[story] guido
author: ravenbell (ravenbell)
email: redravenbell [at] yahoo.com
artist: redplasticglass (redplasticglass)
email: info [at] studiokrum.com
Once upon a time there was a boy with wide eyes, who loved beautiful things. He loved the flowers of his garden and the butterflies that came to court them. He loved the sunlight through the trees and on the water. He loved the birds of the meadows, the green finches and red robins singing in the morning. He loved to count the stars shimmering brilliantly in the black velvet of the night sky.
The boy, Guido, was not at all handsome or beautiful himself, but he had no wish to be. He wanted to create beauty instead, to preserve all the wonders he saw in a form that would live on forever. He learned to draw and paint, and his eyes were very good, his teachers all agreed. He learned composition, light and shadow, proportion and perspective. He learned verdaccio and imprimatura, impasto and incollato, chiaroscuro and sfumato. And when he finished all his exercises and mastered every technique, he bid his teachers farewell, and went out into the world to paint beauty.
Alas, all his efforts came to naught. The pictures he created were strange and twisted things, that only showed the shadow where there was light, the foul where there was fair. He tried to capture beauty, but only misery, horror, ugliness, decay, and the black fears of humanity stained his canvases.
His painted flowers were withered and dying, their blooms mottled with rot and disease. His landscapes were of blighted fields and polluted forests, the waters blackened with oil and slime. Brown hazes blocked the light of the sun and the stars. The only bird he could correctly render was the carrion crow, mad-eyed and monstrous.
The harder he tried, the more horrible Guido's paintings became. He never showed them to another soul. With each new failure, he would hide the images under a thick layer of black pigment and oil, and try to paint something else over them. Layer after layer, canvas after canvas, it was always the same. And despair, darker than any of Guido's paintings, began to consume him.
He wandered the world, searching out beauty to capture in his art, searching for something that could inspire him to paint as he wished to. As the years passed, Guido's wide eyes beheld more marvels and wonders than most men could ever dream of, but his paintings never improved. Rather, they became worse, more malignant and terrifying with each passing day.
Though he did his best to hide his work from the curious, there were a few unfortunate incidents that Guido could not prevent. By the winter of his eighteenth year, whispered rumors of Guido and his painted horrors had spread far and wide throughout the lands of men. Many believed that he had been cursed for his pride and ambition, and they shunned him as a man condemned.
Others, however, did not.
It was in the remote mountains of the Far North, on a cold, spring morning, that Guido met the young man. He was well dressed, tall and thin, with hair black as crow feathers and the eyes of a fox. He greeted Guido with a bow and a flourish, and introduced himself as The Devil's Own Son.
"I seek to congratulate you, young master," he said to Guido, "for you are the greatest artist the world has ever known. The magnificence of your work has even reached the ears of my dear Father, and I have come to bring you an offer of my patronage. I am concerned that you seek to deny your gift, and I would not see such talent wasted."
"I seek no patron," Guido answered warily. "I wish only to paint beauty, and capture all that is great and glorious of the world in my work. Until I have learned to do so, I will never be content."
At this, The Devil's Own Son smiled. "Beauty? Your paintings are already beautiful, young master. But if you think that they could stand improvement, perhaps you would be interested in an item I recently acquired." From the pocket of his coat, he drew out a paintbrush of finest sable hair and held it out to Guido. "You have my guarantee that it will capture all the beauty of the world as you wish. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself."
And because Guido was young, and because Guido knew little of devils, he set out his paints and canvases, and agreed to try the brush.
From the very first stroke, the difference was plain. This time, Guido's flowers were bright and fresh, so alive you could almost smell their delicate scent through the canvas. His landscapes of the great snow-topped mountains brought out the full scope of their grandeur and majesty. Indeed, they almost dwarfed the real thing. And his birds were especially exquisite, like fabled creatures of paradise, almost unearthly in their simplicity and sweetness. It all came so easily now, the gold of the sun, the white of the frost, and blue sky, bluer than any sky he'd ever seen in the wide world.
Guido painted from morning until noon and from noon until night. The urge to paint drove him as never before. He filled all the canvases he had and still felt driven to continue.
The Devil's Own Son returned when the sun began to set. By that time Guido was painting on rocks and pieces of bark. "I see you are satisfied with the paintbrush," said The Devil's Own Son. "It is the only one of its kind, and a very precious thing."
"Will you sell it to me?" Guido asked him. "I have little with which to pay you, but I will give you anything you ask."
