#godslaughter

[saltineofswing]

Here’s some old art of HAWKMOTH, a character I have played with a bunch but that never made it onto Tumblr. Hawkmoth is ‘prodigiously and perhaps even detrimentally clairvoyant’, to the point of spending most of his life literally just walking around and stumbling into food, shelter, and problems that need solving at exactly the most opportune time. Don’t ask him when you die. You’ll get a serious – and, probably, correct – answer.

Hawkmoth is a member of the clandestine Order of the Moth, an order of oracular servants of the Road’s native-born god of time Thysan Thaumeta – which is, literally, an enormous moth. If the moth dies, time ends. So, pretty important to have a small town’s worth of well-trained guardians to protect it. Their compound, high in the dense forests of the Green, is miles away from any outpost, town, or settlement. They are insular and weird, but not unfriendly or unhelpful. 

Hawkmoth is the most powerful clairvoyant of any of them, to the point of finishing people’s sentences, answering questions that haven’t been asked, or providing portents of future events to people out of nowhere. He sees a multitude of timelines, often simultaneously, meaning that he can aggregate the likelihood of a certain event happening relatively easily. Mostly, this power works in regards to his own day-to-day life, although he can extend it to others especially if their ‘path’ crosses his own in a meaningful way. He spent most of his life eschewing any kind of agency, and simply went along with whatever his powers told him would happen.

He usually doesn’t act on his premonitions because, usually, his premonitions also include what he is going to say or do. So for a long time, he was so reliant on his powers that he just assumed he would be in the ‘right’ place, at the ‘right’ time, to say the ‘right’ thing, for whatever outcome he predicted was most likely, in every situation he found himself in.

His powers also mean that he is an absolute fucking demon in combat – he knows every move you and he are going to make the second you unsheathe your blade, and he knows every opening in your guard, and he has the ability to play the fight in his head a hundred times before you even know you’re going to be fitting. Hawkmoth is still bound by the limits of his physical body, but as long as his opponent has an exploitable weakness, he can find it – all the trial and error he needs to do is already done, in a version of events that won’t happen because of Time Bullshit.

Hawkmoth befriended August En-Zaied during the events of the Wild Hunt (see: Godslaughter), after his time-based powers allowed him to overcome Ganzrig Khalgar’s luck-based powers and he defeated her. When the Home Team defeated Glory and their slain allies were brought back to life, Hawkmoth vowed to help August return Ganzrig’s ashes to her family back on their homeworld of Ismes. But when he left The Road and was separated from Thysan Thaumeta, he lost his clairvoyant powers almost entirely (basically giving him a brain aneurysm. He walked it off). Eventually, with the help of August and his family, Hawkmoth grew to develop his own agency and decision-making abilities. His powers of clairvoyance returned, and Hawkmoth was able to save the En-Zaieds from certain doom. Now, Hawkmoth is less like a robot operating on a script, and has been accepted whole-heartedly into August’s family.

[salavarte]

Wybjorn's Threnghelleon divinity, the light in his chest that anchors him to his identity, provides him with the powers of the aspiration domain and mastery over his physical form, has been forcibly stripped from him to feed a nefarious, occult machine. This has returned him to a similar state as when he was an effigy, but the mosaic of divine magic that freed him from Ethem-Cailo's influence still makes him something much more than stone.  One thing is certain, whether he chooses to nurture the strange energy that lingers within him to become something new or reclaim his former glory from that which stole his light: there is suffering ahead.

Pose referenced from the statue "Marble Statue of a Wounded Amazon", a Roman statue from 1st-2nd century AD.

[salavante]

These pencils are a little on the old side, I think I drew these this past summer, which just tells you how long I’ve been planning our post-campaign one shots. But I’ve always liked em and Kuirik is about to become important so I figured I’d revisit them. All the Khalgar gals in one place. 

[saltineofswing]

Devouring the devoted.

[saltineofswing]

Another refsheet, this time for Celair Eshgalweth! One of the most powerful members of the Wild Hunt, who defected to the ‘Home Team’ when the chips were really down and redeemed herself in battle against the Threnghelen Circle of Glory. Celair’s native world, Kith, is sort of an anomaly as far as universes go; it’s actually more of a ‘planar waystation’ in the Unknown, acting as an anchor point that travelers are more likely to encounter when lost in the endless fog between realities.

The three palette swaps of her portray examples of the three different archetypes of the elves of Kith, known as the Esh. Celair was literally made to be their divine patron. The forest-dwelling Wel-Esh (Celair’s favorite, don’t tell anybody) were the most widespread across Kith’s surface; the Cimer-Esh were denizens of Kith’s equivalent of the Underdark; and the Stal-Esh occupy the Celestial Hall, where Kith’s pantheon of gods live(d). The Eshgal (lit. ‘Elvenkind’) had an incredible love and reverence for their patron deity, and Celair also had great love for them. 

Currently, they are ‘extinct’ – the gods of the Kith divine pantheon annihilated the Eshgal after Celair put up such a good fight that she made them all ‘look bad’; imagine that the Kith divine pantheon is kind of like a bunch of snobby billionaires, and Celair was basically ‘the help’. The Circle of Glory found that whole fiasco to be something of a ‘party foul’, and punished Kith’s gods by either killing them (again), breaking their divinity, or your standard ‘locked in a box at the bottom of the ocean’ treatment. This is what drove Celair to join the Wild Hunt, as she had nothing left to live for on Kith with almost all of her patron mortals dead. She took her last two clerics and bailed.

