Irheh’s Archive

The Kickstarter's humming along! Thanks to everyone who's helped out! :D

*Googles* Not bad, reminds me of young Jeremy Irons.

I read pretty much all dialog aloud when I'm writing, because cadence is really important to me, and Valentin comes out slooow, tired, deep, sonorous, with very rounded vowels. All the elder Copper share a strained accent, but Valentin in particular, as he endeavours to be comprehensible to the young.

The Fraternal sect originated when one of the old Aldish kings wanted to split with the Ulestry-controlled Gefendur church, finding it distastefully aligned with his rising nemesis Cresce. Into this new take on the faith, the king put his own ideals: the worship of power, the elevation of government hierarchy and authority, the rights of men over women, the careful celebration of greed.

"Gefendur means givers" to the original Gefendur, but that's not the case to the Fraternal. Every man has a right to take and to keep what he likes, provided he respect his place within the lawfully structured hierarchy. If you fail within this system? You're being punished for failures in a past life, and shouldn't complain. To succeed is a blessing from the gods, and to fail and fall into illness or poverty is likewise a sign that they're putting you in your place.

They LOVE this, this is why they EXIST. They dream about it at night, and it's the first thing they think about when they wake up. There's nothing else in the world for them but serving Master Valentin. Nothing else is as exciting, as pleasurable, as fulfilling, as necessary.

Feels weird advertising the next crowdfund when the books from the last haven't yet shipped, but so it goes! This won't launch until later in the year but you can follow the Kickstarter campaign page for updates so you don't miss it.

Unlike books 1 & 2, 3 & 4 are entirely new content that's never been in print before, covering the end of the Nevergreen arc, Ethelmik's destruction, the introduction of Ruckmearkha and Queen Sonorie, the arrival at Litriya Shrine, really the thickening of the entire plot! There's also a bonus Kissfist Baxter story, and a special something new I'm cooking up.

•►LATEST UPDATE HERE◄•

Friends! ...maybe. We didn't all part on the best of notes... Speaking of notes, throughout our tale you may notice an extra note waggling at you from beneath the comic page. Give it a click or a tap to check out pertinent historical clippings my archivists put together for you.

And now, without further ado, I'm honoured to announce the winners of Unsounded's latest Fanworks Contest! Drumroll please...

For Fanfiction, please congratulate Serpenthyne in first place with her very well researched Mikaila AU story! In second place, please give a round of applause to zacksfairest, for her colourful Lemuel piece! In the Fanart category, I think we were all pretty blown away by Humming-fly's animatic. First place for them! In second place is Nikaleles with their stunning illustration. I'll contact the winners by email this week!

Thanks again to EVERYONE who entered. There wasn't a single entry that didn't make me giddy. Unsounded's readership is insane with talent and creativity, and I'm humbled all the time to have you on this adventure with me :)

(inspired by @diobreeze and their lovely post about their own work- check it out!)

so, antithetical to the purpose of this post, but... i did not actually take any pics of my lineart or sketching when doing this BUT i have a LOT to say about the inspiration/artistic intent so buckle up i guess, lmao

first, this is the image actually submitted to the contest proper;

it's a small version of the original, eventually cropped image (the size limit for submission files was something like 2mb, i believe?)

and here's the larger version, still in my sketchbook as we speak!

there's a laptop underneath, if you wanted a better idea of scale (since i don't feel like measuring anything rn)

it's probably pretty easy to tell (unfortunately) but i used alcohol markers to color this!

less easily noticeable is that alllllll the black parts? ballpoint pen. yes, even the giant void sections, lmao. my hand was not pleased with me, but weirdly i only needed to sacrifice the ink of one (1) pen, so hooray!

the entire lineart (the ballpoint pen) took *exactly* 5 hours and 6-and-a-half minutes; i know this because i was using the time to listen to a video essay on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and i finished the lineart with only a minute or so left in the vid

while it didn't come across as obviously as i'd have liked, the piece is meant to evoke a "christian stained glass window" type of aesthetic- specifically of diptychs like these-

-with the general intent being to evoke a "Gefender Church/Temple Window" type of thing? yeah. i dunno if i really succeeded, as the final piece is definitely more "modern" in presentation, and the actual style itself is, (ironically, given my mediocre skills lol) probably too close to in-comic "realism" to be believable as form of religious iconography

all the same, i'm very happy with how it turned out in the end! even if my initial idea was lost in the alcohol marker-soaked sauce, as it were, aha...

probably the thing i'm MOST proud of or satisfied with or whatever is the title;

Crowned by Hell / Collared to Heaven

the meaning of which is hopefully decently clear to those familiar with the lore of Unsounded, and the characters i've depicted...? but also just sounds raw enough to titillate those of you somehow uninitiated

giving Khette bisexual lighting in her eel "crown" was wholly unintentional by-the-by, lmao; it's just that i needed darker, yet still vibrant colors to contrast Jacaranda's squish "collar"

something else i'm hoping got across well enough, but that i want to babble about anyway- i specifically made Khette have the more animalistic features, like a slitted pupil and a predatory snarling curl to her bottom lip, while having Jacaranda shown with a round pupil and a placid expression

finally, the decision to give Khette a softi flower was mostly made out of a lack of alternative ideas for paralleling Jac's (off-model) jacaranda sprig... i love the color contrast i got out of it in the end, but since Jac and *not* Khette is the one actually depicted wearing both types of flowers in the actual comic, i will be forever mildly irritated with my poor lore consistency

•►LATEST UPDATE HERE◄•

A few strangers to start us off. Careful, crew.

