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.
Fortessa, the Lesser Engineer, is the first to fall by Icarus’s hand in the opening chapters. This encounter takes place shortly after Icarus’s birth into the Overworld, a moment charged with chaos and shifting power.
Fortessa is an inexperienced tactician who leans heavily on calculation and structure to compensate for her lack of instinct. Her attempted assassination of Icarus is swift but fatally misjudged. She’s struck down by Icarus’s Sidewinders, deadly, precise tools forged by the older engineer with terrifying ease.
Fortessa’s form is spider-like, a grotesque fusion of flesh and precision. She possesses eight elongated limbs, each ending in clusters of small, dexterous fingers used to mold, direct, and command her brood, which she shapes in her own eerie image. Unlike a spider, however, her vision is poor: her milky white pupils offer little clarity, forcing her to rely on a heightened sense of smell, aided by a long, snout-like nose and a flickering forked tongue.
To fledgling engineers, Fortessa appears imposing, an architect of calculated menace. But to those with experience, her designs are weak and she requires eight limbs to maintain control over her brood. Her dominion is fragile, spread thin. In stark contrast, Icarus needs no handicaps.
This scene should carry a sense of inevitable obsolescence, a crumbling younger generation giving way to something much older, sharper, faster, and far more dangerous.