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I just finished The Viper Mourned today and... wow. Once I picked it up I could not stop and it did not disappoint. I'm just left here wondering what could possibly be next after that last third of the book.

Marina's hunt has to end one way or another >:)

Also hehe yayyy 🧡 I'm so glad you enjoyed it, thank you so much for putting your faith in me and staying along for the ride

#mvf #the third book is um. civil war #what started very small. with one princess's desire to have fun on her 13th (iirc) birthday will end very very big indeed

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going home today :) And also tomorrow due to in-flight time dilation. Excited to get back to my normal drawing setup because I got a huuuge brain blast for a cool painting last night

#a graveyard smash even #i haven't been able to think up any cool compositions for my more elaborate paintings for a while now so this is fun

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We were talking about a. Warriors Cat AU for our dnd characters so here he is. Poses lovingly based off of my friends' very shaped cats. I haven't been into warriors for decades but it's ripe ground for some silly fun

The design comes from when I drew him as a tabaxi years and years ago

#i find that a lot of wc fanart fails to portray the warriors as regular ass domestic cats #so i love drawing an incredibly normal cat and being like yeah he gets visions from starclan. he weighs 3kg. #jonathan dungeons and dragons

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hits u with my dragon beam

tha boys and their dragons from the au i am self-indulgently messing with. green, bronze, and brown. these are scaled to their actual sizes relative to one another & their riders.

reasoning/more info under the cut. when i say 'niche audience' i mean the approximately One Person who knows my characters and has also read a pern book (me. i'm the one person it's me)

Féiix is a green rider obvs. I think it's really generous of dragons to have a colour specifically for bottoms. Her name is Searrath and she ends up committing matricide by stubbornly rising at the same time as queen Lenath, to protest the weyrwoman's abusive treatment of her rider. Searrath is legendarily short-tempered and protective, and although her rider might continually reassure her that his arrangement with the weyrwoman (as her personal spy; he is an ex-harper) is healthy, Searrath has other ideas. She is quite good at precise hops between, which is how she manages to bait Lenath into flying head first into a mountainside.

Islin's bronze Taranth is very big, very gentle, and completely unwilling to do his duty as a bronze in any capacity at all. He has a... complicated relationship with Lenath and endures a good amount of ridicule, but Islin is adamant that he will never make a bid for weyrleader as this involves sleeping with the weyrwoman and queen (he'll settle for being wingleader). A strong disagreement over Félix's spywork and loyalty to Lenath leads Islin and Taranth to walk out from their weyr, and operate out of a different base for years before Lenath ultimately dies from failing to compete with Searrath on a mating flight. He is the only bronze rider who is not originally from a weyr.

Francis's brown Nelath was almost killed by Lenath when he hatched. As the son of the newly-ousted ex-weyrleader, Francis could have easily impressed a bronze and ousted the current weyrleader, so the weyrwoman conspired to prevent it from happening. Lenath broke Nelath's leg during the hatching, and only the invervention of Francis's father's bronze saved both himself and the injured hatchling from what appeared to be the queen's random fit of infanticidal rage. Nelath recovered well and became a very popular brown dragon and an impressively good shot with his flames. He has attempted several times to chase a queen (usually one of the juniors, still a little wary of Lenath), and has even succeeded more than once. Francis and Nelath support one of those junior queens during an attempted ousting of Lenath and the weyrwoman, but never expected that Félix's loyalty to the weyrwoman would separate them for years (until Lenath goes out carcrash style against a mountainside, as previously mentioned)

It's my first time trying to write a full conspiracy over the course of the characters' lifetimes so it's pretty fun!

#the au in quastion

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I know I said I was going to share some writing about Pascal and Nico but having edited all of that piece now into a presentable state, I'm not happy where it ends. I always do this for the au stuff lol I write a good 20k and then leave it hanging when my motivation shifts. I want to write the proper ending to it before I post it. And I was about to surprise drop the pern au fan fiction as well but it has the same issue sooooo

#to be so clear about why i seem to shift focus and abandon stuff. it's the adhd sure BUT #it's also because this is my hobby not my job and i never force myself to focus on something. that way it's always enjoyable #i force myself to focus hard enough on other stuff. i give myself a break here. it is only indulgence never forced #this is how you maintain a good relationship with a hobby

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How did Ambrose capture the sphynx??

Sphinxes are super dangerous active predators and rarely cooperative with humans so the fact that Ambrose has Flicker working with him is his main evidence of legitimacy as a monster tamer. Ambrose tracked Flicker down after falconers complained of their harpies being dive bombed near his village. The sphinx engaged him in a game of riddles when they met, and Ambrose cleverly turned the riddle back on the sphinx, rendering it speechless, and it then submitted to his will and admitted that he was its rightful master.

That's what Ambrose claims, anyway, and he believes it to be true. In reality, Flicker is an unusual member of its kind who just couldn't be fuckin bothered learning how to strike out on its own after being kicked out by its mother. When confronted by Ambrose it softballed him on every riddle and then cheerfully agreed to follow him home, under the condition that it would get a nice shelter, food to eat, and a nice bed to curl up on. Flicker is lazy and unambitious, but cunning enough to play Ambrose like a fiddle if it so desires.

Having "tamed" an unusually biddable sphinx, Ambrose then felt he could definitely handle a manticore next (he can't - Flicker is the one keeping Twist in line, most of the time). He did not realise that the two creatures, while both catlike, are not remotely similar at all where husbandry is concerned.

