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I wanted to ask why and lecture him on how horrible it was that he just left them to rot. But now, I was sure he was baiting me. Saying nothing, I tried to focus on the job in front of me, picking up the varnish as well as my paintbrush.
“I painted this about two hundred years after my rebirth.” He leaned closer, and I felt his breath tickle the side of my face. “I call it My First Rebellion.”
“What?” At that, my eyes jerked toward him, and he grinned, knowing I’d lost this game. Damn my art-history heart. Sucking up my pride, I ignored his smugness. “Why your first rebellion? And two hundred years after your rebirth would make this five-hundred-years older than the Mona Lisa…and six-hundred-years older than the Renaissance period it comes from.”
“You are so young, you may as well be human.” He laughed at me as he pulled up a chair.
“You really must be enjoying starting fights with me.” I glared at him as he sat beside me to touch the painting. But I grabbed a new pair of gloves to make him wear.
His eyebrow rose, but he took them. “I am. But I doubt you can stop yourself, either.”
“About the art…how?”
“What does renaissance mean, Druella,” he questioned as he placed the black gloves over his hands.
“Rebirth or revival.”
He nodded. “Exactly. For there to be a rebirth or revival then it must have existed before, or else it would have been considered new. People were painting long before the mortals classified the Renaissance period in 1400.”
“Of course, they were, but the Renaissance was of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that had been abandoned during the dark ages and replayed to the world around them instead of being left to clergy and the church.” I felt like I was speaking to my Introduction to Art History 101 professor. “The work of the medieval times is much bleaker.”
I saw a lot of tough times through art, and the Romanesque period was not my favorite. Paintings had continued as illustrated manuscripts and extended to murals within in churches. Everything was focused on holy figures portrayed in stiff and formal postures, with thick halo-crowns and this expression of serenity, which I always felt looked forced. Most of all, the paintings lacked background, and the figures were all flat with no sense of depth or dimension.
“For the mortals,” he corrected, amused. “I know a great many vampires who thought the 15th century was the closest thing to heaven they had ever encountered.”
Now that I thought about it more, no one that I was aware of knew anyone who’d live through it. The paintings I had thought of as all history automatically turned to human history. “For the mortals,” I spoke my thought aloud, so he could correct me if I were wrong. “All of the world was either at war, or dying of plague or hunger, there wasn’t anything scenic to paint into the background, and the faces of people were probably gaunt. Which is why the figures were either stickily thin or overly round. Either the human artist was depicting the reality, their holy figures suffering in serenity like them, or they were imagining those figures above the world of suffering they were in. But witches weren’t sick.”
“And because of that, they were exposed, leaving them the victims of witch hunts and the blame for the human illness. Some, like you did as a child, would pretend to be ill to survive. They lived in the same horrid world and could not use their magic to save themselves.”
“But for the vampires?”
He smirked a bit. “We enjoyed roaming the earth freely for the first time, no more hiding in the shadows. The mortals were trying to survive while many of us were feasting and living like gods; at least the Noble bloods were, anyway.”
“Dr. Lovell always called me a snob for not really caring for art before the Renaissance, but you were all living like Marie Antoinette.” I shouldn’t have found it funny who knew how many died of the plague or at the amusement of vampires.
“Not all of us,” he repeated, nodding to his work. “As I said, at this point, I was rebelling.”
“From?”
“Everything.” He frowned, looking over to himself in the painting. “I had lived for over two hundred years, and I had grown tired of the humans’ constant wars, the witches’ constant trouble, and the vampires’ constant need for power. I wanted it to end.”
“You… you wanted to die?”
“Yes, and Noble bloods do not die easily. It is not only witch fire that can kill us instantly. But bewitched beasts, poisoned blood, or to be ripped to pieces and set aflame, but normal flames would work all the same. I had already been ripped to pieces, and I doubted I could stay still enough to be burned,” he said as if it were nothing and pointed to a man in the distance at the very top of the Colosseum-type structure. “I went to the now-lost city of Hylluspolis, north of Cairo. It was said a great wizard lived there with his bewitched beast, who had never been defeated.”
“So logically you went down to the lost city to see if it was true.”
“Logically.” He winked at me, and I ignored him, nodding to the person he’d mentioned.
“Is this the great wizard?”
“He was King Hyllus.”
“King Hyllus of Hylluspolis? Really?” I gasped, staring at him. “Is this story real?”
He pointed to the stones in the chair of the King, and my Latin was good enough that I could read, King Hyllus I. “He was just as ridiculous as the name of his city.”
“What happened to Hylluspolis?” Just saying that name made me want to giggle.
