There had always been a fascination with how things fell apart. Call it an indulgence of humanity. There is something incomprehensibly beautiful about the moment which one breaks, the precise instant when things crumble. And regarding people, the concept is doubly true- that brokenness shears personality to its bones, that it reveals the soul and opens the heart.
Weiss Guertena was a man who knew intimately the pleasure of beautiful, broken things, for he was not so whole himself.
For Weiss Guertena could not be called a man, not in the strictest sense. Weiss Guertena was a force, one rivaling that of gravity itself, as if he could loosen the ground and pull into himself, strong as iron, constant as the tide and the shifting sands.
With words, he had closed the trap.
When she spoke, however, every flag raised, a current of familiarity catching his attention immediately.
How dare she spoke of art as if she knew it.
“One would assume, with the time, the emotion imbued into each piece, art is far more than paint on canvas. What more could it be, then, than an expression of the very soul?”
For that moment, he was still as death, and just as somber.
“Your friend is obviously inexperienced,” the artist intoned. At once, his voice is soft as sin, facade peeling slowly away at the mention of this person; a friend who had mentioned the gallery, a friend who undoubtedly knew far more than he should.
The artist hovered wraithlike behind the query, presence as dark and nearly so haunting.
“If art is freedom, why display it? If art is that life, what right do critics have to scorn it, what right do publics have to view it, and what right does any man have to twist it into the perversion which brought you here today? You who view without thinking, who appreciate only the barest of surfaces, who know nothing of the sacrifice- what do you know of art? A true artist paints with his very life, but what you see as freedom is little more than a beautiful catharsis. There is no subjectivity in this. One cannot create without the pain of feeling, and such emotion is not meant to stay static upon the canvas. Life does not create art. Art creates life.”
The Stillness suffocates. The artist breaks it, stepping away from the closeness to leave her to turn and face him, should she please, and to look into the eyes of all that art becomes. An empty husk who felt so intensely, whose passions plastered the walls and breathed around them, that which was once man but had since become.
For Weiss Guertena was not a man, he was a soul incarnate, a benevolent creator twisted into monstrosity. Weiss Guertena had drunk deeply from the well of praise, stared too long into the heart of darkness.
“You doubt my seriousness.” All darkness returned to him, saturating his voice in tones of the Abyss. “The moment you stepped foot into the Gallery, you became witness to something much greater. Privilege does not come without price, and thus for this is steep indeed. I cannot allow you to leave knowing this.”
The smile which ghosted his face was perhaps the most sincere thing about him.
“Come down below, and I will show you someplace secret.”