Study After Priestess Leoba Ascelina the First Witnessed Leandrade

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

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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.

Study After Priestess Teccla Kitzingen

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

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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.

Study of Walcher Balgrave the Augur

Study of Walcher Balgrave the Augur, 2025. Brown ink, Conté, colored pencil, and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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In The Vaster Conspiracy, Walcher Balgrave serves as the shadow of the protagonist, art counterfeiter Vaster Vrain. An astrologer/fortune teller with an uncanny ability to remember flashes of possible futures, Walcher seeks to control the course of history by manipulating people and events according to his predictions and those of his blind sister, Elsasara, who has even stronger prognosticative abilities. This is in direct contrast to Vaster, who becomes obsessed with hallucinating events from the past to solve a deeply personal mystery.

Vaster and Walcher shadow one another in other ways, too: while Vaster dresses in flashy designer clothes he can barely afford, Walcher wears the humble ink-dyed robes of an augur despite his wealth; while Vaster has a self-destructive taste for Sperrin whisky, Walcher exclusively drinks medicinal Kinarin tonic.

Study of Balladine in Brown Ink

Study of Balladine in Brown Ink, 2025. Brown ink and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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This is the first work that I’ve made in color since August of 2023. According to Pantone, brown is a color, right?

Balladine changes her look from time to time: I wanted to see how she looked with her hair worn back rather than parted in the middle as usual.

I went on to develop this into a charcoal, mixed media, and gouache drawing. See my post about it or the finished drawing.

Study of Balladine's Bird

Study of Balladine’s Bird, 2025. Ink and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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The character of Balladine has changed drastically since I started the first draft of The Vaster Conspiracy. Originally named Claudine, she started off life as a stock housekeeper character who did little more than answer the door at Cairngorn House. Since then, her role in the story has expanded, to say the least. Her latest character development involves a new hobby: seeking out wounded birds that flew into the Underground City’s ventilation and exhaust fans and nursing them back to health.

This sketch of one of Balladine’s birds was based on a painting by Bolognese Baroque painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi, an artist whose output varied wildly between sacred religious scenes and more informal genre paintings.

The bird, named Gallaper, goes on to appear in a finished drawing of Balladine.