Vanessa of Aurelia

A Fantasy of Art, Power, and Creation

I carried slabs of white marble and a vial of shimmering paint no one had seen before—an artist and architect arriving to carve a new legend.

This is a story not just of time or place, but of a life lived alongside my own—where marble breathes, and cities remember what we forget.

The Arrival in Aurelia

The gates of Aurelia were carved from saltstone and sun-glass—pale and glimmering even in shadow, like something half-remembered from a dream. When I passed through them, the wind shifted. It always did for newcomers, they said. Especially those fated to leave a mark.

I arrived alone, cloaked in ochre linen stiff with dried pigment, a cart of strange supplies trailing behind me: slabs of white marble, a bundle of charcoal rods, oils sealed in beeswax, and a curious silver vial filled with a thick, gleaming substance I had named Acrylia.

The guards watched me in silence.

A woman. A foreigner. An artist.

But Aurelia had its own way of knowing who belonged.

I walked in without a word.

Of Marble and Memory

They gave me a studio at the edge of the old quarter—three vaulted rooms above a candle-maker’s shop. The ceilings bore the bones of an older time: arched ribs of dark timber, etched with constellations no longer recognized. I worked beneath them with reverence.

White marble was my first love. Cool and eternal, it breathed when touched with intention. I never chiseled—only listened. Every block held its own pulse, and I had learned to find it.

I painted by oil and moonlight. My graphite sketches cluttered every wall, curling at the edges from candle heat. But it was Acrylia that haunted me—milky, fast-drying, strange. Born from plant resin and crushed pearl. No one else had ever used it. No one else could.

It shimmered.

It obeyed emotion.

I hadn’t told anyone yet.

The Architect of Echoes

Word of me spread as swiftly as summer fire. Within weeks, I was summoned to court—not by decree, but by a note delivered in the spine of an old sketchbook, unsigned and sealed with gold wax.

The palace sat on a cliff of black stone, its silhouette always framed by thunderclouds, even on clear days. The king did not greet me himself. Instead, his steward—a man with silver tattoos down his throat—handed me a scroll and said:

“You are to design the Hall of Reconciliation.

No straight lines. No repetition.

The king says the structure must sing.”

I blinked.

Then smiled.

Because I already knew how it would sound.

It was the same frequency I had heard in the marble, in the pigment, in the breath between my fingers and the stone.

It was not a building.

It was a becoming.

And I had been born for it.