How Renaissance Artists Were Trained

[Excerpt] Green Ruins & Shallow Blues Book II: Fruitful -- from Chapter 39
(c) 2024 Kyrinn S. Eis
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

"I'd like time alone with your friend, Master.  -- No questions, ...please."
Harren looked on at his instructor, his beloved friend, and saw a fear he'd never before noticed.  It hung badly upon the older man's face, and eroded some of the confidence Harren had in the elder.
-- "Why, of course, Swordsmaster--"
Yskiil placed his left hand solemnly upon his charge's breast opposite him as the man stared intently into Harren's eyes of blue.  No words were exchanged.  Silence, save that of the rustled leaves of the Alma tree and blue blades under their feet.

Yskiil stepped away and looked minutely, instantly, upon Dardon, and strode on, up the hill to beautiful Tarl LhrJalesth, now but a purple silhouette against the lavender clouds of sunfall.  His Madan steel sword glinted orange-yellow like a firerook's distant warning.

"Come.  Let's away, Tarl."
The man of Terra turned his star-etched features and in that turn, eclipsed their mirrorlike qualities in the Oesturman's eyes.
-- "Perilous mission, slim odds, the two of us alone?"
"Quite."
Tarl smiled handsomely, "'Let's.' "
When Yskiil reached him at the apex of the hillock, the entire urbane vale below stretched into existence before him.  Even-cook smoke trailed from all but one stack,
"There." Merisah's point indicated the odd one out.
Together in silence, the two stood, drank in the Westered Sun.  Tarl noticed a reverence well up from within Yskiil, and declined his head a tad, and thought of his most memorable sense of the profound, and relived its memory -- for he imagined surely that was what his bladebrother's thought as well.  He felt the comradery he had many times before a battle, but sensed too, that this was something more for the older man.  He parted his lips to speak, but remembered his days as a sea farer in Norway and rather than be proven a fool, proffered instead that he might rather be a wise man in silence.

Yskiil and Merisah loved the Sun's ensign and the commencement of a night's bloodspill.
~It shan't be your last, Love.  You do know that, yes?"
-- ~My Love, I -- I know what I know in my bones.  Fate has been cast aside, now that Master Harren is of age, and with Her skein's discard, I know that wide open has the door of possibility been flung.  My -- our Life, Together, -- as One, -- is in our hands, alone.  Yes, I die and join you, 'tis true, but what man should take you up, ill-use you -- that -- that we must chart."
~Tarl?!"
His silence was, 'Mayhaps'.
Merisah was cold within herself, angry.  Bitter at the thought, -- the possibility that another should ever hold her -- use her for purpose, -- or worse, -- not, and that, forever -- the hunger within her ahowl in dayless nights uncrowned.  What would her man, Yskiil be then, but a ghost, dust and shadow, ...vapor on the unceasing night breeze?
~If he should prove himself worthy, and that you should with me alone bide in night, and only then -- If! "
-- ~Aye, if but -- if..."

"Let's."
He said aloud as the two then went their way down the rise' far side slope.

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