“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I ask.
“Do they bother you?”
“Yes,” I say, because Kor has taught me the futility of lying to any of Kherishdar’s Shames. And also, “No,” because… what else? I am an artist.
This Shame settles onto the stool facing me. I’ve known two priests of Shame now—three, if you count Kef, and I suppose I must though we aren’t well-acquainted. Tsevet, the first, was a wiry ascetic with hollows under his ribs, vibrating with passions, who frightened people with his zeal: appropriate for an empire that ‘lived more in its body,’ as his successor would later describe Kherishdar at that time in history. But Tsevet had been very little like Kor, who was short and (for an Ai-Naidari), thick, and whose mastery of others began with mastery over himself, and whose self-possession was the ultimate source of his authority, and his mystique. Kef, the third to inherit the stole, had been sinuous and athletic, with a voice that lulled people into opening themselves to the whip-crack of his commands. Like a siren, singing his seduction; or a parent singing a lullaby. He’d been passion all over again.
Amath, though, is like a ghost. Delicate. Frangible. White all over, with weirdling black eyes. His hands flutter over whatever’s near him, touching everything. It’s that, I think, that makes me recall Tsevet. That and the eyes. But unlike the first servant of Shame, it’s the vacuum of passion that makes Amath compelling. He is an empty space, waiting to be filled with confessions. To see him is to long to make him react… to do anything to make the quiet stop. He’s too uncanny for comfort.
His voice does not compel, the way Kef’s did. It’s just that hearing it is a relief, after existing in that vacuum. He is an excellent Shame. “It’s a birth defect. The muscles of my iris are stunted.”
“So you touch.”
“And listen. Mostly listen. We have better ears than you do.”
“Which you know,” I murmur.
“Because we still have congress with the aunera across the Gate?” He inclines his head. “Yes.”
“Is it only the eyes?”
“There are other things. They are minor, in comparison to what many are suffering. Many are suffering.”
“Is it that they need Correction?” I ask. “Or comfort?”
“Correction is comfort,” he says. “But no, I am not ordinarily involved in counseling the grieving and the ailing. But you should know, aunerai, that grief and sickness create disorder in society. In the smaller societies of the family, and one’s social connections, as well as in the society at large. When that disorder inspires wrong behavior, and that behavior cannot be addressed in the usual fashion…”
“Guilt,” I murmur. “Survivor’s guilt.”
“A great deal of that, yes.”
“Broken emethil,” I say. “With little chance of mending. I can’t imagine what that does to your people.”
“To say ‘broken emethil’ is to say ‘broken Ai-Naidar’. There is no difference. We are in a hard time, now. But the hard times will pass.” He cants his head, and that is a gesture he could have stolen from Tsevet. I wonder if Ai-Naidar believe in reincarnation. Or possession. “Will you regret your return to Kherishdar, scribe?”
“Yes,” I say. And, because I recognize a theme, “No.”
“Will you have to know which, before you begin that paisathi?”
I shake my head. “I am already on the road, Kherishdar’s Shame. And if I
were to cleave to one choice or the other, I would no longer be walking it. Some questions have more than one answer.”
“And if you deprive the question of any of them, it is no longer the same question?” He smiles. “They told me I would like you. I’m glad that they were right.”
Who, I wondered? Did it matter? If they were all here with me, in my heart and in my head, why would I think they wouldn’t be in him? Emethil. No wonder an entire generation was suffering. And I would have to go there, to learn… whatever it is I’m supposed to learn.
“I’m glad,” I say, “that this story isn’t yours.”
“No,” he said. “This Correction is administered by a different hand. Though I will be watching.” He smiles, the light dancing on his vast pupils. “Maybe they will one day call you Aunera’s Shame.”
“God,” I say. “I hope not.”
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.