#ehlverse creatures

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so ive been debating for a while doing sketch page illustration type things at the ends of certain chapters in firebreathers, a la stormlight archive.... and i started one for dreamdancers............ and im super loving the pencil sketch vibes but holy shit i could NOT resist coloring this one so uh yeah

here ya go, art taglist:

Art Taglist (let me know to be +/-):

@writeblrfantasy​ ; @hannahs-creations​ ; @naps-tries-writing​ ; @quilloftheclouds​ ; @dahldahlbills​

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Dreamdancer Designs

HI IVE BEEN DOING MORE CREATURE DESIGNS this one took a lot longer than intended but it’s here!!

some quick worldbuilding:

Dreamdancers are endemic to the Maelands, and come in three subspecies: Godwood Dancers, Nimian Dancers, and Melkan Dancers. All have a single antler in the center of their head, resembling an old, twisting tree. They are generally nocturnal, though domestic breeds have been bred for diurnal activity, and it has been noted that Nimian Dancers in particular often shift to crepuscular activity during fall and winter.

Though they appear dainty and fragile, they are strong and sturdy enough to serve as steeds for those of the upper class, or occasionally as part of a rehearsed circus routine. Warriors of the Ehlven nobility are known to ride Dancers into battle, and King Tieling Evergreen’s steed of choice has historically been Nimian dancers.

A transcript of the notes and images is below the cut, as well as the worldbuilding and art taglists!

ID: A fully-colored sketch page on a cool grey background. It is titled “Dreamdancers”, with an @alittlewarlord tag beneath. Images in order of left to right, top to bottom, are as follows:

1. A colored sketch of a deer-like creature. It is a dark, desaturated blue, with speckles of cream along it’s chest and flanks. It has a single twisting antler sprouting from the center of it’s forehead, and several thread-like feathers flowing like whiskers from above the eyes, by the nose, and out from it’s tail. The skin on it’s chest sags, and has a patch of bright, reflective blue feathers along the bottom. It has a fat lump on it’s back that is covered in smaller, dark green down feathers. It’s tail is similar to a peacock’s, mostly dark green, with circles of bright yellow near the ends of the feathers. Several notes point to it as follows. (1. A scale line from the end of it’s hooves to the shoulder, labelled “5 foot six inches, or 165 centimeters”. 2. An arrow points to the back. It is labelled “Completely feathered”. 3. An arrow points to the rounded ends of the thready feathers flowing off of the tail. It is labelled “Bioluminescent”.)

2. A silhouette of a similar creature, facing the viewer. The tail feathers are spread in a display behind it, and flow from a dark blue at the base to a bright white at the ends, with electric blue circles near the ends. The thready feathers flow upward as well. The note on the arrow pointing to it reads “Do mating dances like birds of paradise”.

3. A drawing of another similar creature, running across the page. This one is entirely creamy white, with speckles of dark blue across it’s back, and the same white and blue tail as the silhouette. The note pointing to it reads “Often used as steeds, less dainty than they look”.

4. Three identical sketches of the creature’s head, with different colorings. The one at the top has a bright reddish-brown base coat, with a dark brown nose, and dark green leaf-like feathers on it’s hump. It is labelled “Melkan Variety”. The one at the bottom left has the dark blue with white speckled coloring, and is labelled “Godwoods Variety”. The final one in the bottom right corner has the creamy coloring with blue speckles, and is labelled “Nimian variety”.

/End ID

Ehlverse Worldbuilding Taglist (ask to be +/-):

@charles-joseph-writes ; @violetcancerian ; @phiwrites ; @rhikasa ; @writeblrfantasy ; @talesfromaurea

Art Taglist (ask to be +/-):

@writeblrfantasy ; @hannahs-creations

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OOO i would love to hear about your weirdly normal dragon species!!

HELLO happy wbw i apologize deeply because i drafted that preference post at like 2 am and i have No Idea how the fuck i was defining "weirdly normal dragons". or what that means for the ehlverse. so im going to pretend it means "weirdly normal" as in "not my own concoction of animal blends that i keep referring to as dragons with no consistent throughlines between any of them so why would any society call them All Dragons"

The closest species I have to Classic Fantasy Dragons™, then!!

These are probably the Carrier Dragons (like carrier pigeons!!) that i talked about here, and the Mae Poisonrings! which i really need to rename! but thats besides the point

Mae Poisonrings are named for the poison glands on their eyelids, that kind of look like bright green eyeliner for lizards! They squirt poison in a similar way to how horned lizards shoot blood from their eyes as a defense mechanism (called ocular autohemorrhaging, if you ever want to look it up. its a Not Terribly Rare thing in the animal kingdom apparently), but the poison is acidic and used for stunning their Very Big prey instead!

