submitted for the spring basket contest 1 minute before the deadline holy hell my hands are sweating lol
i didn't plan on making this until i had a sudden idea this morning that i had to get out
it's a very quick and rough sketch but i had fun with it :)
and here's a low quality timelapse cause why not lol, i started with regular line sketching but then realized it would take too long so i opted for a silhouette technique i've been using for game sprites these past few months, and i'm glad i did! :)
If you find Dante's Prex (it's in the Leverian on the podium where Dante himself would be displayed, you can find it once you've acquired Dante and got him to rank 30), you get his real story:
"You... found him, Friend. And Dante's tale deserves to be known. So... allow me to relate it, as he passes it to me.
Dante... ventured... to the... deafeningly... silenced halls of the... doomed... Entrati lineage, encountering... automated defenses, gone senile and violent, chanting in an... unright dialect that slurred thought and... annihilated... hope. That wrongtongued language invaded Dante's mind - infecting it with the one thing he was defenseless against: the promise of knowledge.
It may be said that a parasite is life from without the body fighting to exist within the body, despite the body, even as it risks the body. What, then, do we call knowledge from beyond our reality demanding to be let in?
Poor Dante. If only he had recited to me sooner the wrongtongued words he had heard. I could have told him, you know, that I had heard that language before. Once. Long ago. From the lips of Parvos Granum.
Dante found it, you see. Dante found The Book.
The Dante I knew was many things, but he was not weak. He struggled, fought, refused its knowledge. There was a moment, I knew, when that chill Indifference felt it had won. In those moments I was with him, wrestling the foul thing he had unlocked. Impossibly, though it cost him dearly, he was winning. But miserably, I knew the equation was not so simple as that.
I told him: Dante, what you have found can never be brought forth. Parvos must never know of this.
I felt the chill, the awful loneliness, of understanding wash through him.
I sensed the moment he chose, and I felt Dante give up. When he died, I almost died with him.
But the Book, the word, did not permit Dante to die. The violent diplomacy which ensued rewrit the very fabric of who he was. I understood things, learned things, on that journey with my old friend, from night to day. Things which could not survive in this world, but forever made a lie, to me, of science.
What became of him, and what stars he may have traveled to, is unknown to me. What that wrongtongued Voice may murmur in his mind, on long nights, I'm not sure I would want to know. It teaches because it longs to be known, and in being known it exists. And in existing, it survives."
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Dante found the Grimoire and it corrupted and killed him.
More importantly:
Parvos Granum is looking for the Grimoire. Not only that, he has found the Grimoire before and knows of Voidtongue.