start - 00:25: I'm just doodling, trying to familiarize myself with the sketching brush
00:26-00:28: I do a quick line study of Waterhouse's Lamia and I think 'hold oN-'
00:29-02:25: rough sketch and lines
02:26-02:55: underpainting
02:56-03:55: on a separate layer (still under the line layer) I start putting down more colors and start working out forms
03:56-08:00: I start working on yet another layer on top of the line layer and work on the shapes
08:01-10:00: their faces really bit me this time around and I did some trace-over studies in another document which I copied into this one (the white lines flashing up at around 08:05) and I eventually re-lined Merlin's profile at 08:12. It was Arthur's turn at around 09:20.
I spend the rest of the time fixing Merlin's leg and adding detail to the clothing, trying out different background solutions. Plus, the skulls keep popping back in since I really wanted to add them but I wasn't happy with how barren it would have made the piece look.
At around 19:00 I import the sun and moon from my Wishing morgwen piece because I liked the look of the sun and I wanted to imitate it but it didn't work 😆 I instead proceed to make the sun an egg and don't notice until much later!
19:50: I add a multiply layer to add shadows
20:26: I start adding non-descript greenery which later morphs into a flower bed (and a nice ground to plant some moss-overgrown skulls)
28:00: I finally notice that the circle shape isn't a circle and I add some finishing touches.
Characters: M!Mahariel, Merrill, Kieran
Pairing: M!Mahariel & Merrill, M!Mahariel & Kieran, Merrill & Kieran
Fandom: Dragon Age
Rating: G
Other Tags: Dalish Identity, Father-Son Relationship, Male-Female Friendship, Background M!Mahariel x Morrigan, Background Merrill x Carver
Summary: The Arlathvhen approaches, and Merrill prepares for its imminent arrival with the last of clan Sabrae.
Written for @dreadfutures as part of a server OC swap! 💖 Halevune Mahariel is her OC.
As the years go by, it becomes more difficult for Merrill to remember their faces.
Still, she tries to. She remembers Pol’s nervous smile when he'd finally learned how to knot a halyard; the distant look in Paivel's eyes when a story started getting away from him; how Marethari would stare down her nose at Merrill when she'd failed to meet the expectations that had been set for her.
She sometimes forgets Halevune's face, too, even when he's stood right in front of her. His face is gaunt, dark shadows carved into his face by the fire between them. His hair is brittle, white, like winter's grass, she thinks it would fray if she rubbed it between her fingers. When he smiles (if he smiles) some semblance of her old friend is reborn, and when he doesn't, Merrill looks to Kieran.
D'you know who General Rathura is supposed to be? He's an adversary in the crossroads, and my Rook remarked that he was part of the Dread Wolf's army, I think? No idea how he got that idea/came to know that information. Did they appear previously?
hello! ◕‿◕ after defeating this enemy my Rook said "The armor on those undead looked familiar... Well, whoever they served, they're fighting for the gods now." On defeating this enemy Rook can also say "Those undead looked elven. And ancient." If your Rook said that, maybe Rook's comment (and level of knowledge) at that point changes/increases as their progression through another quest does? (my Rook encountered this enemy quite early on).
I don't think Rathera or at least their name has appeared previously in the series. we know at least from Felassan that General was a rank that existed in the Dread Wolf's forces in the past, and we can say that whoever they were, they were an ancient elf. in the area behind Rathera are a couple of the frozen tree people like you can see in Arlathan Forest. and the Memento you can pick up from the area, the Unspoken, is connected to Dirthamen.
there is also this info/lines from the datamines:
"I've seen their armor on old frescoes. They fought for General Rathera. One of Solas's allies."
"The insignia. Those were General Rathera's soldiers."
"And the gods have raised them to stop us."
"Right! I remember now. An old ally of the Dread Wolf. And now the gods are raising them to slow us down."
