#jenive

WE HAVE LINEART!

The Lady’s Escort -- Sketch To Finished

Pywa help me this piece took entirely too long to finish. But I’m not gonna get down on myself because after a decade of working on this project I have finally managed to draw the entire cast of protagonists in the same frame-- some of which have never been fully realized before [Jahta, I’m looking at you]. It took forever and a half to get myself to just do it, but now that it’s done I feel like I’ve taken a 200 pound weight that had been sitting squarely between the two hemispheres of my brain and pitched it directly into the Void. 

The question is what kind of terror Lorana is preparing to unleash, engaging both sides of her gift at the same time. 

The Elves are a long-limbed, tall and generally slender race, quickly identified by their upwards-pointed ears an the fact that their hair and eyes tend to be of bright colors. It is not at all uncommon for an elf to have hair as blue as the summer sky, or verdantly green as forest leaves, and most tend to be of medium to dark skin tone as their people hail from sunbathed archipelagos on both the east and west of the mainland where the human empire occupies the majority of the continent.  Little is known of the Western elves, but that they are an opportunistic sort who eagerly plunder ships that veer into their waters, but the Eastern elves engage in trade and diplomacy with Jiaal-- though their stance on the human empire is neutral at best. They, too, know very little of their Western cousins. 

If one were to visit any temple upon Kithra, the largest island of the Eastern elves’ land, they would find them not devoted to one of the deities, collectively known as Pywan, but all ten. This reflects the elven connection with magic where, unlike humans and halflings who are born limited to specific elements and who bear markings on their bodies, elves are capable of all elemental magics in lesser ways. They feel this makes them closer to the Pywan, more divine, than the rest of mortal kind-- their excessively long lives are also considered evidence of this, and elves are known to be arrogant in their dealings with humans. 

Martial tradition is considered a life-long commitment to elves; if one joins the military, they are to remain a soldier until such time as their body can no longer bear it, giving up any inheritance they might gain or family title they might hold-- laws that were born of nobles wanting to get rid of uncooperative heirs by carting them off to learn the art of war, as mothers can make the decision for any of their children before they’ve seen fifty years of life-- the time at which an elf is considered of age. Part of this tradition is a portion of service abroad; young soldiers will cross to the mainland and spend time among the shorter-lived humans to observe their innovations to the art of war and integrate them into the faster paced and more agile styles of elven combat-- in return for what can be considered a worrisome hole in the security of their state from possible surprise attack, the Empire of Jiaal gains the oh-so-precious commodities of sugar, spices, and silks, along with a treaty that promises neutrality to Jiaal. 

Our dear protagonist Lorana meets a number of elves on her journey, but there is only one who travels with her; a dark skinned youngster of no more than fifty-seven summers with crimson hair and eyes, both; Jenive, committed to the military tradition not by her mother’s word but her own out of the shame of being the thirteenth daughter in the line of succession to the throne of Kithra. With no hope of accession, she took what she considered the dignified path instead of spending a lifetime bartering her status in court... to find herself on the mainland, committing an even greater shame than being the impotent daughter of a queen. 

*Coughs* 

Sooooo

It’s been slightly more than a month since I’ve posted anything here

So have a work in progress of Lorana’s full squad [which takes two whole books to assemble, and then is almost immediately broken apart because you can’t just throw six strangers together and expect them all to get along and work together without a couple of hiccups]

So, with color coding for convenience, we’ve got Ivori as the massive purple figure on the left, hefting up her oh-so-beloved sword [which I realize should probably have a name if only because most cool swords have names, and it was given to her by a major leader for her services to the military], the little light blue one is Nafiea, the goddess-child hybrid who’s actually some 500 years old, Lorana is front and center as the small brown lady who is about as intimidating as a slice of bread but give her a break she’s trying, dark blue boy with his book is Jahta and honestly I think that journal of his is the only way he’s staving off the existential crisis of the century, dark red and all the way on the right is Jenive-- our favorite elf warrior and also the walking contradiction of elven pride that fell in love with a lowly and short-lived human, and last but not least we’ve got our bright red dragon-kin in the back, Sutim, looking all kinds of menacing and he doesn't even have a face yet.