Lavender Andreas
September 2022
She had a friend.
A slightly stupid friend, but a friend nonetheless. She hadn’t had one of those in a long time.
She sighed, pulling her keys from her pocket. The door to her studio was cold against her hand as she unlocked and shoved it open.
Oran had caught a glimpse of her map, but saw nothing of much importance. She doubted he realized that what he’d seen was part of something much bigger, though she didn’t doubt that he wouldn’t figure it out in time.
Lavender flicked the light switch. Her studio was moderately small, the main room roughly the same size as the average classroom, with a storage room and a bathroom attached.
She shuffled around the cluttered space, cracking open various windows as she switched on light after light. Paintings stood in various stages of completion on easels, side tables and desks littered with paper, paint rags, paint brushes, and pencils. Once she’d opened the wall’s worth of windows on the far side of the studio, her gaze shifted.
The map – the same map she’d been working on for five years – was nearly complete. It took up nearly an entire wall, depicting her world.
The Valley of Jagged Spires made up the Northernmost part of the Island; the loneliest region of the land. She’d made it that way, oh, so long ago, and only recently vacated her spot in solitude.
Oran was to thank for that.
Just south of that stony solitude, vast expanses of rolling grassy hills and flower fields lay, basking in the sun. The valley was always filled with light, seeming to permanently resemble a perfect spring day.
The fields faded to sandy hills in the South, leading to the Stretch of Reflection; a vast, shallow expanse of water so undisturbed the perfect reflection of the region’s neverending sunset shone in the water. The reflective plane narrowed further south until it reached the edge of the Stretch. From there, the ground fell away, creating the waterfall of giggling, flowing into the betta-filled pool below. The water then flowed downstream before connecting to the ocean in a bay furthest to the South-West: the Bay of the Beached Whale.
It was the world – her world – finally complete.
Lavender exhaled. After years of hard work, paint stains, and a whole hell of a lot of practice, research, classes, blood, sweat, and tears, it was done.
After the shit she’d faced, it was finally complete.
Though it’d taken all her strength, she’d healed her wounds, growing in the process. She’d made it to the good part, the so-called light at the end of the tunnel.
That didn’t mean the scar wasn’t still there, evident in both her or her world.
There, tucked away in the shadow of the waterfall, was the cave.
