'Den of Roses & Shadows'
'Prologue'
A/N:This is just a teeny tiny idea I had so I'll just do it because why not & bc my pookie requested it.First person POV btw.💗💗
'A dragon without its rider is a tragedy.A rider without their dragon is dead',is a phrase I heard ever since since I was a little kid.My past sucks,a lot,but I learned to suck it up and move on.
I've never had any family,nor parents,since they didn't want me,or so I came to believe while growing up,so they left me to rot and die when I was a baby.But thank Malek I didn't.I grew up on the streets ever since I can remember and I've been surviving by myself since then,not without people beating,cursing,or even spitting on me,the usual,but I managed to scrap up stuff to survive,but just enough to keep me alive,and I had no friends,because unlike most people,I was all alone,only by myself,and nobody cared enough to even speak to me,because who would associate themselves with the 'poor,dirty street rat',after all.But all the scars,all the bruises,all the trauma,the abuse and everything I want to forget,to delete,were inflicted by humans.Because that's what people do.They break.They use.They replace.And once you are of no use to them,they throw you away and dispose of you like trash.And that's something I had to learn the hard way.
When I was thirteen,it happened.The only 'family' I can say I knew,was my uncle,though I can't call him family,because he threw me in the water,in the ocean,off of a cliff,to drown,and I got injured pretty badly back then,but I survived that,and...I still remember it vividly from back then,even though I was young,many things stuck,because what I try so desperately to forget,my heart remembers,and even in dreams I am haunted by those,and dreams are just mirrors of the soul,after all,so all the nightmares depict traumas that were left unhealed.I wasn't really a 'planned' or 'wanted' kid so I was abandoned.
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Seven years ago.By the cliffs of Navarre.
I was thrown off a cliff and left to drown by my uncle,with no care at all.My uncle was laughing as he heard me scream and watched me swimming to stay afloat.The bastard threw me off right where the currents were strongest,and the depths darkest.He was enjoying the fact that I was in pain.My blood pooled in the water,leaving a stain on the rocks,the blood on myself as well,the scars,the cuts,and how I pathetically crawled to the shore,wet,cold,pale,trembling,looking no more than a walking cadavre at how much more paler and purpleish my already pale body now looked.Once he saw I was alive,he was furious,as if I was no more than an animal,something that needed to be caged,killed.I jumped up,the best I could in my current state and ran until I reached the forest,desperate,blood trailing behind me,so much blood I thought I had actually died and was just a corpse now, while I was desperately running for my life,and him trailing after me.I climbed the mountains,barefoot and bare handed,because I was only wearing a long,torn,raggedy dress,the only clothing he had ever provided me.I climbed,ignoring the sharp pain hitting my body,just to escape him and live.And despite my condition,I made it to the top,and he didn't bother following all the way up,as he never once,not even when he was hunting,followed what he considered to be useless.I was bloody,cut,injured,tired,wet,cold and trembling,with cuts from the sharp rocks of the mountains.But alas,I had made it.Somehow.I actually think Malek has favorites now,and I might be one of them.But I soon fell unconscious due to the blood loss.I woke up to an elderly lady looking down at me.Where I was,I did not know,but I was thankful.She seemed kind.And she turned out to be kind,and to be a healer.Just my luck.I couldn't help but wonder:was she the one who found me?
-
Back to present
I remember that day so vividly.It's the day that left me with a few scars.Not physical,at least not only.Scars are not only physical,or so I believe.I have grown to learn that you are either the snake or the little mouse that gets eaten by the snake.And I will no longer be the helpless little mouse.
I've got nothing to loose anymore,which in the eyes of some people,makes me dangerous.But that's in the past.For now...I have to pass conscription day.
Pushing crimson strands out of my face,I walk towards the line,waiting.
My current life plan for now was simple:to throw myself off of a cliff as soon as possible.It is what it is.If not,fuck it and slay my enemies,in the totally normal way,definitely not planning someone's murder already.
-
ILLARYA
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Fateful Encounter...
Last month, at around April 10th, I decided to revisit an old project I started months prior which was to polish up a test sketch of a comic page about Lucy encountering Lumi in the dreamspace. And after slowly making progress on this, I'm finally finished with this!
I'm gonna leave some artist notes under the read more, but overall I'm super proud of how this turned out!! This is pretty much my first serious attempt at making comics in general so this has been a very interesting learning experience!
Artist notes:
So this is what the original sketch for this whole thing was. It was just me scribbling out a scene I had in my head for Startrails that I wanted to put on paper:
This I'd say was made around 2020-2021 ish. At the time, I didn't really do much with it. Until several months ago, I thought of trying to redraw this page and expand upon it.
But my first attempt at doing this didn't quite lead anywhere. I barely got through the thumbnailing process and just gave up bc I lost motivation (and life/work stuff was Happening so yea I had to put this aside as I figured stuff out). Here's the first draft of the thumbnails:
It was just two pages at the time and was pretty simple. I left this project sitting in my files for a while until I one day just, started binging videos from Thestarfishface on YouTube, primarily her webcomic guide videos. And I decided I'd give this project another go.
It was here where I began making a second draft of the thumbnails and this was what I had to work with:
I wanted to experiment with the panels and get funky with the compositions this time around. The 2 page draft expanded to a 3 page thing. But I thought it would've been better if I added one more page at the end with Lucy waking up as a conclusion to wrap this whole thing together.
And in the middle of working on page 3, my friend had suggested to do a an impact frame page, which I hadn't considered during the thumbnailing, so 4 pages became 5. And this was the result!
I posted the pages as I finished them onto my deviantart so that's where a lot of my thoughts were journaled as I went along dfjsdh.
To summarize my ramblings there, this project was a very fun (and a bit frustrating) learning experience! I'm hoping to keep practicing and improving my workflow, and hopefully one day make Startrails a full fledged webcomic :')
Additional ramblings:
The structure that Lucy finds Lumi in is inspired by an orrery.
For page 5, I initially didn't plan for much dialogue but as I drew it, it felt just a liiiitle bit empty, so I kinda just threw in some dialogue for Mira. But bc I was already in the inking process (and I just wanted to have this project completed), I didn't redo the page to even include Mira in it. So Mira's just out of frame sdfjskdh. If I had more time and energy to keep this up, I'd have made a revision of the page so I could include her.
This experience has taught me that I could seriously work on my rendering process a bit more, and that my layer management is just atrocious sdkfjksdfh
This has also taught me that while Medibang has the tools needed for me to draw these pages just fine, it also lacks some stuff that I personally need if I were to do a longer project like this. So I'll be experimenting with CSP next!
The dialogue throughout this whole thing wasn't all that planned out- I really just stuck close to what the initial doodle had which probably wasn't the best idea bc I just have like, 2 pages of Lucy's awkward sounding dialogue aaaa. I might do something a bit more dialogue heavy to help improve this skill next time.
Anyway, thank you for reading through my 1 am ramblings on this little project of mine shdkjhks
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