The young man's fox eyes glittered, and he whispered into Guido's ear. "Lie with me, sin with me, and the brush is yours."
Guido was an innocent, and did not know what he had agreed to. But The Devil's Own Son was patient, and showed him the ways of flesh and pleasure in the shadow of the mountains. His lips and fingers seemed to burn against Guido's bare skin, and his teeth were very sharp, very precise. Guido did not struggle or protest, but he was afraid. He dreamed of fire and blood that night, of the lands of men burning to ash and dust in all-consuming flame. And when he woke, the brush was clutched tightly in his hand and The Devil's Own Son had gone.
Happy days followed for Guido. Those who had shunned him as a monster now praised him as a man of miracles. His paintings were beloved by one and all, and none could deny that Guido had captured beauty in his art, just as he said he would. He retraced his steps all over the world, and painted marvels and wonders without fear. Kings and emperors and popes commissioned portraits of themselves. Great cities and kingdoms commissioned murals. Guido became quite rich, and gained many patrons, but his love of painting never diminished.
The brush was always at his side, and The Devil's Own Son did not revisit him.
A whole year passed, and Guido came again to the mountains of the Far North. He had been examining his earliest successful work and had been struck by the yearning to see that beautiful, wild place again. But when he came to the spot he remembered so well, he found that the landscape had changed. The earth was barren from drought and pestilence, yielding no flowers, but only stunted weeds and brown grass. Instead of songbirds, swarms of stinging insects filled the air with harsh buzzing. The mountains themselves appeared scorched and blackened, and no snow graced their broken peaks for the first time in a thousand years.
Greatly disturbed by this terrible sight, Guido went to the next place he had visited after gaining the brush, the villages on the banks of the Great River. He found them suffering from famine and plague, worse than any the people could remember. The river itself had turned to slime and mud, the stagnant water breeding more disease. Guido traveled on, and found that everything he had painted, everything that he had used as a subject for his art, was touched by misfortune and malady. All the beauty he had sought out had been diminished or corrupted. All his patrons were falling ill, one after the other. The great cities and kingdoms of men began to crumble as they were struck by inexplicable and terrible disasters, each more grievous than the last.
No one thought to place the blame on Guido, but he knew it was his fault. He knew that the brush had truly given him the power to capture beauty in his art. For it took beauty itself from the world, stole it away, and trapped it in his canvases. Guido's first thought was to destroy the paintings, hoping that this would reverse the destruction he had caused. But after he burned one painting of a linden tree, the real, dying tree did not improve. He tried washing another canvas clean with a distillation of pine resin, removing the paint layer by layer until only a blank surface remained. And he covered another with a layer of black pigment and oil to hide the image, the way he had done with his failures. Neither method had any effect.
Finally, afraid that damaging the paintings would destroy the beauty he'd captured forever, Guido resolved to burn the cursed brush instead. It pained him to do so, for despite the evil he had unleashed on the world, the urge to paint was as strong in him as it had been since that first miraculous day in the mountains of the Far North, as strong as it had ever been since he first set out to paint beauty.
But when Guido set spark to tinder, and prepared to cast the brush into the flames, a voice called out, "Stop!"
And he looked up to see The Devil's Own Son before him, restraining him. He looked no different than he had at their first meeting, save that his white teeth seemed sharper than before.
"Why would you burn your paintbrush, young master?" asked The Devil's Own Son. "Has it not served you well, and done all that I promised it would do? Has it not allowed you to paint beauty exactly as you desired?"
Guido nodded, with tears in his eyes. "But the cost is too great. By using the brush, I have brought ruin to everything I have touched. I must destroy it and end its evil, so that I might repent for my pride and vanity."
Long white fingers pulled him away from the fire. "Destroying the brush will achieve nothing. The damage cannot be so easily undone by a simple act of remorse."
"Then, surely you must have the power to make things right," Guido beseeched him. "What do you want of me this time? My body? My blood? I have learned a little more of the Devil, since we last met. If it is my immortal soul that must be forfeited, I will offer that too, gladly."
"I am not my father," said The Devil's Own Son, fox eyes gleaming, "and I have no use for your soul. As I told you before, young master, my interest is in your talent. And it is you, not I, who wields the power to change this world."
And it seemed to Guido that the young man's form began to shift and warp, so that his face appeared distorted, the features twisted and gruesome at one moment, and then handsome again the next. But as he spoke, his voice remained unchanged.
