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.
This is not the first time that Locust has seen a volcano erupt.
No, it’s not the first time that Locust has seen a volcano erupt, and, in fact, she has stood even closer to eruptions in the past – perched at the front of a ship, watching the steady formation of an island through the glossy lens of a telescope. Now, that telescope is certainly broken, buried somewhere hundreds and hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the sea with the rest of the Sea Star. Still, the memory of stumbling upon an active eruption and watching the lava for some time is a fond one, unhindered by the events that came – several years – afterward. She had been much younger then.
She picks her way down to the shoreline, smoke-thick air tangling in her white hair. (It was tangled anyways.) The sky is ablaze with fiery reds, interspaced by thick, black clouds of smoke, which trail and split the horizon in spaces of flame and void. Occasionally, the clouds are split by a fork of lightning, pale blue or violet – but never, she notices, white. Cinders and ash float down like black-and-red flakes of snow; she blinks strays off her lashes, because gods know she doesn’t want that in her eyes. (It would hurt.)
Around her, Denocte’s inhabitants seem to be possessed by an overwhelming sense of horror and dread. She supposes she can understand it; by all accounts, the sky is on fire, the gods are about to descend from the heavens, and the world is coming to an end. Ridiculous rumors, of course. (But amusing ones.) She passed the island when she came to dock in Denocte, and there seemed to be nothing unusual about it. The eruption might have been worrying, had it occurred closer to shore, but, as things stood, in spite of the dark tendrils of smoke which were descending like skeleton fingers over the coast of the Terminus, she doubted that the eruption was close enough to the court to cause any real problems. At worst, the smoke would be a bit damaging to the observers’ lungs. (But she doubted there was enough, from this distance, to do much.)
For her part, Locust decides to treat the whole thing as a spectacle. The doomsayers, the lava, the crackle of lightning – it all seems rather grandiose to her, in a way that makes her grateful that they aren’t slated to leave Denocte for a few weeks. (Months, possibly.) Primarily, of course, because the eruption would stir the water to chaos for some stretch of time, but also because people were often at their most interesting when they thought that the world was going to end. Always apt to do things they’d never so much as consider under different circumstances.
With a flick of one, dark ear, Locust settles on the shoreline, allowing her legs to bend beneath her weight as she lays down in the sand. Even when night comes, barely discernible save through a vague impression of the already-dark sky growing a few shades darker, she remains on the shoreline – content to watch the sea roll, dark and hungry, and hear whispers of the future.
|| catch me doing this just because I can't turn down free EXP, even for characters I don't plan to keep. || "sea of ice," callie siskel
"Speech!" ||
