His hand shook, and the paint didn't go where he wanted it to go, again.

Damn Jews!

The paint-brush had been over-trimmed, and his trench-knife had been splattered with his previous attempts at keeping it under control. Perhaps if he did this… or that.

No, it was no use.

The painter had had a better war than most. He'd never gone over the top. He'd barely ever had to stand the night watches in the trenches. There had been plenty of troopers in the regiment who'd come, and gone, and been left to rot in the fields, or carried back to cough their lungs out in the field hospitals, or fed into the grave registration machinery.

But the painter still had a bit of tremble in his traitor hands, his Jew hands. They didn't want to do what he wanted them to do, they rebelled against the fineness he demanded of them.

He dabbed again at his paint-mixing board, and tried to retrieve, repair the mistake.

He got through the night with a minimum of swearing at the bankers and the Jews and his damnable hands.

The nightmare of the gas clouds rose over the distance, and he cringed, watching the flashing on the horizon as more and more distant British tubes flung their rations of poison eastward, eastward towards him and his fellows in the trenches. His satchel was full of orders. His mind was full of orders. His soul was full of order. And the trench-entrances loomed before him, beckoned to him like the demon-lined downward path into Tartarus.

He set one foot in front of another, and started his march into Hades.

Then a pair of evil eyes loomed out of the darkness, and he stumbled back on his heels. A face like a muzzle followed those eyes, fierce and beautiful and terrible. The memory of muddy filth raised along his spine, it felt so much like…

The painter awoke, his neck aching terribly. The half-dried paint dripped off of his face like the trench-mud. He'd fallen asleep sitting up, and made a terrible mess of his materials.

He cursed, and went to get water out of the sink in the hallway outside. It was still early, and nobody else was awake. He washed his filth-encrusted face, and looked in the mirror. The little mustache he had learned to trim in the trenches was half-stained blue on the left hand side.

The painter swore again, and rubbed at it with water and a rag. Nothing caused the blue to wash out. Was he stuck half-blue-whiskered until it grew out?

There was the razor… the fellows at the beer hall would make fun of him if he showed up half-blue like a verkakte Britisher Highlander.

Muttering sulfurously to himself, the painter stomped through the darkness of the garret corridor, thinking of the terrible beauty of that half-remembered long blue face, like the merging of some Aryan beauty, and those noble artillery-horses that had died like flies in the rear areas that had been his running-courses during the war. The poor boys in the trenches had been stuck, buried deep in the dirt and the earth, beneath the violated sod, waiting for the shell or the poison or the bayonet. Only the blessed like the painter himself had been given the gift, to run like fire, to run like the wind, to run like all hell set loose, gates blown open and the rushing of all the horses of pestilence and poison and fire and death on the hoof.

The artist, lost in his vision of the horses of hell, sans tack, sans horsemen, rushing through the burning wastes, didn't even notice as he walked through that glowing doorway that had replaced the entrance to his narrow one-room refuge against starvation and poverty and the fucking Jews.

The artist didn't notice when his room failed to hold any easel. He didn't even notice that his chair and his cot weren't there. But the strange change in light and color eventually brought themselves to the artist's attention. He looked owlishly about, and finally noticed that he had gone somehow astray.

Instead of a heavy-timbered fourth-story garret, he was in some great echoing stone chamber, like the interiors of the uper spires of the great cathedral in Strasbourg he had once walked through while the List Regiment was recovering in Alsace. He couldn't see where the lighting was coming from. He couldn't see where he had come from. It was as if he had stood in the real world while balanced on the one foot, and when he'd settled his weight upon the other foot, he was in some wondering dreamland.

Except his dreams had never been like this. Not since Fromelles of the blood and the fires and the stinks.

A humming caught the artist's attention, and he turned to look, alarmed, hypervigilant and aware. He had his trench-knife in his hand, his off-hand guarding against a grab, ready to punch his way through-

The face of the great mare that haunted his dreams stared at him from the darkness, the strange light that lit the chamber blue-black casting her into even stranger shadowed flickering.

The trench-knife made a tinking sound as it fell from his nerveless fingers.

Why had he never noticed the long, sharp, barely-tapering horn that spiraled out of her noble brow? The strong blue feathered pinions that spread out from her perfect back? The swirling, mystic depths where her mane should have been…

"Painter!" the great blue mare said in her vast tones, echoing throughout the dark and stony room. "I have asked the shadows to give unto me a portraitist worthy of my stature, and my destiny!" The great, wondrous, winged, horned horse spoke perfect Viennese German, like she was a Hapsburg princess. But no Hapsburg was so well-formed, so perfect as this mare. No misshapen jaws or oddly proportioned features for this perfected, pure princess of the equine races!

"Are you a delicate and honorable soul, who can paint me as I am, as I should be?" she said, loudly and proudly. Ever since the trenches, the artist had found that nobody really spoke loudly enough for his damaged hearing. It was like the civilian world had been muffled, silenced, made small and squeaking and soft. Not this princess of the four-legged peoples! She spoke with confidence and vigor, loudly enough to cow the heavy guns, loudly enough to cut through even machine-gun fire. This was a commander of horses! This was a leader of the quadruped nations!

"Your worship," said the artist, trying to match her volume and vigor, and failing miserably. "I am but a humble painter of landscapes, of buildings and towns. I am no artist! I have no talent for forms and figures. You want anybody but me!"

