I'm back working on Altostratus' cover with Queen Nike (she/her) and Flammagenitus (she/they)! The thumbnail sketch for the cover is on the right, and on the left are quick anatomy sketches of a pterosaur, wyvern, and modern dredge war-torch.
Long lore post, more notes below!
So, initially, I wanted Flammagenitus to have large feathered wings made of metal. But I had no idea how to translate "feathered wings" to "armored wings" in her visual design. There's, like, a lot of stuff I need yet to figure out about the design of my WOR objectocs in Rise of Relics and The Mundane Realm settings: what era their forms would be the most common, how contflict, resources, and other factors affect the how living objects develop their civilian, worker, and war object groups, and so on. Then there are the cultures that inspired these elements and how to best represent them, even as inspiration for fantasy worldbuilding about talking object people. Something I really need to take time to sit down and think about before going deeper into writing.
I mean, I'm already knee-deep in it, but I'm welcome to rewrite stuff.
Anyway, I do know from my worldbuilding that the first living objects had cores that looked close to their original non-living forms before the Inversion Event. So, Nikey in RFR is just a trident with some mild modifications to allow ichor to create her face and wings, or at least the ichor structure to support her cloth wings. In centuries after the Inversion Event, objects and relics developed modifications to customize their cores, thus the Refitting Process was born.
Without going on too long, the Refitting Process was popular among the relics during the Age of Relics (0-500 AFR). The Hidden Age (500-1800 THA) was when the Refitting Process peaked during the Relic Wars, a time in which relickind fought amongst themselves over the fate of objectkind. The relics used refitting to make themselves more powerful, massive, and greater than their smaller forms. Led by the Great Spear Apollyon, some relics believed their lost divinity could be remade through this process. However, not all relics desired this and rather want to put an end to this war. Queen Nike worked with objectkind to build a powerful weapon to destroy the enemy relics. That weapon was Flammagentius, the first war-torch refitted from a living paintbrush.
:D Lore dumping yay! (Date format might change later, tho)
Anyway, so about Flammagenitus' design: well they are huge, I think I have their current size to be around 2080.2cm/68 feet…might update it later but yeah she's big. Since they were designed by Queen Nike and her relics, along with objectkind, there might be possible influence from Nike's culture prior to the Inversion Event.
Nike, or originally NIkey, was an Antiquan goddess. Her home, Antiqua, was inspired by Ancient Greece (around the Hellenistic period maybe need to look at my notes later ahhh). You can see her goddess form here! She was based on the Greek goddess Nike, the Goddess of Victory, and her goddess design was based on the Greek Hoplite.
So, for ideas of Flammagenitus' and future war-torch design:
Influence will be heavily Ancient Greece due to Queen Nike, but might borrow a few things from Ancient Rome since Flammagentius is a future ruler of Jazera (Rome inspired) which later splintered into smaller kingdoms after her death.
Greek helmets such as the Attic, Corinthian, or Chalcidian styles for her head design. Needs to allow some room for her jaw to move for her devastating killer bite.
Pterosaur-inspired wing design with a little bit of dragon in it. Also, using the pterosaur anatomy with the arms for greater support for Flammagenitus' heavy fuselage(?) and the ichor engine within it. Modern dredge war-torches have lighter construction but still have a heavy ichor engine.
Sidenote: Ichor engines are powered by unfettered ichor harvested from the ichor wells, deep pits in the earth full of ichor. It's the same thing that living objects have for limbs, but it contains enormous amounts of energy trapped within it. Can't be consumed or else it will cause Burnout (a condition that kills a living object with uncontrolled magic)
The modern dredge war-torch mentioned earlier in this post will come about two thousand years later, its role is to cause as much damage to castles and fortresses or to fight other dredge war-torches as an anti-air defense. They, and their monolith counterparts, are smaller than Flammagentius. This is due to the relic technological magic that was used to refit Flammagentius was lost during The Relic Wars. A refitted core that Flammagentius had would put far too much stress on a dredge's ichor structure, increasing the chance of internal damage.
Here are some war-torch designs with more bird-like anatomy from last year. These I might use for smaller war-torches for aerial attacks in battle.
Might do more research on the wing thing or I can just default to ichor limbs shifting into wing appendages. We'll see.