The Gifts of Mortality

Chapter 5, part two

I'm not the best at physical descriptions (gosh, these things are so clear in my head, but they don't translate well to the page!). So, please let me know if you're having trouble visualizing something I describe in this chapter and I'll take another pass at it.

Thank you so much!

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The God of Festivals and the Arts is used to traveling by stepping in and out of paintings, books, and music. His companion is not.

Rachel finds sensation of changing from a living human being into a two-dimensional painting is neither painful nor pleasant.

When she slaps her hands down on the god's open palms, he grasps them and smiles back at her. She begins to feel a numbness creeping through her hands and up her arms, snaking through the rest of her body. She feels an absolute disassociation—it feels like the connection between her mental and physical selves has been severed and she's left trapped inside her conscious mind, lifting out of her body.

She thinks she tries to wrench her hands out of Samil's hold, but she can't feel if she's actually pulling away or if she's imagining it.

Rachel looks down at her hands, still held by his palms, and discovers that she's lost the periphery of her vision. A bright white tunnel is intruding into her sight and the small circle in the center that she's left with is shrinking. It's shrinking. Shrinking. Gone.

She opens her mouth and she knows she screams. She can feel the violence of the sound tearing through her throat, leaving it raw in its wake, but she can't hear herself. All she can hear is a dull, muffled ringing noise.

It's her vision that begins to return first. The intrusive white tunnel shrinks back to the periphery where it had emerged from and her field of sight eagerly claims every bit of ground it gives up.

Rachel blinks and, at first, thinks something must still be wrong with her eyes. There's something off about her surroundings and the painting Samil had brought her into.

The color is the first thing she notices. Everything around her is formed from splashes of muted gold and greens with a few spots of brilliant white and red.

It takes her brain a moment to sort the colors into figures and shapes that she recognizes. Although the figures around her are uncanny enough to mark them as non-flesh-and-blood people, Samil has kept his word and chose a painting that is a far cry from cubism or expressionism.

The two of them are in a cavernous hall amidst a crowd of statue-still people dressed in historical finery. Rachel looks around and down at the faces of the short, unmoving people surrounding her. They're dressed in furs, velvets, satins, silks, and more. Each is wearing a fortune in jewelry around their wrists, necks, in their ears, and sewn into their clothing. Every member of the crowd stands a head or two below her.

She catches the eye of the other giant looming over the crowd. Samil stands smiling apologetically nearby with a few nobles between them.

"Was it awful?" he asks. "I'm sorry if it was."

"It was fine," Rachel lies. "Why do you look like that?"

"It was terrible, wasn't it?" Samil groans, throwing his head back. "I really tried my best, gave it everything I had. I picked out the perfect painting, large and true to life. Each one of them," he gestures wildly at the motionless figures nearby, "are all short because I didn't adjust our heights at all to travel into here. It was supposed to go smoothly."

"Samil," Rachel tries to interrupt. "It's fine. Why do you look like that?"

"What could I have done to make it smoother?"