“Interesting place you have here, Dandelion.” She’d caught up with the owner of the cocktails bar. Indeed a dandy, a playboy, but of the loyalest kind. “But… I must ask, of course. How did *you* get here?”
“Interesting question in turn, my lady, interesting indeed. And the crux of the issue — you’re good at getting to those as I’m recalling. Our many adventures.” He shakes his head with the flood of memories, takes a second to absorb and then recalibrate the discussion. In truth, he didn’t think his great great friend Gerald, the former witcher recently retired to the Touisant vineyard he inherited after killing that, well… red headed *monster*, would choose Merry here over Jennifer. He considers the red head before him, looming large and bright. That must be it. Gerald was always a sucker for bright colors. Like those painters who only paint red yellow blue all over Beauchamp. Abstracters, they’re sometimes called. His other great great friend Princess Anna of Lea who ruled that land had explained it all. Abstraction’s the rage of Beauchamp, she said while pointing an artist out, busy away at it on one of the many town terraces. If you paint or draw realistically you are considered mundane, run of the mill; *anyone* can do realism, she said at the time, which he thought was odd. He preferred landscape paintings himself. And portraits, especially of himself. Which gets him to the point.
“It all had to do with a painting, Merry. A painting of me.”
Sunklands 