Edit: @dreadfutures mentioned in the notes that Bellara gave them the dialogue about recognizing them as an old ally of the Dread Wolf. I reloaded a save just now to kill Rathera again only with Bellara in my party this time and my Rook said "The armor on those undead looked familiar." Bellara replied "The insignia. Those were General Rathera's soldiers" and then my Rook said the "Right! I remember now. An old ally of the Dread Wolf. And now the gods are raising them to slow us down." line.
not a desert technically but I just visited the dunes in Monterey and gleefully trampled on some ice plant and I feel like you might enjoy that. if you wanna talk about the kinds of vegetation that grow in sandy soil or something I invite you to 👀
(also you're doing it! you're surviving! you'll get through that doctorate!)
ok ready this is my most important soapbox of all because soils in the desert are very special and have such cool organisms you don't find in these arrangements outside of drylands...
first lookee here. wauw beautiful utah
ok now look closer
no closer closer closer
CLOSER CLOSER CLOSER
WOW is that MOSS? you are thinking. the answer is YES. but doesn't moss like lots of water you are thinking??? WELL USUALLY. BUT in the desert you will notice that things like grasses and shrubs have lots of space between them unlike in more temperate climates-vegetation cover is not truly continuous. And there's less leaf litter than in forests obscuring the dirt. Which means all that soil is just sitting out in the open with nothing to protect it from being blown away by those harsh desert winds... except of course for our friends the BIOLOGICAL SOIL CRUSTS. also known as crypotbiotic soils, cryptogrammic soils, and biocrusts (for short).
These are communities of mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria (aka blue green algae--yes, those are usually Wet too, but ironically so so common in deserts), and the tens of thousands of surface and subsurface microbes that are associated with them. It's easy to forget just how many organisms are living in one single scoop of soil, especially because science can barely identify 1% of these microbes. Like of JUST the ones we have enough info to classify enough to count in my own master's dataset left me with over 25,000 unique taxonomic units I had to manage. don't worry about what that means just know it was very annoying and makes statistics a headache. anyway you find them all over the southwest US states as well as in other deserts around the world (spain, australia, sooo many in china, incredible ones in the succulent karoo in south africa/namibia, plenty in argentina etc etc), if you know where to look...
anyway OUR HEROS THE BIOCRUST aren't just there to look pretty (though you will can see from photos they also do this :) ), but are a vital component to the dryland ecosystem! They literally hold the soil surface together to prevent erosion, they influence hydrology in terms of rainfall runoff + infiltration, they impact how seeds germinate, they contribute to nutrient cycling and what plant-available compounds are held at the soil surface... like i feel like Tumblr in general has been made aware of how fungi & root networks interact in large scale systems like forests, but that is also happening on a more microscopic level in deserts! just in the top couple centimeters soooo much is happening. Cyanobacteria in particular are tiny organisms that produce little nets of sugars woven in the soil to climb around on and protect themselves, and if you crumble a little bit of soil from the surface you can see how the little spiderweb strings literally hold together the sand particles.
Now that you're Aware of biocrusts, when you look at larger scale landscape photos taken in un-trampled areas of desert, you will notice them as darker patches and textures on the lighter soil:
Yep there's these tiny little communities all over, that many people never learn to see. And now what I said before about mosses & cyanobacteria usually preferring wet environments--they have in fact adapted to life in the desert in ways that means they're dormant for most of the year. They live in stasis until the rainy season hits (or in some cases, winter moisture from a snow layer--many will photosynthesize through a few inches of snow since it's clear/white), and then burst into color and life. Many patches of biocrust will look utterly lifeless and dried out at first and then become vibrant and swell up within a few minutes of being exposed to moisture. Lichens, while more vibrant even when dry, will also mostly only grow/reproduce while wet. And biocrusts come in all sorts of colors, shapes, and preferred microhabitats!
anyway this post is long enough already so i'll be quick. while beautiful and important as you can imagine these are FRAGILE. if they get trampled too much, by humans or cows or cars, that's it. you're back to bare soil that can blow away whenever it wants.
I was lucky to get to participate in a 2x/year survey of one of the very few places in Utah to NEVER have cattle grazing or development, a remote area the entrance is kept secret to inside Canyonlands National Park, where you can see just how dense and lush biocrusts once could be in the US southwest:
ah... glorious. what special little guys. this is why if you visit many of the national parks in Utah you will see signs & stickers around with slogans like "Don't Bust The Crust" and "Tiptoe Through The Crypto" and etc. so heed that advice but DO stop and kneel down and get a better look at them!
This honestly made me think so much (and all of it was delicious; I’m so grateful for this @dadrunkwriting prompt). I love writing Cole from the outside, but I’ve never gone into his head before and it was incredible.
Cole sits above the gates, watching. The brim of his hat shades not just his eyes, but most of his face, giving him a covering veil of shadow behind which to hide his thoughts. His legs dangle over the edge, warmth of the sun-struck stone seeping in behind his knees and along his calves. Legs are a strange thing, he thinks; they don’t seem as though they ought to hold bodies up, like the slightest breeze should topple a person forward and back, and yet they don’t.
