Here come the Comedians - Magnus/Lucrezia/Sinew/any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

It would be incorrect to call the Pangean king incurious.
It depends, really, on what needs to be pried at.

He has, for example, shown great enthusiasm for the equine body. He has studied it, examined it; he has watched many of its different shapes and sizes from afar and from up close. He has inspected the small places between bigger parts, like a physician—the latch of the throat, gently with his lips; the flat plain of the withers, more roughly with his teeth; the bony point of the hip, so aptly made for the clutch of knees; the less visible places, modestly hidden under skin and fat and bone.
Experimented on them…

Everyone has their ‘thing’.

Governance is not one of his, but needs must.
He had, after all, stepped up to the God-king and asked for the crown, perhaps a narcissist’s move more than a rational, carefully considered one. What he had said to Carnage had not been a lie (for, the founding father would have been able to tell if it had been)—he did like Pangea; he wanted her. He liked the way she had been made, so inelegantly and infrangible. For a man who most despised weakness, that wasteland is a wonder. A wonder of violence and domination; an equalizer, in the way she weeds out the feeble and then feasts on them.

Of the kingdoms beyond his own, he knows nothing—he had been decidedly incurious in that regard.

But the clearing and cleansing he had gone through in his time by the ocean had brought him a renewed sense of ‘duty’. He wakes up with stark daylight scattered across the cavernous mouth of Pangea’s horizon, down her limestone hips and across the layers of her sandstone cliffs, and sets off to find Sinew’s painted, expectant body in the dust. “Come. We are going to Tephra,” he says in his grunt, when he does find her, the boys likely not far away.
If anyone else shook loose of the wastes to follow, he would not stop them. He expected—perhaps even trusted—Sinew to understand the nature of the visit, and when she had said she would come he understood it to be absolute.

They were not entering the island to make friends—nor to make enemies, necessarily.
They were going there to… inspect and examine her. Introduce themselves.

The journey is a long, cross-continent one, and by the time they reach the shore of Pangea, the gift-giver walks with a limp that he cannot hide entirely—that suppleness he had given as payment for his glory. He glances across the island, all swollen at her center like a gravid woman; it is lush and dark, so unlike their own pale wilderness. 
It is perfumed and brilliant, and if it weren’t for these things, he might have smelled the familiar scent (one he had met on higher altitudes) as they moved nearer to the volcano, coming to stop where the feral island felt most inhabited.

the gift-giver

@[sinew]/@[Kristin]