Painting the Sky [3]

When Vaska painted the third wedge of color on that pale canvas the paints she used were selected to resemble the colors of the gloaming. Indigo and midnight and spots of titanium white for the stars and for the moon and a blend of gray-green-blue for the Gray Baby, and red and orange against the darkness of the pom-pom trees which reached up unceasingly down in the shrubland. Ingrid and Vaska ironically carried out their ritual of negotiation before they both disrobed and Vaska painted nothing more that night.

They dressed in lacy underwear which was designed to reveal their body parts and among these Ingrid wore turquoise and Vaska wore umber, a dichotomy which was not lost on them for these colors might have represented the Queen of Wind and the Queen of Stone respectively.

"Every Elemental Queen has a sister-self," Vaska explained. "The Queen of Wind guards one half of the divine power of the Goddess of Foundations. The Queen of Stone guards the other half. They appear to mortal minds as two elementals but they are, in fact, the same elemental. Each Elemental Queen and her sister-self appears to mortal minds according to the divine power which is being channeled."

"So you can only see one at a time?" Ingrid asked.

"No. The elemental can appear before mortals with two bodies each one drawing upon separate divine powers."

"I don't know if I believe that they are the same entity. If that was true, then the Queen of Light and the Queen of Darkness are the same entity, which would just be absurd. The Queen of Light is our source of faith and hope in this world, and the Queen of Darkness was sealed away forever by the ancient heroes."

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"They would like you to believe that," Vaska said.

"What do you mean?"

"My family was involved with the binding of the Queen of Darkness. There are things my father will not talk about. There are secrets that I don't even know."

"But what could go wrong?" Ingrid asked. "The Queen of Darkness was evil and it was a good thing to seal her. How could it not be? Is it not the burden of heroes to rise above darkness and inspire others?"

"The Goddess of Freedom bisected herself into light and dark and those divine powers cannot be destroyed," Vaska said. "To me this means that the dark half of the power is still out there. Unguarded. Or maybe actively being misused. Who could stand against the Queen of Darkness before she was subjugated with her binding? Only, I think, Reyndell the Paladin and his luck elemental, the High Daughter of the Queen of Light, which is written in the histories by the name Titania. But Reyndell's bones turned to dust before the founding of the village which would after five thousand years become the city of Heyl."

"Where is Titania now?" Ingrid asked.

"This is the thing my father will not tell me. It is something that not even Erika knows, and she was close to Titania once. As close as a dark elemental can be to a light elemental without being sister-selves like the Elemental Queens."

"Maybe we should look for her?"

"Why would we do that?"

"If she is a luck elemental then maybe she could cure your curse of bad luck."

"Maybe she could."

"Then we should look for her."

"We should."