"Is this one of those abstract paintings where I'm supposed to feel instead of seeing it?"
"No?"
He clicked his tongue before taking the canvas off the support and standing up.
"You don't need to feel it unless you want to; what matters is what you see."
'What I see?'
Loki walked over to his window and hung his painting right next to it on an already prepared nail that stuck out of the wall. He took a step back watching it, and corrected the frame to make it look straight.
"Try again."
He gestured to it with his chin, taking a step back and eyeing me from the side like an artist would look at an appraiser.
The canvas looked to be made out of expensive fibers, standing out from the paint-stained room with its spotless black surface. It looked dark, dark enough to make me blink my eyes and think that it was simply a hole in the castle's wall.
A minute had passed like this as I squinted my eyes at the paint, tracing the tiny lines left by his brush overlapping over the previous strokes and then going down to the wall, taking my eyes off the supposed piece of art.
'There's nothing...'
Yet no matter how much I looked at it, there was nothing special about it. Nothing seemed to stand out from that square of black paint and wood.
On the side, Loki had already accepted such an outcome, sighing to himself with disappointment and sitting back on his little stool, rocking back and forward.
"Well, I expected this from you, you are different after all."
'Urk.'
He stopped moving and locked eyes with me, sending a weak shiver down my spine.
"I guess you have to go and do your job now."
"Huh?"
"What? Didn't Cesar mention it-wait. Never mind, of course he didn't do it." Loki sighed under his nose, murmuring something that sounded like 'lazy bastard' under his nose, and turned on his pulseband, this time choosing to turn off the security feature and show me the texts.
"You're going to need to replace Cesar since he couldn't make it and has to wait a week for another train to get him... wait, no, it's two weeks since it's-"
"Two weeks?!"
Glaring at me from behind his colorless flux screen, he snorted and flicked a piece of text towards me.
"It was a job meant for a golden-ranked delver, so why are you acting so surprised? Do you even know how it is to work for someone?"
I narrowed my eyes at him.
"Do you?"
"Well, no, but I know what you need to do, so it's plenty enough."
'Yeah, right.'
"Why can't you do it? You're clearly better suited to it than me."
"Because I'm busy!"
- Whoosh!
My eyes widened briefly as something flashed past my head, clearly lodging itself into the wall with a dull thunk that didn't echo after a second.
Loki sat on his stool with his hand out; the brush on his tray was gone.
"I won't repeat myself, do it or you're going to regret it."
His voice came as fast as the brush, seemingly grazing my cheek and drawing a drop of blood.
My eyes narrowed.
"You know, maybe you didn't change at all either."
"Really? I seem to have grown up just fine."
"Eh, whatever." Waving at him, I slowly made my way out, dodging every corner of fresh paint found mixed with the floor.
The door opened quietly with an old creak, as it would break at any second.
"Don't forget to do 'your' job."
"I won't."
The door closed softly.
***
Calm footsteps echoed across the narrow corridor, making the sound resound vibrantly in my ears.
Everything here was made of hard, ancient stone that shaped both the outer walls and the structure of the last checkpoint's castle.
It felt nice to be free of that blindingly white marble covering each inch of my room, now replaced with strange building materials I had never seen.
I stopped for a second, taking a long, deep breath of tasteless air that brushed against me, and continued along the long, stone corridor that seemed to be already ending soon, leading to a set of rooms.
'Did I take the wrong turn again?'
The last checkpoint seemed to be built similarly to a citadel, with long corridors running across the castle's walls and many low-ranking people staying on the lower floors, where their lodging as well as most of the attractions were built in a large circle around the castle.
'And here I am doing a job meant for someone who is a licensed delver with a high rank at that.'
Not that it was a dangerous or exhausting job, if anything, it might be barely acceptable for bronze-ranked delvers to go on with.
Just sit, wait for another train to stop here, and escort people from the new list to their designated rooms.
The azure screen of flux flickered into existence in front of my eyes, showing a new panel floating next to my usual pop-ups of news channels. It was the list Loki shared with me.
Old photos and short biographies of twenty different people had sprung out all around my eyes, overlapping with each other in a strange mix of unrecognizable descriptions.
With a swipe of my hand, over half of them disappeared as if connected by an invisible string, disappearing into a flurry of tiny notes of light.
Seven photos were now hovering before me, two of which I was more than familiar with.
'Alright, I guess I'd better get started.'
It was time to meet the first person whom I had to escort, even though they didn't need to.
***
As Loki sat alone inside his room and watched the old, closed door stay there unmoving from its cracked frame, he turned to look at the mess he had made out of his room, something he had yet to notice before finishing his little painting.
Ancient walls surrounded him from all sides, trapping him in a spacious cage of empty colors.
Walls which were as bright as a sheet of paper were now covered in strange drawings depicting something akin to humans but also not quite like them, always taking another form, be it a beast or a monstrosity he had yet to discover.
Through the window, he watched as the old crowd scattered peacefully, with their whispers still carried through the castle's walls.
"I can't believe Loki Albrecht himself came to save us!"
Someone who looked to be young and lively said, gathering attention from his friend next to him.
"It would have been him or the guards, either way, that little bastard is still here at the last checkpoint."
"Oh, don't get me started! It was because of him that my aunt got sent to a nearby infirmary..."
- Ha-ah.
He let out a heavy breath, clutching at the hem of his shirt like his heart would fall out at any second.
It felt like thousands of drums had replaced his heartbeat, keeping him at the tower where no one else would have dared interrupt him.
'I'm saddened.'
His eyes wandered off to his pitch-black painting that hung on the wall, swaying from side to side every few moments.
Tiny tendrils were flailing within the pitch-black paint, clawing, tearing, crushing anything that stood around them, slowly eating through the fibers before expanding in size and growing in a shape that perfectly fit the rectangular wooden frame.
*
That day, he was found sleeping for the first time in a week, lying sprawled in the middle of the corridor.