A brown pen and ink portrait drawing of a woman with long dark hair, eyes closed, with her gloved hands folded over her chest, wearing an ornate clerical outfit. Below is cursive text and 2 symbols: a flaming heart and a pillar on a cloud.

Study After Priestess Leoba Ascelina the First Witnessed Leandrade, 2025. Brown ink on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

Leoba is the most devout and scrupulous of the three priestesses in Ashes and Dust. During her childhood, she had spiritual visions of the goddess Lucca and the Returned, episodes that embarrassed her wealthy burgeis family and led to her being sent to an Enshrinement academy to train as a priestess during her 12th reading. At the academy, her visions grew less and less frequent, and Leoba believed that she had done something wrong and lost the goddess’s favor.

Assigned to the ruined shrine in the war-torn city of Zabool after her ordination, Leoba rarely leaves the shrine’s grounds and spends her time in quiet contemplation and prayer while making sure the candles and incense cones stay lit. She wears dozens of medals of the Returned on and under her clerical outfit, along with several portable reliquaries containing their remains. She even gave up her family name to take on the name of one of the Returned in the hope of regaining the goddess’s favor and experiencing spiritual visions again. She still has occasional strange experiences, though — the game begins with Leoba having a prophetic dream:

“Oooh, ash blew into the shrine from under the door and formed a pile in the middle of the sanctuary! The ashes came together to form the body of a girl! She tried to say something, but all I could hear was, ‘ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh!’ She was standing on her tiptoes and gesturing like she was saying something important, but I couldn’t understand any of it! Then her body exploded and sent ashes all over the shrine, and Archpriestess Vinfrithe made me clean it all up!”

— Leoba

Leoba’s brother, a military officer, taught her how to do “knife tricks” with balanced throwing daggers. Leoba claims to have the goddess’s protection and to never have been hurt while juggling knives, but because she wears silk gloves that she never takes off when anyone else is around, nobody knows if she has any scars hidden underneath or not.

This drawing is a new pen and ink drawing based on an in-game graphic of Leoba from 2020.

A brown pen and ink portrait drawing of a confident-looking woman wearing an ornate clerical outfit with a capelet, with text in a cursive script below the portrait.

Study After Priestess Teccla Kitzingen, 2025. Brown ink on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

The Vaster Conspiracy is hardly the only story set in the world of Neith. Two years before beginning that novel, I worked on another story, Ashes and Dust, which was meant to be an adventure game featuring three priestesses of Lucca who the player could swap between to solve puzzles and open locked reliquaries to unveil a larger mystery.

Some of my designs for Ashes and Dust, such as Enshrinement clerical outfits, phylacteries, reliquaries, and shrine architecture, have persisted and show up in The Vaster Conspiracy when Vaster visits a shrine and meets the priestesses Cinehilde and Miccola.

Teccla, one of the game’s three playable characters, is mentioned in the scene in which Vaster meets Archpriestess Cinehilde:

“Meissa leaned in and examined the cover of Cinehilde’s book, which featured golden Zeelean letters embossed into the brown leather. ‘Oh... Teccla, did she send you more books?’

’I don’t know how she gets away with misusing shrine funds to send me these all the way from Zabool, but I appreciate it!’

’There are shrines all the way in Zabool?’

Cinehilde set the book on her lap and looked up at Vaster. ‘There are shrines in every city on Neith. The Enshrinement maintains the Goddess Lucca’s presence in the world, all across the world.’”

This drawing is a new pen and ink version of a pencil sketch I initially did of Teccla for the game in 2020.