POV: Seren Adaeze
The paint is already on my hands when I wake up.
Not a smear, but both palms covered in blue and grey, fingers stiff, the dried edges cracking at my knuckles like I spent the whole night working instead of sleeping. The brush is on the floor beside my bed. The palette is knocked over on the nightstand. And on the wall across from me, still wet in a few places, is a painting I have no memory of making.
I sit up slowly.
The room smells like turpentine and something older, something without a name that lives in the back of my throat every time this happens, which is more often now. Three times this week.
I swing my legs off the bed and look at the painting.
A staircase. Stone. Wide at the top, narrowing as it goes down, sinking into dark water with no visible bottom. The stone is carved with symbols along both sides, dense and layered, each one connecting to the next like a long sentence. I know these symbols, not because I studied them anywhere or found them in a book; my hand knows them. My sleeping hand knows them very well.
I stand up. My knees ache. My neck aches. This is what it feels like when my body does something without me for four or five hours.
I should be used to it. Seventeen years is long enough to get used to most things, long enough that I stopped trying to explain it to people, because there is no version of this story that does not make them take one small step back.
I am twenty-six years old, and I have been making maps of places I have never visited since I was nine.
I go to the bathroom and clean my hands in the sink, watching blue and grey wash off and spiral away. I do not look at my face in the mirror. I go back into the main room and hang the new painting in the last empty space near the window.
This is the ritual. Painting goes up. I do not think about it.
Thirty-one paintings on the walls now. Every one of them is a place I have never been: a canyon with two moons rising above its rim, a library carved into a cliff face above a dark sea, a market street made entirely of white stone where the shadows fall sideways. They are all real places. I know this the way I know my own name, which is to say with no proof and no real doubt.
I turn around.
And I stop.
Something is wrong with the wall.
Not the new painting. The others.
I walk to the opposite wall, the one with my oldest work, and I check each one the way you check that the gas is off before leaving the house for a week, slowly, not thinking too hard, just looking.
But one is different.
The stone arch painting. Tall, with ivy crawling up the left side and a path behind it leading somewhere I was never quite able to see. I made it fourteen months ago. I remember the night, the temperature in the room, the exact grey I mixed for the stone.
It has new symbols on it now.
Not painted over the top, not layered on. They are in the stone itself, carved the way the originals are carved, as if they were always there and I simply failed to put them down when I painted it the first time.
I press my palm flat against the canvas. Dry. Completely dry. These were not added tonight.
My heart does something loud and fast that I decide to ignore.
I move down the wall slowly, leaning in close to each painting. Three more have changed. A window in the market painting has a shadow in it that was not there before. The canyon has a new path cut into its far wall. The cliff library has an extra door in its rock face.
I count my breaths. I get to four before I stop trying.
These paintings have been on this wall for over a year. I made them with my own hands. I know every detail of every one. And something is rewriting them without me.
My phone says 3:14 a.m.
I could call Dami. She would come over immediately, no questions until morning. She would make tea and sit on the end of my bed and say something that would make all of this feel smaller and more manageable and less like I am watching the edge of what is real slowly peel back.
I do not call her.
I stand in the middle of the apartment in the dark and I look at all thirty-one paintings, and I think: this was one kind of thing before. Visions, sleepwalking to the canvas, impossible places filling up my walls. Seventeen years of exactly that, contained, familiar, strange but mine.
This is something else.
Something that moves, something that comes back to what I already made and changes it and does not ask my permission. It has an opinion about what belongs on my walls. That is a different problem entirely.
I pick up the staircase painting and look at the symbols carved into the stone steps. I trace one with my fingertip, close but not quite touching the canvas.
Across the room, the new symbol on the stone arch painting glows.
Just for a second, a faint pulse of gold under the grey, like a light switched on behind thick paper, there and then not there.
I do not move.
The sensible part of me, the part that has work in five hours and a grocery list on the fridge and a life that mostly makes sense in daylight, says: leave right now, go knock on a neighbor's door, call Dami after all, do not stand alone at three in the morning watching your paintings answer you.
But my hands are not shaking.
My feet will not move toward the door.
I look at the staircase painting, and I look at the arch across the room, and for the first time in seventeen years of waking up to impossible things, I let myself think the thought I have always stopped before it could fully form.
I did not make all of this alone. Some of it was put here for me to find, by something patient, by something that knew I would be looking, knew I would be awake right now in the dark and the turpentine smell, knew I would eventually stop pretending the paintings were only going one way.
Something out there knows I can read it.
And it has been leaving messages on my walls long enough that it has now run out of room.