Page 1 of Never Nix Up

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Hazel

Ink splashes across the canvas in bright blues and greens. There’s no time to pause, no time to breathe, I just oscillate between river water and the inks on my palette. The water on my brush mixes with the colour and it calls to me, just as the tormented faces on the canvas call to me.

I hear them.

I always hear them.

I’m usually a watercolour kind of artist. They certainly sell better around here—tourists love nothing better than a watercolour of an English village—and they’re softer that what I’m painting now.

More palatable.

But this is for me and for me alone.

Capturing the River Arun as mortals see it, even as my own river nix community sees it, isn’t my raison d’être. It pays the bills, keeps the doors of River Studios open, but it’s not my purpose.

I’m not sure I really had a purpose before Trisantona. I worked, I painted, but it felt like I was merely surviving in this life that didn’t really like me all that much.

But ever since Trisantona returned from beyond the Veil, her purpose has been my purpose. And being the River Goddess of the Arun, she misses the adulation of many. The small population of fae folk gathered in Wyrten Bridge aren’t ever going to sate that hunger, and so my purpose is to use my brush, my art, in tribute.

Every time I sell a painting of the River Arun, every time it’s framed and put in someone’s living to be admired and wondered at, that energy goes to her. Mortals may not realise that it’s her they’re worshipping, but that doesn’t change where their admiration goes. Ever since I’ve been working with her, she’s grown in power. In power, and in how demanding she is. She wants more paintings, more art, more of her, of the river, celebrated.

But I’m not working in watercolour today. Today I’m working with inks that I’ve mixed myself, each colour echoing something I feel deep in my soul.

Today these paintings are mine.

My brush moves quickly, deftly capturing moments, memories, visions as I attempt to expel them from my head. I’m only a river nix; when the Veil fell, my people weren’t powerful enough to be dragged behind it, our magic too insignificant to be of any true importance. I’m not some fae queen, all-knowing and all-powerful. I have a slight temper, an affinity with water, and a family with a fondness for drowning mortals.

That’s it.

I shouldn’t hold a goddess’s visions inside my head.

I’m not that kind of fae.

Sweat drips down my forehead, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand, taking a minute to step back and look at my creation.

For all the brightness of the colours, it feels painful. My head aches sympathetically and I know that I’m not done yet. I have to keep going.

The sun begins to rise, her rays slanting through the windows and I know I need to hurry up. I need to have this finished before Finn opens the bakery, because otherwise I won’t leave the studio today.

Not leaving the studio would be a bad idea.

My fingers tremble as a tremor runs down my arm, but I grip the brush tighter and set my gaze on the canvas. I can do this. I just need to focus. Closing my eyes, I allow myself to slip back into the vision I’m trying to recreate. For a moment it feels like I’m underwater, and when I gasp, coming up for air, I swear I can feel water droplets in my hair. I stretch. Breathe.

Then, slowly, I swirl my brush in river water filling the mason jar on my desk. I know what’s coming next. The bit I’ve been avoiding since I woke from my nightmare this morning.

From Trisantona’s nightmare.

Because it isherdreams,hernightmares that fill the hours before I wake, and they feel like they might tear me asunder. Drowning me every night in her river.

I focus on the faces of the painted figures, and deftly capture their features: two river nixes, dragging a mortal to the deep. And not just any river nixes: my parents. The parents who’ve ignored me ever since I started selling paintings to mortals. Well, no. They’ve hated me since I started associating with mortals. They’ve ignored me since I’ve become Trisantona’s acolyte.

There are some benefits to working with a goddess.

But I wake, night after night, gasping and thrashing in bed, reliving these deaths over and over. Every river death for thousands of years. I see them throughhereyes, feel the river’s pain, feel her pain, and I’m as haunted by them as any person would be.

So these inked paintings—with the colours that are a little too bright, a little too bold—they are my way of exorcising the visions I have no choice but to dream.

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