In a similar vein, these dragons?? Are BONKERS huge. Like, nest in the Godwoods, one-brood-per-tree kind of huge. As big as an american football stadium.

Thankfully, they’re usually too preoccupied with basking in the sun and hunting wild herds of Dreamdancers (and unnamed-giant-birds and wooly-bear-goat pasture animals) to care about tiny little people like ehlves and humans! Super thankfully! Because their eggs are about the size of a jacked human man’s torso, and they never seem to really stop growing!

thank you for the ask!! sorry if this isnt entirely what you expected, but i hope its fun info nonetheless!!!

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Hey, Paxy! I'm so sorry this took so long for me to get back to you on. I just now realized you'd sent me an ask for wbw! But better later than never, right? ^_^ So: Happy wbw! For your question: this is pertaining to your favorite creature you've created (or adjusted)... what is the history behind them? How did they come to be and are they aware of their history? Queue Post

a;lsdkfj no worries!! i tend to get asks trickling in all day on WBW, so i had plenty to occupy myself with!!! <3<3<3

My favorite creature has probably got to be one of the dragon species I've come up with!! Unfortunately, this is one that I haven't drawn yet (at least not since i changed them up last), but they're called Mae Poisonrings, and they're a species that lives in the canopy of the Godwoods!!

They're essentially your classic huge dragon of the likes of Tolkien or D&D, but they spend their time up in the canopy tending their nests and hunting herds of Dreamdancers or the other as-yet-unnamed large herbivores of the Godwoods! They're named for the bright acid-green gland that sits in the edges of their eyelids like a ring of badly-done eyeliner and secretes a poison that paralyzes the target.

They don't breathe any fire, but can squirt this poison gland like how horned lizards can squirt blood out of their eyes (do not click the link if you don't want to see a video of this ridiculous defense mechanism at play).

They don't really have any in-world history, besides being around since one of the Growths of the Millennium Cycle decided that hey, these funky little nuisance lizards should actually be giant dangerous dragons instead about 20,000 years ago. And they're like most real-life animals in that they don't have a concept of time or history, so no, they aren't really aware of that event any more :D

thank you again for the ask!!! i love talking about my weird animals <3

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Carrier dragons? Like with little pack saddles and stuff? Please tell me about them 😊

CARRIER DRAGONS MY BELOVED thank u for sending this in and i hope you have a very fun wbw!!!

Carrier dragons in this instance is more like carrier pigeons!! They're a small species of feathered dragons that have been bred to learn the differences between faces and learn to associate names with them!

Generally, they're about a meter tall when perching, and have feathers that range from a creamish color with wax-red stippling, to white with black accents. They're very good for delivering packages and letters long-distance, as they mainly eat fish, and can drink ocean water just as well as fresh water.

They're shaped like a classically lithe dragon, with a long neck, thin skull, and two wings + two legs. Their tail tends to be rather long comparatively, with a tuft of accent color feathers at the very end. And male carrier dragons have a little "mane" of accent color feathers that run down their spine, and a pair of small horns!

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Happy wbw!! Tell us about the plants and animals and other life forms in the ehlverse. Do they resemble ours at all? What fantastic worldbuilding and backstory have you come up with for them? Also, I've been meaning to ask, are there any humans in the ehlverse at all?

:D happy wbw!! thank you for the ask <3<3

I’ll answer these a little out of order, so first up: are there humans in the Ehlverse?

Yes!! Most, if not all, of them are confined to the Maelands, right now, but there used to be an entire continent full of them! If I remember right (because i need to write things down more often a;lsdf) it was called Eqia, before it fell to a Decay, though that was so long ago that there are next to no surviving records of life over there. (I talked more about that in this ask from a few weeks ago!!)

Oh, and Arthur is the Human Eternal! Though, he would argue that some of the side effects of the immortalization have rendered him a bit... different than other humans. He’d argue he’s effectively an Ehlf, now, despite appearances.

Now, on to the plants and animals :D

A lot of the animals of the Ehlverse resemble things from our world, but only parts at a time, if that makes sense? You’ve seen my sketch pages recently, (the only one up is the Rillian Whiptail, though there are more to come) and what I’ve been doing is taking aspects of different real-world animals, and combining them to make the animals of the Ehlverse! Right now, I’m working on designing Dreamdancers, which are a nocturnal deer-equivalent that looks more like a funky unicorn than a deer. The current real-world inspiration for those includes Marsh Deer, Bronze Parotia, and Gyr cattle!

