Drawing

Emi shut the front door behind her with her foot, both hands clutching a plastic bag stuffed with new manga volumes. She slipped off her shoes with a practiced hop and headed upstairs, skipping the creaky step near the top out of habit.

Her room greeted her with familiar clutter – a desk buried in sketchbooks, pencils, and eraser shavings scattered all over. She dropped the bag onto her bed and collapsed beside it, already pulling out the first volume. The glossy cover still had that clean, fresh-from-the-shelf smell.

She read. One volume. Then another.

She didn't even realize how long she'd been flipping pages until her eyes felt dry from not blinking. It wasn't even that the story was incredible. It was good, sure, but what pulled her in was the way the panels flowed, the energy in the drawings. The pacing. The character acting. Even the line weights.

It wasn’t long before the itch came.

With a sigh, she set the book aside and reached for her sketchbook instead. Her mechanical pencil was half-dead but still holding on. Her hand moved without thinking. Sketching. A face. A pose. Then a costume she’d seen in one of the panels, but twisted into her own take. A layout. Dialogue bubbles. She redrew the eyes four times before leaving them asymmetrical and just moving on.

And now, she was lost in it.

By the time the page started to smudge from the side of her palm, she heard a soft knock. Reality drifted back as she felt a presence behind her.

Turning around, and there he was – Orion stood just inside the doorway, arms folded. His usual unreadable expression softened only slightly as his gaze flicked down to the sketchbook in her lap.

“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “I thought you had fallen asleep.”

Emi blinked, sitting straighter.

“Oh. No, I was just… drawing.”

She instinctively flipped the sketchbook closed.

“It’s nothing amazing. Just practice. Still figuring stuff out.”

Approaching her desk, he glanced over, seeing some pages sticking out of the book.

“You made these?”

“Yeah… yeah…”

“These are not the ones you bought?”

Emi gave a little snort.

“Not even close. Like, if a professional manga artist is Mount Fuji, I’m like… the weird bump behind the school gym.”

Orion tilted his head slightly.

“You compare yourself to mountains?”

“No, I… look, it’s just a dumb example, okay?” She laughed, rubbing the back of her neck. “My stuff’s still rough. You can see all the weird proportions and smudges. Even normies could tear this apart.”

“You care about that?”

She shrugged, playing it cool.

“Eh. A little. Not enough to stop, though.”

Orion was quiet for a moment longer, then asked:

“Is this what you want to do?”

“Huh?”

“Drawing. Manga. This art… thing.”

“Oh.” She blinked. Then smiled, softer now. “Yeah. I mean, that’s the dream. To become a mangaka someday. I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes, but… I love it. You know? It’s like the one thing that makes sense.”

Orion didn’t say anything right away. His eyes drifted toward the now-closed sketchbook in her lap, then back to her.

Emi, still grinning from their exchange, flipped open her sketchbook again and turned it toward him.

Orion stepped closer, hands behind his back as he leaned in to look.

The first few pages were full of rough character designs – some dramatic, others silly. A magical girl with a sword the size of her entire body. A quiet boy with glasses hiding a monster inside. Panel layouts, scratched-out dialogue bubbles, backgrounds that Emi clearly hadn’t finished or had just scribbled a little ‘fix later’ tag on the side.

Orion stared.

She watched his face, hoping for a flicker of something. A smile. A glimmer of interest. Instead, after a long pause, he straightened up and said simply:

“These are fictional.”

“Uh. Yeah?” Emi raised a brow. “That’s kind of the point?”

He nodded slowly, but with that same blank, overly logical expression he used when discussing battlefield tactics.

“Then they serve no purpose.”

Surprised, she turned around.

“What?”

“They’re not real. They don’t train you, or solve anything. There’s no… weight to them.”

Her smile faltered.

“I mean…” she tried to keep her tone light, “that’s kind of a weird way to look at it. It’s art. It doesn’t have to do anything. It just… is.”

Orion looked down at the book again, then back at her, confused.

“I do not understand,” he said. “Why spend so much time drawing things that are… false? There’s no function. It’s just… noise.”

That one hit harder than he realized.

Emi sat still for a beat. Then gave a little, breathy laugh.

“Wow… rude…”

“I don’t mean insult,” he said flatly. “I mean observation.”

“Yeah, well, your observation stings.”

There was silence. Orion glanced at the sketchbook again, brows faintly furrowed as though trying to puzzle it out – why she cared, why this mattered, why any of it should.

Emi stared at her own hands, the graphite smudges on her fingertips. The silence stretched.

Then she muttered, quieter now:

“You know, sometimes I forget…”

He looked at her, and she continued:

“That you’re not really human. You’re a Dark Lord.”

