* * *
When she got back home she hung one of the sheets up on the wall. The oil paints were in various condition, but by stirring them up a bit most of them were usable. She put thick blotches of colour on the sheet and spread them with strong brushstrokes. The sheet wasn’t taut enough and sagged, but that just demanded a different approach from painting on a canvas. Once she’d made decent progress with the painting she filled a dropper with delýsíð and put two drops in the linseed oil. The effects were much stronger and sharper than she’d experienced before, and she found the reflections of her own emotions even more honest than before. Purer.
When the painting was finished she could barely manage to look at it. It was a dark brown, chaotic mess with coils in crimson and white, a forming galaxy. Conflicting emotions collided with each other and confused her, supercharged by the delýsíð.
Useless. She tore down the sheet and tossed it into the corner. The feeling emanating from it was faint but still lingering, like shards of a broken mirror covering the floor. She strung up another sheet.
She put more drops of delýsíð into the paint. Her head felt groggy. This time she painted a much simpler image. A crude dragon with nine heads, a crown sitting on each one. She put a skull in one of the dragon’s talons, a dagger in the other one. Garún didn’t spare any attention to detail, intentionally making the painting coarse and ugly. She poured a lifetime of hate and resentment into the painting. Every moment she had felt powerless or small or afraid. She let the feelings she’d grown so accustomed to suppressing rise to the surface, bringing them to an unbearable, scathing boil. She let herself hate until it became exhausting. On the stomach of the dragon she wrote J IX in large letters. The initials and insignia of King Jörundur, the ninth of his name – the ruler of Kalmar. It was a bit too direct, but she didn’t care. Ambiguity and propaganda mixed like oil and water.
As the painting dried its initial effects became stronger. Garún forced herself to stand in front of the painting, exposing herself to the torrent of emotions that threatened to overpower her with each minute that passed. Her fists whitened and her nails dug into the palms. Streams of sweat crawled down her back. She felt her heart beating faster and faster and her face getting scorching hot. Her jaw clenched shut, teeth grinding, the hatred radiating from the painting about to tear her apart. Her own hatred, multiplied tenfold.
She spent her time painting. It was almost impossible to tell how long she spent on each painting. The only measurement was when she got tired or hungry, but even those sensations quickly became insignificant. Sleep, eat, paint, sleep. She had no idea how often she went through this cycle each twenty-four hours.
She kept the sheet with the nine-headed dragon under her mattress. Each night was a sweat-covered struggle and she woke up with half-coagulated clots of blood in her nose. The emotional radiation from the delýsíð painting seeped into her mind, keeping her anger flaring hot. She would not let this place drain her of her anger, turn her into an apathetic zombie. She would never give up the fight. As she woke, she could never remember the nightmares, but they gnawed at her subconscious every waking moment.
Her hatred multiplied each time she rested, so she had to let it out. When she felt sociable enough, she went to Gómorra. Jón-not-reverend-Jón kept his distance after their last interaction. To her surprise she found other people approaching her. Outcasts with sunken eyes and strained faces, who looked at her hungrily for hope and direction. One way or another they had been pushed to the edge of society by the powers that be. A middle-class woman who had fallen in love with a soldier. Her family had sent her to Kleppur, the insane asylum, from which she had escaped before her scheduled lobotomy and hysterectomy. A man who had written a column for one of the newspapers and summarily found himself unemployable. A couple who had refused to hide that they were dating – her being human and him a huldumaður. There were also drunks and addicts, having succumbed to their addictions before or after they found themselves here. It didn’t matter to Garún. She told them about the protest, about the people who had died fighting to make things better. She told them about their network of cells, spread around and outside the city, fighting for a free and equal Hrímland. Garún gave them a few wrinkled copies of Black Wings that she’d found in the recesses of her backpack, and they devoured each word. At first they hesitated, but the huldufólk of the group reached out to her and she opened herself to them, ignoring the intrusive feeling of having someone reach deep into your emotional core, and after that they trusted her. Talking to them and thinking about the masked band that had been playing earlier, an idea started to take shape. This could become a new frontier. A rallying point.
When she couldn’t stand the company of others she walked restlessly on the streets of the Forgotten Downtown, which were empty more often than not. Without fully realising it she had started searching for a way out of the labyrinth, but Rökkurvík’s streets always led her back to where she started. The audioskull’s music was faint and incomprehensible, useless most of the time, but in certain places she could hear a weak noise, a static similar to when she had crossed over at Haraldskirkja. The sound was stronger or weaker
