#prelude to abbadon

[activatebutterflyshield]

Drew up a new ref for Prelude to Abbadon as I revisit my endless pile of abandoned characters

It gets real teef now, and will probably end up with more eyes somewhere

[guild-guardian]

OH man.  Oh my dude.  My friend..... This patch ticked so many of my boxes.... But I have some thoughts and they’re beneath a cut!

First up, here are my thoughts from the trailer those abbadon statues  ----Confirmed.  THis probably rules out Lyssa being part of Balthman’s shenanigans -- ?? maybe confirmed maybe not since it straight up says “one left behind” That looks like a Jade armor but mixed with primordus or Balthazar’s magic -- Magma Elemental.

The first male voice who is it? Male Norn Player character /Matt Mercer

-irrelevant.

the 2nd is QJ Anise -  ---Confirmed. so I assumed it was logan The dark haired human ghost Could that be Queen Salma? --nope or perhaps a Female Orrian?  ---Confirmed. ---Confirmed. ---Confirmed. (CAUSE WE HAVENT MET ONE YET JUST SAYING) thaaat looks like a new dragon model at 0:58  ---Confirmed.  (Unchained Wyvern) I hesitate to suggest “bone dragon” because it looks rotten fleshy but its got a different head than taco and the plague bringers Overgrown sylvari orr confirmed (TEARS OF JOY) -  ---Confirmed. That voice at the endsounds like Livia from EOTN  ---Confirmed. “are you ready to fulfil a prophecy” TENNO   ---Confirmed.

Episode Cons:

Still didn’t get the fucking “Champion of Orr” title. Damnit Reza, did you forget about me?

The lack of player choice in joining the shining blade was a bit hamfisted.

It would have been nice that even if the player declined, a strong rationale could be made for joining and changing their mind.

If the god’s scoured abbadon’s mention from the history books, why are there great fucking statues of him all over eastern Orr? 

Ok well they kind of explain that as “they couldn’t destroy his monuments without destroying their own” or sth....but hmm.

Thats it for the things I didn’t like 

oh

THAT FUKKIN PUZZLE I did not enjoy it lmao. 

Episode Pros:

So many storylines got tied up in this finale; Eye of Janthir, the Mursaat, Livia and the Scepter of Orr, what happened to the royal ghosts of Orr, Firstborn Dagonet being *useful* somewhere for the first time, the aspects of lazarus, the end of the white mantle, closure on Valette Wi, Dessa and the Fractals?? ok lets go slow.

The eye of janthir- i love that i came back and that the raid storyline preludes it in the first place, that was real neat. 

Lazarus and the Extinction of the Mursaat. I honestly thought they’d be dragging this out forever. Not the final battle I expected but definitely one I enjoyed. 

Some might think his dialogue was a bit...immature? But I thought his playful, arrogant snipes at Livia (and her hair) was totally in character for that floating malignant asshole. 

Livia. Ever since hearing the voice actress in the trailer, we knew it. We fucking knew it. So that kind of  weakened her reveal. But her character was so well played it blew everyone else out of the water. Not to mention her Necro/Mesmer build she had going with hexes and necro abilities ripped out of GW1. 

I loved how the Shining Blade got added to the lore and give some reality, far more than any other legendary weapon. The first that is really legendary. 

King Reza being best friends with Dagonet would be a great set of short stories tbh, one ancient king of orr, one a plant. It could be beautiful. Dagonet has spent the last 5 years afk in Divinity’s reach so its nice to see him relevant! 

I liked how this ep had Livia with her own agenda, working on her own gathering the aspects. its nice to see people other than the player taking an active hand in reality. 

Braham was only talked about and never once showed up. A+

I loved the WM training camp/abandoned fortress north of Brisban. That was a really cool way to be like “yo, that broken bridge probably leads here and thats why its remained broken” the overall map re-used Wing 3 raid assets, but it a new way that made the environment feel really original.

That fractal ending, oh my god. Actually the whole fractal was really amazing, the fights were much harder than I expected though!

Dessa and her son just sitting down, staring into oblivion and resetting. 

Acknowledging their own deaths? That they’re doomed to repeat endlessly? 

Yikes. 

My heart. 

