Daedalus and Iapyx

Gooday everyone,

Welcome to the Deacon Corner. If you’re new here, this space dives into the inspirations behind the images you’ll find throughout the books on these pages. What began as a place to share commission breakdowns has grown into something more. In addition to detailing how each piece came to life, you’ll now find expanded chapter notes, lore entries, and my own black-and-white concept illustrations which are raw glimpses into the ideas that shaped this world before they fully took form.

Before we begin, it’s important to say that none of the beautiful stylized images found in the hard and soft copies of these books would exist without the incredible talent of Sickjoe who is quite literally the heart and soul of this visual world. If you appreciate his work as much as I do, I highly encourage you to visit his gallery and explore more of his creations.

Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at the featured image and learn a bit more about the lore hidden in this chapter.

For this one, I thought I'd have you do something on the primordial gods Daedalus and Iapyx, the dukes of the material and immaterial realms. These two are the firstborn children of the Great Devourer and live within the core of a violent nebula.

At the beginning of the mortal timelines, there were hundreds of peninsulas, land masses without a body that drifted in the vastness of space, filling the empty void. These chunks of dirt and rock were populated by violent nasty things with teeth and claws, the first creations of Daedalus’s primordial kiln.

Daedalus: He bears a striking resemblance to the engineers and has forged a flesh-born kiln from the broiling colorful gases of the nebulae where he shapes horrific lifeforms to compete, survival of the fittest. However, unlike Icarus, Daedalus has wings, featherless and desiccated like the branches of a wilting tree, bat wings without membranes with strange organ-filled fruits dangling from the limb’s finger-like projections which he plucks to use in his creations. Daedalus is obsessed with war and strength, granting his creations thirst and hunger always to be driven by their base instincts. He has many arms and fingers and is shaping clay into tooth, claw, and stomach, completely drawn into his work.

Iapyx: He is the opposite of his brother, drawn more towards heavy cumbersome elements like iron and communing with immaterial unseen things. Using his half of the nebula, he crafts mortal fate into long flowing tapestries that he nails to his back with copper, nickel, and brass concealing much of his body. These stakes are hammered painfully and unevenly into his flesh. He did the work himself and struggled to reach the places where he drove the nails. Think of it almost like an act of penance, shunning his own flesh.    

Like his brother, he has many arms and fingers but shapes metal and fabric instead of flesh and blood. The tapestries of fate that cover his body differ from what the sisters of fate shape. These tapestries are tattered with a chimeric display of unusual stitchwork across their surface, a pattern only a true fate weaver would understand. Imagine these fates to be like torn scrolls with stitchwork, unrolled and nailed against his back, sides, and shoulders.

Beneath a tattered cowl, we can see his head, which resembles the face of a cicada. An insect that I always felt resembled an organic machine—a perfect representation of the young duke who values metal and cloth over flesh.

Background: This is where things get a little crazy (if they aren’t already). The brothers reside within a nebula like the pillars of creation, shaping the colorful ionized elements to suit their needs. Daedalus makes a fleshy kiln and designs unspeakable horrors while Iapyx uses his half to shape fate into those tattered tapestries. All around them are the floating peninsulas. Chunks of land drifting in the vastness of space. The suspended islands closest to the primordial kiln harbor the most violent of Daedalus’s creations, ripping each other to shreds in a perpetual cycle of violence, eventually returning to the kiln where the strongest are reshaped, their properties shared with the next generation. However, as we get further away from the kiln and closer to the bottom of the piece, we see reptiles and birds, animals that might be familiar to us. At the very bottom, on an island separate from the rest, lives Adelaide, the first of womankind.

Adelaide: She is essentially the Eve of this story. Adelaide is a woman with long golden hair, beloved by all the creatures who walk and crawl. She admires Daedalus and his primordial kiln, praying for a kiln of her own so that she might conceive life with passion and love, not violence. However, Daedalus ignores her pleas as he sees no value in soft, beautiful things without stingers, talons, and claws. Ultimately, it is Iapyx and not Daedalus who pities her and grants her wish. The sisters of fate, in many ways, resemble Adelaide, and I want to imply through this piece that it is Adelaide Iapyx sought to replicate when he crafted his daughters—an unrequited love, so to speak.  

