Irheh’s Archive

Where I indulge my compulsion to hoard and organize miscellaneous bits of Unsounded lore

[unsoundedcomic]

Coming soon: Unsounded, Books 3 and 4

Ashley Cope's legendary dark fantasy webcomic continues its jump to print, with volumes 3 and 4!

Feels weird advertising the next crowdfund when the books from the last haven't yet shipped, but so it goes! This won't launch until later in the year but you can follow the Kickstarter campaign page for updates so you don't miss it.

Unlike books 1 & 2, 3 & 4 are entirely new content that's never been in print before, covering the end of the Nevergreen arc, Ethelmik's destruction, the introduction of Ruckmearkha and Queen Sonorie, the arrival at Litriya Shrine, really the thickening of the entire plot! There's also a bonus Kissfist Baxter story, and a special something new I'm cooking up.

Give it a gander!

[unsoundedupdates]

Ch01, page 05

•►LATEST UPDATE HERE◄•

Friends! ...maybe. We didn't all part on the best of notes... Speaking of notes, throughout our tale you may notice an extra note waggling at you from beneath the comic page. Give it a click or a tap to check out pertinent historical clippings my archivists put together for you.

And now, without further ado, I'm honoured to announce the winners of Unsounded's latest Fanworks Contest! Drumroll please...

For Fanfiction, please congratulate Serpenthyne in first place with her very well researched Mikaila AU story! In second place, please give a round of applause to zacksfairest, for her colourful Lemuel piece! In the Fanart category, I think we were all pretty blown away by Humming-fly's animatic. First place for them! In second place is Nikaleles with their stunning illustration. I'll contact the winners by email this week!

Thanks again to EVERYONE who entered. There wasn't a single entry that didn't make me giddy. Unsounded's readership is insane with talent and creativity, and I'm humbled all the time to have you on this adventure with me :)

~Ashley

[unsoundedcomic]

"Captain Mallard" listen my dear if anyone is brave enough to name themselves after a duck they are NOT to be fucked with.

It's MalLARD, not MALLard. Get on the plank!

[pasquiniancarriwitchet]

decided to make a post talking about The Process of making my piece for the 2025-26 Unsounded fanart contest, lol

(inspired by @diobreeze and their lovely post about their own work- check it out!)

so, antithetical to the purpose of this post, but... i did not actually take any pics of my lineart or sketching when doing this BUT i have a LOT to say about the inspiration/artistic intent so buckle up i guess, lmao

first, this is the image actually submitted to the contest proper;

it's a small version of the original, eventually cropped image (the size limit for submission files was something like 2mb, i believe?)

and here's the larger version, still in my sketchbook as we speak!

there's a laptop underneath, if you wanted a better idea of scale (since i don't feel like measuring anything rn)

it's probably pretty easy to tell (unfortunately) but i used alcohol markers to color this!

less easily noticeable is that alllllll the black parts? ballpoint pen. yes, even the giant void sections, lmao. my hand was not pleased with me, but weirdly i only needed to sacrifice the ink of one (1) pen, so hooray!

the entire lineart (the ballpoint pen) took *exactly* 5 hours and 6-and-a-half minutes; i know this because i was using the time to listen to a video essay on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and i finished the lineart with only a minute or so left in the vid

while it didn't come across as obviously as i'd have liked, the piece is meant to evoke a "christian stained glass window" type of aesthetic- specifically of diptychs like these-

-with the general intent being to evoke a "Gefender Church/Temple Window" type of thing? yeah. i dunno if i really succeeded, as the final piece is definitely more "modern" in presentation, and the actual style itself is, (ironically, given my mediocre skills lol) probably too close to in-comic "realism" to be believable as form of religious iconography

all the same, i'm very happy with how it turned out in the end! even if my initial idea was lost in the alcohol marker-soaked sauce, as it were, aha...

probably the thing i'm MOST proud of or satisfied with or whatever is the title;

