Aaliyah, one hand occupied with her flats, opened a door to a room that had a mattress on the floor. She came to the closet that was empty save for some children’s storage bins to search through them. After only a moment’s rummage, she found what she was looking for just where she remembered it. A spooky toy alien that she painted when she was a child. Looking at it, holding it, she remembered the times when she still wore pinafores.
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The table was laid out into separate stations stocked with acrylic paints, synthetic brushes, cutting mats, pallets, napkins, and bowls of water. The light of the lamp overhead was to make the colors pop down to the finest detail. Aaliyah and Hannah were in Tyler’s room where he would show them how to paint toys the way he did.
It wasn’t the first time he showed them, in both demonstration and practice, which made it all the more embarrassing for Aaliyah that she still failed to get the hang of it. The image she had in her head was cast further and further down a chasm of disillusionment with every sloven stroke that contributed to the ugly reality in her gloved hands. He had even done the work of assembling the toys for them, and she ruined it with her incapabilities.
She looked to her side to see how her friends were doing. Tyler, mesmerizing as always, bestowed his flag with a definition that matched the tapestry she had seen in cathedrals. Meanwhile, Hannah was worse off than Aaliyah was: the splotched and melted paint gave birth to a horror far more monstrous than the original model and she made a mess of herself too. Aaliyah felt comforted about being better than Hannah, which wrapped back around to feeling bad about taking happiness from someone else’s shortcomings to distract from her own.
“Is something wrong?” asked Tyler.
“Well, I’m not very good so my toys always come out ugly.”
“Model miniatures. You just need to practice. You have an idea in your head, don’t you? I want to see it, so I want you to keep trying.”
“But I can’t…” she whimpered, now surprised at how much she teared up.
“Let me see… there’s the problem: you didn’t prime it. Applying primer provides a strong, adhesive undercoat on the model so that the paint you put on top has something sticky to hold onto. How can you judge yourself when you haven’t given yourself a fighting chance? Here I’ll show you.”
Tyler brought out another model, cut and glued together beforehand the same as the last, reliably prepared as he always was. He set it on the mat and then used the primer bottle to squeeze out a gray drop on a napkin. The dry paintbrush was placed in Aaliyah’s hands which he held at the wrists to guide them with his own.
“Now dip the brush lightly in the primer, just to frost the toe of the bristles,” he said in her ear over her shoulder as the weight of his chest pressed on her back, “now take up the model in your other hand. I want you to brush quickly to make sure none of the wet primer pools in one spot and keep the undercoat thin. We want to balance uniformly covering the model while preserving the important details.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“O-okay…” Aaliyah replied. His arm moved down around her waist now as he watched her paint from over her shoulder. The craggy metal toy had its shiny surface smoothed over with a layer of dull gray.
“You took the first step; it seems less daunting now, right?”
“Yeah,” she said with a blush. He always knew just what to do and say to warm her when she was cold. A different warmth, however, was enkindled when he finally saw what Hannah was doing to his room. Aaliyah felt a little bad about how much she enjoyed Hannah getting scolded again but she couldn’t hold back her giggles when Hannah got her cheeks and ears pinched.
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The knights stood in the middle of the room with their sollerets in hand. Zhou Deimos told the knights to put their shoes on and brace themselves, then came up on Aaliyah’s side in the closet. Zhou traced her fingers along the wall, but Aaliyah was only broken out of her reminiscence when she was struck by a green shine that caused the wall to fall away.
Drowsiness dragged down Aaliyah’s whole body. The toy fell back into the storage bin as her grip lost strength. She let her shoulder slump against the closet frame to keep from crumpling completely. While the knights close to her held each other for support, those any further away collapsed on the carpet. Those that could move feebly pointed their slung rifles at Zhou.
“Oh put those down, you big babies. You’ll get used to it soon,”
“What… did… you…” Aaliyah did have the will to finish the sentence.
“Welcome to Hell. It will only get worse. If this is too much, then give up.”
Aaliyah slid down the frame and caught herself with limp wrists that sprained on impact with the ground. The pain and instability added to the chorus of her devitalized body that begged to melt away. Her muscles felt like they were about slough off at any moment. Her eyes lids were weighed down with iron. Her mind was sapped of the will to do anything but to let go.
Her grip on life hung by her fingernails on a cliff edge. No matter how badly she thought she wanted to let go, to release her bloody fingernails, something inside more powerful than Hell would not allow her to fall. Instead, it commanded her to dig her nails into stone.
Aaliyah stretched her hands out to the side which allowed her face to smash into the floor. Her nose bled but her hands were free to form a strong bubble around her group. While the bubble protected them from the force that dragged them down, the pain and fatigue remained.
Aaliyah lifted herself by her core onto her knees then put forward one wobbly leg to push herself to stand. She looked Zhou in the eyes as the knights began to stand as well. Zhou scoffed but led them into the gateway regardless.
The gateway led inside a dark and empty storehouse. The force that commanded inanition before now filled her muscles with phlegm as it seeped through the bubble. Sluggish as every breath was, with the knights huddled tight around her, Aaliyah pressed on in Zhou’s footsteps. Zhou led through the dark to a bronze door.
Zhou began to open the door, and that initial crack was enough to leak in a baleful dusk light that burnt against Aaliyah’s bubble. The fully open door revealed the travertine tile floor and tufa stone walls of the storehouse. The sky writhed along sickly veins that all connected to a beating sun. The insulae apartment blocks gave a cover of shade to the stone road they were now on. The path downhill saw a wall that separated the cityscape from the vast fleshy plains beyond.
“Welcome to hell," said Zhou, "This is Arx Horatius, citadel and grave of Saint Horatius. We will follow this road up the hill to the forum where his basilica stands."