity to revulsion, which made her move away from the window so that their eyes would not be locked any longer. Watching the girl turn her gaze towards the Duel beside her made Constance close the window, and attempt to push the strange encounter from her mind. Just as she did, she moved over to her painting and looked at the horrific mess she had made of the whole thing. What was suppose to be a pitch for new artwork for Dark Magician Girl had become a mess of sickly tones and botched linework.
"Do you really think I look like that? You really think my skin has the tone of green cheese?" Came a voice from beside Constance. She turned, and saw her friend and model standing beside her, still clad in her cosplay and smoking as she looked disapprovingly at the portrait.
"Of course not, Piper! I just made a mistake with the colours is all. My pallet must have needed more washing, or maybe that grey worm out there cursed my damn brush." Constance responded, after shaking her head.
"Grey worm?" Asked Piper, looking a little curious as she took a drag on her cigarette.
"Just some corpse bride wondering around down there." She said, gesturing to the window.
Piper walked towards the window and stood where the artist had been, the sunlight displaying her milky skin, and blonde hair done up to resemble the character she was modelling as. The rather tightly fitting outfit left little to the imagination, and was the main reason she perused a career in modelling to begin with; something which made Constance thankful for her talent, seeing drawing such a buxom figure as a perk of her chosen profession.
"Blimey! You don't mean the girl in the yellow cloak, do you?" She said, looking rather shocked as she turned her deep blue eyes to look at her friend.
Constance looked at her with a puzzled expression, and moved to join the model at the window. She looked down to see the hooded girl from before, sat on a bench watching the students Duel.
"Yeah. That one, there. That was a cloak? I thought it was a beaten up raincoat or something." She remarked, before looking to her friend, who was holding her hand over her mouth in shock.
"I dreamt about her!" Piper said to a now more puzzled Constance.
"What? Oh, come on, Piper! Even for you, that's a little crazy! She's just some sickly student at LDS, I'm sure."
"No, I did! And you were in it! It was the strangest thing I've ever had floating around in my head!" She exclaimed.
"Dreaming about me, are you? Can't be the worst thing..." Constance quipped, her tone slightly flirtatious.
"Hey! Don't be like that, I'm serious! It was still so strange, though. I saw you, me, and that weird looking girl along with a bunch of others I didn't recognize. Some of them had Duel Disks, and others just hunched over crying. We were all in what looked like a golden throne room, and the grey worm was sat on this huge throne, singing something I didn't recognize. There were... black stars in the sky, which was a deep purple; two suns and a huge lake seemed to go on forever. I still can't quite recall all the details."
That description made a bell ring in Constance's head. She had read something about black stars, and twin suns; however, she couldn't for the life of her remember where she had read such a strange depiction of reality. She merely shook it off and shrugged a little to her friend.
"Well, there's been stories of people with precognition. Maybe you've got psychic powers?" She said, playfully.
Piper rolled her eyes and dropped the subject. While she was somewhat spiritual, Constance was always hard to convince of anything remotely abnormal. An artist being a devout agnostic was something of a paradox in her mind; how do such people gain inspiration if they cannot believe in either the revolutions of science, or the legends of religion?
"Forget it. So, are you going to attempt to fix... that?" She asked, nodding in the direction of the botched portrait that made her look like a vaguely zombified Dark Magician Girl.
The artist ran her hand through her hair as she tried to think of a way to save the canvas, only to sigh in defeat. She walked over, and put her cigarette out on the still-wet paint; a hiss of extinguished fire sounding as she removed the stub and left a noticeable burn mark.
"This is pretty much dead. Might be the turpentine, or the paints. We'll start something new tomorrow, and I'll scrap this." She said, as she pulled a knife from her table and slashed into the canvas.
"What beasts artists are!" Piper mused, as she stubbed out her own smoke in a near by ashtray.
Constance ignored the comment, and proceeded to vandalize her down work, breaking the canvas over her knee and kicking the remains toward the corner of the studio. She rubbed her eyes before gesturing for Piper to leave her be.