Small things I loved; the amount of written lore that expands on previous lore in this map. The lost parables of the gods, shining blade handbook and everything intractable in the HQ. 

The dirges and mastery makes me feel like they sewed in a bit of Legend of Zelda and it makes me happy. Also that spot above the waterfall is so pretty. 

Bring on August 1st!

Also is this idk, a Balthazar glint? is he like doing something to her corpse? Or is it Gleam? Since when are there Pyramids in the Crystal desert? hmm Maybe the forgotten’s outposts? hmm. 

[modern-days]

VOLUME FOUR: GODS, MONSTERS & MEN

Q. Volume Four opens with issue # 32, both an interlude and prelude issue.

It opens in the distant past. Chronologically this is the first time we meet the Morningstar family. It takes place entirely in the Crystal City. It’s where we meet Sariel, who is the youngest of the Morningstar family and where we first see the family home, WinterSong.

I also knew that in this volume and the next we were going to see a lot more of Abbadon. In the previous volumes he’d only been glimpsed briefly, so before he turned up properly in the present day I wanted a deeper look into his character and his reasons for beginning the uprising in the first place. It was a nice opportunity to explain both his background and the background to why he took the path he did.

Q. Interestingly, that path turns out not to come from political or power based reasons, but from a devastating personal loss he suffers. Was the ill fated Sariel Morningstar always part of the plan?

Not to sound like I was making this up as I went along, but Sariel really didn’t exist until I began planning this issue. She originally came about to solve a story problem, which was that I really didn’t have a personal reason for Abbadon doing what he was doing. It is partly political and comes out of his frustration with a stagnating society but predominantly it’s to do with the fear and suspicion of the unknown that prevents him going off to The Dark to find his missing sister.

Q. It goes deeper than that too. He’s partly driven by guilt as well, isn‘t he?

Sariel is young and impressionable. She wants dearly to prove herself to him and believes, as he does, that angels should not fear the unknown, that they should explore, so of course, tragically, to prove her worth she goes off to The Dark alone, totally unprepared and is lost.

Q. The others accept her loss, but Abbadon refuses and goes to The Dark in search of her. He barely survives and returns much changed.

I guess it’s almost an origin story for him in a way. The Abbadon that returns from The Dark is not the same person we see in the early scenes.

What he sees there and endures there affects him profoundly and he also comes back physically changed, with his prominent face scar and his hair now being white. I liked the fact that it was a physical change too, as it kind of implied something of the old him had died in The Dark.

Q. It ends with a particularly nice touch as well when we realise the whole issue has been a story Sam is telling Mercy in The Twister Trap.

Yeah, and as Sam is leaving she tells Mercy from this point on the story gets a lot more interesting, which of course is me talking to the reader.

Q. The story of Volume Four begins properly with issue # 33 where we catch up with Gwen, who’s been absent since the end of issue # 21.

It’s funny, it wasn’t intended as an interlude issue but it really feels like one in a way as it mostly focuses on Gwen and Redgrave’s road trip. Firstly, I wanted to properly re-introduce Gwen without the other regular characters clogging things up. She’s been away for ten issues by this point so I wanted to remind people who she was and what she’s about and I thought the best way to do that was to have her as far away as possible, which was her intention at the end of issue # 21 anyway.

Q. Throughout the issue her story interweaves with her mother‘s, as Epiphany stumbles out into the world for the first time in twenty years.  

It was a nice to re-establish their relationship family wise and to show how on some level they’re connected, as was hinted at in Volume Two with Gwen’s dreams. I like how we see things as Epiphany does, off kilter and basically just a jumble of images, and how she only perceives the city through her disorientated state, like the Hell like landscape and when she sees the group of street thugs as demons to be slain.

Q. In the second half of the issue we also have some nice call backs to Volume Two with cameos from Sister Midnight and Henry Jones.

It was really nice to write those characters again, however briefly, and having them gave it a similar flavour to Volume Two, which is what I wanted.

Q. Issue # 34 bookends with the return of deranged Morningstar, Absalom. The opening begins on the day Mount Vesuvivus erupted, reminds us of the events of 1888 and then brings up to the present day where he now resides in the SunnySide Sanatorium.

