27

"Well…I'm not exactly a professional researcher. I'm trying to find out everything I can, but all I have is books and the stuff that's already in the archives. It's not like I have some new, groundbreaking information about her or the town. Plus, she was basically a mystery even while she was alive. All the books that mention her are pretty much guessing about a lot of stuff already. And the archives themselves are just way too much for me to search through on my own, so if I find anything, it's pretty much down to luck. Even if I ever get this exhibition off the ground, I don't know if it'll be worth a scholarship. I thought it could at least help the archives, but…"

He trails off, seeming suddenly discouraged.

"Sorry—you probably don't care about any of that. I guess I'm just feeling frustrated. The archives are pretty neglected. And seeing what's happened to 'Every Year' hasn't helped. Oh, that's the name of the sculpture, by the way," Robin tells you. "Hang on a sec…"

He flicks through his notebook and shows you a page headed with the word "Sculptures"—or at least, you think it is. From the look of Robin's handwriting, he seems to write as quickly as he talks.

He points to a spot near the bottom of the page, where a little monochrome picture has been pasted in next to a nearly illegible paragraph. You can at least recognize that the picture is of the vandalized sculpture as it originally was.

"So, nobody knows a whole lot about Selene Corvina, and she never really wrote about her work, but the title is a pretty good clue that this is supposed to represent the way that things in nature change, while still repeating the same patterns over and over again," Robin says in an excited rush. "These branches at the top will blow in the wind, but the base is always solid. And based on what we do know about her, we can kind of work out that this could have been inspired by how she felt about her life. She never stayed in one place for too long; she made this sculpture right before she disappeared for twenty years. But she came back to Silvertree eventually, and in the end, she died here. It's way more than just a piece of wood."