Inktober

summary: Carmina Mora finds an interesting challenge on the internet and decides to participate in it.

word count: 625

a/n: happy (late) valentine’s day, Aquivor! I hope you enjoy your story! btw, this takes place pre-fog.

Ink black fog. Shifting, reshaping, reforming, flowing like a soft stream. Dull, vacant eyes, glassed over. The caws of crows filled her ears, first in a trickle, and soon becoming a rapid torrent, like the raging river below the DeathLeap. But Carmina knew that the soft stream and the raging river were nothing but different parts of the same whole. And the river flowed black. Black with ink, and black with the feathers littered across its surface, hidden in swaths beneath the brine.

A voice. “Carmina!” She whipped her head around. It was her friend. They smiled, relieved. “Lost in thought?”

Carmina shook her head. “No. FOUND in thought. I’ve just been inspired to make another piece.”

They grinned. “If only I could be fueled so steadily to create. What is your muse?”

“Agony.” Carmina said simply, and it reflected a thousand tears cried, day and night, over unspeakable losses.

Her friend didn’t notice, however. “Tragedy is our greatest inspiration, isn’t it? Though in some cases, the biggest tragedies are our daily woes.” They gave a chuckle. “Mine sure is. Woes aside, I found something you might be interested in. Care to take a look?” They held up their phone, and Carmina scooted her swivel chair over to get a closer look. Their screen showed an Instagram feed containing black-ink art.

“A local artist?” Carmina asked. She didn’t recognize their style. Someone new, perhaps?

“Nope. Just a foreigner, but their art isn’t my focus. See this?” They tapped one of the photos, and the full screen image revealed a graphic.

“Inktober,” Carmina read aloud, “Sounds like it’s made for me.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Her friend said, “And what better way is there to popularize yourself with international audiences than this?”

Carmina smiled at them. “Thank you for thinking of me. It means a lot.”

“Of course,” They replied, “You’re my friend, and I want to see you go as far as you can. I’ll send a screenshot of the post to you so you have all the prompts and the hashtag.”

The two artists went back to talking about pretty things they’d seen and heard that day — the sunrise, a child unintentionally sounding poetic when telling their mother they loved her, two lovers reunited outside of a community center, a feral cat finally letting a good samaritan pet it after he fed it for months. Nature and humanity can move the heart in so many ways, and one can never know exactly when it will happen.

After her friend left, Carmina set up her easel, grabbed an old pot of black ink, and began to draw. She was inspired, not by the pretty things, but by the dark and the morbid. She could never quite figure out if the images that haunted the reaches of her mind were a comfort or a burden, a blessing or a curse, but she always felt compelled to bring them to life, with her black ink being their lifeblood. Perhaps, she thought, her compulsion was due to the solace the nightmares brought her — in such an ever-changing world, it felt easier to dwell in the familiarity of the horrors than risk shattering her heart for daring to think she belonged in the light.

Whatever the reason, she found herself creating in the dim light the moonlight provided, as day turned to dusk turned to nightfall. This drawing, sparked by an Inktober prompt, had long since taken on a life of its own, as if every etch from her quill was casting a spell to animate it. The fog from earlier encroached on the corners of her vision, and Carmina thought to herself, ‘I’m in the zone.’

But of course, she had no conception of what that “zone” truly was.