Three days after the funeral, someone knocked on the cottage door. Astra was on the floor. Not in the way of collapse, not anymore. She had moved, at some point in the night, from the middle of the studio to the wall beside the window, and she had sat there with her back against the cold stone and her knees pulled up and the scattered brushes still around her, the dried pigment still spread across the floor in its long dark pools, and she had stayed there because the floor was as good a place as any and getting up required deciding where to go next, which required a reason, which she did not have.
The knock came again. Two sharp raps. Confident. The kind of knock that assumed it would be answered. Astra did not move. A pause. Then a voice, unhurried and slightly too loud for the quiet of the morning, as if its owner had decided the door was merely a formality.
ILA: I know you're in there.
Astra looked at the door. She did not stand up.
ILA: I'm Illia. You probably don't know me. That's fine, I know you. Blook sent me, which means I had to come all the way down from the heavens, which, for the record, is not a short trip, so the least you could do is open the door.
Silence from inside the cottage. Silence from Astra, who had become very good at silence in the past three days. Another pause. Illia, to her credit, did not knock again.
ILA: He said you were an artist. I'm an artist too. Better than you, probably, but that's not the point.
Outside, a bird passed. The morning continued its indifferent work.
ILA: My paintbrush can draw things in and out of existence. I once painted a mountain just to see if I could, and it's still there, which is either a great success or a geographical problem, depending on who you ask. The point is I know what it is to make things. I know what it is when making things is the whole of you.
Astra's hands were in her lap. She looked at them the way she had been looking at them for three days. The same hands. The same faint scar on her right index finger. The same stillness where the warmth used to be.
ILA: I'm not going to tell you it gets better. I hate when people say that. It's not useful information. Better is far away and you're here right now and those are two different problems.
A beat.
ILA: I'm also not going to tell you he'd want you to be okay. People say that too and it's annoying because it's probably true but it doesn't help anything. You can know something is true and still not be able to use it.
The pigment on the floor had dried fully now. The blue near the window had cracked slightly at its edge the way dried paint did, pulling away from the stone in a thin curl. Astra noticed it the way she had been noticing small things, without investment, without reaction, the way the eye moved over a thing simply because the thing was there.
ILA: You don't have to open the door. I'm not going to make you. I'm cocky, not unreasonable.
Despite herself, something moved in Astra's chest. Small. Not quite anything. She did not stand up.
ILA: But I'm going to come back. That's not a threat, it's just information. Blook asked me a favor and I don't do favors halfway. It's a personal policy. So I'll be back tomorrow, and the day after that if I have to, and I'll knock the same annoying number of times and talk at your door for an unreasonable length of time and eventually one of us will get bored and it's not going to be me.
The morning held its quiet. Somewhere down the road, something moved. A cart. An ordinary sound from an ordinary world that had not received the message about what had happened.
ILA: Also, and I mean this with complete sincerity, you should eat something.
Footsteps. Retreating. Unhurried, the way Illia seemed to do everything, as if urgency was something that happened to other people. Then silence.
Astra stayed on the floor for a long time after the footsteps faded. She looked at the door. She looked at her hands. She looked at the dried pigment on the floor, the blue cracking at its edges, the ochre that had spread into the deep almost-black green and made something new in the mixing that she hadn't intended and hadn't named. She had not opened the door.
She was aware, in some distant and not yet useful way, that she had listened to every word.
She put her head back against the cold stone wall and closed her eyes and outside the morning kept moving, patient and unhurried, the same way it always had, and somewhere up above the clouds a woman with a paintbrush that could draw anything into existence was walking back down a road that led away from a cottage where a light had gone out, and was already planning what she would say tomorrow.