Erik closed his eyes and tried to reign in his breathing after Tess left. How dare she! How dare she speak ill of Christine! To think that she had accused him of loving her only for the sake of his own vanity, it was madness! He had loved her with all his heart and soul, had poured his spirit and music into her, amplifying her own natural beauty a hundredfold.

Erik collapsed back onto the couch and released his death-grip on the object being crushed in his hands. He had warped the circle of reeds around the perimeter of the web in his anger. He pulled at the braid, trying to force it back into its original shape, but it remained slightly bent despite his efforts.

Spoiled little doll. Insolence! Christine had been a bit childish in certain (always endearing) ways, but she was never spoiled. Tess was jealous, that was all. The girl was mad. She did not know of what spoke. How could a child like that possibly know the face of evil? He knew evil. He had served evil more than once, and saw its face in every mirror he passed. Erik put the web aside, laying it on the couch next to him, and buried his face in his hands. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl! Why did she rouse such conflicted feelings in him? He was fascinated by her, he owed her a great debt, and yet he wanted to throttle her, grasp her by the neck and shake her until some measure of sense seeped in. Why did her foolish words cause such a deep pain? No one had been able to pierce him so and survive to tell the tale since he last spoke to the Persian daroga.

He looked up through parted fingers as the door cracked and slowly opened. Oro stepped into the room, hesitating a moment before walking over to where Erik sat. He bent down and gathered up the papers on the floor, somehow catching sight of the sketch underneath the couch and pulling it out as well. He sat down next to Erik, dropping the sketches in his lap.

"I saw Tess in the hall. She's rather angry. I assume you said something to her, and it must have been quite something indeed. I do not know what, but she was practically screeching 'hypocrite!' as she stormed off. I think she's quite frightened a few of my staff."

Erik propped his head on his folded hands and stared at some indeterminate spot on the floor.

"Tess is a fool and I told her as much."

Oro's expression turned grim.

"That's a rather harsh judgment, and one I do not believe she entirely deserves. May I ask what she did to earn this condemnation from you?"

"She said that I loved Christine for the sake of my vanity only, and called her spoiled. Nonsense! Utter rubbish! The girl is clearly insane with jealousy of Christine's beauty!"

"Oh, is she? That is quite odd, you know, considering the fact that she has never seen Christine."

"Well obviously she gathered some knowledge of Christine's superior beauty and grace when I was rambling in my madness."

"Has it ever occurred to you, Erik, that it is not Christine's appearance or skills that she covets, but rather her hold over your thoughts?"

Erik laughed.

"If that girl desires my presence, much less my thoughts, then she truly is mad. I am neither handsome nor wealthy nor kind."

Oro sighed heavily.

"Erik, you worry me. Can you not see even the slightest measure of your own worth? Tess is not a complete fool, no matter how childish she may be acting at the moment, and she's obviously seen something in you she deemed worthy of her time."

Erik sneered. He picked up the grass web again, worrying at the bent spot on the edge.

"She can't see ugliness when it is staring her in the face. She does not know evil when it sits before her. She does not know beauty either. If you sat beauty and ugliness side by side, I doubt she could tell you which was which!"

Erik held up the intricate web to show Oro.

"She spent hours making this earlier today, sitting up in a tree in your garden. When she was finished with it, she tossed it carelessly on the table in the hall, and when I asked her what she was to do with it, she bluntly replied that she would just 'hang it somewhere until it turned brown, then throw it out'. I have never seen a design like this in my life, and she would throw it out as though it were nothing!"

Oro took the object from him to study it.

"She made one of these while you were ill, too, when she was feeling particularly frustrated. It did not seem a difficult task for her. She clearly had her mind on other things while she made it. She could make more of them, no doubt."

Erik threw his hands up in exasperation.

"You two are both mad! Beauty should be treasured, not thrown about like toys!"

Oro pulled Erik to his side firmly, despite Erik's efforts to pull away in annoyance.

