Empress Noshva of Vider - Concept 1

This is a concept for Noshva, the empress of the province of Vider on Raktogin in my RAVAGE AND REQUIEM series.

When Drixilo fell from the Unleztruv, he sought to mock Unzelkoyte, the creator of Raktogin and the spiritual planes known as the Anli realms, by trying to create angels of his own and style himself as a god. To Drixilo's chagrin, however, he was only successful in molding preexisting matter, such as fire, water, stone, and other things into certain shapes and infusing them with his twisted dark essence. As a result, Noshva was born, a demonic amalgamation of ice and other natural elements tainted by Drixilo's influence. Despite his frustration with his failure to manifest beings to his full preference, Drixilo was nevertheless proud of his "creation."

Unlike Gyeno, the Drixilian emperor of Goena, who deals in machinating the industries of humankind, Noshva's expertise is seeping into the natural elements of Raktogin and haunting the environment and possessing wildlife. In Ancient Raktogin, witches, druids, and cultists of the boreal arctic East revered Noshva as a goddess of nature, as her abilities consisted of imbuing and manipulating the surrounding tundras, taigas, and frozen oceans with her power, leading many to believe the land itself was alive. As much as Drixilo desired to replicate his "angel," he knew that his powers, as vast and daunting as they seemed, were limited due to his fall from the Unleztruv. Drixilo eventually appointed Noshva as the tetrarch of the glacial wastes of Vider after the Drixiles' Second Surfacing, where she accumulated mortal Drixilac worshipers, ranging from witches, wayward druids, and even genetic engineers and technicians eager to utilize Noshva's dark esoteric knowledge of biology and nature itself.

Noshva and her followers inhabit a dystopian hi-tech cluster of gothic complexes, biospheres, and facilities in the snowy mountains, all surrounding her surreal stronghold: a massive armillary sphere nestled within the gnarled boughs of a gargantuan, enigmatic "world tree." The branches of Noshva's stronghold reach up through the thick storm clouds, past the vibrant green streaks of the aurora borealis, and into the cosmic Anli itself, perturbing the fabric of the planes of existence and syphoning power from the spirit realms to fuel the Viderians' nightmarish experiments within Noshva's bleak laboratories.

Though not electronic like a man-made machine, Noshva's personality is nevertheless cold, calculating, and robotic, utterly devoid of emotion. Such a disposition is in stark contrast with one of her fellow Drixilian tetrarchs, Maethel, the draconic, ill-tempered empress of the volcanic wastes of Tauldren.

NOTE: The RAVAGE AND REQUIEM novels feature Noshva with four slender black eye slits, two pairs of eyes, one on top of the other. This concept features her with only one pair of eyes. I plan to do another concept of Noshva in the future showing these four eye slits.