Skyhold is almost empty now, the nobles vanished back to their estates and the soldiers to their barracks, wherever those might be. There’s a strange feeling in Cole’s chest, as though he’s lost, but what it is he’s lost—or who has lost him—he doesn’t know. He feels hollowed out, like Skyhold itself, the furniture and trappings of the Inquisition removed from him, leaving bare spots in him, free of dust and oddly bright where the everyday parts of him are comfortably faded.
Even as he thinks it, another group of laughing people passes through the gate, carrying carved wooden chairs and overfilled chests and all manner of things the Inquisition needed once and is now shedding like a heavy coat in the spring sunlight. Skyhold is a shell, the Inquisition a living thing inside it, and Cole wonders—has this thing they’ve built died or only outgrown its home?
He wonders the same of himself. Would he know? Or would the Fade reclaim him, just as he is now, real and unreal merging and melding, a bright spark only he himself can see?
He hears a voice nearby—not spoken, but felt—and, moments later, a warm presence touches his. He knows this one, worn and weary, all threaded through in gold and blue.
Cullen comes to stand beside him as though taking up a post. It fits, Cole thinks, like the armour he still wears even now. The Inquisition may no longer be responsible for holding up the sky, but Cole knows that, as long as there is a sky, Cullen will carry it on his shoulders.
“This must feel very different,” says Cullen with a smile, weak and wistful, and Cole knows he doesn’t mean it. Or at least, if he means it, he doesn’t realize. It’s a thrown rope, a bridge, something Cullen says only so that he can say another thing, a bigger thing, like each thought he has is transparent and only by layering enough of them over one another can he make them real.
Cole understands the feeling. He, too, is often transparent, layering himself into thoughts and feelings until he becomes real.
“Feels like fading,” Cole says thoughtfully. “Like finishing, but the sky doesn’t end.”
Cullen blinks. Cole is expecting a question, or perhaps to be asked to speak about something else, but neither comes. Instead, Cullen asks, “What will you do?”
Cole doesn’t think that way, in lines of time and truth and intent. The question brings with it a sense of the ephemeral, as though anything Cole says will be true for this moment only and, in the next, he might be anything, anywhere. Right now, the warm stone tethers him to the earth, drawing his roots down into the depths of Skyhold’s history, until they reach the place where what he was and what he is diverge. If he lets go…
“I don’t know,” he says, because it’s true and because he doesn’t understand the question and because he knows that Cullen, too, is searching for a tether.
For those who have joined the Inquisition along its journey, this is natural—a shift, a change, from one world to the next—and their departure is as much joy as it is sorrow. Cullen is not one of them. As far as any man can be, Cullen is the Inquisition—more than those who began it, more even than the Inquisitor who led it. Each person who enters Skyhold’s gates becomes Cullen’s responsibility and each person who leaves is a stone pulled from his foundation. Who will he be when all the stones have been taken?
The smile on Cullen’s face becomes softer, more genuine. “Neither do I.”
Cole says, “It’s lonely.”
“What is?”
“Leaving,” says Cole. “Losing, looking forward, looking for something new. It starts so small and finishes just the same. Was it ever more?”
Cullen sits down beside him, letting the stones’ stored sun warm him, ground him. It’s a rare gesture from someone built to stand tall, a precious thing because it means.
“What do you think?” Cullen asks and means that, too.
Cole looks at him, searching. In many ways, he and Cullen are the same—formed in fire, faded in flame, until they were forgotten. Where there is neither peace nor purpose, Cullen finds one and Cole the other. But is that all they are?
His question echoes back to him. Was it ever more? Were they?
“I think,” he says, and looks deeper, climbing the walls Cullen has built—and everything, to him, is a keep, a tower, a cage—not to enter, but to sit on them and warm himself in the pale sun. There’s an answer there, not his own and perhaps not Cullen’s either, but it’s something Cullen has kept here nonetheless and that makes it matter. “I deserve a happy ending.”
He understands it better then, hearing it the way Cullen does. Not a folk tale, not a song, not a story that follows rules that should be instead of the ones that are. Just an ending that asks nothing of Cullen, that doesn’t leave him whole but hollow, a lantern in late autumn.
Cullen says, “We all do.”
