Color of Devotion

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Written for the fe_contest comm challenge #008: "flying through the rainbow sky."

He could see it on the canvas- white-feathered wings turned gold in the sunset, caught in a webbing of luminous clouds. The sky shouted with the colors of a desert evening, crimson and violet and deepest rose mingled with sooty gray and traces of salmon-flesh orange.

But those colors shone only in his mind; the canvas before him showed the deep-blue background (the last of his Renaitian Ultramarine layered with diluted indigo), the starkly pale foreground image of the pegasus (half of his remaining lead white), and the gray shadings. The riot of color he needed to capture that scene, that moment of sunset, simply wasn't there, and Forde wasn't sure when or where he might find it.

If I'd gone with Princess Eirika through Carcino, I could have refilled my entire set.

But he was out of King's Yellow, out of vermilion and had used his last trace of malachite green on this painting already. At least his trip with Prince Ephraim had allowed him to score a fresh supply of Grado Pink. But without a warm, rich gold to balance it, all that michew-berry pink would throw the sky out of balance. Without any bright color, the scene was almost a monochrome- and somber enough to drag his spirits down every time he looked at it.

Well, that was no good. It was no good at all to have the shadows of oncoming night pressing around the pegasus and its rider. Forde shook his head, reached for the jar of Grado Pink and so began to liven up the lattice of clouds. As the sky lit up one brush-stroke at a time he could feel some knot of tension deep inside of his soul grow slack and untangle. It wasn't exactly true that the act of painting gave him peace, any more than it was entirely true (no matter what his brother Franz believed) that Forde painted his usual landscapes to master his knowledge of terrain. The actual work of creating a painting was always a struggle between his soul and his hand, between the images captured in his mind's eye and the physical reality of his brushes and paint. Winning those miniature battles- or at least losing with a certain sense of style- gave Forde his release from the concerns of the greater war that had them all snared in a net of darkness.

And lighting up this sky, in this particular painting, mattered a little more to him than just capturing the right color of the shaded side of a mountain or the perfect texture of an open grassland.

Forde made some headway on the painting before the mess bell clanged for supper, but that only made it all the harder to break away. That knot in his soul wouldn't untangle just yet, and leaving the painting as it was made the strands in that knot coil back a little more tightly. Grado Pink screamed for yellow to counter it- true King's Yellow, darkened ever so slightly to a warm gold. Forde would have liked to just push the problem out of his head entirely until they'd reached a city and he could buy some new paints, but the more his painted sky flared to life, the harder it was to shut down that need to get it all the way there. He could see those feathered wings bathed in golden light, suspended before the glowing rainbow curtain of sunset. They were as real as the withered sausages poking out of the seething pot of water, as real as the plate in his hands.

What was paint, anyway? Pigment dissolved into some sort of binding agent, water or oil or even the white of an egg. He'd improvised before- with crushed glass, with soot from the fire, and even once with a lady's discarded make-up. A pity yellow wasn't in fashion; if he'd needed red, he might have been able to talk Tethys out of her lip-rouge. No, make-up wasn't the answer this time. He could look for some brightly colored rocks, bang them into a powder, and mix that with the oil he used on his armor...

"What are you staring at?"

Though his unfinished painting occupied at least three-quarters of his mind, the rest of his brain was on task, engaged with his surroundings. Forde answered Kyle's brusque question without a second's hesitation.

"Garcia always puts such a terrifying quantity of mustard on his food. It's a wonder the man can taste anything at all."

Pigment dissolved into oil. Ground-up, brightly colored seeds mixed into a binding agent. More than one of his shirts over the years bore testament to the staying power of mustard. Forde leaned across the circle of their campfire.

"Garcia! Care to share some mustard? This sausage needs a little something to make it palatable."

The affable ex-knight grinned through his beard and nudged his son to ferry the mustard to Forde.

"Thanks, Ross," Forde said as the boy handed him the open jar. He scooped some mustard onto his plate with the handle of his knife- one dollop on the tough venison sausage (which could definitely stand some help in the flavor department) and a second on the cleanest spot on the plate. Forde was careful not to let one drop of grease fall into that little heap of yellow pigment through the remainder of the meal.

When supper was over, Forde collected his knife, plate, and cup as though he were going to wash them up in the communal trough, then veered leftward toward his tent instead of joining the wash line. As expected, he heard Kyle's heavy step following behind him.

