66 to 76

66# EyeGate fire on Sleeping

Synthetics on reversed Trilobite shell.

What seems to be a sunset is a watch fire on the Nightmare Sea. A mixture of oil from psychic whales and chemiluminescent stacks received through mysterious but unending trade with those below. The EyeGate fire is always lit, and, like every light on the nightmare sea, it is a warning, not an aid. In the blur of lights all objects are removed. Only the light and the storm, the sea and the white cliffs.  (Everyone has nightmares on the nightmare sea as Aboleths make it their embassy)

67# Tyrants Tectonic

Model of a proposed building.

This is the intended temple of a light-bearing god who wages fruitless conflict against the spherical tyrants of the worlds tectonic core. It looks like a science experiment, part telescope, part amphitheatre, part staging post for an underground war. Though the building itself is roofless and clearly placed underground.

68# Remainder of a Theft

Spectre of a fresco, conjured by a specialist necromancer.

This spirit is held frozen by encircled wards. Multiple layers of the fresco can be seen at once, the working-out drawings, plumb-bobs, angles, compass marks and original, more-radical sketch. Then the finished piece and its slow decay, all at once in silver and grey. The subject;  a woman holds the ghost of her fearful self inside her flesh.

But this is only one small remaining part of the whole.

69# Dancer

Impossibly delicate sculpture of ruby and emerald.

This is locked in a physics-dulled glass case that is itself a minor treasure.

The veins and arteries of this person have been crystallised by some unknown process. The dead flesh was then carried away by a slow chemical bath. Arterial blood has become a network of ruby, veinous blood an interlocking network of green emerald. The reproduction is exact down the slenderest nets of the eye or the channels under the palm. The area around this one-of-a-kind piece is always silent.

70# Creation Halo’s

Sculpture-Lamps in Gold.

(These are the same kind of lamps seen in the image in 87.) Cage-like networks of gold in the shapes of a woman and a man. Each cage is also a golden lamp whose blue flame burns inside like a trapped bird and sends arcs of fire, scorchless, through the empty figures heads to stand like burning crowns or halo’s of vermillion air.

71# The Hiding Man.

Slate lithograph.

There is clearly a man hiding behind this painting, but when you pull it away or turn it round, you can’t see him. Inside the painting is a copper sky with an azure ruin underneath. Daemon’s hunt through the sky-shaded stones under the celestial metals. They are dragging people of for torture and judgement. Signs in the painting indicate that they are recovering a debt, that this kind of behaviour is to be expected from daemons, and that the people involved probably deserved it. In the painting is a stone, behind the stone hides a man.

72# The Flower of Ash.

Life sized sculpture of a naked woman in clear glass.

This naked woman crouches with one hand on her head, the other on her thigh. Her body twists, her worried face looking down, long hair down her back. The glass is filthy with dust and can never be fully cleaned. The dust runs in endless barely-visible rivulets up and down the folds of her flesh and her hair, the crooks of her limbs and the corners of her eyes. It never stops.

73# Temple-Projecting Lamp

This lamp holds carefully constructed colours of vermillion, azurite, malachite and gold. It is made to project upon the walls of an enclosing cave, the image of a temple to the Optical God. Saints and stories ash forth from its burnished surface and colour and shape the walls of the cave with gospels and holy grace. To some degree, this lamp is a temple to that god, with all of the benefits and consequences that infers.

The portability and usefulness of its churches may be one of the only reasons the cult of the Optical God survives at all, so far from the light of the sun.

74# Whalebone Totem Pole.

The mildly-psychic whalebone of this totem makes the figures seem to writhe and gawp. Stacked faces carved by blind hands in the gleaming shadows of the Bone-Beach Sea. The tribes of these isles neither make, nor surrender their totems easily.

Each one holds a competitor-myth of the world’s creation and no tribe can stand the existence of another’s story.

75# Ninety Percent Optimistic

A Guide to Public Murals of City 1A.

This handwritten notebook is the first draft of a prospective guide to the officially  sanctioned ‘positive’ cube murals of Duergar primary city ‘1A’ This city is a grid of carved cubes, arranged in a cube. The boundaries of the city are cuboid. The doors are square. It was briefly considered that murals of a positive and work-affirming nature would prevent wastage of worker elements through self-destruction. A series of square murals were created with correctly organised aesthetic schema. The effect of the murals was minimal and the cost of removing them considered a waste. By this guides account, they stand there still. (The guide, if understood, also forms a kind of map to the city for which no maps exist. All Duegar remember their place in City 1A through a series of mental equations. For anyone else it is a borgesian maze.)

76# Un-named storm

Oils on skin.

Few caverns carry the vastness to sustain a cloud, let alone a storm, but those who can cradle the vortex, do. Even the deep Wyrms and the sorcerers of the infinite chain fear the chaos of the speleo-nimbus or the hurricane beneath. Few ever see one, but hear and feel it only. The howling winds blot out lamps and blind even the dark-sighted, they are known by their voices. This painting is unfinished, the painter was probably killed by the storm they observed, or fled. It is a nest, or hatching of many blackness’s, wrapped around an embryo-curlicue of unseen force. Stormsheep in the foreground raise their limbs, haloed in electric fire.