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Description
Did these as an attempt to remember what it was like to draw actual character scenes. If you’re interested, then fight your way through the text snippets. I have nowhere else to share them so might as well post them.

1 - top left
  From her bedding on the elevated floor above, she could peer over the ledge at him, checking now and then for signs of death. The dull gleam of his Marks still shone in the darkness of the roost as she lay turning the Aural stone on its knotted chord about her fingers. In the gloom its pulse was visible, ever so dimly, like a creature alive.
      She had always found the stones to be pretty, but never truly looked at them until now. Others had found ways to use it in technology, but the Aurum were able to manipulate it, carving their bodies with it to greater attune themselves to the mana with patterns following the flow of their own energy lines.
  She couldn't understand why, but then again, she supposed they couldn't understand her cosmic Basking and Journeying into the vast unknown to read the patterns in the stars. Perhaps it was their way of finding understanding in the void and celestial spheres.
  Setting the stone to one side, she gazed through the sky window above and cast herself on a Journey, drifting through the aether and clustered orbs of burning gas.
2 - top right
She took his hand and set it on her shoulder to guide him through the wild foliage until they hit the path. “In truth, I haven’t experienced much hardship from the people in Culvert, none of us have. There’s generational acceptance between us and the humans, we work and live together well enough. But with outsiders…”
One could never be too sure how things were.
“Did any give you trouble?”
With a shake of her head, she negotiated the uneven ground while keeping a hand out across his chest to slow him a while. “Serona Celini is pretty good with that kind of thing.”
“Would she know of any local Salvage Dogs?”
She held his arm firmly now as she helped him feel his way down a slightly overgrown slope where some thick roots made footing tricky.
“You think your man came this way?”
“He knew where he was,”
“You’re so certain?”
“He took small things of value. Personal items, electrical components, useless for survival,” he said.
     The heat of insult at his unspoken accusation crept up her spine and shivered her feathers. “People would ask questions, if a man showed up with trade like that. If he’s a Salvage Dog, he could be holed up out in the jungle, there’s plenty of places to set up a roost for trade, and out here there could be any number of packs. The Outreach is littered with old wrecks and ruins.”
He simply nodded, hearing the tightness in her voice, and she was glad of that. Up until then she’d been quite content with his company, but now the first inklings of unease were twisting her stomach.

Salvage Dogs are people who hunt salvage, largely via illegal means. Not to be confused with Ruin Divers. There are many ‘packs’ of them. Monnenwen works with an ex-Salvage Dog called Bidden, who now runs a reputable repair/junk shop. He’s a master with ceramics. The reason Monnenwen is having to guide Aeselfrith is because he lost his vision (luckily it returns later) due to contracting Whiteflare, a kind of fever infectious to humans but not Nufthalians. Technically Aurum are not human, but they can contract Whiteflare, they just have more chance of surviving.
He’s looking for the only other survivor of the transport crash, a man who bailed on them with the transport tracker. Without that tracker, the wreck can’t be relocated, or the bodies recovered.

3 - bottom left
  Coloured streaks of light cut Harrin’s grey face into portions of blue and purple, shot with unmoving gold.
The channels of his Marks leached dark across his ashen skin, drained and empty as the last of the Aurulite was drawn sluggishly from the body and into the Vault Urn, sparking only with the Resonance of the others.
  Brennan hadn’t truly been putting his heart into the ritual for his brother, and Caldwin’s eye indicated that he was aware. Father Ulder’s reedy voice rose in the Invocation of the Void, demanding attention, and for a while at least, Brennan could distract his thoughts in duty toward his dead brother.
May he Re-join the Resonance in Ascension and SkyBirth.
Words denied to Harrin.
Instead, Father Ulder completed the requiem with the Earthbound Commendation: “May he nourish the Base Matter of the Universe, dust and atom, reborn in all and every.”