Crowned by Hell / Collared to Heaven

the meaning of which is hopefully decently clear to those familiar with the lore of Unsounded, and the characters i've depicted...? but also just sounds raw enough to titillate those of you somehow uninitiated

giving Khette bisexual lighting in her eel "crown" was wholly unintentional by-the-by, lmao; it's just that i needed darker, yet still vibrant colors to contrast Jacaranda's squish "collar"

something else i'm hoping got across well enough, but that i want to babble about anyway- i specifically made Khette have the more animalistic features, like a slitted pupil and a predatory snarling curl to her bottom lip, while having Jacaranda shown with a round pupil and a placid expression

finally, the decision to give Khette a softi flower was mostly made out of a lack of alternative ideas for paralleling Jac's (off-model) jacaranda sprig... i love the color contrast i got out of it in the end, but since Jac and *not* Khette is the one actually depicted wearing both types of flowers in the actual comic, i will be forever mildly irritated with my poor lore consistency

that's about all i have to say, i suppose! VOTE FOR ME maybe pls?

[unsoundedcomic]

Does that mean Shaensigin regards the Bird and the Fish and the Tree with disdain? I guess that fits her warm disposition.

She and Sessine were once the greatest of friends, but no longer. And the rest? Never a fan of them. The Tree is aloof and the Fish is insane.

[unsoundedupdates]

Ch01, page 02

•►LATEST UPDATE HERE◄•

A few strangers to start us off. Careful, crew.

If you're a newcomer and not familiar with the regular update flow, the comic posts three pages a week: a page each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Occasionally there'll be a multiple page update, often with a skip afterwards to make up for it. I'm very insistent on keeping up a buffer of pages, as I think it's crucial for quality control that time passes between a page being done, and it being shared. You need an editing window!

For now if you would, please head on over to the Fanworks Contest page and check out all the beautiful entries! There are illustrations and animations to gawk at, music to sample, and lots of fics to read. Vote for your favourites! Polls are open through the week and weekend, and I'll announce the winners next Monday. Thanks to all the lovelies that entered - and to all the lovelies that vote!

~Ashley

[humming-fly]

Unsounded's first book just finished after about 15 years of updates and I knew I wanted to do something Fun to celebrate, so thought I'd share the animatic I whipped together for the final fanworks contest!

It's got some Significant Spoilers in it so go read Unsounded here before you watch it! It might take a couple days but the read is Well Worth it if you've never checked it out~ :))

I threw some other little bonus thoughts and comments under the cut just for fun, enjoy!

I’ve been reading Unsounded since whenever chapter 4 originally came out (maybe 2012?? horrors abound thinking on it too long) and couldn’t be more thrilled to commemorate that decade plus reading experience with this little tribute animatic!

Song is King and Lionheart by Of Monsters And Men (Straight up when I realized how well this song fit I ended up pacing my workplace for 30 minutes just listening to the song on loop and working the animatic out in my head like a prophet experiencing visions haha)

All animation done in Clip Studio Paint (over the course of like 4 straight days ha h a procrastination is a hell of a drug)

Fun fact: did you know I've actually made something for each one of unsounded's now 6 fanworks contests? They read like a bit of an artistic time capsule stretching back nearly 10 years now hahaha - I admit many of them I whipped together fairly quickly, so it was nice to sit down and actually spend some real time on a piece - given the number of hours of entertainment the comic has provided seems only fair!

good ol old bad perspective art from nine years ago, how time flies lol

actually while we're going down memory lane I found this from 20fuckin13?? This is an impressive one because this Must have been from my old bamboo tablet days and I'm 90% sure this was drawn in pen and then scanned in to be colored haha, it's like an archeological relic - I have the fuzziest memory of struggling a lot with drawing a sitting pose I liked and I feel like there's a Real chance I had one of my friends in high school hold that pose while I sketched or something 🤔

From this to a 4 minute animatic, an artistic journey capped by Sette and Duane friendship haha

[unsoundedcomic]

I feel like if he were to read Moby Dick Duane would find Ahab far more admirable than most commentaries do, he'd probably be angrily writing essays about it too.

Absolutely. Ssaelism asks: what if someone read Moby-Dick and made a religious prophet out of Ahab? Ahab is Ssael consigned to a purely material world. Ssael is Ahab fighting on after he drowns; fighting on through the sea of the khert, finding the gods that offended him, and finally taking his revenge.

Duane would lose his shit over that book, haha.

[sky665]

Check out the video on youtube!

Finished my animated fanart entry for the Unsounded webcomic contest! Deadline's coming up here on the January 5th, but I'm leaving for my Cali trip on the 31st so my deadline is basically up! And I think I'm ready to just go ahead and call this finished, even though there was a lot more I'd have liked to add in and fix up. I'm cooked chat!

