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There is a cold that comes with the Knight into Sheo’s house. Or maybe not a feeling of cold—an immediate loss of all heat and life. Whatever it is, it grows deeper and deeper each time they visit. The pupil who comes to visit Sheo is always stranger, somehow larger, although they never change to any sight Sheo can claim. Some days, Sheo catches himself trying to shut his own door, as if to keep the cold out.
He always stops himself before he does.
Instead, he leaves his door open. When Sheo feels a shiver run up his spine, feeling a cold somewhere deep in his soul, he'll turn around and realize that the Knight is sitting behind him in silence, watching him paint with an attentiveness that would be flattering if Sheo were more deluded. “Have you come to hang up your nail, small one?” he'll ask, but every time, the small Knight shakes their head.
He thinks, once, that the Knight watches so closely because they see what Sheo does when he spends hours upon hours perfectly rendering a single vase onto canvas, and the thought startles him so thoroughly that he stops painting altogether. Does it mean anything, if someone sees what he sees in reality when he puts the matter down into fictitious canvas? Is this what he’s been searching for, as an artist? Or something more?
The Knight keeps staring at the half-finished painting with exactly the same intent until Sheo realizes that the Knight isn’t watching him paint, or seeing what Sheo sees in the vase through his paint. The Knight is quite literally watching the paint dry.
“Would you like to try for yourself?” Sheo asks, because there's more than one way to ask someone if they'd like to retire from the way of the nailmaster.
The Knight does not respond. Their nail never leaves their grip. Sheo thinks that should maybe be concerning, even for a nailmaster like himself. It’s certainly bad social form to draw a weapon in someone else’s house. Sheo waits until it’s nearly certain that they don’t intend to respond, and then a little longer, just in case they change their mind.
“There’s no cost at all to trying,” says Sheo.
The Knight stands and trots to the door. As they disappear, they finally sheathe their nail.
*
That night, Sheo dreams in color: sunflower yellows, royal blues like ocean water he’s never seen himself, the lush magenta of velvet carpets. He dreams of red splattered across the floor, and never mistakes it for the color of blood; it’s the red of roses and deep blush. He never uses orange, but the air is nearly a liquid gold, the color of old bronze and rusty sunlight.
He’s had this dream many times before. In this dream, he turns and his only student stands behind him, nail in hand like a paintbrush. Sometimes, Sheo paints a weathered mask of bronze that he doesn’t remember ever seeing. Most often, he paints the golden air around him with colors until the sky rains with it and the earth is soaked in paint. Sheo’s brush digs deep into the sunlight, desperate to tear the very fabric of space around him in half. In this dream, Sheo is never quite strong enough.
But it’s only a dream.
*
The next time the Knight comes, Sheo is working with charcoal. “We all have our paths to walk in life,” Sheo says. “I’ll neither dissuade nor persuade. If you can make peace with yourself, then your choices, your roads belong to you alone. I only keep my door open, if you grow weary of your nail, and wish to choose some other road.”
The Knight looks up at the charcoal portrait, then at Sheo.
“No, not me,” says Sheo. “My brother.”
The Knight tilts their head. At length, the Knight sits on the floor, waiting for Sheo to resume his work.
Sheo thinks that he sees something of Mato’s kindness in their collective student, as if the Knight absorbed some part of Mato when they learned his nail art. Sheo thinks he sees something of Oro’s dark, unnameable matter, that writhing uncomfort that resists word or image or name. (He wonders if this lonely haunting was always there, and then wonders if he’s thinking of the Knight or his brother.) But if the Knight inherited anything from Sheo besides fancy nailwork, this, Sheo cannot see.
The portrait turns out horribly misfigured. It’s been too long since Sheo saw his brothers, and drawing from memory was not what Sheo had wanted to do in the first place; Sheo had wanted to study his own brother’s visage and recreate it from the inside-out, except that his brother isn’t here to be studied. Sheo keeps the work anyway.
*
That night, Sheo dreams the Knight draws their nail and and carves their own art through the paint Sheo scatters across the battlefield. Their nailstrokes are economical to the point of admiration. There’s artistry in minimalism. When they twist to avoid Sheo’s paint in midair, their grace is a little moment of portraiture that will never happen again, and is all the more valuable for its temporality.
By contrast, there’s so much of Sheo’s paint all across the earth that no matter how fast the Knight is, in these dreams, Sheo’ll will have scattered paint all along the Knight’s mask in messy rainbows, greens and purples, pinks and blues. There’s so much paint that he thinks their mask will crack under its weight. He keeps waiting for the earth under their feet to split apart with the amount of Sheo’s paint that’s scattered in the stones. Sheo dreams that the air itself in front of him begins to tear like fragile canvas. The deep black of the Knight’s eyes never reflect the light.
*
The next day, Sheo knows when the Knight approaches ages before they show up. The chill runs deep in his carapace. He feels the cold from the inside out, as if something inside him has lost feeling. Sheo knows it will not leave until long after the Knight has gone. Sheo still does not close his door.
That day, the Knight spends entire hours on his floor, fiddling with their map. Comprised of a dozen different pieces of leather sewn together with thread, the map has been marked and remarked with not only rooms, waterways, doors, and boundaries, but faces, too. Little mantis faces in the Fungal Wastes. Tiny pins for vendors, one in the shape of Master Sly. In the Forgotten Crossroads, a strange black head with orange eyes, created by (what looks like) hand. The rest is a nearly incomprehensible mess of scribbles, where the Knight had misdrawn routes, erased pathways, corrected doors, scribbled and scribbled out symbols in the margins.
