Lady Ravynn

His earliest memory of her, actually, was when she yanked him aside after dinner one night and hissed through her teeth that she wanted to show him her “secret room.” A place no one knew of but her. A place where she could spy down on the courtyard and laugh at the smith when he dropped the ingots on his toes and dream of fantastical lands beyond the gray skies of Mordices. “But you can come up, if you want,” she had said to him. “You just have to promise not to tell my brother or any of his brutish friends. They’d just spoil it.” He promised. Of course the others would find a way to ruin the room, to make it not theirs. He promised and it became theirs. She called it “the Roost” because up there, she said she was a great dark bird “who flies above everyone, and if any one bothers me, I can swoop down and carry them off over the sea, where the serpents will gobble them up!” And he supposed that she was a raven, and he was a hawk, and there was something simultaneously freeing and confining about looking out of a window onto a world that no one else could see. And she knew that. And he knew that. But she insisted that there were others like them out there, and he only talked of monsters.

Painted in photoshop with bamboo tablet.