I had that opening scene in my head for a long time, possibly since I was writing issue # 6. I always knew he had a pretty tragic back story and a very good reason for being as deranged as he was, and I wanted to briefly show him again here as I knew he’d play a bigger part later on.

He’s the chaos aspect of the family. He’s not bad as such, he’s just damaged.

Q. After featuring in a few previous issues Skye also plays a bigger role.

I’d wanted her to play a bigger part in things since she first appeared in issue # 8, but until this volume it always felt forced so she just got the odd scene here and there. I really like writing the relationship between her and Solomon and hinting that they have an interesting past.

Q. Issue # 35, ‘All The Best Angels Have Daddy Issues’ is one of my favourite titles. How do the titles come about? What’s the process?

Most times I’ll have a pretty good idea of what happens in each issue so I’ll write up a list of various titles, just jotting things down, experimenting. There are certain titles that just feel right for ‘Modern Days.’ It’s not something I can properly explain or put my finger on, I just know when a title feels right, that it’s got the right flavour. It’s the exact same process I have with book titles, song titles and character names.

Q. A lot of seeds planted in Volume Two and Three begin to come to fruition here, things seem to get more epic yet more personal at the same time. Was this a juxtaposition you were aiming for?

Yeah, in a way. Like I said before, the story of ‘Modern Days’ at it most basic level is always a story about a family, but right from the start I always wanted to address the big stuff as well, so I’m constantly trying to balance that, to keep it to an earth bound perspective if I can.

You won’t get many big battle scenes and wide shots of battling armies in this series, issue # 50 being the one major exception, it’s just not what it’s about, and when it is I’m very careful that it’s seen from the characters point of view and that they’re also directly involved. I just naturally gravitate toward character stuff over action stuff.

Q. Issue # 36 reveals a surprising past relationship between Odin and Skye and it’s also strongly hinted that she once had a very different persona. We don’t learn her true identity until issue # 54.

That was another idea that wasn’t planned at all, much like Sariel. I just wanted to bring her back, but while writing her vision of Asgard in issue # 34 I suddenly realised that it used to be home, and that she used to be a very different person, a person of nobility. It’s not a major mystery but I think fans of Norse mythology can work out who she is.

Q. Issue  # 37 feels like you’re experimenting and having fun with things.

I’d wanted to experiment with a different way of writing the comic for a while.

I knew this issue was coming up and figured it would be perfect to try some of those different approaches. There’s no panels or captions on some pages and I wrote them far closer to being illustrated prose with a series of images that bleed into each other with the words positioned as near as possible to the images as the artist can get with it.

I wanted the artwork itself to be very different as well, with pages that had no colour at all, just using stark black and white and grey. I remember for part of it I very much had a Charles Addams style in mind.

In other parts I also wanted to invoke the work of the great Alfred Bestall and his work on the classic Rupert stories, and just like with those stories there’s no word balloons and the descriptions and dialogue are set beneath the panels. And the colours are in direct contrast to those starker pages being quite bright, vibrant, very fairytale.

Q. Later in the issue you also invoke the world created by Lewis Carol, not strictly adhering to the landscape and images but gently nodding toward the iconography, just enough for people to get it.

Yeah, there’s no borders, no word balloons, with the story being told through the prose. Again, it’s more like an illustrated book with the prose beneath each image. The dialogue itself is based on the dialogue in the books. I might be wrong but I think it worked really well.

Q. Jim Bob, Portland and Dwayne make a return in this issue, don’t they?

They do indeed, I just can’t imagine writing the Void without them now.

Q. Issue # 38 introduces us to the Godless Angels and their leader, Raphael.

Yeah, both issue # 32 and # 39 both directly flashback to the war so I wanted to approach it differently here, get more of a feeling of where the various angel factions are in the present as opposed to where they were.

In a lots of ways Volume Four is all about getting answers to those questions that have been quietly bubbling away since at least Volume Two.

For Lucy, the biggest question is about what part Abbadon plays in all of this. Is he really behind all of this? Did he really do the things they say he did? Once she has those answers she’ll decide how to act on them.

