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Prologue: FireWood Carving

"Fire is my element

Wood my second

I bring to my mind a picture

And my hands ready for the click sure"

The spell was uttered by a voice like distant, soft thunder.

The chimera king towered at nearly seven feet, and his powerful shoulders were nearly twice the width of a human's. Despite the word used in invoking his telementaling, he did not have hands, but lion's paws. They were dexterous enough for most purposes, though, including artwork. The pink pads glowed yellow and fire sprang above them. The yellow glow protected him from being burned by his own power. Even holding skin too close to a candle would burn them, and though he was skilled with his element, he was no exception, especially if he was not focusing.

For a moment, his crimson eyes roamed his canvas, a slab of wood that was about ten by ten, and four inches thick.

First, he reached into the soft pine wood and called it to him, creating the mountains in relief from the sky. Those parts were decompressed from the rest of the rings. He could feel their contours under his magic, like age lines of a wrinkled face. He would never have that, as his face was every bit as animal as his hands. His mouth had both lion canines, humanoid front teeth, and grinding molars at the back, but no laugh lines would ever be etched. However, even if he had had skin, like his brother had when he was alive, he was immortal, so it wouldn't have mattered either.

The slab had the youngest rings facing towards him, as per usual. Some artists preferred to wrestle with the much older wood, especially hardwoods, creating impressionism that monsters called "Gnarl Snarling."

Wood elementals had carefully fused three different slices. He could tell that this one was made of three different trees, to get this ten foot width. Farther up, they made smaller and smaller ones to sell. Sometimes canvases were made all of one tree. Unlike white cloth canvases for painting, tree canvases had no standard sizes. 'The tree will decide what will be immortalized on itself,' as the saying went.

More modern artists who made their own canvases cut geometrical shapes and fit them together in a square, creating several different directions of grain and slightly fractured images referred to as "Mirror Shards."

After he was done forming the pointed peaks, he began burning dark shadows at their bases. In the sky, he burned more mildly and left the original wood color as clouds.

Then, he extended his claws and scratched up the front of the board, to imitate grass stalks of a field reaching to the observer. He made smaller and smaller scratches until he reached the point where he pictured the forest began.

He snorted in contentment, showing off a bit of his bovine ancestry. He had horns, and though he was completely covered in white fur, his brother had had skin on his chest as well, reflecting more of his minotaur genes. His beard had been reddish, but the artist's was golden, along with more mane and elbow tufts.

He sang another self-styled spell,

"Though your light is snuffed

I can still huff and puff

I'll alight this candle

With a green mantle"

Though the surface of the wood was burned, he reached down into the unharmed layer just beneath and breathed deeply, blowing a bit of magic. In response, the wood put out buds of very shortened pine needles, tiny trees that would line the mountain's skirts until they reached the image's snow line. They would stay green as long as they were under the occasional care of a wood elemental.

That used to be his favorite part of the process, up until one of his advisers, a blindingly brilliant and endlessly creative man, had suggested something to integrate his very self into the pictures.

He went to his desk and pulled out a drawer.

Chapter 1: https://www.sofurry.com/view/1102491