[salavarte]

MASTER / APPRENTICE

This is purely speculative, though Ethem-Colias does exist in our main game canon. An AU scenario where Jovix-Cailo returns to the world under his own auspices 10 years after he's killed by Osmanthus Quince, and is able to rescue his daughter before the cult successfully indoctrinates and trains her to become a weapon. A better life for them both. Some meta context under the cut.

In oh, I dunno, SEPTEMBER, there was one of those art-things going around twitter that was your character’s original design with an option to draw them with either a “Corruption Arc” (if they were a hero) or a “Redemption Arc” (if they were a villain).

 I couldn’t help but notice that results skewed pretty heavily towards the former, and wanted to even the odds a bit. IDK I don’t think that the domain of “greed” necessitates that an entity is “bad” (look at Greed from FMA, for example), JC is/was just kind of an asshole about it and may have even settled down in a few hundred years into being a cooler guy, but would have caused too much mayhem in the interim. I had also wanted to draw him as he normally is but tbh, I’ve sat on this piece long enough. I started this before my hand took another dive for the worst (almost three months ago) and have only just recently managed to push this from 80% done to 100% done. That said, kind of a fun AU that I wouldn’t mind revisiting. I never got to play the new God of War and have daddy issues so this whole concept really tickles me. 

[salavarte]

Just a little Godslaughter AU where Osmanthus was raised in the same culture as his mentor, Lysander, and joined his knightly order while at war with the Threnghelleon Empire. Alas, he finds himself caught in a starcrossed romance with Threnghelleon’s Goddess of Memory, Ethem-Awnrah. Is there any hope for the esteemed Lady of Mirrors and a simple knight of the Order of the Solemn Nail? 

I drew/inked this a couple of months ago and lost interest a bit as my life and the world felt a bit too serious for chainmail bikini babes. But today I felt like trying out a limited color palette to see if it would make me work a little faster, and decided to take advantage of this almost finished piece. You can see the inks on my patreon.

[salavarte]

                                   THE FOUR LAPININE DIVINES

“When a warren grows too densely populated, we will gravitate towards other likeminded malcontents, and strike out together on grand quests to find new ground that we may settle, taking our hopes and fears with us. And so goes with us our Gods, and whatever perception of them we may have...” cont. 

“Tevilthatz of the Loam, God of Death and Change. Patron of time, decay, physical and psychological growth, funerary rites, ecological cycles and extrasensory abilities. It’s said that when a lapinine suffers a near death experience, they meet this frightening being, converse for a time & then are returned to the living without memory of the incident. When their true and final death occurs, they remember, and meet their god as a lost friend. In times when the God of Death heeds a call to arms, his pelt turns white as the grisly, glaring sun.

Apherhaim of the Briar, Goddess of Blood and Struggle. Apherhaim’s domain can best be described as conflict in all of its forms, from war to overcoming personal struggles, as well as blood in all its forms, from blood spilled on the battlefield to blood spilled in childbirth, making her a revered figure to warriors, people in mental or physical recovery, doctors and midwives. She weeps for all pain in this world, but does so most bitterly when the Lapinine wage war with one another - though she understands the blood of tyrants was made to be spilled, and stands with victors over oppression.

Halarenu of the Root, Goddess of Survival and Community. Mother to All, it was Halarenu who made the choice to repopulate the world with mortal beings of the quartet’s creation, and is the figure that her siblings would refer to as their leader. Often seen as a stalwart, patient guardian who is worshipped at least in part by all, but has special reverence from civic leaders, guard captains and other individuals put into positions where they are meant to protect those around them. As such, there is nothing she despises more than the abuse of authority.

Melphinlay of the Blossom, God of Harvest and Innovation. The most interactive of the gods, Melphinlay is often credited for the bolts of inspiration felt by artists, writers, scientists and engineers. His gift of fecundity is not limited to the realm of the mind, as he is also said to be responsible for the prosperity of crops and all growing things cultivated by the Lapinine. Ancient texts imply Melphinlay set the Lapinine on the path to the creation of the science of Alchemy, and is also seen as a proponent of its sister discipline, culinary witchcraft. This bombastic deity also has somewhat of a petty streak, leading to many fables about the crafty ways in which he extracts revenge.

Though generally referred to as the Divine Quartet, the Lapinine Gods have also been referred to as The Four Divines, and in circles in which the gods are all depicted as female, The Four Mothers. Indeed, the Four Divines are interpreted in a myriad of shapes, from primitive, quadrupedal beasts, to the traditional Lapinine form (which they allegedly use to sometimes walk among us in mortal guise), to something tall, lank and utterly alien. But whatever way we depict their physical forms in art and prose, we know that they are never far from us, existing most often in a sort of imperceptible, immaterial miasma that lingers in places where their domains are most present.

However, it must be understood that though the Divine Quartet are responsible for the creation of the Lapinine race, as well as a higher plane in which the gods and Lapinine dead dwell, a myriad of deeply magical plants, and a few odd creatures that border on mythological, they did not create the material world in which we live. The origins of the earth, and the dark echoes of its former ages, remain a mystery to us. But let it be a comfort that though the world is hostile, strange and full of hungry teeth, the beings that made us did so with utmost and unconditional love, and love us still to this day.”

At very long last, I’m pleased to present to you the full Lapinine pantheon of Greenbrier. Some of you may recognize Tevilthatz from a sepia and black version of this same illustration, which I posted on Halloween.