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.
Velbrava was never meant to be anything. A lesser engineer, abandoned in the wake of the Vibriatus exodus, his name severed from a body, his purpose lost in the dark world. He lingered in shadow, forgotten, a ghost without flesh, until desperation drove him to commit the unthinkable: he attempted to steal Icarus’s vessel.
But the vessel was a trap.
Velbrava was caught and imprisoned, not in chains, but within an eye. Trapped inside Icarus’s gaze, he was left with a cruel task: to shape a body of his own, cobbled from discarded tissues and scraps of failed forms.
What emerged was a broken, misshapen cricket; a mockery of design. His joints crack and grind where they don’t quite fit. Antennae sprout from his limbs instead of his head. His skull is swollen, too large for his body, giving him a hunched, trembling stature. To the untrained eye, he is little more than a malformed insect. A mistake.
But Velbrava endured.