“What happens?” Cole asks. “In a happy ending?”
“Well,” Cullen says, “I suppose that depends on you.”
Cole says, “What’s yours?”
Cullen’s answer is silent, a lance through the weak light. It’s hungry, haunting, this thing inside him, laughing and longing, the ghost of an old song hidden behind a smile. He knows the old song, even if he doesn’t know it; Cole can hear it sometimes, in his mind, in his bones. Cullen tries hard to forget, so Cole doesn’t talk about it.
Instead, he says, “Skyhold is different now.”
Cullen says softly, “It must be strange, not hearing everyone and everything at once.”
“It was made for great deeds,” says Cole. “Great and terrible and necessary. But it’s not that anymore.”
It isn’t only the fortress Cole is talking about.
“It’s almost empty now,” says Cullen thoughtfully.
Cole tilts his head as if listening to a sound beyond the edge of hearing. “Some of them are still here,” he says. “Some of them want to stay.”
The shape of Cullen’s thoughts shifts at that—a lake, a dock, the quiet darkness. Sanctuary. He doesn’t say the word. Cullen wouldn’t want him to; it would crack the fragile shell that surrounds this peaceful place inside him and let the world claim it, like everything else. But Cole knows—has always known—the silhouette of Cullen’s hurt, sharp-edged and severe, held inside himself so that the cuts bleed only where no one can see.
You could stay here, he thinks, but it’s the wrong answer. It won’t fix the hurt; it will make it worse, because Cullen’s one uncompromising truth is that what he wants and what he can have are always separated, two constellations reaching for one another across an empty sky.
Cullen reminds him of another man—not the templar, but the mage; the first, failed, feared. Like him, Cullen has the old song in his blood, not by birth, but by necessity. Like him, Cullen has been filed away, forgotten, freed from one prison to fill another. Like him, Cullen has wounds that bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and never heal.
When they met, Cullen would not have thanked Cole for the comparison. Today, he might understand.
“This is a refuge now,” he says, speaking to the mage in his memories, to the soldier at his side. “It needs protection.”
Cullen says, “You think people will stay even when the Inquisition…?”
Cole hums. “Lingering, longing,” he says. “Last and lost, but they found something here. It can be safe. You could make it safe.”
“Skyhold doesn’t need me,” Cullen says. “I’m a soldier without a war, Cole.” It isn’t said with sadness or self-pity, only resignation, threadbare and comfortingly familiar, like the mantle that covers his armour.
“You could be something else,” says Cole quietly. “I was.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy.”
A group of Cullen’s recruits passes under them, almost in formation, but not quite; for a moment, it’s like they’re going to war, shields raised and muscles taut, but then they pile the shields on a waiting cart and turn back, unprotected. Cullen sits up a little straighter as he watches them, and Cole wonders—does he know he has already changed? The soldier fits him well, but Cole can see the way the outline of it settles around him, can see it’s something he wears, not something he is. Not anymore.
Cole says, “I could show you.”
Cullen looks at him and there’s a long moment of silence. Time moves in lines here, but Cole feels for a moment like if he reaches out, the Cullen he touches will be the one that arrived here so many months ago, hopeful and frightened and hurting and needing and standing so far, so far away from everyone else in the middle of the courtyard, in the middle of the crowd. Cole found him then, too, but the walls were too high, the sun too fierce, everything old and far away and edged in furious blue.
He could be something else. They both could.
“Will you stay?” Cullen asks him. “At Skyhold.”
Cole says, “I can help here.” It’s a question, even if it doesn’t sound like one, because nothing is as sure as it should be, because these are the times when this world is like the other, shifting and shining, ready to be shaped. This is a fortress, but its gates are open and unguarded. It could be something else.
Cullen says, “Then perhaps I can, too.”
Is this a happy ending? Cole wonders, soft and sun-gold. Is it enough?
He knows there are no answers for questions like these. He knows there are hurts too old, too important, for him to change. But right now, beside him, Cullen is warmer, somehow, brighter, solid enough to stay.
@dreadfutures drew me a beautiful rendition of Cirilla Hawke in the Hades style a while ago, so now I'd like to share it!
This whole concept was inspired by an AU idea where she was a forgotten local deity of Thedas, revered by those who go to war on behalf of rebellion or on a vengeance quest. I borrowed Hades' layout for my quote because I've been wanting to use it since forever :'3
Version without a BG and some design notes are under cut!
