March 2022 Coppermind Art Commission

The time is 7:46 in the morning, as the people of Iri mark the time. The sun is rising over the leeward horizon when the Kasitor Bay ripples with a wave that is not quite a wave (fine, it's a bit late for a sunrise, but your memory of the event has painted it with a bit of an artistic license). From the illusory water rises a spren with a body like a jet of water, a hundred feet tall (your memory embellishes the sight a bit again), four arms sprouting from the main body, landing on pillars carefully constructed in the exact locations the arms' hands land every morning. Cusicesh the Protector has arrived, just like it does every morning.

For the month of March we chose to hire Jordi Rapture, an illustrator talented in depicting (among other things) all sorts of weird creatures (you may have seen this Nightwatcher or this Stormfather from a couple of years ago). Cusicesh is a notoriously difficult spren to paint, in large part because of how little detail there is to its shape, but we think Jordi gave it a very fair interpretation - faithful to the text, but also unique and strange, as befitting a one-of-a-kind spren. We couldn't do the shifting faces, unfortunately, turns out you really need animation for that