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.
Xerxes was not born, he was engineered. From the very beginning, he was shaped by Icarus himself, a hand-crafted heir meant to carry forward his legacy of war and perfection. Among all his siblings, Xerxes has proven the most capable of ruling the skies, earning him the title: The Hollow Spear.
This name comes from the chitinous tuning fork that protrudes from his snout; a jagged, resonant weapon that hums with energy. It gathers and amplifies electrical charge siphoned from the rapid beating of the tiny silver wings that line his spine, shimmering like mercury in motion. Each wing pulses in rhythm, building voltage across his form until he becomes a storm given shape.
Xerxes is the only engineer to have truly mastered aerial warfare since the days of Icarus himself. His rolling tempest is a marvel of predatory coordination—an airborne legion of specially-bred harpies, each one fitted with unique antennae to channel his will across the battlefield like an airborne orchestra.
When an enemy proves worthy, Xerxes does not sit back. He leads from the front, descending in a screeching arc of violence and precision, hurling black lightning through the heart of the opposing swarm. His strikes are not just powerful, they are disorienting. Xerxes excels at scrambling hive logic, disrupting the luminescent neural threads that lesser engineers use to command their broods. Against him, those threads twist, flicker, and fail, leaving enemies helpless and scattered.
To weaker engineers, he is unstoppable. They cannot track him. They cannot target him. They cannot outfly him. He is the storm, the living embodiment of air superiority.