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.
Just before the storm breaks, Xerxes makes a desperate move.
With his forces faltering and the tide turning, he dives toward Icarus, who waits silently beneath the massive chin of his monstrous creation. Xerxes seeks to end the war with one decisive strike. But his opponents inaction is a ruse.
It’s a trap.
Icarus loses one of his eyes, but in that instant of contact, he ensnares Xerxes, not with claw or toxin, but with the webbing of his own soul. The threads, luminous and ancient, wrap around Xerxes’s essence and drag him screaming beneath the sands, into the Sunken Plain, the realm where flesh holds no dominion.
In the Sunken Plain, also known as the Dark World, they do not fight with bodies.
They fight with fragments of memory and spirit that coalesce into surreal masses of unimaginable power.
Here, souls are mutable beasts, and the two engineers tear into each other like feral animals, their true forms flickering in and out of perception. The glowing web shifts wildly, sometimes a scythe, sometimes a claw, sometimes a cavernous maw. There is no consistency, only rage, instinct, and eons of experience made tangible.
Each combatant remembers every vessel they've ever worn, claw, wing, blade, and bone. These are called into battle like old weapons from forgotten arsenals. Xerxes strikes with the grace of harpy talons and winged arcs of lightning. Icarus answers with the grinding limbs of titanic beasts, rivers of bile, and the daunting wings of once mighty dragons.
Xerxes is outmatched.
Realizing his doom, Xerxes makes a final choice: he flees from the dark world.
He twists and tears at the threads binding him, burning his own soul to slip free. This battle was no triumph but a lesson. Icarus may have won, but Xerxes lives on with new memories, fresh adaptations, and an explosive new idea...