Luna Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Luna Nightshade stared at the blank canvas and hated it. The grand exhibition opened in six days. First place would prove she was more than half of anything, and her canvas was still empty. She dropped her brush. Every color she tried told only one story. Pink for the vampire. Black for the wolf. Never both at once. She paced her studio inside the little stone keep she called home. Colored banners hung along the tall windows, and painted dragons crowded the walls. None of it helped. Luna pressed her palm to her chest, where two hearts seemed to fight for room. Blue eyes stinging, she picked up a jar of black paint and threw it. It burst against the wall and dripped. Her dragon lifted its head from the corner. The creature was the size of a large dog, its scales shifting blue into purple as it moved. It padded to the ruined wall and sniffed the dripping paint. Then it huffed. A thin ribbon of flame licked from its jaws. "Careful," Luna warned. But the dragon wasn't burning the wall. It breathed low across the spilled black paint, and the heat changed it. The paint bubbled, then cooled into a strange sheen. Where the flame touched, the black turned violet at the edges. Blue crept through the middle. It looked alive. Luna knelt. She touched the cooled paint. It was smooth and shimmered like dragon scale. She understood then. The paint alone was only half. Her dragon's fire was the other half. Fire and pigment together made a color that shifted the way she did. She worked fast. She mixed her black paint thick and spread it across the canvas. Her dragon leaned close and breathed. The flame passed over the wet paint, and the black bloomed into blue and purple, then settled dark again in the cool spots. Luna added pink into the melted color while it was still warm. The two shades bled together and held. Hours passed. The image grew. A forest rose across the canvas, deep green and tangled with roots. Behind the trees she painted a castle, its windows glowing pink through the dark. It was the place from her oldest dream, half wonder and half fear. The fire-touched paint made the castle glow from inside, the way memory does. Both her halves lived in it. The wolf in the wild forest. The vampire in the haunted tower. Luna set down her brush at dawn. The canvas was full. She had found her medium at last. Then she stepped back and saw the flaw. The fire-melted paint was still soft in the thickest places. She pressed one finger to the castle and it smeared. The color that made her masterpiece work would not dry on its own. In six days the paint would either set, or the whole painting would slide and ruin. Her dragon looked at her. Luna looked at the melting castle. She had one problem left, and no idea how to solve it.