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.
When Locust hears the news, her response is, at best, dull shock. At worst, it is apathy.
Tempus. Oh, she knows who he is; she’s even been assured that he’s real, and Locust is superstitious enough as a rule to believe the rumors about him. And, really, his presence on the island made sense. What other force would be enough - would so much as want - to create a place like this? She doesn’t have to know much about time gods, or gods in general, to know that this feels like a place befitting of a god. It’s certainly as strange as one.
Of course, that has nothing to do with her. She isn’t of this land, and Tempus certainly isn’t her god. There is certainly a part of her that desires the relic that is apparently hidden somewhere on the island, but she is no devotee, so she assumes that it is pointless to spend her time looking for it. There is certainly someone devout, determined, and in possession of proper Novus citizenship who will be looking for it, and who no doubt deserves it more than she does.
(After all – who knows if it would even continue to work if she left Novus? Locust wouldn’t give up her seafaring ways for anything, even a relic of unimaginable power and control over the ebb and flow and time.)
The rumors which accompanied this revelation, however, were something entirely different from the revelation itself.
The island had felt like a trap the moment she’d set hoof on the pristine, white shoreline. Nothing so utopian was ever actually good; that wasn’t the way of the world. Assuming that it was a trap and knowing that it was a trap were two slightly different things. Now that she knew who had created the island and why he had created the island (to find a worthy possessor for the relic, she could only assume), she could make some guesses about the character of the place, and the nature of the traps within it.
(None of Novus’s gods were kind, or so she had heard. What god ever was? If they were kind, as far as Locust is concerned, they would not be gods.)
Tempus was knowing, but that did not mean that he could not be cruel. She suspected that the stakes in this hunt were deadly, and she did not intend to be one of the dead, though she was not searching for the relic so much as she was anything else that might be of use. Tempus was the most neutral god, but he was fond of tests.
She wondered what the penalty for failure might be.
(She considers leaving, briefly, when she sees the statue. This land’s affairs, and the tests of its gods, are no real concern of hers. She spends quite some time staring at the bridge, wondering if it would be best to return, board the Strider, and escape Novus before the island sprung.
She stays, of course. She doesn’t know if it is curiosity or something more fatalistic.
She stays.)
|| aaaand we're 4/4. || "sea of ice," callie siskel
"Speech!" ||