It’s basically unreadable.
“A fine work you have here,” says Sheo. The Knight looks up at him, as if silently daring him to call it “art.” How unfortunate that most of everything is art whether we like it or not, whether we call it by its name or not. Instead, Sheo says, “This must have taken quite a bit of dedication. Such eye for detail and precision. These are the lines of strong resolve.”
The Knight looks down at the map. Looks back at Sheo.
“Mayhap you will not become a cartographer, though,” Sheo allows. “Not without... better handwriting. But it is not the product that matters. In art—like most pursuits—the means are the ends themselves.”
The Knight hands hold onto their nail like a safety blanket.
“As always,” says Sheo, “you are welcome to my art supplies, if you would like.”
The Knight does not reply.
Sheo studies his once-student. He's shivering despite himself, and looking at the Knight gives him a sense of vertigo that he can't explain. The Knight is not here to learn the way of the nail—Sheo has nothing left to teach them. The Knight is not here to learn art. Is it the company? The safety? If Sheo were to draw them in a still life, would Sheo draw them in color? If Sheo were to recreate their visage from the inside out, would Sheo finally see them as they are?
At length, Sheo sits down on the floor with them. He says: “Have I ever told you how I came to take up the brush?”
The Knight doesn’t move. Still like dark ink. Impenetrable, imperceptible. After a long pause, their small, dark hands fold their map and tuck it away. They tilt their head up.
Sheo doesn’t know how much longer he can sit here besides them. The cold grows from their small frame. Sheo should be able to see his own breath with how cold he is, but mostly he only sees black spots in his eyes, as if he were on the verge of unconsciousness, some strange place between waking and dreaming.
“Oro—” Sheo begins, “—it was always Oro—Oro had a bad habit of following through with a series of nailstrikes. Even if the first few with ill-placed and the follow-ups with little hope of success, he’d go through with it.”
The Knight stares at him with the same intentness that they give Sheo’s works of art.
“Mato accused Oro of becoming frustrated and swinging his nail wildly about,” Sheo continues, “but I suspect that it was not anger that compelled Oro to follow through on his mistakes, but hope—the most stubborn of furious and misplaced hopes—that the next strike would be the one to land. Oro is quite good at hope, you see, and it is unending hope that can make a person bitter. It is very difficult for him to know when to quit. He lacks the gift of resignation.
“His barrages of nailstrikes were devastating if they hit, at any rate. He was not persistent without reason.
“But I won’t trouble you with tales of my siblings.
“Master always was trying to break him of the habit, in the only way that Master knew how, which was to complain and belittle and mock. Master shall always have my respect. If a person were to lose your respect on account of having flaws, nobody would respect anyone, and Master Sly is deserving more than anyone I know. But on this day—my brothers and I had been training for decades, you see, and Master was growing older and wishing to hang up his nail, and Oro was supposed to be a Nailmaster in his own right—by reputation alone, he was certainly accomplished, and it was only ever in Master’s eyes that he was insufficient. And at last Master cried: ‘Oro! Committing to your mistakes will not solve them! Put down your shovel and climb out of your grave. No matter how far you are down the wrong path, you must turn back.’
“I hung up my nail the next day.
“Before, I walked only one path, with the conviction of a bug unwilling to see. Now I walk so many paths, I have become lost within myself. I confess to you freely: I do not understand what I am doing or where I am going. I do not understand the road upon which I walk. But as I take each step, I ask if it is the right one for me, and step by step, day by day, looking no further than my own feet, I find myself on a road that is all my own. It is never too late—not for me, not for you, not for anyone. We may always turn back and find a new road to walk. My door is always open to you.”
Without warning, the Knight stands. Picks up their nail.
Bows.
Leaves.
The cold does not. For days after, Sheo sees only black in the corners of his eyes. But Sheo’s door remains open.
*
The Knight does not come again.
As the cold sweeps Greenpath, Sheo’s door remains open; as the infection dies at its roots, Sheo’s door remains open. He meant what he said, as much as he ever meant any killing blow of his nail. As the light dims and fades, as all the veins of the infection run dry and swell with dark matter, as the kingdom of Hallownest rocks at the shore of some rising silent tide and as the long tentacles of the abyss raise their heads from the water, Sheo’s door remains open.
The spread of darkness is marvelous work. The black void is bold and all-encompassing, containing multitudes and denying all depth. The paintstrokes are without reservation. The drippings of void from Greenpath’s leaves and roots are slow and steadfast. Such conviction, Sheo believes, is the work of a master artist.
So Sheo pulls his easel outside to the black grass and considers the landscape of the newly-risen apocalypse. It will make a marvelous picture to show Master Sly, or maybe (if he’s lucky) Mato and Oro. He’ll looking forward to showing it to them. He looks forward to maybe meeting the Knight again one day, and showing them his rendition of their own work. Will they see what he sees in them? He hopes so, as he always does when he stands before a blank canvas. It is not too late for us, he hopes. No, it is never too late for us.
He dips his paintbrush into the inky water. He flattens his apron and considers the canvas in front of him. With one eye on the rising void, he begins a portrait of an open door, entirely in shades of black.