Not every character here lives at the same extreme. That's deliberate. We wanted the release to stay balanced: a few who push things as far as they'll go, and others who hold a more classical line. The classical ones aren't the lesser ones. They're there to anchor the whole thing.
Drystan and Nyriel are those anchors. But classical doesn't mean we didn't have fun with them. Take Drystan: every so often, some of you tell us the same thing, you make so many beautiful women, could we have a few handsome men too? He's our answer.
Masculine and athletic, clearly built, but just as elegant, with long straight hair falling far down his back and a bearing that tells you he knows exactly how good he looks. We drew here on a certain kind of Japanese manga, where a character can feel refined, almost androgynous, and unmistakably masculine all at once. The idea was to lean fully into seduction. To give you a sort of warrior dandy.
The others go much further. Kaelis among them, leaning into everything that makes this faction so unsettling. There's a thread running through them: these are beings who walked away from their own bodies long ago, yet remain endlessly fascinated by flesh, forever trying to wring out of living things something they themselves have lost.
Xazariah is where that idea turns physical. She keeps her full elven body, legs and all, drifting weightless in the void, yet from the waist she's fused into the body of an enormous spider. An arachnid centaur, of a kind.
She's the one who builds the Gruesome Arachnos (see below), experimenting on living flesh to make them.
Sylanxia we designed as a gothic bride. A gown that could pass for a wedding dress, a veil drawn across half her face, a single tear of red crystal on her cheek. Even her weapon, a sheath bristling with hologlass shards, reads almost like a bridal bouquet.
She's a deliberate mystery: why the cursed bride? What is she doing among humans? Her motives clearly run deeper, and stranger, than anyone else's here.
Mal-Akor is unmistakably vampiric. At his feet, a victim lies half-swallowed by a gluey, living web, picture Venom's symbiote, and through it he seems to drain the soul, or the raw energy, of whatever he catches.
Xarith-Zian, the Phase Dancer of the Splinter, slips in and out of reality. We caught her mid-arrival: an explosion bursting from her open palm, her body not even fully materialized, pieces of her simply missing, as a rain of hologlass lances falls behind her.
If one model captures the whirling, multidimensional strangeness of the Void Elves, it's her.
Kaelara opens micro-portals at her wrists. She plunges a hand into one, and that hand, along with the blade it holds, reappears somewhere else entirely. In her scene, she's carving a hapless opponent into ribbons, bounding around him while her hands roam the empty air and catch him completely by surprise.
And there's Harpies' Queen Nys-Ra:
One more thing: if I had to point to the two strangest models in the whole release, it would be these two. Xarith-Zian and Kaelara. They're the clearest sign of where this faction is heading.
The Troops
With the Troops, I'll be honest: we let ourselves have some fun. We've already covered a lot of ground across the previous releases, so this time we focused on giving you alternatives that are either even more striking, or something else entirely.
The Eclipsers on Jet Bikes fall squarely into the first camp.
The Void Scythe Harpies fall into the second, and, led by their Queen Nys-Ra, they're quite possibly one of the most beautiful units we've ever made.
And for those of you who like your creatures big, menacing, and just a little repugnant: the Gruesome Arachnos are waiting for you. The very things Xazariah builds in her experiments.
