Very old and barely cleaned up art of the majority of the main cast of my unfinished fantasy novel, because I realized that these are all trapped over on my old compromised blog and I'd like to have them over here.
Tsh'ander Clan West | Verrim kil Hadir vi Amalathae | Myn
Relia Eidanri | Asforahl | Marashac
Riv | Tyalaskr | The Meli
Deidric Carnelian-19 | Cieni *high whistle/click sound* | Kortha VI
This is roughly the order of introduction, if I'm remembering correctly, although it gets a little muddied after Tyalaskr.
Random nonsense about these freaks under the cut.
Verrim was born missing one arm and about 30% of either lung in a deal his mother made with their patron god to make sure he inherited a specific magic that only presents in Amalathae women, without which he would have been taken from her at birth and raised up elsewhere.
Myn and Riv are members of a species born from the energetic aftershocks of the creation of the planet. They have a static population—when one dies, another is born to take their place and carry the energy that creates their equivalent of a soul. This is referred to as a "changeover," not reincarnation.
Asforahl and Marashac are the last survivors of the first generation born after the First made the planet and a manufactured species to populate it.
Tyalaskr is the result of a complex breeding experiment involving the murder of one of Riv and Myn's people, the changeover of which led to the birth of Riv. Tyal and Riv are best friends and share a birthday.
The Meli was accidentally created in a magical splicing accident that resulted in a couple people and at least one large feline getting fused together into a single living thing. It has two hearts, several extra ribs, too many vertebrae, and telescoping legs.
Deidric comes from a culture where hair color defines a person's role in society. She is, unfortunately, a genetic aberration who was born to parents with white hair (commoners, ~90% of the population) while she has black hair (nonperson labor, ~9.9% of the population); her teacher is a white-haired man who was born to black-haired parents ~50 year prior. Their culture is in shambles.
What would constitute the closest thing Cieni has to a surname is a series of sounds that literally can't be produced by most spoken or any written language, so that's what you get.
The last characters in the “main” cast are going to be posted individually, mostly because the amount of detail in these last few means they’re likely to take longer, and I really want to let the portraits shine on their own.
This is Marashac. She, facing insurmountable odds, is the hero of her own story. Unfortunately, the story I’m telling isn’t the one she would tell. One of the two original indori to survive the first war, she’s the only one of her kind left to still use her original symbology, as seen in the tooth design on her necklace. (It’s modeled after the two upper front tooth-plates of a dunkleosteus.) She also still wears the indori crest, painted on her forehead and detailed into the pauldron.
She also wears way too many pearls and my hand still aches a little just looking at them all.
If asked, she’ll tell you she’s right, to the very end. And maybe she is–but the ends don’t justify her means, and that’s the important thing.
Tsh'ander (pics 1 and 2) goes through some shit after she finally meets Marashac (pic 3). It's nice to see her with the eyepatch again after so long, as that's really how she's always looked in my head. Also! This is the first time I've drawn Mara in literal years and I'm pretty pleased with her. Our pretty antagonist finally has a face. ( @zoegears @cuddledragon this is the woman who forcibly tears herself out of the tree all covered in sap at the end of chapter 3, isn't she lovely?)
