## Chapter: Barlow
Grand Admiral Ademineos Barlow walked slowly through his gallery, his eyes giving no note to the treasure and riches beyond imagining scattered throughout the hall; the frescos of the Hundred Wars, the Goldskins, the Chimneymounds, and the golden crowns atop the skeletons of two Kings whom his father murdered; the tapestries and rugs, and even, in the farthest corner by the cold fireplace, the chests of overflowing gold and silver.
The wind came creeping in the window in a clear, cold current, and it made the flames dance in the lamps, which were suspended from the wall-beams above the great blackened fireplace. The flames flared up and broke into little pieces, glittering upon the dark red of the tiled floor of the room. Under his feet, the hard tiles swirled in the pattern of oceans, a shape which reminded him of the ship which was his prison.
There was a palpable sense of melancholy in the way he held his gaze straight ahead, toward a familiar painting easel which was his only sense of comfort. As he stepped closer he felt a sense of ease come over him which didn’t quite wash away his inner disturbance, an anxiety like cosmic background radiation that clouded his soul.
He was not old, but he was old. The habit of his rank: a coat woven of gold and gems; heavy; burdensome, weighed on his back and his mind, a constant reminder of his endless and unattainable and inescapable purpose.
The breeze sent a shiver down his back that made his skin crawl. And so Barlow drifted from his thoughts, from the endless sea that was his dominion and curse, back into the room, and there he stood. He thought better with his hands than his tongue, and so he absently picked up the brush that lay on the table next to the easel and started to paint.
What came out was not masterful, but it was at least precise. He had had no teacher apart from the masterpieces hanging on the walls of the room, half of which he had scraped down layer by layer with his knife to see the underlying technique of their masters, and so his learned competency was that of a forger, not an artist. After years staring at these paintings that were not his own, and attempting to copy them brushstroke by brushstroke, his efforts now resulted in near perfect simulacra. He had long since given up trying to create visions of his own imagination; he hadn’t the talent. Past attempts at originality had ended in pieces that were so obviously uninspired that he had immediately thrown them in the fireplace lest anyone see them. One had been the painting of a horse. Another a portrait of his daughter. He had felt no guilt at watching the face burn, since it wasn’t her face, but some evil twin’s that for all it was correct in form, had none of her life. This was then another failure that haunted his mind; it seemed that even in his only escape, he was destined to fail.
Today he was copying a favorite; a painting of a lady gazing out of a window. Over an hour he stood, staring back and forth between the original and his. He was satisfied with the perspective of the window, the shading of the sill, and the lines of the lady’s chin and jaw. The lines and shapes he had mastered, but for some reason, although he was assured that he had all the same inks and oils as the masters had, he always struggled with matching the colors. Red was a particular challenge. The lady in the painting was gazing at the setting sun, which made her skin reflect a soft pink, which he had managed after a few minutes of mixing oils. However the red hues of the sunset itself were not perfect. He couldn’t tell if they were too dark or light, too brown or yellow. On his mixing board the inks looked like a perfect match, but for some reason upon his canvas they were just _wrong_.
He stood there in the pose of an orator, staring at the wrong color. Wrong. It was all wrong. With his arms subdued, and his chin raised, he turned to the center of the room where an imagined audience stood. An audience of old masters who had had the vision. An audience of his ancestors who had had the vision. And he in front of them, sightless. Unable to even distinguish two shades of red, let alone exact revenge upon a lands he could not even find. There was a pain which overtook him, shaking his body. Standing upright he steadied himself against the chest of drawers beside the easel, and felt his heart beat, then stagger. A longing for the end was on him. Its beat became a flutter, its flutter a tremor in a haunted house, its tremor a piteous crescendo; and he dropped to his knees, and found his head in his hands, to pray to God to make an end. He prayed to die, to escape the isolation of the universe, to escape eternity; to have an end and be gone. With the brush in his hand, he shook uncontrollably, and tears began to roll down his face.
He cried then, like a child, in despair and loneliness for the first time in years, and the tears came to clean the redness from his eyes. And he wept bitterly for his father, who he had never known, his mother, who he had abandoned, and his family that had been exterminated; and for his victimizers; and for all his victims; and for the years of isolation in which he found himself. All the years of toilsome striving, fruitless planning, and degenerative searching, they came into his mind and vision like the dark shadows on the sea’s horizon, reaching for him like the waves. He was alone on a ship of ghosts, standing alone aboard its black deck, knocking upon the sky and asking to be let in, but no one answered.
His mind was a storm, a place far away from other men, where all the thoughts that were not happy met in a tomb where they lay drenched in sorrow; where the elements of his nightmares usurped all the chambers of his soul; where no thoughts of the past could be summoned, and no thoughts of the future were worth taming.
He stared ahead and upwards into the darkness upon the ancient, oaken beam of that ancient room, his face nearly touching it, and met the face of the woman in the painting which stared into eyes that were not there to stare back.
The woman’s face looked into the sunset, the window a frame within a frame; the edge of her golden mounting shone brighter than the fire. She stared at him. Though it was beautiful, the face and the woman in the painting were surely dead, dead to all he had ever known, still the recluse seemed to know her soul more clearly than he knew his own. But he feared her appearance, and in his despair feared that her soul was more alive than his own.
Sitting on the floor, draped by his burdensome habit, brush with the wrong color red upon its tip in his hand, he felt his own soul call out from within him deeply, as though it were from far away, as if it were a voice calling out from a far distant past, and he listened to it closely; he raised his chin while in the momentary stillness of his sorrow, and he asked his soul what had he done, what had he done to deserve this fate?
Where was his vision? Where was the color red? He sent out a plea to the last living refuge deep within him to show him beauty. Show him truth. Show him a path.
The plea was answered with the reverberating echoes which pour out of nightmares, a voice which was deep and sweeping. It called his name: death.
