Gooday everyone,
Welcome to the Deacon Corner. If you’re new here, these galleries dive into the inspirations behind the images you’ll find throughout the books posted on these pages. In these issues, I also like to share the commission details for each project, so readers can follow along with how these images came to life.
If there’s a particular piece you’re curious about, you can find all previous issues under my journal entries or linked directly beneath the images within each chapter.
Now before we begin, none of these beautiful art pieces would exist without the incredible talent of Sickjoe who is the creative force behind all the artwork in these books. Quite literally the heart and soul of this visual world. If you appreciate his work as much as I do, I encourage you to visit his gallery and explore more of his stunning creations.
Now, without further ado, let's take a look at the featured image and the commission details below.
The Great Devourer is among the most ancient and incomprehensible beings of the upper pantheon, an assembly of deities that includes the Basilisk, Ignis Machina, The Twins, Stormbringer, and the Ashen Fog. As with her peers, her form is vast, confusing, and more than a little madening. She is chaos incarnate—not malevolent, simply mindless—a being whose hunger predates even her own awareness. In truth, the Devourer is an almighty idiot, a cosmic glutton who has forgotten her own name, the only Ouroboros to have done so. A cruel irony, given how obsessively her children cling to the sanctity of names.
She festers at the center of the universe, her body so massive and luminous that even from trillions of light-years away she appears in the peninsula’s night sky as a radiant eye, the heart of the Draco constellation. Worshipped by mortals under the mistaken guise of sainthood, her "divinity" is a distant misunderstood mask. As Dr. Cromwell once lamented, "If you peel back the veils of far-radiance, all you’ll find is a teratoma, a churning mass of eyes, teeth, claw, and coil."
Her body is a living paradox: a womb that births galaxies even as she consumes them. Her movements are a dreamless drift, the steady advance of entropy.
As with all beings of her station, the Devourer is attended by a court. Three greater daemons—Crucius, Crux, and Saevus—serve as her royal tasters and executioners. They are the first to feast upon stars, judging which are worthy to be offered to her insatiable core. They also perform a vital pruning, carving away festering clumps of her own tissue to spawn the lesser leviathans, vast horrors that drift through the dark, serving to slake her nigh endless hunger.
Though known as leviathans themselves, Crucius, Crux, and Saevus serve another: the Basilisk, whose silent will opposes the Great Devourer’s blind appetite. Like the street scholars who strive to blind the lesser leviathans, the daemons perform a cosmic misdirection—guiding the idiot god away from Eden, from the garden, from the truth. Not out of kindness, but necessity.
This final image should depict the Devourer not as a monster in motion, but as a seething, radiant tumor suspended at the universe’s core, its hunger pulling everything slowly, inevitably, inward.