Chapter 6
Upon seeing the system window, Elliot resolved to extricate himself from the situation first. Fortunately, activating the System did not strictly require physical contact.
Simply willing it strongly enough seems to do the trick.
Having to reach out and touch the air every time the System needed to be activated would have been awkward enough on its own, but doing so under the eyes of another person would have earned him a reputation for being unwell in the mind.
"Then I shall take my leave, brother."
"Come by often. And take the other art supplies with you as well I will have them sent over. Fairly expensive things, so do make use of them."
Elliot accepted Luon's generosity without deflection. In the current age, art was ultimately something that existed for the nobility, a luxury in every sense of the word, and the tools that went with it were priced accordingly.
"Thank you."
As he made his way back to his room, Elliot turned over in his mind the points of similarity between the piano and the brush. Until now, with only a single example to work from, it had been difficult to identify the conditions under which the System activated, but with a second example added, patterns were beginning to emerge.
To begin with, both are extraordinarily old.
The piano had a history deep enough to be called an ancient artifact in its own right. The brush was no different. Luon had said that he did not know its precise origins, but that it was at least two hundred years old.
And both carry preservation spells.
Two clear points of overlap, and beyond those, nothing that seemed to connect them in an obvious way.
But simply being old cannot be the only condition for the System to activate.
There was clearly something more that he had yet to identify. Knowing the exact conditions would make things considerably easier. He had been turning the brush over in his hands and examining it from every angle when his thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door.
Knock, knock.
"Who is it?"
"My name is Edel, and I serve young master Luon. He has asked me to bring you art supplies."
That was quick.
"Where shall I put them? There is quite a lot."
"Just over in that corner somewhere."
Edel and several servants filed into Elliot's room, and a collection of items began to be arranged neatly along the wall canvases, drawing paper, paints, ordinary brushes, and more besides.
"We will take our leave now."
Once he was alone, Elliot decided to go ahead and activate the System. There was a chance it would reveal something useful.
I am a little tired, but it is not so late yet. What matters most right now is understanding this System properly.
Elliot took up the brush and directed his will toward the System. The same message as before floated up before him.
[Would you like to activate the System? YES / NO]
YES.
He was, if he was being honest with himself, somewhat curious. What memories did this brush hold? Alongside the curiosity, there was a thread of apprehension as well. There would be no tutorial reward this time, so how far would the System actually reach?
Hm?
But contrary to his expectations, no memories came flowing in. Instead, an additional system message appeared.
[Tip!]
[First-Time Bonus]
[For the first artifact encountered, its full power may be drawn out on one occasion only.]
[However, if the user's qualifications are insufficient, the 100% application will not be guaranteed.]
[The First-Time Bonus is applied immediately upon System activation.]
[Please bear this in mind for future activations.]
What is this, a First-Time Bonus?
The system message was already beginning to grow faint. Elliot did his best to commit every word of it to memory, uncertain whether he would be able to call it up again later.
First-Time Bonus. Once only. Full power. Immediate activation.
The message dimmed further, and then it was gone entirely. In the same moment, just as had happened with the piano, the memories of the brush began to flow into him.
The memories of the brush were nothing at all like what Elliot had anticipated. He had expected something similar to the piano the memories of a person, a particular individual whose life had left its impression on the object. Instead, his mind was suffused, without warning, with color.
This is not a human memory.
This was, in all likelihood, the memory of the brush itself. The memory of a tool rather than a person. To Elliot's perception, it was deeply strange, and yet at the same time it was beautiful so utterly unlike the way a human being experienced the world that the colors washed over him and he lost himself in them for a moment.
The world of a brush is color.
Colors spreading endlessly outward, bleeding into one another. Paints seeping and blending. Formless paintings drifting and dissolving with the passage of time.
I want to paint.
The thought rose in him naturally and unbidden, because the brush itself wanted to paint, as a brush ought to. Elliot decided to simply surrender himself to the brush's memories and let them take him where they would.
"Ngh."
He steadied himself with some effort and propped a canvas up against the wall in the corner of the room. Then he began to move the brush. The fact that it was a brush with magic worked into it meant that paint was not strictly necessary, which was fortunate.
I can barely keep track of myself, let alone look for paint.
But even in the midst of the confusion, Elliot had tried to reach for the paints. His body, however, had already begun to move of its own accord.
"Ngh."
A low groan escaped him involuntarily. Receiving the memory of a tool rather than a human being was extraordinarily difficult. Fortunately, as time passed, something more recognizable as human thought began to filter through as well. It was a memory a recollection that had been held within the brush itself.
An elf?
It seemed that one of the brush's previous owners had been an elf, and moreover the one whose impression the brush held most powerfully of all. The memory of that elf began to take over Elliot's consciousness an elf who had treasured the brush dearly, who had been freer than anyone, and who had painted the most breathtaking things.
It hurts.
What the elf had painted most often was the face of a beloved. Longing for a love that had ended. Pouring that longing into every stroke. And woven through it all, a faint thread of resentment toward the way emotions change without asking permission.
The feeling that the elf had pressed into the brush transmitted itself to Elliot in its entirety. The nature of love. How beautiful it was, and how fleeting how it faded with the passage of time, leaving nothing behind.
I still love you. Even now.
But at some point, the love on one side had simply gone out. And so it had ended. A common enough story.
Have you grown tired of me?
No, it is not that. It is just... that is how it is.
...Is that so?
Yes.
The elf had tried for a long time to rekindle what had been lost in the other's heart. But breathing fire back into something that had already gone cold was an almost impossible thing to do.
