Where whims and dreams blend into reality...
Dà Jinhuáng, a great golden firebird of legend (hence the name) held to be a god-like figure and a kind of embodiment of fate and "The Tao" where Jinfèng comes from.
Few have actually seen Jinhuáng, but for some reason she appeared to Jinfèng, causing others around her to think that she might some day hold a great significance for her country and maybe even the world.
And actually, they could be right.
You may or may not have noticed it, but the errant copyright notice that accidentally got left on the Stolen Heart concept image I posted is now gone. That image was not intended to inexplicably be under a stricter licence than the rest of the Stablehand project, nor was it meant to track people using my images in some kind of covert, nefarious scheme. I'm not even sure a scheme like that would work, come to think of it, though I can only imagine it would be an interesting science experiment to put a copyright notice on one image but not on the other and see whether people heeded the false copyright notice or went to the trouble of finding the actual Creative Commons licence.
In any case, that copyright notice has now been removed. Sorry for the confusion!
I had this idea for Stablehand to create a number of great hexarts that each embody one of the many Destiny Attributes in the story (you'll hear more about the Destiny Attributes later when I get all their symbols created). Among these, Quietus is the hexart that represents the Ruin Attribute. Nearly all who encounter him are destined for a gruesome, horrific death unless they have the sense to move far, far away before catching his notice.
When trying to design Quietus' appearance, I was thinking this: you know, no matter how scary you try to make a dragon, nobody really succeeds at it any more. Even if you try really hard to make the thing look heartless and dangerous, it just backfires because "omg that's so badass!". Have you ever noticed that? It seems like it's pretty much impossible to put wings or horns or spiky projections on something without making it look undeniably cool.
My goal with Quietus was to create a dragon that was really, truly scary. I think I failed. XD
Among other things, he has multiple mouths, great serrated scissor-arms in place of wings, and nozzles in his sides that squirt gastric acid. His skin is almost entirely covered in a protective mucus that prevents the acid solution from reducing him to nothing, but even so, he still has small scars remaining from thin areas that occurred in it previously. Oh, and he also has a giant rhinoceros-like horn on his chest.
And yet he's still not scary. (sigh)
Sadly, it seems that I was not quick enough to heed the renewal mail on my free domain name and it expired without notice on the third of February, replacing this home page with an obtrusive advertisement for a Visa gift card. As a result, now NOBODY can have the name sangkara.tk without paying $19.90 to register the domain for at least two years, and probably a bunch of people are going to be confused by the advert and think that between me and my web host, at least one of the two of us is a scammer. And did I mention that probably over half the links to stuff on the site, either on Sangkara or elsewhere, are broken? I won't be able to fix all of them until Google un-registers the dead domain name from my blog, either.
Instead of completing the all-too-common "Dot TK is a bullshit scam" narrative in full, however, I will instead give you good news.
The site's new address is darktearsbrownishnaga.blogspot.com.
RIP sangkara.tk.