If you're a newcomer and not familiar with the regular update flow, the comic posts three pages a week: a page each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Occasionally there'll be a multiple page update, often with a skip afterwards to make up for it. I'm very insistent on keeping up a buffer of pages, as I think it's crucial for quality control that time passes between a page being done, and it being shared. You need an editing window!

For now if you would, please head on over to the Fanworks Contest page and check out all the beautiful entries! There are illustrations and animations to gawk at, music to sample, and lots of fics to read. Vote for your favourites! Polls are open through the week and weekend, and I'll announce the winners next Monday. Thanks to all the lovelies that entered - and to all the lovelies that vote!

It's got some Significant Spoilers in it so go read Unsounded here before you watch it! It might take a couple days but the read is Well Worth it if you've never checked it out~ :))

I threw some other little bonus thoughts and comments under the cut just for fun, enjoy!

Absolutely. Ssaelism asks: what if someone read Moby-Dick and made a religious prophet out of Ahab? Ahab is Ssael consigned to a purely material world. Ssael is Ahab fighting on after he drowns; fighting on through the sea of the khert, finding the gods that offended him, and finally taking his revenge.

Check out the video on youtube!

Finished my animated fanart entry for the Unsounded webcomic contest! Deadline's coming up here on the January 5th, but I'm leaving for my Cali trip on the 31st so my deadline is basically up! And I think I'm ready to just go ahead and call this finished, even though there was a lot more I'd have liked to add in and fix up. I'm cooked chat!

But it was nice having the real animator worker experience of feeling that deadline rush lol! Felt good to animate again too, shake a lot of my rust off. I feel like after putting in 30+ hours into this is when I realized "Oh yeah, I should have done legit everything differently to make this way more efficiently" haha

Jets don't blow up in the same way! This is why I think they're the best caste: extra time, no particular body horror.

Tree is a Tannery man, in charge of processing incoming hides. You can see him working in the afternoon and evening, unloading the dog carts that roll in from the piggeries and monny ranches outside the city. He's nice af but in that moulten way, where he'll give you the boots off his feet one minute but then bash your head into a wall the next for cracking a joke about the Shadwe.

All Sevencrow Court knows him. Some say Tree's the neighbourhood's unofficial mayor, and smile; others say he's a shill and a plant and should mind his own bloody business. Everyone agrees though that you don't cross blades with him. People who run afoul of Tree or the Tannery tend to go to smoke, and disappear.

Tree's best mates are Gedeon, a soud who works with him over the tanning vats, and Lacy, a foreign embroiderer who minds the front counter of the showroom the few days it's open to the public. Tree also has doings with the Lions of Mercy, though no one really understands why he hangs about their compound so much, and he changes the subject if you ask him.

Pymaric spellcraft has within it a number of expedients and syntactical shortcuts. One is baked-in geometry. You can refer to cubes, spheres, and pyramids, and the khert understands these forms and can draw them.

Another is the gestural system. A core spell is constructed: Declaration, target aspect from material to destination, trigger. Every material and destination must be verbally coordinated at x,y,z, which can really add a lot of verbiage to your spell, consequently making it longer for you to speak it and slower for it to execute.

Instead of speaking these coordinates and other related variables - the coordinates of your source material, of the destination, of a secondary destination, of the speed it should travel, and even of the actual trigger that should execute your spell - you can instead gesture. Almost every numeric variable can be replaced with a gesture. You want the Solidity from THAT Granite rather than that OTHER Granite? Gesture at the one you want along an appropriate khert-line, and you got it. You want that Solidity to apply to that Water over there? Trace the khert-line with your hand along the correct vector, and it'll travel there.

There is gesture specific language for accessing these shortcuts, including ways to cast by touch, to swap Aspects from port to port, to hold Aspects in one port while casting with another, to assigning specific or a default gesture as a spell trigger. Hands are arguably as important to a martial spellwright as their voice. A battlewright who loses their hands, like poor Quigley, is forever crippled pymarically even if they survive. Losing access to gestural expediency is too much of a handicap.

It's interesting to think about Duane having no real pymary in the khert because he'd also be crippled there by not having his physical hands and so not having his gestures. So it almost doesn't matter anyway.