"A humble artist! Wonderful! Glorious! I see your soul, my dear ape. I know a fellow-spirit when I see one! I put my trust in your paint-brush, I put my destiny in your clear eyes!"

The artist found an easel placed before him as if by magic, and paints, and a knife, and brushes. He mixed his paints, judging with a certainty he'd never felt in the real world the shades and the tints which would suit this great dark lady of the pony nations.

The artist worked, and mixed, and sketched with his charcoal-fragments, and judged with eyes somehow made perfect beyond all previous fallible moments he'd suffered through during his many, many failures after the glorious and savage war years.

The princess's portrait slowly emerged from this welter of charcoal and paint and brush-strokes. Slowly, slowly. Somehow, through the night that never ended, time stretched long and sinuous and glorious, the shifting bright stars glittering through the many windows of that dark castle-chamber, answered in turn by the starfields, nebulae, and heavenly lights that peeked through his subject's endlessly-shifting tresses.

The artist found himself challenged by those impossible locks, and fought, again and again, to pin them down in paint and canvas, savagely stabbing with his trusty trench-knife, trimming his brushes again and again, scraping away paint from the surface of the damp painting, removing, revising, swiping, repainting, dabbing and slashing and stroking again and again. On more than one occasion during those long, seemingly-endless hours, he nearly wiped his canvas clean, leaving only faint traces of what had gone before, scraping down to the fabric itself, to start again.

He laid down layers of paint a dozen times, and removed them in increments a dozen times more. His subject sat, inhumanly patient, impossibly so. Only a divine being could possibly be so still! Only a horse of the heavens could be so accommodating of such a fallible, flailing painter! So unworthy of his subject, so unworthy of his theme!

All the hates of his long war, all the fears, all the broken places he had painted and cut and scratched upon his palimpsest soul, fell away as he whittled and brushed and cut and swiped at his stubborn canvas.

The strange visage of his terrible, vast, sublime princess-subject slowly began to peek in swipes and scars through the sagging, fretted gaps of his much-abused canvas. Her strange, terrible eyes. Her proud brow! Her long and curling star-stuff mane, endless, wondrous, beautiful, dangerous! Again and again, the artist found himself falling into the depths hidden in that hair, that endless, endless space within which you can lose yourself, your terrors, your screaming memories, your nightmares…

Your dreams.

Finally, after pouring his soul into that abyss hidden within his subject's vast eyes, deeper mane, endless shadow… the artist came to an end. Not of his subject, because she was endless.

But the artist? The artist was finite, and small, and his hopes and fears and heart could only bleed so much over his canvas, before there came an end of him, and an end of his heart's-blood.

"I am sorry, my liege, my lady, my heart. I must rest. My brushes are pared to their last bristle. My knife is dull. My eyes see less and less, your glory is more and more muddled in my feeble sight. This is all I can offer you. It is enough. It can never be enough. But it is what I have for you."

The artist's eyesight and his consciousness shrunk, his world collapsing around the one true fact of his half-life, that terrible princess-subject. Her glittering eyes took up more and more of his shrinking world.

"No, my painter. My portraitist. It is enough. Though no pony else sees my beautiful night, you have shown me that there is someone who has seen it, if only a little corner. You have given me a night worth a thousand years. And though I have no other realm, no other kingdom, you have given me this thousand-year imperium, this millennial empire of the night! Thank you, my little human. Go back to your own world, and know that you have given Luna, Princess of Dreams and the Night, a precious gift. One that will last me another hundred years in the long shadow of my arrogant sister's brutal sunlight. I will need nothing else, and you may be assured, I shall meditate long upon your vision of my soul."

And with that, the artist fell back into sleep, and was lost to oblivion, for how long, he knew not.

In the morning, the painter awoke, and stumbled about like the bohemian veteran layabout he was. He snorted into the mirror at the blue tints in his whiskers, and getting out his razor, trimmed away the offending hairs.

He had another meeting with the Party in the evening, after all. And though they tolerated his artistic pretenses, they wouldn't understand multi-coloured former corporals' bohemian personal oddities.

And yet, that room full of serious men seemed smaller than it had the day before, full to the rafters and overflowing with their petty blame, and their anger tasted bitter.

Though he couldn't remember the night's dreams, they had left him in a good mood. An expansive mood, that felt pinched, and restrained in that little room, as if parts of it, and him, might be chopped off like the dyed hairs in a hallway sink until what was left of him would fit.

He left the meeting early, and went back to his room for some foolscap and charcoal sticks. He felt like trying his hand at caricatures. See how much beer he could get for free. And find some fellows worth drinking with.

And young Adolf strode off into the starry Bavarian night with his bag under his arm, looking for a warm and welcoming beer-hall full of horsey, long-faced women and hearty drinkers.

Author's Notes:

This story is no-one else's responsibility but mine. No-one else in the contest had anything to do with it, and the contest's only input was the image, the contest framing, and my personal, idiosyncratic response to what is, on its face, an innocuous photograph. (I shamefully libel the actual painter of that landscape by suggesting that it looks like something Adolf Hitler, terrible painter, might have made. Also, that knife obviously isn't a trench-knife.)

Please direct any anger resulting from this in the proper direction - me.