Day 26: Cinder features Willough, who will eventually get the cinder gene, getting awestruck by a lil' fire. This may be the first time I drew an aether and their face structure had me very confused for a hot minute.
For Day 27: Plague I broke out my plaguiest boy Nikodeme to retry last year's Rot and I'm impressed by how much better it went this time. This feels like a base I can clean up and build on where last year's felt like it needed a full restart. My boy will get his spooky portrait yet!
At this point I was starting to get outside of October itself since I fell behind at the end. Dergvember!
For Day 28: Streak I did the streak familiars, specifically the snow streak bonded to Pruino with a touch of Pruino's silhouette in the foreground. I've always loved the streak familiars, there's something otherworldly about them and I've been in suspense as to who is armoring them since Fallen Streaks were released in 2015... although I doubt the devs will ever elaborate on that one.
Day 29: Fish features a scribbly fathom about to catch a billy bass. The fathom was intended to be Phi, but honestly any of my fathoms would fit.
Day 30: Funeral was a struggle at first for me because there aren't much in the way of canonical deaths in my lore-- it's happy fiction land where dramatic things can happen without fatal consequences. I haven't exalted or sold a single dragon in 12 years and I like it that way. >-< Deaths in backstories sometimes happen though, and since Wrathe is my unofficial Halloween boy due to being hatched on it, he seemed fitting. Wrathe sees himself as a mere shadow of a dragon due to the death of his charge Melaena. I've never fleshed out the exact circumstances, but I wrote if it from another dragon's perspective once in a CYOA:
"He remembered a spray of dusky feathers in the sand, and a great red dragon thrown into a rage that cast friend and foe alike away from him. That same dragon turning cold and still and unresponsive to any attempt to reach him. A paid venture gone terribly, terribly wrong. He remembered the days before, and the dragon that had been. A young coatl still soft in the ways of the world, but deeply gifted in the Sight and protected, so they thought, by a shield so tough and vigilant that she didn’t need to grow up."
I had two ideas for how to show Wrathe at the start of his long mourning, and ended up trying to throw them side by side in some sort of multi-image composition. I started to envision what his garments looked like before they became hopelessly threadbare; they were once a ceremonial uniform to go with his position as seer's personal guard.
For Day 31: Shade there was a few directions I could take it, as the Shade is definitely a thing in my lore even if it's rarely collected enough to act with any intend. I treat it as little fragments scattered everywhere (that much seems to be FR canon), that are drawn to negative emotions and violence. It gathers around suffering and quietly influences everyone to be worse. Having enough of it in one spot to have a noticeable presence is rare and a Problem.
I decided to take the nostalgic direction. Nycto here was my character in my first roleplay on Flight Rising, over 11 years ago, and he sits in an awkward place where I don't consider the rp version of him canon but still feel nostalgic for the character. In the roleplay, villainous dragons were cast into a sinister afterlife called the Darkness that was basically the Shade. If I were to develop a new canon for him (long overdue), he'd probably have had the closest interaction with the Shade of any of my dragons.
