Dergtober '24 Exalt Finished
Ii have a bunch if wips going but apparently the next dergtober is what I've finished first. The sketch from 2024 is here (which apparently has a content label now? I don't know why, maybe because there's a snake).
Here's my 'scared and slightly divine tundra cub.' He lost some of his smol scared baby look in the lineart, and I still don't know how to render ice, but overall I'm pleased with how this came out.
I wrote on some of Mani's background when I first posted the sketch. He sits deep in my personal headcannons of how eggs absorbing elemental magic, familiars bonds, etc. work in Flight Rising. His egg was abducted by an ancient ice clan that had been painstakingly collecting and studying even more ancient ice artifacts. The collective magic aura of these items was dangerous for most adult dragons, but for eggs, which absorbed elemental energy in order to hatch, the intense energy would freeze them solid. Mani's survival was due to a mix of rare compatibility and questionable spellwork that bonded him to a familiar while still in the egg, so that some of the excess energy passed through the bond instead. Both tundra and elk familiar survived, but not unchanged. Poor baby Mani possessed an absolutely absurd amount of ice magic. It would be a long time before he learned to more or less control his magic, and even longer before he relaxed enough to really settle into his found family, far far away from the dragons that did this to him, but he gets there.
Next up is day 11 pile, where I'll get to properly focus on that found family.
I recorded part of this one too, which is shorter mostly because I skipped a lot of the tedium of me getting confused over the back leg, cleaning up crackle markings, and all the final rendering while I tried to figure out how ice works.
