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.
The Leviathans are fractured echoes of the Great Devourer, carved from her flesh and will by the trinity of Crucius, Crux, and Saevus. Each one is a wandering nightmare, colossal, abstract beings adrift across the stars, resembling cosmic jellyfish twisted into impossible geometries. Their forms defy symmetry: some trail vaporous tendrils that flicker and fade, others pulse with internal organs that spiral like blooming galaxies. No two Leviathans are alike, but all are defined by their gaping maws, dark, endless voids from which not even light returns.
They drift silently between constellations, patrolling the heavens in search of new “flavors”, hungering for novelty, for life, for memory. Their passage explains the emptiness of space, vast regions scrubbed clean by their insatiable consumption. Planets, stars, even time-warped debris fields, all devoured.
From these lesser Leviathans are born a different breed of engineers, children not of Kath’le Kal, but of bastard bloodlines. These engineers, called crusaders, are deemed unworthy of entry into the sacred throne of the Devourer. Instead, they are cast into the void, drifting like broken tools.
Yet they are not without their uses.
Even in rejection, they serve a purpose, to assist the Devourer in her eternal search for the lost Garden of Eden, that fabled origin point, a mythic oasis whispered through larval hymns and corrupted scripture. And so they wander, malformed and loyal, shaping nothing, consuming everything, dreaming of paradise.