The Allure of the Jar

The sun began to set. The old winds rattled the narrow windows of the old castle. Gates had suggested that the young lord take a short rest. Jonas rose after a brief period in his bed, and most of it had not been spent sleeping. Nor had he been truly awake; he'd been in a restless state where conscious thought could not take hold, but neither could sleep, for his mind was fully occupied by the damnable alluring image of that glass jar.

The plush carpet and hard stones muffled his footsteps back to the office, where the jar remained illuminated now by the red sunbeams coming in from the sea. The allure of this relic was unfathomably irresistible, and before he knew it, he had his hands on the jar and ready to open the lid.

He remembered being in church with his mother, where it was suggested that he ought to fear the Lord our God, and reacting like any child would – with the proprietary blend of confusion and horror that accompanies every expansion of awareness. They don't start you on the hard stuff until later, where you find out that God can ask a father to kill his son, or sometimes he'll let the devil kill your children for a wager. That had always struck Jonas as a tremendous advertising challenge: as an immortal being, how do you manage that kind of public relation for the long run? All the other stories, like Zeus and Poseidon in the Odyssey, had an easy moral to learn: Don't mess with the inhuman if you want to live.

However, before you get to that, what you get at first is the starter set, which covers things like church attendance, dress code, and mealtime observances to get you into protocol. It doesn't have much to say about Fear. And they're only using the word Fear because they don't know what else to call it, how to name that rising, primal ice one feels when faced with the hanging jowls of the unknowable. Language can be all too limited for the Incorporeal, and he supposed that's why the Lord was branded as any number of other names in history.

But Jonas understood now. That's how he felt when he opened that jar.

Indeed, a figure appeared before him in a very jarring manner. There was no sound of footsteps, no unsettling of its robes or hair as it moved. It seemed like a shadow of flesh, a ghost, flickering in and out of visibility with the dancing light of the room. Jonas felt he was hallucinating at first, as if there were some toxic gas that he had just released from the salt jar, but that illusion fell away like mornings after coffee.

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Had the itch to draw, it was a good change. Here's a scene from the first chapter of my new book, lord Jonas Veers of Castle Ravenstone in Wales, during the height of WW2. He's been tasked with finding foreign religious relics and taking them back to his estate in the country to keep them safe from the war. On his last trip to Egypt, he found this lovely green glass salt jar - And, of course, it had a Genie. How nice! Indeed, Jonas is definitely not a gray-haired elf this time, so that's alright too.

Photoshop CS6. 3 hours maybe. I miss the old Artistic filters, don't have that anymore.