Shao'Vara picture
Picture I drew of one of the Aspects of my primary Deity, Djao’Kain. The Aspect’s name is Shao’Vara. Xe is an Aspect representing Death, Mystery, the Death Mysteries, and the transformative side of death. Xer face is covered by a featureless mask to represent mystery (especially the mystery of the Afterlife) as well as the faceless and uncaring truth of death. Xe is wrapped in a burial shroud (in the culture on Traipah that Xe is from, burial shrouds are black), and the hands holding fire are both torches and symbols of pallbearers; though in that culture, pallbearers don’t carry a body to be buried, they carry it to where the corpse can be liquefied. The liquefied remains are fed to Memorial Trees, which are old-growth trees fed the remains of everyone from a particular family that dies, with plaques installed in their trunks. Those plaques have names, birthdates, and death dates of those whose remains were fed to the tree. Traipah has whole forests full of Memorial Trees, called Memorial Forests.
The three moons of Traipah are also visible in this picture. One is full, two are crescent. One of the crescent moons is tiny, right to the left of Shao-Vara’s head. The paved road is mainly to try to give a sense of perspective. Shao’Vara, wrapped in Xer burial shroud, kneels on a cliff. Not pictured is the ocean the cliff is overlooking, because I didn’t know how to draw that in a way that added to the mystery (or at least did not subtract from it).
I originally wanted to draw Shao’Vara as Xe first appeared to me in a vision, where Xe was nude and emaciated, with one saggy breast and another shriveled up, but I didn’t know how to draw that.
This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1292703.html
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