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It wasn't as Satarella had imagined it. Her final showing, her last moment in the conservatory. All of her said it should feel momentous, powerful, triumphant! The future unfolded before her and it was all hers to walk upon it. It was a trash ceremony. They were serving all kinds of wines and cheeses and her half-dead body couldn't taste any of it. The eyes of half-interested people brushed over the surface of countless cycles of her work with all the casual interest of viewing an advertisement for soap.

Art was a market, of course. That was the duality of its nature. Your hard effort and meaning, life poured into paints in a microcosm of the aurora colors of your own soul, but solidified, captured in a moment, and, just as one's life was so often treated, passed over with complete disinterest. Hers were just a handful of the hundreds of paintings on display in the main hall. Her life was just one of the hundreds in the room.

"Wow."

A glitzy golden dadal was standing in front of one of her works right now. Just as Satarella's soul spilled out of her cold body in strings of light, the dadal had an excess, as well, collected into a pair of red and blue arms, which were crossed in a dramatic telegraph of deep thought. Turning--at the hip, so she could see past the ridiculous gold-foil fan framing her head--the dadal tipped her nose in Satarella's direction.

"These yours?" the dadal asked in Brinnesch.

"Yes," Satarella said. Here came the critiques, the examination, the mortifying ordeal of another soul attempting to understand and only able to ever perceive the surface, the finished image, never the process, the internal life of--

"You're not actually a Brinnelander are you?"

Satarella's thoughts stumbled a moment. "And why do you say that."

The dadal sashayed over and sat down in the couch next to her. The crinkle of the gold-foil was a loud distraction among the haze of quiet footsteps and muttered words that flowed down the great hallway incoherent and formless. "I'd call out your outfit but I mean look at what I'm wearing. This is like, a triple mix of cultures you can't tell anything like that anymore. Art though! Hey there's a neat shortcut into someone's soul."

"A shortcut few find themselves able to meaningfully traverse," Satarella said pointedly.

"Sure cool. I'm gonna make a random shot at why I think it okay? If I get this one right I get your name deal?"

"I don't really want to play games."

"That's a deal then okay. You had to learn a lot about Brinnelander art tradition and nothing of what I'm guessing is like more Avurhurm-y stuff and since you weren't actually raised Brinnelander you resented it which is why you're like, actively fighting the influence in your style. Like you're doing late-era Gammerlern composition and you really don't want to be and it's at the point where you're doing it in anger."

That wasn't fair, Satarella considered. But wasn't someone deciphering the flash-frozen moment of the art and cohereifying the whole of the artist's soul what she had hoped for? For someone to connect with her through art? To expose herself? But to feel so naked? "That is a very specific guess."

"Yeah I'm good at specific guesses," the dadal laughed, too loudly for the quiet hallway. "Half my soul is sticking out my body half your soul is sticking out your body maybe that makes it easier? How right am I."

Satarella sighed, which was a complicated process, the auroral puppet-strings she controlled her body with having to really push in the diaphragm and let out a long, heavy sigh of cold air. "It was meant as a parody of Germisali's style."

"Huh. What's parodtit about it."

"I don't know," Satarella admitted. "I hated him being held up as the greatest example of art when he died in the Old World and only a handful of originals even exist anymore. I guess you were wrong, then, though. I do not resent his nationality. I resent that his nationality's idea of art is distilled into the obtuse idea that 'such-a-one has done this, all subsequent art shall be compared only to him.' That is why--"

"--the constrained composition feels so suffocating--"

"--yes because his standards of composition itself are overbearing--"

"--and so it breaks down at the top because you're breaking--"

"--yes! Yes! Exactly." The Ocean had seen fit to provide someone who GOT it, sacred fate, how well timed was this relief. "I may not have even been consciously aware of it as such when I had painted it but there it is."

"Nice! Hey." The dadal leaned in more closely, staring into the eyes Satarella didn't even use to see. "I was half right. Can I get half your name."

"Sata," Satarella said, turning her snout up mockingly. "That's half."

"Pfft. Okay. I'm Sasf."

"Sasuf--Sa--"

"Nili. Let's do the Escalihaxim one."

"Nili. Well. Are you an artist yourself?"

Nili laughed. "Oh no, dead Brinneland gods no. I'm from the DPREI. It's not our culture to produce anything of meaning at all."

Satarella had to laugh, now, the auroral light of her soul vibrating in humming amusement throughout the air. "They are for sale at the end of the showing, if you're interested."

Long, soft fingers cupped beneath Satarella's trunk and turned her head in close towards Nili's conspiratorial smile. "Do you come with the painting?"

