The One Who Doesn't Sleep

Night forest closes into an arch of bare branches, and inside that arch — a dark face with smoldering eyes the color of embers not yet cooled to ash. From its crown a thin turquoise cord flows down, curling into a spiral at its end — the one line here belonging neither to fire nor to water, neither to day nor to night.

The face flows downward in a single unbroken line into the head of Yashcher — the chthonic serpent-dragon at the border between Yav and Nav, lord of waters and of fire beneath the earth. The path of trial reads in the color itself: where the jaw ends, the fire cools into fire-water, and under ultraviolet light the same border sharpens further.

Turn the painting counterclockwise, and the same line resolves into the profile of a Shaman, and the branches of the World Tree reach toward him, finally recognizing their own axis. Yashcher and the Shaman do not transform into one another: they were always a single line, half a truth waiting for the right angle — this is what the hero's path looks like from within, while it is still unfinished.

In total darkness, everything goes out — the body, the flame, both faces, the whole forest around them. Only the Shaman's eye remains: it lights up turquoise-green on its own, the one sight that doesn't go out with the likeness it belonged to. Neither dragon nor shaman — the one who doesn't sleep while the path is still unwalked: the only one left keeping watch where both likenesses end.