Orion’s head tilted slightly, the way a beast might respond to an unfamiliar sound. Not offended, but merely detached.

“Well, I’m here on Earth now,” he said after a moment. “I… am trying to learn.”

She didn’t look at him.

“Then maybe learn what makes us tick before you say stuff like that.”

She flipped the sketchbook closed, this time not playfully.

Orion stayed still, staring at the cover, feeling a sudden urge to explain. He didn’t know why this feeling was so urgent, he only knew he wanted to solve it – with logic, like everything else.

But maybe that was precisely the problem.

And yet, he went ahead anyway and said:

“I am… a King of the Dark. Beauty is part of the light. It is… no longer with me.”

Orion stood in silence for a moment longer. Then, with the smallest motion of his hand, gravity formed in his hand, another one of his lost magicks now returned to him, tracing through the air. Symbols curled in the space before them – foreign, mathematical, geometric. A pulse of Starheart fire cracked softly like lightning in a bottle. And from that mystic glow…

A drawing began to form.

A conjured image hovered midair. Not pencil or ink, but something between a painting and a vision. Lines bent with too much precision, proportions uncannily perfect. The girl in the drawing was meant to resemble Emi – her green hair bright, her face smiling, holding flowers. But her expression was glassy and hollow, her eyes like polished stone.

Emi blinked, not knowing what to make of it.

Orion stared at it, unsatisfied. He flicked his hand once more. Another version materialized. This one was worse. The colors clashed. The smile was... wrong. And another one, again and again.

By the fourth try, he was gripping the edge of the desk, forehead furrowed with frustration. The images faded one by one like broken dreams.

“I… don’t… think…” His voice was low, strained, cracking under something deeper than embarrassment.

Emi finally looked up.

Her eyes were glassy, but she didn't cry. She inhaled slowly, like drawing back the tide.

And then she smiled.

Not out of mockery, or pity, but something else. Something she didn’t have words for.

Maybe it was the sadness, from how harsh his words were to her. Maybe it was the fact that he tried. That he failed so sincerely. Maybe it was because of this moment, being imperfect and fragile, but still so real.

She slid her sketchbook back open, turned to a blank page, and nudged a pencil into his hand.

“Here,” she said softly. “Lesson one. You start with a circle.”

Orion stared at the pencil like it was a weapon. Or a relic. He took it hesitantly. Watched as she guided his hand.

There was silence. A strange kind that even he had no words for.

Then, after a pause, Orion murmured:

“I… may not understand art. But I understand stories.”

Emi glanced at him, and was surprised to hear what he said next:

“You have a story, here in your art. I’m… I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t understand. I see now that you tried. You… really tried. And you criticize yourself too.”

Emi sat there, somewhat relieved he saw through her. He continued:

“I know what it’s like… to be hard on yourself. What you have here – is precious.”

She did not know why, but that word stuck inside her, leaving a mark on her heart in ways she could not describe. It was just a spoken word, but it somehow felt like his magick of a wizard’s dream. Floating in an ethereal plane, somewhere new and uncharted.

And in this place – she was happy.

“Well,” Emi grinned, “you’re a story expert, right? Got any from your home world?”

Looking back at her, now in the middle of this moment, one of the few times he truly made eye contact with her, letting her see the black in his eyes – unashamed.

And here, somehow, some way, he too – felt happy.

Something that was meant to be foreign to him, having been lost for so long. But the peace of this evening was soothing, calming the bruises he had accumulated from countless wars and dead gods.

Giving him a sign that perhaps – the scars could be healed.

Orion continued, voice quieter now, steady:

“There is a tale we tell on Gigas. About a hero made of clay who walked into the moon’s mouth to steal back a spear made out of a frozen star.”

“Wow, for real? That sounds insane. How does the story go?”

“Well, you see, it all started in a land far away…”

And their voices trailed off into the warm peaceful night, getting lost into long conversations that lasted way past their usual bedtime – but neither of them wanted to sleep.

Emi was woken up by the morning light spilling in through her curtains, soft and golden. Emi blinked awake, a slight ache in her neck. She had fallen asleep at her desk, her pencil still in hand, vaguely remembering her showing Orion how to shade and a few other techniques.

She rubbed her eyes, stretched, then came downstairs barefoot. Her hair messy from last night’s sleep. The house was quiet.

But then she saw Orion, seated in the living room.

He was hunched over the coffee table, his notebook open in front of him. His pen was set neatly to the side. No scribbles, no equations mid-thought. Just numbers and symbols, stacked with clarity, no hesitation.

He was not writing anymore, not even calculating.

Instead, he turned around, facing her. His voice now calm, echoing a gentle question:

“Do you want to visit Gigas?”