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.
Forged in the early chapters during his confrontation with his sister Fortessa, Icarus’s Sidewinders are brutal reinterpretations of a once-delicate design. He took the original template, slender, fragile scouts conceived by Persephone, and transformed them into monstrous dune predators.
These are no longer worms but dune ravagers, twisted, hulking analogs to the sandworms of Dune, but with a crueler elegance. Their armored hides ripple with biomechanical tension as they burrow beneath the sands, silent but for the telltale sign of jagged, shark-like fins slicing just above the surface.
Icarus wields the Sidewinders with ruthless efficiency, not only as scouts but as siege weapons. They tear through terrain, undermining the foundations of Fortessa’s hive. Entire structures collapse under the sands in a choking roar of dust and stone, consumed from below.
Some of these horrors are even more perverse: Icarus has reversed the structure of their stomachs to create bile beasts which are acid-spewing variants that dissolve everything in their path, even parts of themselves. These creatures erupt from the sand vomiting corrosive bile that burns on contact.
Icarus watches and refines, remarking on their fragility, noting that their epithelial linings must be reinforced, lest they fall victim to their own design. His mastery lies not just in their creation, but in his willingness to let them fail, adapt, and be reborn more deadly than before.