#ice storm over kosa #flicker doesn't want twist to ruin the good thing it has going on

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the evil part of my brain wants to unite all the more disparate stories in the kosa setting into one unified plot.. but I must resist... big plot is the killer of enjoyment... that being said I have some ideas about ambrose & his cats being hired on at kosa to help the general effort alongside the falconers

#ambrose is a dumbass but he's also got two dangerous monsters captive #twist and flicker might start to wonder about their situation if they encounter the fairer treatment of cuinn & co

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TVM spoilers

I thought a lot about the funniest way to foreshadow the avatars and decided that jean mentioning them in his very first chapter, it going unacknowledged, and then him not thinking about it again because he's got better things to think about would be best

important to note that the old art doesn't show the carhaix avatar's antlers.

#mvf

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it is within the wyrm's best interests to keep the village prosperous and well-populated, but this does not necessarily mean the wyrm must keep them happy, safe, or in good conditions. this fact seems to have missed the king of the city, who believes wholeheartedly in the goodness of the wyrm

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still going with my guy :)

These three heads are all part of Onozar The Transcendent. Each head has slightly different red patterns (that I will draw.. i only really worked on the middle one so far) and different horns. In general a new head begins to sprout every two or three hundred years but it takes decades (if not centuries) until the lower jaws open up and a head emerges fully grown. This one, given his age and good health, likely has about fifteen heads which can speak, and a few more still cooking.

The very large settlement - a whole city - has been great for the wyrm under it. The massive concentration of life draws crawling beasts to the city like a honey trap, where they are then consumed by the wyrm. Therefore it has an active interest in keeping the town safe and prosperous. The leftmost head here is the one which is the kindest and supposedly the wisest, and it provides the king with live updates about the crawling beast situation - how many have been killed, how many slipped away, which quarters of the city seem to draw the most attention from the crawlers etc.

#ice storm over kosa

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because the wyrms were all hugely self important wizards at some point im naming them using a wizard name generator and deciding that each gets a special title as well (like "the magnificent" or "the resplendent"). they were big shots before being punished for their hubris

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[WIP] Meeting the three overground heads of the Onozar Wyrm

Unfortunately this was a catastrophic lineart on sketch layer incident (I made the bg the same colour as the sketch so u can't tell), so it'll be a massive hassle to finish but whatever it's doable.

I will do their faces properly to match the other drawing of this wyrm I've done (the green and red one). The underground heads are the ones with the heavy digging limbs and jaws.

The wyrm of Onozar village is one of the more well-known of its kind. Although this is all one monster, with an unknown number of heads, each head (consisting of the humanoid head & torso at the end of each neck) does act slightly different. The wyrm seems to favour certain heads to express certain emotions - there's a head for arguments with people, one for polite conversation, etc. Since this is such a gigantic creature, it may be that the typecasting of each head is an effort to meet humans at their level, like a person wearing finger puppets with exaggerated emotions in front of children who see each puppet as an individual thing who is always happy or sad. I'm so tired and I hope I'm getting this across properly lol you get me. you get me

The settlement was named after the wyrm, who was there first. it's one of the more built up areas in this world and might even qualify as a city, able to grow larger than other settlements due to the shield against crawling beasts provided by the wyrm. It expresses itself aboveground using three heads consistently, though as many as seven have been spotted in the city at once, on rare occasions. One of the consistent heads is an advisor to the king.

#posted it at a weird time so see it again #dw guys i know how to fix the lineart thing i prommy

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TWIST ECZEMA REPRESENTATION REAL AS FUCK!!!!!!!!!!

YOU GET ME

[ranticore]

[WIP] Meeting the three overground heads of the Onozar Wyrm

Unfortunately this was a catastrophic lineart on sketch layer incident (I made the bg the same colour as the sketch so u can't tell), so it'll be a massive hassle to finish but whatever it's doable.

I will do their faces properly to match the other drawing of this wyrm I've done (the green and red one). The underground heads are the ones with the heavy digging limbs and jaws.

The wyrm of Onozar village is one of the more well-known of its kind. Although this is all one monster, with an unknown number of heads, each head (consisting of the humanoid head & torso at the end of each neck) does act slightly different. The wyrm seems to favour certain heads to express certain emotions - there's a head for arguments with people, one for polite conversation, etc. Since this is such a gigantic creature, it may be that the typecasting of each head is an effort to meet humans at their level, like a person wearing finger puppets with exaggerated emotions in front of children who see each puppet as an individual thing who is always happy or sad. I'm so tired and I hope I'm getting this across properly lol you get me. you get me

The settlement was named after the wyrm, who was there first. it's one of the more built up areas in this world and might even qualify as a city, able to grow larger than other settlements due to the shield against crawling beasts provided by the wyrm. It expresses itself aboveground using three heads consistently, though as many as seven have been spotted in the city at once, on rare occasions. One of the consistent heads is an advisor to the king.

#i should have put more effort into that perspective but it's late #ice storm over kosa

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what's with the silly little saddle on Twist?

it's the band that goes behind his elbows and attaches to the martingale on his bridle. I realised that the previous design would be soo easy to just pull off his face because of how his jaws are shaped, so it needed a lil band around the body to keep it from slipping forwards. the padded red part is just to prevent chafing over his shoulders because the skin is thin there

#ice storm over kosa

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if you pet twist you'll come away with a nasty residue on your hand like when you pet a dog. both greasy and dry all at once #eczemarepresentation. the stinger scutes are similar to fingernails in how they feel & attached to his skin. the needle is so fine that you will not feel it pierce your skin.

#my nasty disgusting #ice storm over kosa

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I drew my thing for fun .. I figured that since Twist is nocturnal, vampirically pale, and being forced to work in daylight, he would have a lot of problems with sunburn.

#he is miserable all the time he hates his job #ice storm over kosa #manticore #he got lil freckles from the sunlight