Chapter III — The Painter of Forgotten Dreams
Morning found the city veiled in mist. The cobblestones glistened like wet glass beneath the soft drizzle, and smoke curled upward from the chimneys in thin, ghostly threads. Malien stood before the canvas in his small upstairs studio, its surface blank but heavy with expectation.
He hadn’t slept. The pages of Songs of the Hollowed Light and The Anatomy of Longing still lingered in his mind like twin voices humming under his ribs. Each time he closed his eyes, a vision pressed against him—neither memory nor dream. A woman, her face hidden by a halo of light, walking through water that reflected no stars.https://www.effectivegatecpm.com/xj9f6a1ga?key=fe82ea16f2e93e509be210df9b936bd6
He would wake with paint-stained fingers, though he had not touched a brush.
By mid-morning, he began to paint. The strokes came unbidden—fluid, restless. Shades of muted blue and ash spread across the canvas. A single figure began to take shape: a woman’s silhouette turning away, her gaze lost beyond the frame. Something about the posture hurt to look at. It was both worship and farewell.
He stepped back.
For a long while, he said nothing. Then softly, to himself:
“Who are you?”
The shop below remained empty, but he could hear the wind pushing against the door as though someone were listening.
When evening came, he placed the half-finished painting beside the window and lit a candle beneath it. From where he stood, the flame’s reflection seemed to ripple through the woman’s painted hair, making her look alive.
Malien closed his eyes.
For the briefest second, he could hear the faintest whisper—
his name, or something that resembled it—spoken from a distance no map could hold.
The next few nights folded into each other like pages from an unfinished story. Malien slept little; when he did, his dreams felt too vivid to belong to sleep.
He dreamt of corridors of light that curved without end, and of water—dark, still, eternal—mirroring a sky without stars. And always, she was there. The woman from his painting. Sometimes she stood beside him, silent; sometimes she moved just beyond reach. But what unsettled him most was her eyes. They shimmered like sorrow learning to love itself.
When he woke, the brush was already in his hand.
He painted feverishly now. Canvases lined the room—faces, forms, fragments of something that refused to be whole. Each stroke felt like confession; each color, a wound. The paintings were not beautiful in the ordinary sense—they were true. Too true, perhaps, for comfort.
By the fourth night, the bell above the door trembled softly, cutting through the hush of midnight.
Malien looked up from the counter, startled. It was past eleven—the hour when only ghosts and sleepless souls wandered Edinburgh’s streets. The rain had thinned into mist, painting the windowpanes silver.
A woman stepped inside. The lamplight caught the edge of her shawl, the damp folds of her burgundy dress, and the faint shimmer of exhaustion beneath her calm. Her eyes carried that particular clarity found in poets—the look of someone who sees the invisible and suffers for it.
“I’m sorry for the hour,” she said softly, her voice steady, careful. “I saw your light. I was hoping you might still be open.”
Malien nodded, still caught between curiosity and a quiet recognition he couldn’t name.
“For those who read,” he said, “I’m always open.”
She smiled faintly, almost as if she’d heard those words before.
“I’m looking for something older,” she said. “Something that remembers beauty differently.”
He gestured toward the back shelves. “Poetry, then. The kind that refuses to die.”
She moved through the aisles like a melody he could almost recall, tracing her fingers along the spines of forgotten collections—Blake, Rossetti, Coleridge—her touch light, reverent. Malien watched her from behind the counter, wondering what kind of poem she was searching for, and what wound she hoped to mend with it.
When she returned, her arms were filled with slender, dusted volumes.
He took them gently, stacking them beside the register. Then, after a moment’s thought, he reached for a particular book—Songs of the Hollowed Light.
“This one isn’t catalogued,” he said. “Found it weeks ago, tucked behind my grandfather’s desk. No author’s name, but the words… they stay with you.”
She looked at the book as if recognizing something before even touching it. “A nameless voice,” she murmured. “Those are the ones that haunt.”
He caught her gaze then, and for a heartbeat, the world stilled—no rain, no ticking clock, only the silence of two people who might have met before, in another dream.
When he handed her the book, their fingers brushed. She didn’t pull away.
“I’ll take it,” she said quietly.
He nodded, almost too quickly, unsure whether to speak again.
And then she was gone—the doorbell chiming once more, the mist swallowing her shape as if she had stepped out of the hour itself.
Malien looked down at the counter.
She had paid in exact change—save for one thing.
A folded slip of paper is beneath the coin.
He unfolded it slowly, half-expecting a name.
There was none.
Only a line written in delicate, uncertain ink:
“Even forgotten light remembers its warmth.”
He read it twice before realizing—he’d forgotten to ask her name.
© 2025 Mahadin Ahsan Malvin
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