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Realistic and cartoon drawing blend. Moody, ethereal. Very intricate lines and details. Masterful composition, tender irony. The strokes are the life of the picture and the lights come from them. Combien vaut une nuit? - what's a night worth? A closed fairground at blue hour, at the edge of the dream world - empty booths, furled awnings, everything asleep except one machine, lit. A tall Victorian automaton of brass, copper and glass, gothic and slightly time-lordy: 'LA MACHINE À AIMER' on its marquee in warm bulb-letters, several bulbs out. Its glass belly is full of thousands of tiny paper hearts, red and pink, pretty as candy. A polished brass slot in its front is shaped exactly to fit a dream-bottle; beside it, an engraved exchange plate, the rates half-worn, illegible where it matters. From its dispensing tray, a thin trail of paper hearts has spilled to the ground, and the hearts on the ground are fading: the freshest still red, the older ones pink, the oldest gone grey and papery as ash, curling at the edges. The machine hums, patient, warm-lit, wanting to be fed. Before it stands a fleshy woman in her end twenties early thirties, French, in her gothic steampunk victorian timelady witch's travelling coat, the ornate dark hat with the tiny closed wooden door. Auburn / dark-strawberry hair (muted, not flame-bright), disheveled, ends white and rainbow, remnants of eons gone (for now). Fair, warm pink-toned skin, light freckling; smallish, youthful, cute rather than striking, a soft, present, delicate lived-in face. Ice blue eyes, teal and blue liner, discrete sparkles; a tiny drawn mark under one eye, soft and imperfect. Necklaces, rings and fabric wristband. Skin, shoulders, arms and legs soflty lit. In both hands, held close to her chest, a corked glass bottle glowing with the gathered colours of a whole dream, the only true colour in the frame beside the machine's paper hearts. She is reading the worn exchange plate with a small, unconvinced tilt of the head, one eyebrow slightly up; doing the arithmetic, and not liking the rate. Whether she feeds it the dream or keeps it is unknown. Blue-hour palette, the machine's bulbs and the bottled dream carrying all the warmth. Out-of-time and timeless. Wry, tender, quietly defiant. Hidden melancholy, held bottle. Masterpiece, by eryn.
but the dreams never come back, do they?