Axugaem2 Teaser: Brack, Duke of Estuaries

Hi folks! Before I start rambling about this month's teaser, I'd like to happily announce that it will be the last teaser I'll be releasing for the Kata Kata Update (aside from the promo image, which I don't count.) The update will be ready by mid-January, so get hyped for that, and thanks SO much for sticking with the project during this crazy past year and a bit. Love you all!

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Here's a character who has been a part of Imperium's lore for about as long as I've been coming up with lore for Imperium. He's gone through a few iterations over the last decade or so (entirely in my head, since I never drew or wrote anything with him in it), but the core concept has always been to have one of Elarel's generals be a slippery, opportunistic sleazebag who is never short on schemes and who makes a lot of shady deals with mortals. I intended him to be -sort of- a foil to Elarel, and by that I mean someone equally devious who she doesn't like but also tolerates for one reason or another. Maybe he has dirt on her, or maybe he's just competent at his job and she doesn't consider him a real threat. It's possible there'll be content somewhere down the line that develops this dynamic between the two of them more thoroughly, but for now, that's the synopsis.

Originally I didn't have much of a mental image of him beyond a large generic-water-elemental-but-muddy, and this remained the case up until a couple of years ago when I was working on the Night Market update. I'd considered giving him a cameo appearance in that update, since it's his slime labyrinth that you get to rampage through as Linda, but I had too much else I wanted to put into that update already. That was the point where I started imagining him first as a giant salamander type creature and then more specifically an axolotl. Once again, I think it was the lush caves in Minecraft that got me thinking in this direction, but there was also the thought of 'hehe wouldn't it be funny if the artist named after their Axolotl OC made another axolotl OC years later (except this one was butt-ugly)?? That would be probably sort of amusing, maybe.'

I decided around this time that it made sense to have Brack's domain be the deepest depths of the sewers/caves under Ironfruit Jungle, since I didn't have any other locations in mind, and this way he could have an influence on a number of factions befitting his role as a sort of 'don' pulling strings with the mortal races. From there, it just made sense that he'd be involved in the Caretakers organization, which is how it came to pass that he became a minor part of the Caretakers questline, which you'll get to complete in this update!

After all of that, this image of him is still the first time I've ever drawn Brack, and I'd say the result definitely does justice to what I had in mind. Yet his design also somehow ended up even sleazier than I'd envisioned. Part of that I will attribute to all the true crime podcasts I was binging while drawing him (and Apollo) to get in a grittier headspace. But I also believe it's because I wrote his scenes before I did this art, and he came out as such a grumpy old newt in those scenes that it inevitably trickled into his design. It took him over a decade, but the Duke of Mud has finally emerged from the depths of my psyche, at just the right time to become the nasty sewer dwelling slimelord that Imperium deserves(?)