Here’s the third aesthetic post for the fantasy series I’m writing. (Adair’s can be found here and Blythe’s is here.) This one is so aesthetically pleasing! Probably because Etri is too goth for his own good lol. He’s an introvert who tends to keep to himself, but he’s also absolutely loyal to those he cares about and a total romantic sap underneath the stoic exterior.

Like Blythe, Etri has a bunch of careers/hobbies going on. Officially he’s a performer with a carnival troupe; he shares a knife act with Blythe and a fire act with his brother. Etri has shadow magic, which means he can shift into an incorporeal shadowy form, snuff out fire, and has an immunity to fire. In the past he used his magic to work as a reverse-thief and returned stolen art. Art theft is a huge problem in the culture I’m writing. The title he carries from book 2 onward is Sentinel (and also the title of book 2!), which is the role of bodyguard/spouse to an artist. Etri becomes Adair’s sentinel. (Alongside Blythe, but as of the current draft she’s far less open about this role because Adair kind of bent the rules with the sentinel thing.)

For the rest of the pictures, I picked books because he’s a bookworm and loves studying history, lore, and astronomy. Lockpicks as a thief. An hourglass because he collects them and uses them to judge time when he crosses to the plane/world of shadow. The quote is a good representation of how he approaches relationships as asexual. The knives are partly to represent his act, partly because he has special dark-bladed ones that are the only thing that can hurt shadow creatures. The moon is the symbol that represents his past as a former priest of a shadow god. And he has stars of his favorite constellation tattooed on his wrist.