This is a concept doodle from the book.
The crystalline forest called the Darklight Forest, lives up to its name. This petrified forest glows with an awe-inspiring passion. Blue, purple, and pink grasses litter the floor. Swollen translucent bulbs of starlight get ready to burst when the season changes. Glass trunks of crimson pulse as though the fluid beneath the facets get pumped through by a beating heart hidden somewhere within the stony roots. A twinkling starlit canopy dares a beast to climb through the dense number of razor-like leaves.
Seemingly impassable, poisonous even, this is the Wolf King's front lawn.
These lapin are anything but normal. Larger than a rabbit but smaller than a hare, these thick-legged creatures are anything but the species they represent.
Antagonizing these lapin creatures is a mistake of epic proportion. The potential threat will find their fur and flesh freezing over merely by remaining within proximity to a Thumper. One breath of the fluid air that accumulates around a Thumper-Noble and the threat's lungs will turn to ice. Swelling this frigid power far beyond a veil around their body, these lapin easily send forward the chill with mere willpower. Metal soldering will snap, vapor in the air will glimmer into crystals, and any organic material will shatter into dust.
This may all sound incredibly powerful but you should know, this ability to endlessly attract all of the nitrogen in an area is nothing compared to when one of these lapin puts their foot down. If an enemy ever wishes to know what the land looks like with a shattered bedrock foundation, coax a Thumper-Noble into drumming his or her feet. If their bones survive the vibrations of this quake and their flesh fares well against the freezing aura, the threat will certainly not survive the cannon shell that is the rabbit's foot as it missiles toward them.
Did you know that I pretty much had to teach myself how to make digital art? You do not even want to know how long this took me to figure out! (more than half a year)
I tried many tricks. I would finish an area and save and take a break for a few days, then I would come back and absolutely despise what I had done earlier, but at the same time, I would get an idea of what I would need to do in order to fix and improve the area I was working on. After a time of getting one small done at a time, I would sit back and admire that section. By the time I had finished the ghost-snake's left arm, I knew I was only at about 10% or 15% the way to completion and I had already put a month of effort into this project. I am still amazed that a guy with no official training in digital art could just wing it with paint brush and smudge tools to acquire this level of detail. This shoulder alone took me maybe 15 hours alone to figure out and I was not even done giving it all the smoke detail later on.