"Where are you taking that plate?"

"It's for a midnight snack!" Just give Kyle one more reason to think he was touched in the head.

Forde eluded his comrade easily, or perhaps Kyle just gave up on him. Back at the tent, conditions were ideal; Franz had the evening watch and wouldn't be back for several hours. It was just Forde, his painting, and the remaining moments of natural light. He'd stowed the unfinished painting behind the tent at suppertime- this wasn't something he could pass off to Franz as an exercise in terrain. Now he set up with haste, uncapped his empty pot of King's Yellow and scraped the mustard into it, then mixed it up with the end of his brush to take advantage of any last grain of original paint left clinging to the walls of the jar. The mustard wasn't quite the same hue as the real paint; it was a little darker, a little less bold. It was exactly what he needed.

Forde touched the end of his most finely-tipped brush to his improvised paint and traced a stroke along the underside of a cloud. Perfect. Just perfect. The texture wasn't quite what he was used to, and it might dry strangely, but if he didn't get ahead of himself...

Soon his palette sported several variations on a theme of Garcia's Special Mustard- mixed with lead white for a delicate gold, mixed with Grado Pink to get that perfect sunset salmon, mixed with Campfire Soot Black for a nice earthy accent. Daylight was fading; the real sky above Forde showed a blandly pretty sunset of cloudless blue shading into orange. He had to work as fast as his own fingers and the paint would allow.

His crazy idea was turning out all right- he'd have to share this escapade with Kyle during one of the moments where Kyle was unwound enough to appreciate it. The brilliant sky he needed was there now, lit up with every color from red through violet and anchored by the fingers of rosy light reaching across the blue. The foreground image wasn't stark and cold any longer, as the wings and body of the pegasus were gilded by the unseen sun. Flashes of darker gold pierced the shadows, made the swirls of gray comforting instead of ominous, and all the rich yellows contrasted with the streak of malachite green floating above the shoulder of the faceless rider, brought the green to life so it stood out against the blue sky instead of fading into it.

The sunlight at his back deserted him. Forde set down his palette; it was time to bring everything back in the tent. If the painting wasn't perfect, he could always touch it up tomorrow...but it was so close! When he'd cleaned and stowed his equipment, Forde stood back a few paces and took in his painting as a new set of eyes might. His eye first went to the great explosion of color in the upper left, where the crimson and purples were brightest, then followed the pinks and golds in an arc to the image of the pegasus, where the eye lingered a little on the rider, on that streak of malachite hair and on one illuminated hand gripping the reins. Then the eye followed the deeper yellows and salmons in another arc downward, where at last the viewer might notice the details of the desert terrain, the black silhouettes of scrub palms and the deep-blue shadows of the dunes.

Maybe it already was perfect. Maybe when viewed under better conditions- in true sunlight, instead of the inconstant candlelight of the tent- Forde would see something he'd missed. But right now, he felt this painting was exactly what it was supposed to be. Forde decided he didn't even need to cover it up for the night; Franz would have have a good time wondering how this one fit into any grand plans for knightly self-improvement. Forde smiled to himself; he'd have to explain that aspect of the condition of man to his younger brother sometime soon. Though, judging by how often Franz went off training with that little recruit from Grado, he was well on his way toward understanding it on his own.

And now, with that tension in his soul released for another day, Forde could enjoy with a clear conscience the one thing that was better than painting. He settled into his bedroll, cast one final look at the pegasus rider soaring through the rainbow sky, and closed his eyes for the night.

The End

Notes:

All colors based on real pre-industrial equivalents. Which are, for the most part, incredibly toxic things- lead, mercury, arsenic. Don't eat the paint!

Michew berries are FE8 canon from the Neimi-Amelia supports.

Based on Forde's own supports, he rarely (if ever) paints portraits, for reasons of his own. This faceless representation of Vanessa is therefore intended as a signifier that he rather likes her.

The idea of using mustard to complete a painting is not my own; the inspiration comes from an anecdote of Ronnie Wood, the guitarist from the Rolling Stones who paints on the side and has several books about his own artistic capers. His own mustard painting was of Mick Jagger; I'd rather have the one of Vanessa!

Finally, the title kind of plays off the conception of the mustard seed as a symbol of faith, though in Forde's case the devotion isn't exactly of the spiritual sort.