I envision this piece being like many of the old biblical artworks of creation and the Garden of Eden, demonstrating the vastness of space, the immense power of the firstborn children Daedalus and Iapyx, and how tiny and fragile mortal life is compared to their whims. Adelaide is on her knees praying to the horizon where we can see distant islands and two cosmic deities weighing the measure of mortal life, flesh, and fate.

If you’ve made it to the end and found your way here, you’re probably curious about what you just read. I’m glad you are. Let me walk you through these pieces in the author’s notes below which includes some of my original concept artwork:

On the Sea of Storms and the Primordial Kiln

In this discussion, lets bring together several points across the narrative: the Cosmic Steed, the Great Devourer, and the origins of the Sea of Storms and the Primordial Kiln.

Long ago, one of the Devourer’s nascent fingers, Leviathan Crucius, collided with the Steed. What followed was among the most catastrophic events in the history of the Divine Garden. The collision ended in something akin to a supernova: a titanic expulsion of superheated plasma that stretched across entire star systems. From that violence blossomed a vast and unstable nebula.

Every story in these books unfolds somewhere within that roiling abyss of disturbed matter.

At the center of that primordial wound were born two deities: Iapyx and Daedalus, twin sons seated at the point where the collision began.

There is an important detail mentioned briefly in the prologue of The Oxidized Garden that is easy to overlook. Before Adelaide, procreation among the gods was rare, and when it occurred, it was violent. The firstborn children of the primordial gods were therefore not born from love, but from catastrophic conflict.

From this observation emerges one of the central divides in the Garden: those born of violence, and those born of passion.

Adelaide would one day change that balance.

But before we reach her story, we must understand the strange nebula that formed after the Steed and the Devourer collided.

Ordinary nebulae eventually condense into stars and planets. This one does not. Instead, its superheated matter condenses into something far more terrifying: new Leviathans.

The debris cast from the Devourer and the Steed is slowly reforming into fresh fingers of the cosmic glutton.

One such monstrosity is Cerberus, a multi-headed leviathan spanning several light-years across. Despite its size, Cerberus remains blind and immature, still forming within the nebula’s storm of matter. For now, it drifts in a dormant state and poses little threat to the drifting peninsulas that orbit the abandoned throne at the nebula’s heart.

Between two growing leviathans stretches a bolt of violent light: a tempest of raw energy known as the Sea of Storms.

This is where the elder deities first made contact. Matter continues to expand outward from this location, leaving the Sea of Storms as a vacant throne. Iapyx and Daedalus have long since abandoned the duchy they once held there.

And yet something remains.

At the center of that storm lies the Primordial Kiln.

Unlike the kilns later granted to Adelaide and her descendants, this one was external—an immense organic womb constructed from the bodies of nascent leviathans. Daedalus, the elder of the twins and heir to his mother’s affinity for flesh, built it himself.

Its bricks were bone, muscle, omentum, and slick sheets of living endothelium.

Within this grotesque architecture, Daedalus experimented with life.

With milk drawn from his ear and salt gathered from beneath his eyes, the firstborn son shaped organs within the kiln’s walls: tooth, claw, liver, and stomach. From these pieces emerged the first creatures that gnawed and slithered in the abyss.

To them, he gave a gift inherited from his mother: hunger and an endless thirst for dominance and power.

To satisfy that hunger, the newborn creatures fought one another in the dark. Only the strongest survived, claiming the most valuable traits of the fallen: fang, chitin, tendril, claw. Evolution in the kiln was brutal and efficient.

But the brothers could not coexist.

At some point, a terrible conflict erupted between Iapyx and Daedalus. We know that Iapyx attempted to kill his brother. The struggle ended with Daedalus driven away from his creation, leaving the Primordial Kiln without a master.

