IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME -
the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
The sun is high in the cloudless expanse of the mid-afternoon sky when Locust makes her way back to the docks.
The Dark Strider bobs in the water, which is surprisingly clear – she can see a few feet down into it, in spite of the expansive depth. Silver fish catch in the sunlight, appearing in smudged, collective dashes, and she thinks that she catches a glimpse of the dark shape of some feeder shark, though it is gone almost as quickly as she spots it. Light catches on the choppy waves, staining the ridges golden.
When the sea is like this – not dark and imposing, but light and subtle – she likes it. She used to like it during storms, too, when the waves would rise impossibly high and the surface would grow blacker than the midnight sky, but that was before it bit her. It was easy to like frightening things, she thinks, before you realized that they could hurt you.
It isn’t a stormy day, but that almost feels worse. The water is too-still, the sun is too-still, and there is no wind – and that damned bridge, like black sea-glass, is visible even from the docks, stretching out for gods-know-how-long into the sea. The one thing that Locust knows is that you should never trust anything that comes from the sea. It is deceptive, and it is cruel, and it will turn on you in an instant no matter how much you claim to love it. She does not trust that bridge, or where it leads, and she has half a mind to collect the part of her crew that hasn’t been foolhardy enough to try crossing it and set sail for their next destination.
Pegasi can’t fly, near the bridge – nothing can. Ships can’t approach it. It’s cursed, she thinks, or divine, and she isn’t sure which option is worse.
Still, what she is actually doing is securing the Strider in its place on the dock, and locking up everything of importance. Wouldn’t keep out the most persistent thieves, she suspects, and Denocte has plenty, but, if they’re willing to pick a fight with her, she almost feels as though they’d deserve whatever they could loot for their bravery. (Perhaps even a spot on the ship – that was how they’d gotten Bird, prior to the…accident.)
She paces back and forth along the deck, re-tying ropes and testing locks; if she’s humming the tune of some shanty or another, she isn’t much aware of it. Damn fool that she is, Locust knows she’ll be heading out along that strip of dark sea-glass, and, though it pains her to leave her ship at the docks, she knows that it won’t be able to reach whatever’s on the other side of that bridge…and, even if it could, the last thing she wants is another ship gone down into the unknown.
She knows what should lie in the direction of that dark strip. She knows, somehow, that it is not there.
So, nudging a sealed crate down towards the hold, she continues to work, a solitary silver shape darting about, like the minnows in the water, on the deck.
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"Speech!" ||