I’m not pleased with how Brennan looks, it’s not at all how I imagined but hey-ho. He’s quite fragile due to events in his past and often suffers from moments of seemingly irrational crippling fear, which is holding him back from getting his Marks, thus his uniform is different.
He was close to Harrin as a sort of mentor, along with Caldwin, however, for reasons yet unknown, Harrin took his own life and that served to push back all of Brennan’s progress.

4 - bottom right
“Did you come from the Rosary?”
It was pointless to lie as there was nowhere else down that hallway. “I was seeing that the Cileni was Attuned,” It was as good an excuse as any, and completely valid if anyone should ask.
“Oh,” Brennan avoided his eye, shifting slightly with the edge of discomfort he always seemed to have when confronted with anyone other than Caldwin or Father Ulder.
“Brother Harrin’s Stone,” Aeselfrith began, stopping him from skirting off, “I didn’t see it there,”
Brennan flushed, considered making an excuse, but gave up in the same breath. “No,” He sighed as though it had been some great burden on him, and reached into a pocket with a weighty slump of his shoulders, “I’ve…I’ve had it,”
“For how long?”
The boy cast his eye to the tiles with another half-shrug.
“Since he died,”
Aeselfrith’s heart dropped.
That was weeks ago.
The stone’s Attunement would have been disrupted, and whatever Skin Shared memories it held would now be tainted with Brennan’s. Could Monnenwen still use it like that?

The reason Aeselfrith wants the Stone is to figure out what caused Harrin to neglect the Cilarian, a kind of amplifying structure designed to attune everything to the same frequencies as the Resonance. It may also give insight into why he killed himself. But he also can’t tell anyone he’s accepting Nufthalian practices (Skin Sharing is a type of memory/emotion/sensation share, which Monnenwen likes doing with objects to glean some memories of those who owned them. Strictly objects whose owners are dead, as it’s not a violation- she has rules). ‘Officially’ the Auraculairium rules that heresy, so he’d hoped to ‘borrow’ the Stone from the Rosary, only- it wasn’t there.
Related

Description
Did these as an attempt to remember what it was like to draw actual character scenes. If you’re interested, then fight your way through the text snippets. I have nowhere else to share them so might as well post them.

1 - top left
  From her bedding on the elevated floor above, she could peer over the ledge at him, checking now and then for signs of death. The dull gleam of his Marks still shone in the darkness of the roost as she lay turning the Aural stone on its knotted chord about her fingers. In the gloom its pulse was visible, ever so dimly, like a creature alive.
      She had always found the stones to be pretty, but never truly looked at them until now. Others had found ways to use it in technology, but the Aurum were able to manipulate it, carving their bodies with it to greater attune themselves to the mana with patterns following the flow of their own energy lines.
  She couldn't understand why, but then again, she supposed they couldn't understand her cosmic Basking and Journeying into the vast unknown to read the patterns in the stars. Perhaps it was their way of finding understanding in the void and celestial spheres.
  Setting the stone to one side, she gazed through the sky window above and cast herself on a Journey, drifting through the aether and clustered orbs of burning gas.
2 - top right
She took his hand and set it on her shoulder to guide him through the wild foliage until they hit the path. “In truth, I haven’t experienced much hardship from the people in Culvert, none of us have. There’s generational acceptance between us and the humans, we work and live together well enough. But with outsiders…”
One could never be too sure how things were.
“Did any give you trouble?”
With a shake of her head, she negotiated the uneven ground while keeping a hand out across his chest to slow him a while. “Serona Celini is pretty good with that kind of thing.”
“Would she know of any local Salvage Dogs?”
She held his arm firmly now as she helped him feel his way down a slightly overgrown slope where some thick roots made footing tricky.
“You think your man came this way?”
“He knew where he was,”
“You’re so certain?”
“He took small things of value. Personal items, electrical components, useless for survival,” he said.
     The heat of insult at his unspoken accusation crept up her spine and shivered her feathers. “People would ask questions, if a man showed up with trade like that. If he’s a Salvage Dog, he could be holed up out in the jungle, there’s plenty of places to set up a roost for trade, and out here there could be any number of packs. The Outreach is littered with old wrecks and ruins.”
He simply nodded, hearing the tightness in her voice, and she was glad of that. Up until then she’d been quite content with his company, but now the first inklings of unease were twisting her stomach.