Cruel as it felt, the elf had not blamed the former lover. There had only been sorrow, and a quiet grief. Emotions change that was simply their nature. Slower in an elf than in a human, perhaps, but they changed all the same. It hurt beyond measure, but the elf had accepted that it could not be helped.
What the elf had perhaps miscalculated, however, was the depth of their own feeling. After the parting, rather than fading, the love had only grown deeper, and the elf had found it impossible to forget. And so they had painted. Longing for the one who was gone, always and without end.
Tweet, tweet.
Vif's morning call rang out over the ducal estate as it always did.
"Ah."
With that, Elliot came back to himself. And when he looked at the painting before him, he could not help but stare. The quality of what had emerged was something he could not bring himself to believe had come from his own hands.
For a long while he simply gazed at it in something of a daze, drawn deeper into it with every passing moment, the lingering impression of it refusing to leave him. The elf painted within it was so achingly lovely that it was almost painful to look at.
Good grief.
The memories of the brush and the elf still clung to him, unsettled and restless within him. Elliot shook his head several times in an effort to clear it. He soothed the part of himself that wanted to keep looking and turned the canvas to face the wall.
"Huu."
That was somewhat better.
In any case, what rank did it come out to?
Elliot summoned the system window and looked it over.
[Brush and Painting (B+)]Allows the user to read the memories of the brush.Any brush may be handled with reasonable competence.Corrections are applied to the handling of paint.A degree of emotion may be imbued into a painting.
There was also a new message that had not been there before, something added to the help section regarding the First-Time Bonus. And alongside that, something pertaining to ranks.
[S Rank: Among the finest on the continent.][B Rank: Among the finest in a city.]
No explanation was given for any rank beyond those two.
It only tells me about the ranks I have actually obtained, it seems.
Even so, enough information was present to allow him to extrapolate the rest. A rank would likely mean among the finest within a single kingdom.
Continent, kingdom, city, town. Something like that order, perhaps.
Elliot confirmed what he needed to know and dismissed the window. He was thoroughly exhausted.
Still, Vif needs his rose leaf before I sleep.
Elliot shuffled out to the back garden with a rose in hand, moving with the unhurried lethargy of someone running on nothing but willpower, and delivered the leaf before returning to his room and collapsing into unconsciousness entirely.
After delivering Vif's rose leaf, Elliot fell into a dead sleep almost immediately. Leona, who was aware that he had been up through the night, slipped quietly into the room.
Leona was Elliot's personal maid, but she had previously been under the duchess's authority. Her assignment was to attend to Elliot while reporting his every movement back to the duchess.
Honestly, exhausting.
Because of that arrangement, Leona could not retire until Elliot himself had gone to sleep. Under ordinary circumstances even a dedicated personal maid would not be expected to stay awake through the night alongside her charge, but surveillance had its own demands.
What a nuisance.
Leona began to tidy the room, which had been left in some disarray. Whatever her other obligations, her first duty was still that of a maid.
He does not usually leave things like this.
Before his illness, the Elliot of this era had placed such emphasis on cleanliness that the word obsessive would not have been unfair. Since the regression that tendency had mellowed somewhat, but he had never left a room in this state before.
Did he finish the painting?
Once she had set the room in order, Leona turned her attention carefully to the canvas that was facing the wall, and in that moment she could not breathe. Even to someone with no particular knowledge of art, it was immediately apparent that this was no ordinary work.
"Oh..."
The exclamation escaped her before she could stop it.
This is not the time for that.
Leona turned the canvas gently back to face the wall and went to find the duchess.
"A painting?"
"Yes, my lady. Young master Elliot stayed up through the night painting with the brush that young master Luon gifted him. The painting seemed, even to my eyes, to be something extraordinary."
The duchess's brow furrowed at Leona's report, and then smoothed again.
Well. If that is the case, perhaps it is for the best.
Piano.
Painting.
Just as the duke had said, the boy appeared to have been born with a gift for the arts. If anything, that was a relief, and it did ease her mind somewhat.
"Let us go and see it."
"Young master Elliot will be asleep at this hour, my lady."
The one thing that prevented her from feeling any straightforward warmth toward the boy was simply that he was not her child. The fact that the duke had shared another woman's bed and fathered a child with her still sat poorly with her, even now.
She understood, as a noblewoman, that such things were unavoidable. But understanding something in one's mind and making peace with it in one's heart were entirely different matters. And so the duchess elected to be a little petty about it.
"Hmph. Sleeping at this hour is itself the offense."
In truth, she had once been prepared to go considerably further than this for Luon's sake. By that measure, this was almost affectionate.
Knock, knock.
Knock, knock.
Several knocks sounded, but Elliot remained deep in sleep and unresponsive.
"Open it."
"Yes, my lady."
The duchess stepped into the room and clicked her tongue.
"Tch. Still asleep when the sun is already up."
She knew full well that he had been painting through the night, and yet it rankled her regardless.
"Is that the painting? Turn it around."
But the moment her eyes found it, every trace of that displeasure vanished in an instant.
"..."
The duchess had little ear for music, but her knowledge of the visual arts ran deep. She painted herself, and was well regarded for it even among the nobility. And so what struck her in this moment was all the more profound for it.
He painted this in a single night?
It was exactly as it had been when she heard Elliot play the piano. She could not believe it. She recognized the value of what she was looking at immediately, and that recognition only deepened the impact. The longer she looked, the more her breath seemed to stop.
The painting Elliot had made carried emotion within it. A love that had been carried through an entire lifetime of longing, tender and heartbreaking all at once. Without quite knowing why, tears gathered in the corners of the duchess's eyes.
"My lady?"
"Be quiet."
The weight of what she was seeing was too much to look away from. And so the duchess stood motionless for a long while, her gaze fixed on the painting, unable to move.