LASERS LASERS

idea for the Hollow Knight's charm system. they start off fully kitted but bound. to progress, the Knight must break the Pale King's parameters and, in turn, break their charms. with the charms set in its mask, it is essentially a shattering and remaking of the self and a claiming of personhood and divinity.

The Wandering Tower, The Hag of the Wastes

An ancient and massive nomadic higher being who wanders the wastes. Her paths used to be more meandering until she bore children with a wind god and a number of said children took an interest in becoming couriers.

The Tower and her children have established themselves as a distantly friendly presence in the bleak surface lands. Travelers caught in dust storms find respite under her vast cloak. Villages and towns welcome them for their service of delivery and aiding in trade. The Tower’s children have an extensive culture of cartography and are well learned in multiple languages, able to offer translation services for some very obscure tongues. Indeed, some have split off and settled or created settlements of their own to provide exactly such services where needed.

The Tower has made herself into a bit of an outpost in addition: she has fashioned howdahs to attach to her back from the bones scattered throughout the world and fabric from her own pelt. Initially as a way to address keeping her young gathered in one place, it has come to serve as storage, sleeping spots, and a place for guests to rest now that her children have gained her divine endurance.

what if we were gay and we kissed while taking a romantic row over maggot lake instead of committing suicide by glorious battle

concept art for the taishibethi sun ravens from the Book of Sorrow. the Golden Amputation remains one of my favorite stories from the book and from Destiny as a whole.

the head design is very very loosely based off of west coast first nations raven masks. i don't know if the link between the tai and the story of the raven stealing fire from the sun is there but i personally like the possibility of it.

these are rough sketches of baseline body plans for the tai and there's likely a lot of deviation depending on culture. it sounds like they're living in some kind of deep future, sun utopia, stellar-scale megastructure, long before the hive came along and kicked over the proverbial sandcastle. possibly energy beings? i speculate that the Emperor and similarly sized tai probably shed the star web nurseries off of themselves as a reproductive strategy. considering how devastating the loss of the Emperor was, she might have been the only one who does this.

back to the concept sketches: the tai grow these corporeal platforms as a way to physically interact with the universe and also as transport and tools. there might be more than one tai in one platform but they tend to be born into a platform singular.

You are a Human. Tenacious, hardy firstborn of Sol. The earliest kind of creature to write histories of the Earth.

You have been taken.

Rest your feet. Turn your bare head to the sky. No more invaders will come from the black to raze your home, to steal your past and make your children live in fear.

Why have you not died out? What keeps you standing tall? 

This world is yours. Your ancestors’ ancestors’ bones mingle with every patch of earth you step upon. The invaders steal what you might have shared, if they had only asked. But they did not. Now, they will not leave. There are so many of them, and so few of you. There is so little you can do to protect that which you love.

If you cannot be feared singly, you need to be feared together.

There is a knife for you. It is shaped like [shoulder to shoulder].

Take up the knife. Seal it into your bones. Take your new shape.

You are Nixis. So-called Archon Priest of Wolves. Vassal of the Queen of the Reef. Progenitor and pastor, tending your flock on the edge of the Deep Black.

You have been taken.

Look up, Nixis. Fill your lungs free of guilt. Let your shoulders down. No dead-souled thing measures you for acquiescence, now.

What keeps you on your feet? What private lodestone holds the disparate parts of you together?

Your people are chained. Their future is not their own, but without one like you, they have no future at all. The queen suffers no rival crowns, so you wear your faithless nobility like a cloak of woven lead. Your mouth is full of empty words.

One gasp of defiance, and the cold took you prisoner. Do you remember a time when you did not feel hollow?

Your grim years of dedication deserve a more righteous cause.

There is a knife for you. It is shaped like [sovereignty].

Take up the knife. Fill your sunken heart. Take your new shape.

Follow-up piece to the quick Nixis redesign for @schniggles

Poor Archon Priest Nixis, devoured on the verge of freedom.

ETA ALERT: @schniggles is posting the fan taken cards!!! go read them because they're fuckin' RAD!

Bonus quick Taken human design keep everything together.

started off as a quick redesign of poor Wolves Archon Nixis (whose in-game model is a Taken version of Archon Aksor who is Kings but the Wolves Archon? it was all very odd, although it gave us some fun fuel for the potential state of inter-house politics) and then it got a bit artsy.

there isn't much we know about Nixis in canon but what we do get kinda juicy. he was likely ascended into archonhood under Mara since Aksor was the Wolves archon during the Reef Wars. we speculate that this was a way for Mara to tame the chained Wolves's faith to better suit her rule.

there isn't much D1 lore on what Mara's rule over the conquered Wolves was like, but in the decades-long ordeal (between Reef Wars and Wolves Rebellion in HoW dlc), we know she never took the time to learn their language (Variks translates for her in a couple lore pieces) and the Wolves were described as chained (Variks and Skolas both describe it as such) and that the Wolves rebelled against her to follow Skolas, the Rabid (the epithet is a bit telling).

somehow during all of this kerfuffling, Nixis ended up in a stasis pod. did he try to join the rest of the Wolves during the Wolves Rebellion and get captured? or something else? either way, when Winters tried to spring him, Oryx ate him straight out of the pod. D1 was really good with using the Taken blights for horror.

for his design, i went with an unusually 'plain' (by eliksni nobility standards) appearance. he stands the same height as any other archon and kell, but his sparsely adorned helmet strips him of any sense of grandeur. i designed his ether mask to look vaguely like a muzzle although it's rather hard to convey it when a majority of eliksni designs already have masks. i pulled the pale 'U' on his helmet from screencaps of Mara's eliksni bodyguards.

A Warmind and an Iron Lord sitting in the Iron Tree...

the sex organ chart was a significant cooperation between @kaleidoramblings , @schniggles and i, although i didn't have the foresight to name them at the time as the post was actually mostly for our personal reference, lol. i didn't think a niche specbio anatomy exploration would actually gain much traction and i'm glad you enjoyed it!