"Erik, she can make more. Nothing lasts forever, anyhow. Honestly, child, I worry about you! You have made an idol out of a very narrow definition of physical beauty and you seem completely blind to all other forms. I do not know who poured this self-hatred into your heart, but it is high time you let go of it. If this idol of yours is worth more to you than your friendship with Tess, then I pity you greatly."

Oro let go of him and stood, handing the stack of sketches to Erik.

"I must get back to my work, I'm afraid. I will say one thing before I leave, though. Do not dismiss Tess's words completely. She may have said something cruel to you in her anger, but whatever else she is, she is not a liar. In fact, I have found that she is honest and blunt to a great fault. Open your eyes, Erik. Try to see the beauty around you for what it is. You will accomplish nothing by rejecting everything that does not look or sound like your Christine. She is but one form of beauty among many."

Oro left Erik sitting in the silent library with a sketch of his own eyes still glaring its indictment of him.

Completely blind… Open your eyes, Erik. Better an ugly little toad than a great ugly fool who can't see beyond the end of his own flat nose!

The end of his own flat nose, she'd said. Short-sighted indeed. Their voices flapped around his head like a flock of carrion birds. He squinted his eyes against the headache forming between them and shuffled through the sketches. They were quite good. He never would have expected a rough unpolished creature like Tess to draw like this. She was… not beautiful. She was nearly the antithesis of beauty. She was not ugly either, just a nondescript forgettable plainness. She was practical, earthy and plain. The sort of girl who, if she had been born a commoner in 19th century France (He simply could not envision her as one of the nobility, no matter how hard he tried) would end up as an unhappy but efficient rawboned housewife, rearing her plain children like little soldiers and wrestling her plain husband into a straight, sober life, determined to live with a plain dignity despite their poverty. There was nothing about her that suggested the presence of an imagination or an appreciation for something as frivolous as art.

Well, no, that was not entirely true. The planet they had camped on the night after she'd picked him up had been absolutely stunning. From her familiarity with the terrain and local fauna, it was obvious she had stayed there before. He had not thought much of the fire pit that had clearly seen repeated use, but it seemed likely now that she had been the only one to use it, and had used it often.

Not all beauty is readily apparent.

Erik stared at the sketch of his hands in his lap. He lifted his own hands and stared at them, turning them over and back again and again, trying to discern what about them Tess had deemed worthy of her attention. They were thin, like all of him, with long fingers and large joints. His yellowish skin was just barely starting to wrinkle and loosen with age. All in all, they were not really unusual hands, other than the long fingers. He had seen thinner in his life, though not many.

He flexed his fingers a few times and picked up the sketches again. There were three of his hands, oddly. Nothing else of him, save his eyes, had seemed to garner more than a single study. She had told him that she found him 'interesting.' What kind of idiot describes another's body simply and dismissively as merely 'interesting' and nothing else, as though it were nothing more than some odd object, a vessel utterly disconnected from the entity living inside it?

Someone who values what is within more than what is without, perhaps?

Where did that thought come from? He shook his head. Maybe Oro was right. Maybe he was blind. Tess and Oro both clearly had a vision of the world around them that was broader than his own. He'd always thought himself head and shoulders above the rest of the human race, yet here was a girl who clearly saw things he did not. It was unthinkable!

He suddenly wondered what Christine would have made of the girl. Christine had always sought to see the good in others. She had naïvely believed that no one was fully evil. She sought out the good in him, too, at the end, and he had been forced to let her go when she found the last dying ember of purity buried so deep within him that he had not even known of its existence. She had pulled the weak reluctant little thing out into open air, breathing just enough life into it that he would be forced to release her. She had nearly ripped him in two in the process. It was such sweet cruelty that he could not bring himself to hate her for his destruction at her gentle hands.

She was gone now, and he had no one left to tend to the dying ember in his soul or his bleeding heart but an aging grandfather and an infuriating girl. Oro too, sought to bring out the good in him. Tess… Tess sought out the good in him as well, he thought, but she sought out something else too, and it seems she had found in him something she thought… beautiful.

The girl was clearly unhinged.