But it was nice having the real animator worker experience of feeling that deadline rush lol! Felt good to animate again too, shake a lot of my rust off. I feel like after putting in 30+ hours into this is when I realized "Oh yeah, I should have done legit everything differently to make this way more efficiently" haha

Here it is though- enjoy! My favorite lil thievin' girlie with a lion's tail.

[unsoundedcomic]

I got to thinking about our above-average height cast coming up for the next chapter, and a small detail just hit me. We know Copper's get huge, Giant even!, but what of Jets? They live longer, but do they also grow, within reason, larger than the average? Not giant-huge but, still enough to look down on everyone, literally for once instead of figuratively!

Jets don't blow up in the same way! This is why I think they're the best caste: extra time, no particular body horror.

Copper don't start to get freaky big and super red until after that Jet cut-off. So around 250 years. That seems to be the point where their altered body crosses some khert threshold and starts to warp.

[unsoundedcomic]

Is there anything non-spoilery you can tell us about Tree? Maybe what he was like in RP? So excited to meet him in the next book!

Tree is a Tannery man, in charge of processing incoming hides. You can see him working in the afternoon and evening, unloading the dog carts that roll in from the piggeries and monny ranches outside the city. He's nice af but in that moulten way, where he'll give you the boots off his feet one minute but then bash your head into a wall the next for cracking a joke about the Shadwe.

All Sevencrow Court knows him. Some say Tree's the neighbourhood's unofficial mayor, and smile; others say he's a shill and a plant and should mind his own bloody business. Everyone agrees though that you don't cross blades with him. People who run afoul of Tree or the Tannery tend to go to smoke, and disappear.

Tree's best mates are Gedeon, a soud who works with him over the tanning vats, and Lacy, a foreign embroiderer who minds the front counter of the showroom the few days it's open to the public. Tree also has doings with the Lions of Mercy, though no one really understands why he hangs about their compound so much, and he changes the subject if you ask him.

No one knows where Tree came from, either. He has a Sharte navy tattoo and a foreign twang, but he's unmistakably Bronze. He plays a mean guitar, has a penchant for singing and song-writing, and has been a generous patron of The Nightlamp, a shabby theatrehouse near the waterfront. He never misses holy days at the Temple, wears a stupid silver tree bandana, and says he'd rather be Ssael's disappointment than Riv's knob polisher.

[unsoundedcomic]

We've seen gestures referred to & used a fair bit by wrights, but it's very rarely been opted out. This implies there's some notable advantage to hand gestures with pymary. What's the difference in language for an action to use as compared to not use gestures?

Pymaric spellcraft has within it a number of expedients and syntactical shortcuts. One is baked-in geometry. You can refer to cubes, spheres, and pyramids, and the khert understands these forms and can draw them.

Another is the gestural system. A core spell is constructed: Declaration, target aspect from material to destination, trigger. Every material and destination must be verbally coordinated at x,y,z, which can really add a lot of verbiage to your spell, consequently making it longer for you to speak it and slower for it to execute.

Instead of speaking these coordinates and other related variables - the coordinates of your source material, of the destination, of a secondary destination, of the speed it should travel, and even of the actual trigger that should execute your spell - you can instead gesture. Almost every numeric variable can be replaced with a gesture. You want the Solidity from THAT Granite rather than that OTHER Granite? Gesture at the one you want along an appropriate khert-line, and you got it. You want that Solidity to apply to that Water over there? Trace the khert-line with your hand along the correct vector, and it'll travel there.

There is gesture specific language for accessing these shortcuts, including ways to cast by touch, to swap Aspects from port to port, to hold Aspects in one port while casting with another, to assigning specific or a default gesture as a spell trigger. Hands are arguably as important to a martial spellwright as their voice. A battlewright who loses their hands, like poor Quigley, is forever crippled pymarically even if they survive. Losing access to gestural expediency is too much of a handicap.

It's interesting to think about Duane having no real pymary in the khert because he'd also be crippled there by not having his physical hands and so not having his gestures. So it almost doesn't matter anyway.

Take care of your hands, aspirant.

[unsoundedcomic]

Who is the boss of the Aldish Geffies? Also the Stitchers, do they actually have a more official, less sinister name?

