Tag: Dorian

Some Team Orobelle doodles + commentary

I was just musing on the characters yesterday evening and scribbling them. A bit of commentary on these:

  1. I am a huge fan of the sort of relationship dynamic where one character is very attuned to emotional cues and the other Knows Nothing. In romantic relationships it makes for some extremely fun writing. Anyway Vesper hasn’t figured out that Marcia is head over heels, water is wet, more at 9.
  2. Felix probably dresses like this in Adelaide’s world. Despite the way he was raised, he’s open to trying different things presentation-wise. Spoilers for chapter 48: I imagine Adelaide left behind her night market purchases in the hotel room when the CIA dragged her back home and Felix kept the cat keychain (which is hanging from his pocket in the pic). If you think about it, he is the solar powered lucky cat.
  3. Artur and Hong Yi have (to me) a deeply entertaining dynamic. There is a very strong surface-level personality clash that continues to have an effect even as they get to know each other better and recognise some points of connection. Orobelle always puts them in the same room when she’s the one determining lodgings; she’s like, “let’s group them by gender…I think that’s how things are done.”
  4. Dorian cooking a fish (Chapter 45) while Orobelle naps next door. I still laugh about that mini scene sometimes. He’s never cooked a fish in his life (his homeland doesn’t have much in the way of bodies of water) so he definitely overestimates how much heat they take to cook through. I think Orobelle sleeping while he does favours for everyone else is pretty indicative of their dynamic.
  5. Adelaide with butterflies…the idea of butterflies emerging from cocoons was always, in my mind, an apt parallel for her departure from the lab room after years inside it, imagining how the world beyond has changed while also being changed irreversibly by it. I imagine she’s the sort of person who could sit there watching living things interact for hours (…relatable…)
  6. Vesper using her powers. In her original character concept, like from when RD was conceptualised as a fighting game with world-switching mechanics, she was the “circuit completer,” and even now I almost always portray the electricity moving from one hand to the other or from her hand to the ground, because that’s how I picture her powers working. It’s really just based on lightning—cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground.

Revolving Door volume covers!

Now that I’ve outlined all four volumes of Revolving Door, I decided to make covers for all 4 planned volumes, each featuring a character relationship. Being a story about the way people connect, with each pair being both foils to each other and interdependent in different ways, I sought to capture a different kind of symmetry in each image.

We’re currently at the tail end of Vol. 2, so the series is about half done!

The Taste of Urana Salad

“What do you miss most?”

Dorian turns abruptly in the dimness. “Me?”

Curia smirks back, pulling one foot up onto the drystack. “Who else?”

Beyond their vantage on the wall, ancient insects creak in the night. The barren plains are a dull mirror of the moonlight, sprawled on every side of them.

Dorian could never forget any of this, no matter the years he spends away. He wasn’t expecting to return to his homeland so soon—barely two years since he left—but here he is, brought by new duties, the same duties that are soon to take him away.

Yet, already, there is an awkwardness to the way his heart nestles itself here—a subtle foreignness to everything that tells him he will never be a man of Tyse again. Not now, now that he’s severed that thread and given it forever to the keeping of the Duchess of Diamonds.

“It would be easier to say what I don’t miss,” Dorian finally answers, folding his arms as his eyes cross the unchanged stars. “I miss the very scent of the air. The burning of the wind on my skin. The taste of urana leaves.”

Curia takes this all in with a thoughtful nod, a mellow smile. “I’ve forgotten how urana tastes like, you know,” she replies. “It’s always the small things. And you think you could never forget them, how precious they are, but time always comes out the victor. Scrubs everything away, bit by bit.”

As Dorian listens and gazes upon the scout commander’s face, crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes and greying hair in six braids, he feels as if he were seeing the future.

Thirty years surviving. Thirty years on the move. Thirty years carving spaces for herself in worlds she’s never known before. That’s the life in store for him, and she has already lived it.

“I don’t know if it’s naive of me to hope,” he admits then, glancing down at the sleeping Duchess in the camp. “And I don’t know where this journey is taking us…but the next time we meet, wherever that is, we should find you some urana salad.”

Curia seems baffled, then amused, almost as if she were shaping a retort on her tongue.

But instead she offers a grin and says, “Yes. I’d like that very much.”