"Your gift was always the ability to capture that which makes humanity tremble and despair and wake screaming in the dead hours of the night. But you've hardly used it. In fact, you've never tried painting anything that wasn't beautiful. That is a far more dreadful sin than those you would seek to repent."
Guido clutched the brush in his hands tightly. "You mean to say that if I paint ugliness with this brush, then beauty will return to the world?"
The Devil's Own Son smiled, a smile that was both terrible and wondrous. His shape became whole once more. "I still wish to become your patron. If you have no use for your new paintings, give them to me. I will take them to my father's vast and unequalled domain, that some call Hell, where they shall be truly appreciated."
And he pressed his red mouth to Guido's. And this time Guido's wide eyes were open as The Devil's Own Son shed clothing and civility to indulge his base desire. Guido took the pain and the pleasure into himself without fear, though his body burned as if he had cast himself into hellfire. And his hands stroked the hair black as crow feathers and his bare legs intertwined with something that may or may not have been a long, whip-like tail. And when he was beyond exhaustion, and had found release more times than he could count, Guido drifted off to sleep. This time he did not dream at all, but slept deeply and soundly. And when he woke from his slumber, he found a warm hand clasped tightly in his own.
Guido set out again with his paints and his canvases and the brush he had bought and paid for, this time to paint all that was horrid and vile in the world. He was not in the habit of hiding his work any longer, and so his efforts brought only revulsion and horror from his former admirers. If his earliest paintings had been ugly, then aided by the power of the brush and Guido's newfound purpose, his new paintings displayed ugliness tenfold. Hardly a soul in the lands of men could stand to look at them.
In time, the pestilence and plagues abated, and the world birthed life anew. Some who had been afflicted lived, and some died. There was one stretch of mountain in the Far North, where nothing ever grew again. Yet by and large, balance was restored, and nature was once more in concord with heaven and earth.
As for Guido, some say he still wanders the poorest, harshest wastelands and battlefields, painting ugliness year after year to keep the mortal world beautiful. And some say he followed The Devil's Own Son to Hell, in order to paint a portrait of the Devil himself.
And some say he has grown very sharp, white teeth and learned to smile like a fox.
the end
Author's Note: Much thanks to my betas, Lady Sisyphus (ladysisyphus) and Winged Sandals (winged_sandals)
email: redravenbell [at] yahoo.com
artist: redplasticglass (redplasticglass)
email: info [at] studiokrum.com
Once upon a time there was a boy with wide eyes, who loved beautiful things. He loved the flowers of his garden and the butterflies that came to court them. He loved the sunlight through the trees and on the water. He loved the birds of the meadows, the green finches and red robins singing in the morning. He loved to count the stars shimmering brilliantly in the black velvet of the night sky.
The boy, Guido, was not at all handsome or beautiful himself, but he had no wish to be. He wanted to create beauty instead, to preserve all the wonders he saw in a form that would live on forever. He learned to draw and paint, and his eyes were very good, his teachers all agreed. He learned composition, light and shadow, proportion and perspective. He learned verdaccio and imprimatura, impasto and incollato, chiaroscuro and sfumato. And when he finished all his exercises and mastered every technique, he bid his teachers farewell, and went out into the world to paint beauty.
Alas, all his efforts came to naught. The pictures he created were strange and twisted things, that only showed the shadow where there was light, the foul where there was fair. He tried to capture beauty, but only misery, horror, ugliness, decay, and the black fears of humanity stained his canvases.
His painted flowers were withered and dying, their blooms mottled with rot and disease. His landscapes were of blighted fields and polluted forests, the waters blackened with oil and slime. Brown hazes blocked the light of the sun and the stars. The only bird he could correctly render was the carrion crow, mad-eyed and monstrous.
The harder he tried, the more horrible Guido's paintings became. He never showed them to another soul. With each new failure, he would hide the images under a thick layer of black pigment and oil, and try to paint something else over them. Layer after layer, canvas after canvas, it was always the same. And despair, darker than any of Guido's paintings, began to consume him.
He wandered the world, searching out beauty to capture in his art, searching for something that could inspire him to paint as he wished to. As the years passed, Guido's wide eyes beheld more marvels and wonders than most men could ever dream of, but his paintings never improved. Rather, they became worse, more malignant and terrifying with each passing day.
Though he did his best to hide his work from the curious, there were a few unfortunate incidents that Guido could not prevent. By the winter of his eighteenth year, whispered rumors of Guido and his painted horrors had spread far and wide throughout the lands of men. Many believed that he had been cursed for his pride and ambition, and they shunned him as a man condemned.