Without its architect to prune the weak, life within the kiln changed.

Creatures grew more varied. Competition softened. Some lineages abandoned the arms race of teeth and stingers altogether.

Eventually, something remarkable appeared.

A creature rose from the crawling masses on five fingers and five toes. The fangs and talons of her ancestors were gone. In their place stood Adelaide, soft of breast and heart, the first of womankind.

She inherited a fragment of divinity left behind by Iapyx: ingenuity, passion, and the capacity for love.

Unlike the creatures before her, Adelaide embraced the tapestry of fate woven for her. Hunger and thirst remained, but they no longer defined existence.

All living things adored her.

Adelaide, in turn, became fascinated with the Primordial Kiln. She admired the power it held—the ability to create life itself. Ignoring Iapyx’s warnings, she asked the Great Devourer for a kiln of her own so that life might be conceived through passion rather than violence.

Her wish was granted.

Within Adelaide formed a hollow muscular organ beneath her belly: a living kiln. At last, she possessed the ability to create life through love.

Adelaide would come to bear many sons and daughters who spread across the empty peninsulas, guiding lesser creatures and building the foundations of mortal civilization. These descendants became the countless mortal races, as numerous as the stars themselves.

As revealed in the prologue, she also conceived two daughters with Iapyx: Morta and Decima. From them would descend the line of divine mortals known as the keepers of fate.

Both of Adelaide’s lineages were conceived through passion rather than violence. But Adelaide had been deceived.

Daedalus, who despised softness and delicate hands, poisoned the bricks of her internal kiln. Not long after humanity received the gift of life, a terrible corruption spread through their blood.

Love and meaning gave way to something older.

Hunger returned.

This curse manifested as a disease known as the Mangle—a regression toward the primordial state that existed before Adelaide’s intervention. Those afflicted gradually lose the qualities that make them human. Flesh twists. Reason fades. Eventually, the victim devolves into a creature driven only by conflict and appetite.

Childbirth itself became dangerous and painful: one of the two great curses placed upon Adelaide’s descendants.

But what of her divine daughters?

Morta, the elder, was spared. She was born stillborn—the first of the dead before mortality truly existed. The Mangle cannot progress through necrotic flesh.

Decima, however, was not so fortunate.

In the opening chapter, she suffers terribly from the disease. Desperate to save her child, Adelaide carries Decima to the Sea of Storms and bathes her in its volatile energies.

The act nearly kills her.

But death is a contradiction for a duchess of life. Decima returns changed, but alive. The Mangle is burned from her body. Mostly.

Because Adelaide herself could not enter the storm. Being mortal, she suspended the girl by her ankles in the churning energy.

Everything above the ankle was purified. Everything below it was not. The disease remained in Decima’s legs, twisting them into the grotesque form she now bears.

If this story sounds familiar, it should. It echoes the ancient myth of Achilles, whose mother bathed him in divine waters to make him immortal, leaving only his heel vulnerable.

Decima’s story follows a similar pattern.

In the end, Adelaide did save her daughter. But something sinister yet remains.

Adelaide’s mortal descendants continued to twist and writhe beneath the curse, unable to cleanse themselves in the Sea of Storms as Decima had. One by one, they were destined to regress, mind and flesh unraveling until only the beast remained.

Seeing what awaited them, Iapyx granted a final mercy.

He placed his blade in the hands of Adelaide and commanded her to drive the steel into the throat of their lifeless child. In doing so, she awakened Morta, the first of the dead, and with that act, the nature of mortal life was forever changed. From that moment forward, all beings born of Adelaide’s first lineage would no longer endure forever in twisted suffering. They would die. Their bodies would fail. Their spirits would pass on.

Mortality was born.

In this sense, death is not a punishment but a kindness. For without it, the path awaiting mankind would lead only toward the slow and monstrous unraveling of the Mangle—a nightmare no living soul should ever endure long enough to see.

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