Salvage Dogs are people who hunt salvage, largely via illegal means. Not to be confused with Ruin Divers. There are many ‘packs’ of them. Monnenwen works with an ex-Salvage Dog called Bidden, who now runs a reputable repair/junk shop. He’s a master with ceramics. The reason Monnenwen is having to guide Aeselfrith is because he lost his vision (luckily it returns later) due to contracting Whiteflare, a kind of fever infectious to humans but not Nufthalians. Technically Aurum are not human, but they can contract Whiteflare, they just have more chance of surviving.
He’s looking for the only other survivor of the transport crash, a man who bailed on them with the transport tracker. Without that tracker, the wreck can’t be relocated, or the bodies recovered.

3 - bottom left
  Coloured streaks of light cut Harrin’s grey face into portions of blue and purple, shot with unmoving gold.
The channels of his Marks leached dark across his ashen skin, drained and empty as the last of the Aurulite was drawn sluggishly from the body and into the Vault Urn, sparking only with the Resonance of the others.
  Brennan hadn’t truly been putting his heart into the ritual for his brother, and Caldwin’s eye indicated that he was aware. Father Ulder’s reedy voice rose in the Invocation of the Void, demanding attention, and for a while at least, Brennan could distract his thoughts in duty toward his dead brother.
May he Re-join the Resonance in Ascension and SkyBirth.
Words denied to Harrin.
Instead, Father Ulder completed the requiem with the Earthbound Commendation: “May he nourish the Base Matter of the Universe, dust and atom, reborn in all and every.”

I’m not pleased with how Brennan looks, it’s not at all how I imagined but hey-ho. He’s quite fragile due to events in his past and often suffers from moments of seemingly irrational crippling fear, which is holding him back from getting his Marks, thus his uniform is different.
He was close to Harrin as a sort of mentor, along with Caldwin, however, for reasons yet unknown, Harrin took his own life and that served to push back all of Brennan’s progress.

4 - bottom right
“Did you come from the Rosary?”
It was pointless to lie as there was nowhere else down that hallway. “I was seeing that the Cileni was Attuned,” It was as good an excuse as any, and completely valid if anyone should ask.
“Oh,” Brennan avoided his eye, shifting slightly with the edge of discomfort he always seemed to have when confronted with anyone other than Caldwin or Father Ulder.
“Brother Harrin’s Stone,” Aeselfrith began, stopping him from skirting off, “I didn’t see it there,”
Brennan flushed, considered making an excuse, but gave up in the same breath. “No,” He sighed as though it had been some great burden on him, and reached into a pocket with a weighty slump of his shoulders, “I’ve…I’ve had it,”
“For how long?”
The boy cast his eye to the tiles with another half-shrug.
“Since he died,”
Aeselfrith’s heart dropped.
That was weeks ago.
The stone’s Attunement would have been disrupted, and whatever Skin Shared memories it held would now be tainted with Brennan’s. Could Monnenwen still use it like that?

The reason Aeselfrith wants the Stone is to figure out what caused Harrin to neglect the Cilarian, a kind of amplifying structure designed to attune everything to the same frequencies as the Resonance. It may also give insight into why he killed himself. But he also can’t tell anyone he’s accepting Nufthalian practices (Skin Sharing is a type of memory/emotion/sensation share, which Monnenwen likes doing with objects to glean some memories of those who owned them. Strictly objects whose owners are dead, as it’s not a violation- she has rules). ‘Officially’ the Auraculairium rules that heresy, so he’d hoped to ‘borrow’ the Stone from the Rosary, only- it wasn’t there.
Related