Others, however, did not.
It was in the remote mountains of the Far North, on a cold, spring morning, that Guido met the young man. He was well dressed, tall and thin, with hair black as crow feathers and the eyes of a fox. He greeted Guido with a bow and a flourish, and introduced himself as The Devil's Own Son.
"I seek to congratulate you, young master," he said to Guido, "for you are the greatest artist the world has ever known. The magnificence of your work has even reached the ears of my dear Father, and I have come to bring you an offer of my patronage. I am concerned that you seek to deny your gift, and I would not see such talent wasted."
"I seek no patron," Guido answered warily. "I wish only to paint beauty, and capture all that is great and glorious of the world in my work. Until I have learned to do so, I will never be content."
At this, The Devil's Own Son smiled. "Beauty? Your paintings are already beautiful, young master. But if you think that they could stand improvement, perhaps you would be interested in an item I recently acquired." From the pocket of his coat, he drew out a paintbrush of finest sable hair and held it out to Guido. "You have my guarantee that it will capture all the beauty of the world as you wish. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself."
And because Guido was young, and because Guido knew little of devils, he set out his paints and canvases, and agreed to try the brush.
From the very first stroke, the difference was plain. This time, Guido's flowers were bright and fresh, so alive you could almost smell their delicate scent through the canvas. His landscapes of the great snow-topped mountains brought out the full scope of their grandeur and majesty. Indeed, they almost dwarfed the real thing. And his birds were especially exquisite, like fabled creatures of paradise, almost unearthly in their simplicity and sweetness. It all came so easily now, the gold of the sun, the white of the frost, and blue sky, bluer than any sky he'd ever seen in the wide world.
Guido painted from morning until noon and from noon until night. The urge to paint drove him as never before. He filled all the canvases he had and still felt driven to continue.
The Devil's Own Son returned when the sun began to set. By that time Guido was painting on rocks and pieces of bark. "I see you are satisfied with the paintbrush," said The Devil's Own Son. "It is the only one of its kind, and a very precious thing."
"Will you sell it to me?" Guido asked him. "I have little with which to pay you, but I will give you anything you ask."
The young man's fox eyes glittered, and he whispered into Guido's ear. "Lie with me, sin with me, and the brush is yours."
Guido was an innocent, and did not know what he had agreed to. But The Devil's Own Son was patient, and showed him the ways of flesh and pleasure in the shadow of the mountains. His lips and fingers seemed to burn against Guido's bare skin, and his teeth were very sharp, very precise. Guido did not struggle or protest, but he was afraid. He dreamed of fire and blood that night, of the lands of men burning to ash and dust in all-consuming flame. And when he woke, the brush was clutched tightly in his hand and The Devil's Own Son had gone.
Happy days followed for Guido. Those who had shunned him as a monster now praised him as a man of miracles. His paintings were beloved by one and all, and none could deny that Guido had captured beauty in his art, just as he said he would. He retraced his steps all over the world, and painted marvels and wonders without fear. Kings and emperors and popes commissioned portraits of themselves. Great cities and kingdoms commissioned murals. Guido became quite rich, and gained many patrons, but his love of painting never diminished.
The brush was always at his side, and The Devil's Own Son did not revisit him.
A whole year passed, and Guido came again to the mountains of the Far North. He had been examining his earliest successful work and had been struck by the yearning to see that beautiful, wild place again. But when he came to the spot he remembered so well, he found that the landscape had changed. The earth was barren from drought and pestilence, yielding no flowers, but only stunted weeds and brown grass. Instead of songbirds, swarms of stinging insects filled the air with harsh buzzing. The mountains themselves appeared scorched and blackened, and no snow graced their broken peaks for the first time in a thousand years.
Greatly disturbed by this terrible sight, Guido went to the next place he had visited after gaining the brush, the villages on the banks of the Great River. He found them suffering from famine and plague, worse than any the people could remember. The river itself had turned to slime and mud, the stagnant water breeding more disease. Guido traveled on, and found that everything he had painted, everything that he had used as a subject for his art, was touched by misfortune and malady. All the beauty he had sought out had been diminished or corrupted. All his patrons were falling ill, one after the other. The great cities and kingdoms of men began to crumble as they were struck by inexplicable and terrible disasters, each more grievous than the last.
