I loved drawing all the little details in the eyepatch and ear, this is the kind of thing I used to fill my notebooks' margins at school, so I was prepared 😁

It was my first time painting a shiny armor, scary stuff. It wasn't easy to capture Julia's brilliance: "dazzling golden armor, overlaid on rich, brown leather (...). A whitish sheen gleamed across the surface, refracting faint prisms as he moved into the room’s faelight;" I see the vision in my head as he moves and the light is refracted, but the painting doesn't move and I was worried it would just look like a colorful armor. But I think it's subtle enough, and I love how it turned out.

The hardest part was his face, mostly due to my own stupidity. At first I wanted his head to be slightly turned up, but at that angle he: 1. has no chin, 2. has no nose, 3. is not elongated and sharp like Eris in my head. I just couldn't make him handsome. And then his expression, it was either too smug or too happy or too sad. And all I wanted was "proud and moved, emotional but restrained", how hard can that be 🙄

I hope you all like it, I'm super proud of it 🥹 thank you @the-darkestminds for your writing and everything you do for azris, I hope this gift makes you happy 🧡

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At the next impact, a growl ripped through the cell. He paused, allowing the tendrils of leather and ash wood to drape across the ground.  Eris’s back shook with a heavy panting, as if an animal knelt at his feet instead of his son.

“Eris,” he murmured.

No other words were necessary: his breathing hitched before steadying, and Beron’s canvas fell still and obedient again.

A confluence of scarlet rivers slowed dripped patterns across the rippling wounds—between his shoulder blades, down the pointed bones of his spine, around the curves of his hips.

Beron studied the flow, curious.

Did his eldest son see his actions as cruelty?  He knew that his other sons thought so.  Raivis, in his youth, screamed and cried, so different from his usual pathetic silence.  He couldn’t count how many times he heard the words slip from his second eldest son’s mouth: Why?  Why?  He had been a small, dumb little creature, who only used his voice to scream or cry or laugh with his mother.  It wasn’t until his name-day that he finally found the pride and rage every male must utilize.  Then there was Elmar, the proud one with a sharp tongue and snappy words, who groveled as quickly as some pathetic servant before a fist made its landing.  The fourth came less than two years after: Galeti, who spat at the ground and wept before the tenth lash fell.  

Son after son, his bloodline weakened.  He despised it.  He felt it like a rotting between his bones.

The last was born after the Human War, less than two decades ago.  Lucien.  

His golden-brown skin would turn raw and swollen from the constant, and Beron would still hear the stubborn recalcitrance when he screamed.  

And even worse was the grim feeling that the crimson spilt from his back did not match his own.

But Eris.  He was not a groveling son or a bastard filled with hate.  He knelt before him, patient and willing.  And after, with a back bloody and raw under his armor, his eldest gazed around at Autumn with that cold, pragmatic air, assuring Beron that his lessons impacted him in all the right ways.

No, he decided: Eris did understand him.  He did not see a whip as cruel.  Cruelty was black and infecting, like mold, a pullulation, an unhealing, rotten thing.  It tainted his victims mercilessly before clearing the way for new and ameliorated things.  But the color red was the eminence of Autumn that he, the High Lord, had carved.  Rippling scars were of pride and honor and possession.  It was fresh growth, a blooming Autumn leaf, a bloody back.  It was love.

And the back that knelt before him was red with love. 

Cropped it so much coz the bg and chair weren't working. ✨Laziness ✨ lmao

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