#svietavaj

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Just as I finally got all this put together, I realized there's four more minor characters whose designs aren't on here because they were quickly sketched in a different style. RIP

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LIGHTLESS

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illuminating the fallen city

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“I must look so old to you,” said the man whose identity she still could not believe. Svietavaj did not reply. What was there to say to such a question from a man who she, like the rest of the Empire until yesterday, had believed to be unaging, undying?

“I had supposed, given how few years are left to me, that it would be my successor who would have told you the secret.” She nodded at this, still mute, as though it made any sense at all that for a thousand years, any group - no matter how tight knit - could’ve kept such a monumental truth silent. She wondered if there was any record of how many, like Ayna, had died or been killed to keep it so. How many deaths this simple, petty old man himself had ordered just to protect the knowledge that he and every Emperor prior was but a mortal man.

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"I'm not sure why you seem so surprised to have found it; did you think you were the only subject? Nay, flattering as it may be to think we got you right on the first try."

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Assorted Valecny character designs

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Czernocite Soldier

The fall of the Venanosan Empire removed the need for alchemical speculation in Czernocite creation; the Cataclysm unleashed a potent magical chain reaction of death, ensuring a plentiful harvest of the mythical substance. A millennia later, even the most common gates and aqueducts of the modern capital would grind to a halt without the stone to focus more constant and potent magics than a human will could ever wield unassisted. The advent of Czernocite ushered in a new era of warfare, one where a magic-less army couldn’t hope to meet the might of their enemy.

But it is said that even this is not enough for the Emperor of Valecny. That the ruler of the entire continent has ordered experiments in secret probing deeper into the possibilities of the fell rock, and that they have begun - far off the coast in remote waters - to delve into deeper sins than that which first rent will from body on a mass scale and toppled the old orders. The goal, it is whispered, may even be to find a way to enhance a soldier with the stone - to create the ultimate machine of pure extracted human lifeforce welded to a living body. If one could ever hope to survive the profane operation, that is.