#astersatdawnart

Soooo I feel weird doing this since I'm not used to rambling about my ocs, but since the images in the dueling circle imply this is a wiz oc lore heavy piece I'm gonna ramble a bit... I wanna talk more about my ocs anyway so this is good practice for me hsfdkldasf anyway

I tried to loosely tie in the slot with the image in the circles, but that wasn't always the case, or it's a stretch at best lol ANYWAY

☀️: In the sun slot we have the young, but not yet, wizard, and she is, well, incredibly young. This from when she (Alexandria Unicornriver) was still on Earth. The image is of a polaroid photo capturing Alex's first win at a local fencing competition. Her dad fences, and so Alex was familiar with fencing at a young age and when she was old enough to try she was super eager to get into it.

Due to size limitations, I didn't commit to showing other stuff in the scrapbook, like her participating in choir, (fun fact: her papa is a music teacher) and a few other school/family events, but the thought crossed my mind. Her parents kept a scrapbook and intended to update it her entire life, but one day Alex disappeared, and so less than a year after this image there are no further updates... But even now, though Alex doesn't know it, her parents still regularly look at the scrapbook, missing her and hoping she's still alive :') On the other side, you have Alex, who, while she doesn't talk about her past before Ravenwood super often, still loves her parents, and uses her love for music, as well as keeping up with fencing/(eventually) strictly using sword-wands, as a way to hold onto them, since she believes she will never see them again :')

👁️: So here Alex's eyes are opened up to the world of magic! Not as much to say here, but she is a life wizard, hence the pixie. She's nervous, but also as a young kid she's kinda excited. Ofc if we wanna add a touch of angst, she's gonna regret some of this in hindsight since she becomes, secretly, incredibly homesick. In general, home is one of Alex's major themes/issues, but for now this is the last time where that is relevant in regards to the moments of history on display in this piece

⭐: So this is one of Alex and Monica's (my other main wiz oc, though she is not The Young Wizard) early interactions, and is one of the important turning points, with this one being more critical for Alex than Monica.

For context, since in the lore the dual school thing seemed kind of important, primary and secondary school's play an important part in my OC's lore. For Alex, she's a secondary death school student, so she shares a couple of classes with primary death school students like Monica. There is a bit of a one-sided rivalry at this point, as Monica, a magical prodigy herself, is really bothered by the fact that Alex is one of the top death students in their age group, despite being a primary life student. In general Monica is a haughty brat but since there's that one-sided rivalry thing going on Alex gets to see a lot of it since Monica likes to but into as much of the events as she can to show off (while simultaneously refusing to work with Alex).

Alex doesn't mind her, as she kind of appreciates the... openness, I suppose, of her feelings, esp since the hostility feels more rooted in skill (and Monica's general demeanor) rather than because there's something wrong with Alex's origin or oddities. While Alex is kind of being swept up by all the events of Arc 1, in the background she is noticing that she is subtlety being othered, between being Ambrose's favorite (child soldier), being from Earth which is not even in the Spiral, and she's a life/death student, which is incredibly rare in my headcanon (similarly, storm/myth and ice/fire primary/secondaries are incredibly rare; they're all not only considered unusual, but powerful and dangerous). She's maintaining some sort of optimism, but it's slowly becoming more mask than sincere.

Anyway, this is the first time where Alex is really able to get through to Monica and cooperate together, even if it starts kind of separately, since this is before Big Ben, where they need reach the top of the east/west towers, but they will still climb Big Ben together. Alex sees it as a sign of them finally becoming friends, tho Monica does not see it the same way and won't for a while. Considering the main ship for these two is, well, the two of them (Alex/Monica), their relationship development milestones are important for what I presume are now obvious reasons. A couple more of these milestones will probably get covered if I get around to doing this for Monica, or if by some miracle I finally learn how to talk about my OCs without feeling the need to have some sort of excuse hjdfljkashdfas

🌙: So major timeskip between the previous image and this one. This is after arc 1, but still quite a bit of time before arc 2 starts. She's growing up, and a lot of the events that have happened in arc 1 are haunting her. While she believes she made the right choices, considering she's still relatively young here, it's kind of impossible to not be haunted by all the horrific things she's done/witnessed up until this point, such as killing multiple people.

It was important to me that this image was sort of showing that idea of the young wizard was getting to be known to others as a hero (untainted) versus her internal image of herself slowly turning into a monster (tainted). This was one of the hardest sections to settle on a concept for, since while I had quite a few ideas, my space here was incredibly limited so I needed something with smaller scope. I was also trying to see if I could include Malistaire in some way in one of the images, and eventually those two things got me to this part here. And this isn't even going into the fact that at this point she's getting homesick and has learned no one knows how to send her back home to Earth. So. :)

🗡️: Another massive timeskip, but I knew as soon as I conceptualized this idea that Azteca's doom had to be included. I had a different concept for this section initially, still Azteca focused but leaning more into how haunted she is by what happened, but iirc I was struggling a bit with the execution so I ended up straying from that direction. I don't think there's much more to expand on rn since I presume most of the young wizard's are haunted by Azteca, and she is no different... doesn't change the fact that I may expand on it more another time xD

🔑: This one falls in the same camp as the moon in that I knew what I wanted but not sure how to show it with the limited space, so this one went through a lot of iterations. I originally wanted to showcase more Morganthe, but again, space limitations. I settled on having Morganthe more in the back, with Alex using shadow magic, and I suppose it's implied that's one of the threads connecting them. While the short term consequences of learning shadow magic aren't so bad for Alex, there's a lot of long term stuff that comes up (some of which is seen in canon). It's one of the contributing factors to Alex feeling more and more like a monster (and slowly letting herself embrace it)

💎: This moment's sweet and simple :) Alex and Monica graduate from Ravenwood! They're dating by this point, and it is hopefully implied they are holding hands. I wanted to include the graduation piece since this is kind of an expanded version of the "growing up" piece which I did a few years ago, and it featured fresh wizard Alex (eye), arc 2 Alex, and graduating wizard Alex. I'd say there's no background angst here but that's a lie, there's always background angst with Alex shjfdljkadshfads Look I mayyyyy enjoy characters who smile lots but are repressing a lot of their problems and Alex is no exception do not be fooled by the amount of times she is smiling in this image :)

🌀: The last slot is Alex's scion trial! I don't actually have a lot to say about this part ksdjfkldasfa I do know I kind of reconceptualized the area leading into it, tho, partially cause I was to lazy to find a reference and partially because iirc there was only one color of flames in the trial space and I disagreed with that lmao I think I was just hoping the hair in her hand implies that it's related to a ritual of some kind... I have notes on it, but rn I can't recall if locks of hair for the ritual is canon or not. Regardless, I used that as an excuse to lead into Alex getting a new outfit/hairstyle, which is featured in the center.

Through arc 3 and a good chunk of arc 4, she switches from the katana to a sword/shield combo, then switches to the aeon sword mid to late Novus.

While it would've been nice to include some arc 3/4 stuff, there wasn't room... and it helped that it felt fitting to have Alex entering the scion trial as the last space, with the image at large being her "scion" attire.