"In a way," Satarella said. "Every painting contains a part of the artist's soul, captured in the moments of its birth."

"Hah! Okay." Nili playfully pushed Satarella's snout away. "Bet you I can do another one."

"Another analysis?"

"Another guess. You. Are. Incredibly concerned about something approaching. Is it your graduation? Is it this? No but look at how ominous it all is, no. I'm going to say you--no, it is the graduation. You're afraid of leaving the conservatory... because there's something terrifying lurking just outside it you don't want to go to."

Other races wore their thoughts on the flesh of their bodies, in blushes of heat, in widening of eyes, in changing of breath. Satarella's soul, instead, shivered. "If I discover you are a reader, I'm going to be much less impressed."

"Pfft! Am I right?"

"... sure. What do you win this time?"

"The rest of your name?"

"Satarella."

Nili clapped her paws together. "Neat. Satarella. I'm Nilivir. So. Why praydotell do all of your paintings have such a sense of impending terror?"

"... also unintentional," Satarella admitted. "Or, no, it was intentional. I suppose I intended every stroke of darkening pressure didn't I?"

Nilivir leaned in close again. Satarella's body's nose could smell the faint berries of wine on her breath. "So what are you dreading? Having to sell bits of your soul for a living? Worldfear itself? No? Ah, I'm stumped. It's time I confess it all. I just had a hunch. You know that's the secret? You make enough blind guesses at enough targets eventually you hit one and then it's like, wow, how did you do that? And it's like, statistics. I think I got far enough though."

"I don't feel comfortable telling my life to strangers," Satarella said.

"We know one another's names! Also pfft good luck being an artist and not wanting to be known. 'cause what you get then, you get half-known! You get idiots like me making half-guesses so now I'm full of ideas and I'm missing important bits so now I have an idea of you in my head that isn't you, you know? So you either leave me with a half-finished Sata that I'm sure you'd hate to be known as, or you do the other end and fill out the rella and we'll see what's worse. Being misunderstood, or being known, yeah?"

The display had been dead uneventful otherwise, besides this, Satarella thought to herself. This was the first person to even stop for any time at anything she'd made. The Ocean had arranged this, she felt, in the stirring cloud of her soul, why deny fate? "What do you think of the concept of royalty?"

"Yeah I got a lot of thoughts about that but I start saying them we're here all night just listening to me."

"Well. Do you know of Alofhom?"

Nilivir shook her head. "What's that?"

"When the torfedden arrived in the Old World we did not all integrate into old Brinneland. My ancestors stayed apart, and Alofhom is one of our few remaining vestiges, the last relics of the oldest Avurhurn."

Nilivir nodded. "And you're their princess."

"Yes. One of them."

Nilivir choked on her tongue and scrabbled about on the leather of the couch. "Pfft--what? Wait? Really? Should I be saying your majesty or something?"

"Yes," Satarella said, managing complete seriousness.

"My apologies, your majestry," Nilivir said in matching earnesty, standing up from her couch and dipping into an extravagant bow that gave Satarella several conflicted feelings braided into one mass of weight.

Satarella said, "But I am terrified. Can you imagine the burden? The mass of responsibility? The last traditions of Avurhurn are entrusted to me to preserve and die without me. It looms over me like the Void. It makes its way into everything I paint, intentional or not. It sucks."

Nilivir dropped herself back down onto the couch with a heavy thump. "Yeah. I can get that. In DPREI we killed our kings and decided the people with the most money get to be called 'boss' and that's our royalty. My family happens to have a whole lot of money and they are so not happy that I am spending my life, say, for example, hanging out in an art show."

"Well. They are for sale. If you would like to show off your fine taste in royal artwork, and commemorate this fleeting moment of interpersonal connection. Or at least commemorate the lucky guesses that lead to it."

Nilivir laughed. Again, her fingers scooped up Satarella's snout, and now her auroral arm wrapped around her side, embracing her in the familiar warmth of another naked soul. "Or you know. It doesn't have to be a fleeting moment, your majesty. Who says princesses don't get to have a bit of fun now and then?"

Satarella had no response in her soul prepared for this and it was thus almost a relief when the door far down the hallway exploded and a dozen people with guns rushed in. Echoed shouts and screams ran up and down the long hallway, deafening, chaotic. "They're here for me," Satarella said, not knowing it until the words vibrated out of her soul. "Something's happened to my family. They're here for me."

Nilivir peered over Satarella's head, and then looked back down at her. "Neat. I never got to rescue a princess before."