I’m still trying to get the hang of watercolour pencils. Tutorials show people scribbling with the pencils, applying water, and getting nicely spreadable colours. It doesn’t quite work for me… I get scribble marks that don’t go away, so I get solid colour scribbles with fainter puddles of the same colour around them.
Anyway. A guy in a waistcoat and a plant in a jar on a shelf:
I also tried to do sunrays shining from behind clouds… but the watercolour-pencil version was so bad I’m not going to show it. I tried again in ink wash, which is less colourful but a lot more forgiving:
Last week’s post reminded me of the end of The Last Battle, last of the Narnia books, where a giant stands up to blow a horn and quench the sun. I always wondered what happened to him afterwards. Everybody else got to escape; he got locked in, trapped in a cold, dead world.
And the locking of the door comes back to me sometimes when I’m locking up after myself and leaving some place for a while, or forever; I remember the finality of Peter locking the door on a dead world with fingers half-numb from the cold.
(This drawing shouldn’t be taken as an illustration of that, though; I don’t have a copy of The Last Battle handy to check the details. It’s just a variation on the idea.)
Fantasy stories (and sometimes other genres) often have some place which is twisted, or cursed, or marred by horrible events in days of old – the swamps of unrotting corpses outside Mordor in Lord of the Rings, the post-apocalyptic Cursed Earth in Judge Dredd, the results of torque bombs in Perdido Street Station, come to mind but there’s certainly many more. (Last I checked, Dwarf Fortress’ continent generator creates some cursed areas where it rains blood, or poison, or vomit, or acid. The excellent mech-roguelike Gearhead has an area where nothing lives and corpses do not rot.)
I’ve always wondered what it would take to mend these places. What would a magical clean-up crew look like? What spells, rituals, etc. would need to be performed? What price would you have to pay to un-mar the world?
(The Narnia books, in which the world is not actually all that scarred, explicitly deal with this by a version of the Christian apocalypse – entrance into a new world of which the previous was merely a shadow. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, in some drafts, had its own apocalypse, but it’s not clear whether Tolkien wanted these kept in. Tolkien, I gather, initially conceived of Middle-Earth as a kind of mythological prehistory to our own world, and made it deliberately pre-Christian, so evil can be defeated (for a while) but there’s limited prospects for healing and redemption – it lacks the price paid by Christ on the Cross.) (Qualification: IANATolkienScholar.)
inadaptation 