Ashtearul design ideas

I honestly didn’t figure I’d hammer out a design for him so soon. I’ve always left his shape in this form kind of vague because no one alive, aside from Kromelia, has really seen it. Ashtearul is a peaceful and tolerant figure, he has rarely had a reason to reveal his true nature, so this form would have remained unused in the later half of his life.

I know that by shifting into their actual bodies, they outwardly convey raw emotional intent. Things ranging from aggression to trust and compassion are expressed when they shift forms. Like posturing or tone of voice, it’s easier to pick up on your company’s motivations depending on how straightforward they are when they interact with you. Of course this doesn’t mean they don’t convey emotion and expressive qualities under a more humanoid guise, it is just less obvious how honest an individual is being to someone unfamiliar with them (you can take Tanuth as an example for that). Retaining an appearance that is condensed, if not eye-level with another Oriancarus portrays an air of confidence and control. Shifting is a way to signal motive, but it’s not solely dependent on emotion alone, as many will know how to manage themselves and their mannerisms. When that toleration runs thin, however, it’s all huffing, spitting, exploding, and sizing each other up from there. Mentally unstable or corrupt Oriancari have been known to blur that line of control in the past, and in those cases they would shift sporadically between those two forms based on emotional insecurity.

When it comes to Ashtearul, he’s a pretty ancient and hard book to read in terms of honesty, but despite this he still remains a highly regarded figure in their world and it’s that dishonest and pretentious quality that Brenth absolutely loathes about him. He’s almost always seen in humanoid until a later point in the plot, where he is inevitably pushed into losing his composure, and when he does he’s massive and I don’t want to be anywhere near him.

To reiterate on him a bit, as it’s been a while since I’ve rambled about Ashtearul, he’s the cipher to the element of time and space and quite predictably the oldest of the group, (his age would land him somewhere around 4,500 years based on his stature before humans came to Vyrundal). Because of this he specializes in a more archaic form of manipulation, one that resembles the Divine precursor race’s use of glyphs and calculated movements, which allows him to warp the flow of the world around him to his bidding (which accounts for his extended age). It's all a matter of inter-dimensional physics and gravitational pull with him, really, but it's his bloodline's ability to stop the flow of time and his close connection to the foundation of his element that brings reverence to him as an Elder elemental. Much of this knowledge he will have passed down to his reallyreallyreally young and inexperienced heir, Kargia.

But yeah no to get back to this form, I wanted to aim toward the general look I had planned for him and Tanuth with a few unique/fun qualities thrown in, as it’s fairly likely Ashtearul spent his childhood around the radioactive mutating qualities of the Allrian cavern beneath Orinacria. I took Tanuth's crest and swept it forward along the line of his neck. The little doodle at the bottom of the right page was me trying to translate that form into what he’d look like pre-human settlement but it was a quick scribble and I lost interest. Beside him on the far left are quick scribbles of a moderately sized Chelly and a human for a size comparison.