So, Sadly, I Have A Small Writers Block, And Therefore, Chapter 4 Is Going At Very Much A Snail's Pace.

So, sadly, I have a small writers block, and therefore, chapter 4 is going at very much a snail's pace. (And the more I think about some scenes in chapter 2 and 3, the more I want to scrap them completely, so there's that...)

I also have decided to have so many new art projects besides doing stuff for uni...

Long story short - have a sneak peak of one!

(I have updated Azar's design a little to suit it more to the real-life georgian armour)

You know what? Have another even more out of context one!

Muhahaha! (I have officially lost it, you guys...)

Anyways, wish me luck for my exams starting next week!

I love it!!!! Can’t wait to see more of your OC

One of my projects is done!

I love when artist make OC drawing memes and since I'm starting to be more active on my blog with my art, I want to catch up on some of them so...

Here, have this "Draw your OC as..."-Reel as a mini comic with Azar! (can we even call this a comic?)

And some close ups

The only thing that I'm still unsure about is the backdrop colurs... But the rest? Man, was it fun to do!

Hope you guys like it as much as i do!

Sick again, half-delirious and full of lead but the thought made me giggle out loud so here we are— though to be fair Azar's case is just me theorizing because @importantdestinydefendor hasn't confirmed anything yet (👀) and forgive me @marchdancer but I can't for the life of me remember whether you posted this info publicly or if it was something you revealed to me in private DMs (curse my health and my Swiss Cheese Memory) 😭😭😭

I found a very old piece of art that I posted on other sites a long time ago. I loved experimenting with clothes for Jaswant and conveying his image through them. The first art shows the image of the Black Leopard (black and dark gray colors), the second art shows just formal and rich clothes (he wore them in one of my fanfic works). Cool light turquoise tones with silver patterns highlight his eyes and convey his character.

Here is the first drawing of 2024. Don't know what to draw? Draw Daryun! Handsome, boring and soulless.

(on this art)

Sometimes I find myself wondering why Shapur's mother waited two years before she attempted murder on Isfan and his mother. Or perhaps she tried/wanted to try earlier but was unsuccessful due to Shapur's presence and interference? I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.

Okay, I have a confession to make. This ask unlocked a memory in me and I went to look in my drafts and sitting there was an unfinished post about this very matter, in which I tagged you because I think we had been talking about this in comments somewhere, and I checked the date and it said July 2022 🫠

Anyway, this is going to involve a lot of theorising and definitely veers into headcanon/possible fic backstory stuff, but it's a question I've thought about a lot and there are a handful of possibilities, in my opinion.

My first thought was that to begin with, she didn't know for certain who Isfan's father was. I'm sure there were also male slaves employed by their household, or it could have been any number of soldiers of other visitors that was the culprit. But perhaps in time the resemblance between Isfan and his father became impossible to ignore, or perhaps gossip reached her ears and her suspicions grew to the point at which she could not put them aside.

Perhaps she suspected right from the start, though. Maybe her husband's behaviour gave her cause to; maybe it wasn't an isolated incident. In that case, for someone willing to do what she did it feels like suspicion alone would have been enough, so why wait? One thing that comes to mind is infant mortality rates. Maybe she was hoping that the babe wouldn't survive past the first year or so, in which case there would be no need to dirty her hands.

Or perhaps at first it didn't seem to matter — her own son, both legitimate and older, would be heir.

I don't think Shapur's father would have involved himself with Isfan at all (after all, in not wanting to cause trouble with his wife he was content to ignore her actions in consigning a mother and baby to freeze to death) but I know we've both speculated before that Shapur might well have taken an interest in his baby brother even before he rode out to save him.

So was Shapur's behaviour a factor somehow? Was it his acknowledgement of his younger half-brother that changed things? Did his mother, for some reason, start to fret that one day, Isfan might be the one to inherit everything from Shapur rather than a son of his own, a grandchild that would carry her blood? How would she have felt at seeing Isfan accepted by the one other person she had assumed would also see him as a threat?

(Going down this line of reasoning definitely veers into some potential headcanon territory that I can't recall whether I've talked about before, but essentially something I toyed with was that his mother's fears not only stemmed from Shapur's clear affection and bond with the child but also the fact that she had begun to have her suspicions about her son's preference for men, and worried that given his closeness with Isfan he would be content to pass things to him rather than marry and have children of his own.

At this point, Shapur is 16, a year over the age of majority. I wouldn't be surprised if discussions of marriage had come up at this point in terms of potential matches, especially if he is the only legitimate son. Certainly I headcanon that later on, the main reason Shapur doesn't marry is to protect Isfan's status as his named heir and ensure it can't be contested, but before his rescue of Isfan I doubt he was thinking that far ahead; he was simply fond of his younger brother and did his best to look out for him and his mother. He could have easily brushed off talk of marriage without realising why his mother pushed for it.

Still, overall I think the biggest factor was simply that Shapur's mother hoped that if she ignored what she thought of as a problem for long enough, it would go away. And when it didn't, she opted to take matters into her own hands. The cold simplicity of Isfan's mere existence being enough for her to want him and his mother dead speaks to both her own callousness and the problems with Parsian society in the importance it places on bloodlines, so I've always been a bit wary of diluting that.)