Aviarium: fantasy art of dragons, time-travellers and winged people

[Jubal]

I'm now thinking of the complexities of dress design for people with wings sprouting out their back. It must actually present quite a bit of a faff and some additional challenges...

(Also, I sent you a message so check your inbox )

[Ierne]

I actually really enjoy doing costume design for people with wings It is another thing to think about, but it's a fun concept to work with/around

[Jubal]

At what point do you have the wing connection on your characters? It looks from the art like it's lower than the shoulder-blade which is where it's often put.

[Ierne]

So. The wings are made of the mage's magical energy, rather than bone and feathers. They can appear and disappear, and an accomplished mage can generate them at will.
The wings are pretty solid, hence the need for altered clothing still stands, but they connect to the magical energy within the body, rather than to the body itself.
I positioned the wings between the shoulder blades and just below them because I felt it looked balanced (from a flight perspective) and aethetically pleasing.

[Jubal]

Yes, below should definitely be better for balanced flight, I think, closer to the centre of gravity. And I guess magical wings means you can put them closer together because you don't have to have a really big muscle mass around the bases of them.

[Tusky]

I really liked the art for Miyake. Subtle blending on the blue and overall design.

Really nice! You are obviously very good with different mediums.

So are all these pics you are doing just for planning & worldbuilding? Or do you include to include anything in the finished thing?

[Ierne]

Thank you!

This definitely isn't going to be a graphic novel, so it would all depend on how my purely hypothetical publisher feels about illustrations XD. I'd like to include some  But I'm mainly doing these bc I like drawing my characters, it helps me write if I can visualise the characters well.

[Ierne]

A couple of drawings of another of the novel's main characters, Cei Darian. The dragon is named Asuka, and is very much wiser than her somewhat reckless rider. Cei's main purpose in the novel is to drive Winter crazy, and give her someone to occasionally rescue from certain death (always his own fault).

Cei is a void-wanderer from the universe Atana, and is a kind of magical being known as a Cinaed. Like everyone from Atana, they can fly a little, and have a natural afinity with fire and light based magic. The Cinaed are highly enigmatic, often appearing only as indistinct forms shrouded in coloured smoke.  Because of their mystery, they are often unfairly feared.

           

[Tusky]

Amazing Scales

[Ierne]

A couple of designs for Megumi, a central character who acts as Winter's guide in her new world. She's quite an enigmatic figure, she seems to know a lot about everything that's going on but won't reveal how.

Megumi's an adventurer, time-traveller, resurrectionist, and really terrible pilot. Her life and her plans to save the world are incredibly chaotic, but it always seems to work out in the end.

She's very friendly and loves meeting new people, but she has no respect for anyone and once greeted an emperor with the immortal words "who the heck are you, sunshine?"

And she has a folding bed that she loves and refuses to be separated from, under any circumstances.

[Jubal]

Does resurrectionist here mean "someone whose job/role it is to bring the dead to life" or?

Also, terrible pilot of what? I don't know if I should be expecting zeppelins, biplanes, balloons, hypersonic jets, submersibles, or what in this setting

[Ierne]

'ressurectionist' is defined in this setting is defined as someone who tries to bring back the good (as far as anyone is good) who died too soon, so it's not like trying to bring back a hundred year old dark lord who really needed to stay dead. However, it is slightly frowned upon as meddling with time, and is very much a chaotic good sort of thing to do.

Ah sorry, forgot this world mainly exists inside my head so far XD. If you have any other setting questions, please ask!
So.
Since everyone in Atana can fly (apart from random humans who've wandered in through gaps from other universes), and they derive their magical abilities from the magical energy of the sky (in the same way that in other settings elves or fey might be thought of as linked to the magic of the earth), they are obsessed with air travel.
there are a huge variety of types of aircraft, everything from zeppelins to very futuristic lightspeed craft.
(although these are only used for travelling between continents, there are no other inhabited or indeed inhabitable planets around).
There are also a few people who have access to void ships that can travel between universes, and it is there in particular that Meg is crashing :'D

[Jubal]

Not to go too heavily into the meta/physics, but does "void ship" imply the existence of an actual inter-universal void space, or is it just a general usage term here?

Also, am I allowed to assume that the lightspeed travel very much involves magic? Because I'm pretty sure the curvature of the planet and the issues of deceleration from lightspeed are sufficient that a pretty heavy additional dose of magic may be needed to sort them out functionally

[Ierne]

so, I'm going with the general sci-fi principle that lightspeed travel is possible via hyperspace, the most useful of imaginary scientific concepts. I'll admit to not having thought about hyperspace much, 1. because star wars did it for me and 2. because its not at all significant to the plot, wheras magic, time-travel and void-travel are, so I put effort into developing detailed systems for those instead. (which I love talking about )

yes, there is an inter-universal void space, which essentially acts like normal space. It takes time to cross in a void ship, it has vast gaseous nebulae as a result of matter leaking through from universes. All universes exist within it, and appear as vast, silvery spheres.
The proximity of universes to one another is based on how frequently their timelines diverged, splitting them from one universe into two or more. Universes that are close together and split recently will be fairly similar, while ones further away will be vastly different, having separated billions of years ago.
It would take maybe a a couple of months to travel from one side of our local cluster of universes to the other, and about half an hour to travel to a universe very nearby.

It is also possible to move directly between universes without going into the void, if a rift opens; but inter-universe rifts are so rare that most time-travellers and void-travellers believe they are pure myth.

[Jubal]

OK, that all makes sense

Though I think spheres feels too normal somehow. Silvery tauroids or something maybe?

Also I'm assuming that universes don't constantly split, and that it's only things of particular magnitude that cause schisms? Otherwise you'd get an infinitely sized nearby cluster of universes that you couldn't tell weren't your own.