No one thought to place the blame on Guido, but he knew it was his fault. He knew that the brush had truly given him the power to capture beauty in his art. For it took beauty itself from the world, stole it away, and trapped it in his canvases. Guido's first thought was to destroy the paintings, hoping that this would reverse the destruction he had caused. But after he burned one painting of a linden tree, the real, dying tree did not improve. He tried washing another canvas clean with a distillation of pine resin, removing the paint layer by layer until only a blank surface remained. And he covered another with a layer of black pigment and oil to hide the image, the way he had done with his failures. Neither method had any effect.
Finally, afraid that damaging the paintings would destroy the beauty he'd captured forever, Guido resolved to burn the cursed brush instead. It pained him to do so, for despite the evil he had unleashed on the world, the urge to paint was as strong in him as it had been since that first miraculous day in the mountains of the Far North, as strong as it had ever been since he first set out to paint beauty.
But when Guido set spark to tinder, and prepared to cast the brush into the flames, a voice called out, "Stop!"
And he looked up to see The Devil's Own Son before him, restraining him. He looked no different than he had at their first meeting, save that his white teeth seemed sharper than before.
"Why would you burn your paintbrush, young master?" asked The Devil's Own Son. "Has it not served you well, and done all that I promised it would do? Has it not allowed you to paint beauty exactly as you desired?"
Guido nodded, with tears in his eyes. "But the cost is too great. By using the brush, I have brought ruin to everything I have touched. I must destroy it and end its evil, so that I might repent for my pride and vanity."
Long white fingers pulled him away from the fire. "Destroying the brush will achieve nothing. The damage cannot be so easily undone by a simple act of remorse."
"Then, surely you must have the power to make things right," Guido beseeched him. "What do you want of me this time? My body? My blood? I have learned a little more of the Devil, since we last met. If it is my immortal soul that must be forfeited, I will offer that too, gladly."
"I am not my father," said The Devil's Own Son, fox eyes gleaming, "and I have no use for your soul. As I told you before, young master, my interest is in your talent. And it is you, not I, who wields the power to change this world."
And it seemed to Guido that the young man's form began to shift and warp, so that his face appeared distorted, the features twisted and gruesome at one moment, and then handsome again the next. But as he spoke, his voice remained unchanged.
"Your gift was always the ability to capture that which makes humanity tremble and despair and wake screaming in the dead hours of the night. But you've hardly used it. In fact, you've never tried painting anything that wasn't beautiful. That is a far more dreadful sin than those you would seek to repent."
Guido clutched the brush in his hands tightly. "You mean to say that if I paint ugliness with this brush, then beauty will return to the world?"
The Devil's Own Son smiled, a smile that was both terrible and wondrous. His shape became whole once more. "I still wish to become your patron. If you have no use for your new paintings, give them to me. I will take them to my father's vast and unequalled domain, that some call Hell, where they shall be truly appreciated."
And he pressed his red mouth to Guido's. And this time Guido's wide eyes were open as The Devil's Own Son shed clothing and civility to indulge his base desire. Guido took the pain and the pleasure into himself without fear, though his body burned as if he had cast himself into hellfire. And his hands stroked the hair black as crow feathers and his bare legs intertwined with something that may or may not have been a long, whip-like tail. And when he was beyond exhaustion, and had found release more times than he could count, Guido drifted off to sleep. This time he did not dream at all, but slept deeply and soundly. And when he woke from his slumber, he found a warm hand clasped tightly in his own.
Guido set out again with his paints and his canvases and the brush he had bought and paid for, this time to paint all that was horrid and vile in the world. He was not in the habit of hiding his work any longer, and so his efforts brought only revulsion and horror from his former admirers. If his earliest paintings had been ugly, then aided by the power of the brush and Guido's newfound purpose, his new paintings displayed ugliness tenfold. Hardly a soul in the lands of men could stand to look at them.
In time, the pestilence and plagues abated, and the world birthed life anew. Some who had been afflicted lived, and some died. There was one stretch of mountain in the Far North, where nothing ever grew again. Yet by and large, balance was restored, and nature was once more in concord with heaven and earth.
As for Guido, some say he still wanders the poorest, harshest wastelands and battlefields, painting ugliness year after year to keep the mortal world beautiful. And some say he followed The Devil's Own Son to Hell, in order to paint a portrait of the Devil himself.
And some say he has grown very sharp, white teeth and learned to smile like a fox.
the end
Author's Note: Much thanks to my betas, Lady Sisyphus (ladysisyphus) and Winged Sandals (winged_sandals)