Brotherhood of the Midnight King, or just the Brotherhood. Yerta is associated with the sun and Riv the night, which I know may sound sinister, but in the north, the night is seen as the more powerful, but neutral force, swallowing the sun, enabling the predator, enhancing the freeze and annihilating the weak. Night is when the Father returns to the family and resumes his seat of authority, defending his kingdom with spellsong and axe.

The Fraternal Gefendur are overseen by the Grondsparra.

[unsoundedcomic]

We know Duane was a top tier, max level, battle wright. Do more 'typical' wrights find themselves specializing in their battle pymary maneuvers, tactics, or even particular targets/environments?

Yeah! But I do have to point out that Duane DOES have a specialization. Core Technique! That is, Aspect manipulation done at fundamental levels with overwhelming accuracy and speed. Duane is adept at other techniques, many of which rely on intimate knowledge of local spellburns or an arsenal of pymarics - but Core Technique is both what he regularly practises and it's what he taught professionally.

Quigley was a pymaric specialist and not great at environments. Remember when he was fighting Anadyne in the warehouse and he hated that there wasn't anything interesting in there to fight with? Or how Duane totally snowed him in the forest via misdirection? Quigley was great at fighting alongside pymarics, and no slouch at maintenancing them.

Elka was just the opposite - extremely adept at utilizing her environment. She was flying with the raindrops, hurling elevator cars, ganking the Volume from a barking hound. If it was at hand, she could find some use for it. A very creative and flexible caster.

Bastion can fight, but since he has no range, he has to be fast and constantly moving. This has caused him to turn his martial pymary towards touch; attacks on an opponents body. With his fingertips on the right place he can strip away consciousness or sensation, sever an artery, paralyze a limb.

[unsoundedcomic]

[unsoundedupdates]

Epilogue END

•LAST UPDATE HERE•

Click the new page and keep going 'til you're back here!

And that, my dears, is Unsounded. I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I enjoyed chauffeuring you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your eyeballs, your generous support, your feedback, your comments, your memes, your artwork, your fanfiction, your theories, your nonsense, and for just being you, part of a very indie story and a very indie community. Thank you.

...but we're not going anywhere! As announced, I'm very hype to bring you a sequel - "The Red Cost" - launching right after the holidays, on Monday, January 5th. Sette, Jivi, Duane, and Matty return - along with some other old friends and a lot of new ones - to take us further into Kasslyne. New senet beasts await, new mysteries lurk - and so does a new website and a bigger display size for pages. Mark your calendar or just follow one of Unsounded's social media accounts so you don't miss out on the launch. During the break, if you want to follow along with the sequel's development and peek on forbidden art, consider subscribing on Patreon.

Monday I'll be posting info for the fanworks contest! Submit fanart or a fanfic to delight your fellow readers and compete for a prize. And don't forget to check out the Kickstarter if you want your hands on print books with print exclusive bonus comics in them. For now - Seeya later! :)

Pledge now for professionally printed editions of the first two books of Unsounded featuring brand new covers and bonus material - and eventually a place in actual stores! If these sell well, we can get the whole series archived in print and on your shelves. We can do it! I want you to have these books!

-Ashley

•••••••••••• Discuss the comic on Discord or Reddit

[phantom-september]

The Lovers of Seferpine Art of the ongoing comic @unsoundedupdates by @glassshard Thank you all for the love my piece received in the fanart contest! :D Additional Quigley and art thoughts below the cut.

Mathis Quigley! I could talk about him forever. This piece was partially inspired by the Lovers of Valdaro, a pair of 6,000 year-old skeletons in Italy that were found buried in each other's arms. Largely inspired by Quigley's line that his heart already stopped years ago. Quigley feels dead and buried, but is unable to reach out for the love he's buried with. Comforting Matty means reaching out with hands stained with his mother's blood. I wanted the grave to resemble skin/an open wound around the edges. Full of so much raw hate and love, wanting to die yet having to live on in the ruins of his life--knowing what has happened is his own doing. Blood on his hands. His self-awareness only makes the wound that much more painful for him. What a well-crafted character. As The Odyssey says, "Tell me about a complicated man." I love reading about Quigley; keep telling me about this complicated man. There is no Penelope waiting for him at home, and there is no home for him to return to.