Varin’s Oath of Vengeance

My new painting, set in the Dragonlance fandom for a custom D&D campaign, where we see one of the main characters, the kagonesti elf Varin, committing herself to an Oat of Vengeance. Commissioned by A. T.

Varin is at a sacred grove of the Beast Lord called Dark Raven, a favored companion of Habbakuk’s; it is the time of her initiation. She sits beside a pool of water and the Hand of Kinthalas reaches out of the water, clutching the obsidian sword blade. She grips it tight enough to draw blood.

(To see the original, NSFW, painting, click here.)

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Gallery

“Coming to terms with a prophecy regarding her future, Varin enters an initiatory rite of passage amongst her tribe. Learning what awaits her in the near future, and the lethal choices she will need to make on behalf of her people’s freedom, she foregoes the patronage of their ancestral guardian— and instead, Varin chooses violence. Making an oath of vengeance with a dark goddess, binding herself through blood, she chooses the relentlessness, wrath, and strength, which will bring her short life dramatically down upon the untouchable enemies of freedom, whose cities she sees burning in vision, whose river boils in the wake of her revolution.”
A.T.

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About Varin – born to a space between sheltered enslavement and some degree of privilege as the illegitimate daughter of a noble of Silvanost and an enslaved Kagonesti mother, Varin knew both the total absence of autonomy, freedom, and the stationed tolerance of diminished consequence. In this polarized place of “more free than others” and “still not free”, her disposition is one of contrasting polarities, and internal oppositions: she has been direly “without” in fundamental areas of life, and yet in others, “provided with”. For half a century she dedicated herself to using the privileges from her paternal line to aid the underworld of Silvanost, which serves the lowest classes, toward liberation, uprising, and reform-by-revolt: she is a member of an elite guild of rogues, specializing in the “redistribution of wealth and persons”, including and especially the exporting of those in need of sanctuary from Silvanost to safer places abroad, through an organized network. Varin was shot through the shoulder with an arrow, and wound up healing it by passing a blue Phoenix feather (consecrated to Habbakuk) through it, and while it healed the wound, it left the star-burst type markings behind

About the Oath – At this time in her journey, Varin is committing herself, by way of sacred oath, to the goddess of vengeance, Kinthalas (aka Sargonnas). She has accepted her destiny, as a revolutionary leader who will die for her people, and has “chosen violence” and the ferocity of the dark god, in lieu of the blessings of the Blue Phoenix, who she also has devotions toward. Becoming one of the Chosen of Kinthalas, the Champion of Kinthalas, Varin has chosen to forego much of the blessings she might otherwise have enjoyed as a dedicated hero of Habbakuk— but, she has done so with the Blue Phoenix’s blessings, for he agrees that some situations, and some destinies, are better served with unrelenting violence.

About the scene– We are on the sloping forests west of the Northern Kharolis mountains, between the Solvin River and the Wilder River. She is physically at a sacred grove of the Beast Lord (demigod) called Dark Raven, a favored companion of Habbakuk’s; it is the time of her initiation (Kentommen, rites of passage) and she is being adopted into a free tribe of Kagonesti, having recently escaped slavery in Silvanost. She sits beside a pool of water, a natural and rough sacred spring, beneath a grassy and mossy overhang in a raised hill. The Hand of Kinthalas: an elven woman’s arm, muscular and with red-skin, tattooed with black ink in the Kagonesti styles, reaches out of the water, clutching the obsidian sword blade. she grips it tight enough to draw blood. Varin’s blood flows down against Kinthalas’s; below the god’s hand, their blood flows down the blade’s length together, to the ground. It gradually becomes less like blood, and more like veins of molten lava, flowing down against the obsidian and pooling at the point where the sword point goes into the ground. Their blood mingles together in a dark version of  how Arthurian myth deals with kingship and “the rightful sovereign” with the sword Excalibur; but here, Varin is made not a king, but an elevated Champion, the Chosen of Kinthalas, the sensual and violent goddess of vengeance, rather than the placid/ghostly “lady of the lake”.

About Silvanost – Even though the scene takes place in the Kalkist mountains, Varin has a vision, and she sees Silvanost, burning and drowning in blood: this is why we share Varin’s vision of some elven tower-tops peaking out from the trees in the distance. The blood of Varin and the god’s hand flows away from Varin and the spring; the scene becomes more abstract now, depicting a sacred vision or dream which Varin receives during her ritual initiation, of the “molten blood” flowing from her into the rivers around Silvanost, thousands of miles to the East, as the city burns with fires of the revolution that she will lead. Curving across the ground which becomes distant/abstract, the blood is fading into a background which shows the heavily forested city of Silvanost in the distance, white towers peaking up through the trees, with the might rivers around it “receiving the red” of the molten blood. she sees her blood, molten and burning with Kinthalas’s blood and power, flowing as lava and fire and vengeance toward Silvanost, through the branches of the might Thon Thalas River surrounding the city (which have for too long protected it, sheltered it). The city is a distant dream-like abstraction, a vision: its towers merely distant vibrance sticking out from the forest.

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Artwork created on 20/03/2022
Copyright Elena Zambelli “Greenedera” #noai

Last page edit 13/06/2023