Vortigern
Vortigern stared at the canvas in front of him, blood red paint dripping from his hands to puddle on the floor. Wide open screaming mouths and broken bodies littered his artwork. A raven rose in one corner, its wing leading the eye to a slumped body and lines of text.
'Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more'
Tennyson; Tears, Idle Tears.
The lines of script curved in and around the body in loopy paint splattered scrawls, still legible but disappearing into the highly textured canvas. Blacks and reds, sometimes highlit by a stroke of white, of sullen yellows, of indigo blues, forest floor greens... Dark and screaming as if in nightmares, faces peered out from behind veils of smoke.
Different poems, all morbid and dark, painted on with a thin brush. One painting had the words of the Lady of Shallot by Tennyson behind a female figure. Eyes bound shut and hands together as if she was praying as blood dripped down her face. Mouth slightly parted as the words formed the backdrop, black on red and herself a pure white. The dynamics made it a powerful piece and dead and dying flowers bloomed under her feet and through her hair. Reflected in the mirror in her hands was the back of a knight, Sir Lancelot.
Restlessly, he took the raven painting down and put another one up. Paint daubed hands left fingerprints on the worn pages as he leafed through to find a poem. Here. Yes.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light
Black paint quickly splashed onto the canvas, obscuring any patches of the creamy material as Vortigern painted. A glowering red, dark like drying blood carefully entered the words onto the canvas. An angel, wings bloody stubs, eyes dark holes and mouth open in a silent howl staggered through a nightmare landscape, one hand trailing a broken sword and the other cradling a dead child. The moon overhead was red, and another thought flashed into Vortigern's mind.
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was
a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair,
and the moon became as blood;
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree
casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind...
Revelations, verses 12-13, chapter 6.
Bloody tears rolled from the angel's black eyes as Vortigern painted. Stars fell in great streaks towards the scorched earth, and the words of the poem fluttered as a backdrop.
OOC:
Tennyson - Tears, Idle Tears
- The Lady of Shallot
Byron - Darkness
The Bible, The Revelations of Saint John the Divine.