I also have plans for livestock animals made of a combination of Bears, Addaxes, and Cashmere sheep, but we’ll see how long those take to design ;alskjdf

I think the things that most resemble real-world life tend to be plants, because I have a much more difficult time coming up with plants than animals! The most weird plants so far in the Ehlverse are all trees, because I like trees the most ;LSKJD

This includes Rillian Cypress (which I still need to name something cooler), which is the tree shown on the Whiptail design! It’s essentially a normal cypress tree, but with the bark-shedding of rainbow eucalyptus, and veins of blue through the dark wood. It has some special properties in the magical healing rituals of the area - it’s very good at dispelling cancers and tumors early on in their development - but otherwise, there’s not much to it other than looking cool :)

And, of course, the Godtrees! If you’ve ever looked at pictures of Angel Oak trees, they’re kind of like that, but the size of mountains. Their wood is resistant to fire, and it tends to grow back where you mine it out, so it’s a renewable resource despite there never being any new Godtrees, or dead ones, or seeds.

Well, no dead ones except for the one at the ruins of Fahrial. But that’s the only one. They’re kind of a universal constant, assumed to be created at the same time as Ehl itself, and it’s a common idea that if they ever die off, the world is already beyond hope.

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Thank you for the ask!!! I’m just gonna drop the worldbuilding taglist here, since I keep forgetting it exists, and this is some fun stuff :D

Ehlverse Worldbuilding Taglist (ask to be +/-):

@charles-joseph-writes ; @violetcancerian ; @phiwrites ; @rhikasa ; @writeblrfantasy ; @talesfromaurea

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Look at me realising it's wednesday :> Happy WBW ! Since Ehlverse seems to be a really big world, how do people get around? Is there teleportation? Is it sidely accessible? Or do you have cute little harbours or train stations? Tell me everything :D

Happy WBW to you, too!! :D

The Ehlverse is quite large, yes!! And how you get around it depends on what magics or technology you have at your disposal!

A majority of people in the Maelands and Emarye find themselves using either steam- or magic-powered trains or long distance pack animals to get around! Some of the more popular animal companions include Pack Lizards up in the Nimian mountains, Dreamdancers in the Godwoods, and horses or camels in the prairies and desert. Meanwhile, up in Emarye, there are some large yak-like creatures that are often used as beasts of burden, and occasional domesticated bears or furry-snake-dragon-things that have yet to be named.

In Sieril, Gordahan, and the Chard Islands, people tend to use lots of canoe or gondola equivalents! Sieril in particular is only really inhabitable in the bayous and swamps, so instead of streets, they have canals, like Venice! And the Chard Islands are mostly mangroves, so unless you’re Mulari and can jump from tree to tree, you’ll be using boats and wading shoes as much as possible.

The Ehlves of Deltierin tend to ride Griffins (gryffins? griffons? i cant remember how i chose to spell it a;lsdkjf), while Mikrona can Shift into whatever animal is best for the trek they’re taking!

Getting between continents is usually a matter of taking a ship and waiting a few weeks or months... Or, if you’re human, you can use Runes to teleport yourself. It takes about a 1:10 ratio of blood-ounces-per-mile. Particularly brutal killers have been known to hop continents to evade capture before...

That got a little dark at the end a;sdlkfj but thank you for the questions!! :D

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Here is a wild WBW Ask!! Tell me, for any of your worlds/WIPs, do you have any system of "species alters another species for cuteness/war/help/reasons" ie. wolf-to-dog line? Or the concept of bonsai? I don't mean necessarily domestication but more a general sense of "hey look at that thing... I wonder if it can be another thing of better use?"

(Wow this phrasing makes it really hard not to think of humans as some sort of kid's cartoon super villains haha)

:D hi!!! happy WBW!! this is a super fun ask, thank you for sending it in!!!

The Ehlverse, in particular, has a few species like that! So far, they’re all animals, and mostly domesticated and bred for specific purposes!!

The first one I really came up with are these things that I’ve been calling Pack Lizards, since I don’t have any better names yet. They’re kind of like salamanders, except about as big as a wolf, and they were domesticated by the Dwarves to serve as a beast of burden that could fit into their tunnels easily! Wild pack lizards used to be pretty dainty and skittish, but the domesticated ones are very sturdy and stubborn, and the two groups have interbred enough to make all of them fairly similar! Wild ones just have a bit of paranoia around people :)

There are also dragons in the Maelands that were bred for mail carrying! They’re essentially bigger long-distance carrier pigeons, and they’ve gone from dangerous screechy things to small, nearly-harmless screechy things over the years. They tend to be used mostly for super long-distance communication, though - people-ish mail carriers are still essential for everything else.

And, of course, I couldn’t just not have pets in the world! A lot of people tend to have griffins or sparkfowl as pets - though in my world, griffins can be feline or canine! Ever wanted a dog that could fly?

Thank you again for the question!!! <3<3<3