"I need to figure out how the hell we're going to salvage this whole thing, Piper. You go home and I'll hopefully have something in the morning. Oh, and don't walk back in costume again! Last time, you ended up in a damn convention!" She said, a before throwing herself down on the modelling chair to relax.
"Oh, come now! You know this isn't just my job, it's also my hobby." She pointed out, before waving off the comment and walking out of the studio to get changed.
The two said their goodbyes, and Constance folded up the costume and placed it back in the closet for the next day. She would sometimes keep Piper's cosplay in her apartment for their frequent collaborations. It was then that Constance realized that she had barely been in touch with any of her other models for the past few months. Almost all her projects had been with Piper, and this came as a surprise to her; considering she was frequently contracted to provide pieces for Duel Monsters production and local galleries. She thought for a moment about Piper, and the figure that accompanied her. She had never tried so hard to get every curve and proportion just right until she had met her favourite model, and she finally began to acknowledge that she might have something else in mind when choosing her models.
The sun eventually descended behind the Miami skyline, and was replaced by the pale light of a full moon, and the glow of street lamps. Constance had spent the last few hours in her living room and attempting to find a book for inspiration. The words, however, simply did not enter her mind's eye, and she eventually thought about just giving up and heading to bed. The night was dragging, and the clock began to show the early hours were looming.
Closing her book, and placing it back on the shelf, she noticed something that she could swear wasn't there when she had last run through her collection. She pulled out a hard-cover book, wrapped in a yellow fabric. The title alone made her heart skip a beat as she ran her thumb against the imprinted text.
The King In Yellow: a play written in 1889; obscure and heavily censored in many countries, sometimes even banned outright. The myth of the piece alone made it a collectors item, and uncensored copies were worth more than a Blue-Eyes White Dragon to many. It was said that the publisher ended his own life after the book was decried by public and press for its great truths, and simplistic beauty; making those who read it go mad once they read past the first act.
Her hands began to tremble as she realized this was where she had read that description that had a more than passing resemblance to Piper's dream. It came flooding back, the memories of her reading the play as an infant, and the nightmares that followed upon reading the first page of the second act. She remembered Carcosa, and the King; Princess Cassilda, and the Twin Suns that descend into Lake Hali, stretching the ideas of men late in the afternoon. The worst part, however, was the Pallid Mask. The man in the tattered mantle, and his mask that had no expression, but somehow conveyed all the emotions in the spectrum all at once. That was where the nightmares came from. She would dream of the cursed city, and rotting houses and rusted golden spires. She would run through the decrepit streets of Carcosa and attempt to escape the Pallid Mask. All the while, it would follow her; floating through the air like a spectre, and opening its cloak to engulf her.
Slowly, Constance opened the book. She stood there, shaking and trying to not to scream as her eyes scanned the words of the second act. Her mind began to crack as the truth was shown to her, and the Pallid Mask was thrust upon her gaze as she read; only for her to scream and throw the book across the room. It landed just beside the fireplace, open on act two, scene two.
Constance held her knees to her chest, as she cowered in the corner, just staring at the cursed text that would have been destroyed forever had she just aimed her throw. For an hour or more, she just locked her eyes on the book as she tried to hold back more tears; however, there was a morbid, powerful force eating away at her will. The images she saw needed to be seen by others. This truth, this realization could not go unheard, and she crawled back over to the book; picking up where she left off.
"Show me... show me the answers, Hastur." She mumbled to herself, as she returned to the horrific blight against literature.
She had to know about it all. About Carcosa, the King, the Princess, and the Pallid Mask. She simply needed to know. Throughout the night, she laughed, she cried, she screamed, and she sang.
From below the window, her sounds could be heard by one person, who had watched from afar. Her yellow cloak flowing in the night's breeze, and a smile creeping across her rotted, maggot-chewed lips. The Grey Worm listened and danced with the song of madness the artist made that night, and rewarded her with the Yellow Sign.