With a steady look into her eyes he replied, “What do you want to do about it?”

She didn’t answer then but instead gave the matter careful consideration.  She concluded that what was most desperately needed was color.  Her father obliged by returning one day with paint, and her project began.

Luna started by painting the ceiling a beautiful sky blue.  White clouds so simple in form they almost looked as if they had been cut from wood were scattered throughout.  It was still missing something until Luna painted the dark wings of a raptor gliding far overhead.

The rest nearly painted itself.  The floor became a pleasant deep blue of a still pond, which her father sealed by magic.  At the base of one cabinet, an inquisitive, deep brown, white-throated otter⁴ looked toward her and sniffed the air.  An elm tree⁵ stretched upward on the doors of the larder, its leafy branches backed by a beautiful blue sky with more cut white clouds.  On a branch near the top a cheerful, light-brown song thrush,⁶ white breast speckled with yellow and brown, poured forth his music.  On the door to the oven, the distant black-and-white striped face of a badger⁷ poked out of his den.  Behind a bush painted beneath the east window, a timid hedge pig⁸ browsed with it is black snout, white, black and brown quills at ease.  Similar trees, birds and water-loving animals surrounded her, captured frozen in bright, primary colors.

The transformation had been almost magical.  As the kitchen came alive, so she and her father came back to life from the gloom of their tragedy.  Her father said the paintings were wonderful, but Luna had improved greatly with practice, and now these seemed childish and simple to her.  She looked forward to her next project, the barn outside.⁹  Her goal was to paint it so realistically that it blended in with its surroundings perfectly.