Q. There’s a lovely little scene in the Twister Trap between Red -grave and Anna.

That came out of a story problem I had. I had everyone else off doing other things, but both poor Redgrave and Anna had been left behind, so I started thinking about what I could do with them and just how they were gonna end up in the same place as the others by the end of the volume. I also wanted to bring Ellie back into the story somehow, so it occurred to me that I could simply bring those elements together.

It’s one of those pure character scenes I love writing. At first glance these two characters are pretty different but if you scratch the surface you see they’re also quite alike in some ways too when it comes down to it.

Q. We also learn that Abbadon is a more troubled soul that he outwardly appears as it’s revealed he sees the ghost of his sister, Sariel.

Yeah, like I said, guilt is a major factor in everything he does, specifically his guilt of knowing his influence possibly led to Sariel’s fate. Unlike the rest of his family he still can’t really bring himself to believe she’s dead, even after all this time, he needs to believe she’s just lost.

Q. Issue #39 is another interlude issue and is a follow up to issue # 32, though this time it jumps between before the war and the last days of the war. What was the thinking behind doing it this way?

Just a need to keep it interesting for myself, to keep challenging myself. I gave myself three rules when I started this, the first was never to repeat myself if possible, to keep trying new things, the second was that every issue feature a member of the Morningstar family, and thirdly that every issue not follow directly on from the previous one. I like the idea of not resolving a cliffhanger straight away.

Q. It goes into detail of how the war began and what happened during it.

Yeah, I wanted to get some of this stuff into it before we got into the final issues of Volume Four. I really wanted to show that moment where Abbadon finally turned, that moment when he made that decision.

Q. I really like the reveal that Lucy’s tear drop tattoo is in memory of Sariel.

Well, Lucy had never mentioned Sariel in the series, or shown any feeling about that loss, so I kind of wanted to address that, to show that even though she doesn’t say it that loss cut her pretty deep. Sariel was her younger sister after all. Up until this issue I’m not sure I had any intention of showing how she got that tattoo and what it means, but after writing the scene with the memorial on the hill it just came to me.

Q. Issue # 40 feels like another riff on Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol.’

It certainly is, although that only occurred to me after I’d finished it! I’m beginning to think that story is so deeply ingrained in my subconscious that sometimes I don’t even realise that’s what I’m doing.

I really wanted him to be visited by some old ghosts and I wanted him to get a better insight about Epiphany and why she is the way she is.

Q. It’s also an important step toward the decision he makes in issue # 42.

Yeah, because that’s such a major thing for him to consider doing, taking a life, even if it is for the greater good. I really wanted to make sure that I’d built up to that properly, so when it happened it felt justified.

Q. Issue # 41 opens with a flashback of Gabriel and Solomon meeting in the Devil’s Crow pub in London 1898 and reveals when Gabriel first gave Solomon the ancient box that was first introduced way back in issue # 2. Was it always planned out this way?

This is one of the few things that was planned out from the very beginning and unlike some of the others it barely changed at all. I always knew right from the start what was going to happen to Gabriel, I wasn’t exactly sure about the how or the why but I knew that was going to happen to him. What I also knew was that he was going to come back in some capacity so I began setting that up really early.

Q. You also begin seeding in the growing division between Sam and Abbadon.  

We really get to see who Sam is through her relationship with her twin brother, Absalom. Abbadon though sees Absalom as an unwanted problem, the sand in the gears of his plan. It’s clear he doesn’t want Absalom around and would be more than happy to see him still imprisoned. It’s on realising this that Sam’s loyalty begins to waver, she begins to wonder if Abbadon’s claims of doing all this to bring their family back together is all it seems and if he’s been misleading her.

Q. Issue # 42 is the last issue of Volume Four and a major turning point.

That’s also something that was planned really early, back when I was sketching out the whole story from beginning to end and I knew that it was going to be one of those tent poles that would take things to a different level. As soon as I knew it was going to be five volumes the end of this volume just seemed the natural place for this thing to happen.

Q. In hindsight it’s foreshadowed pretty early on, in issue # 7 in fact.

Yeah, I stole that from Neil Gaiman, it’s the same trick he used when foreshadowing Dream’s death and Daniel’s transformation into the new Dream. The only difference is I foreshadowed it a lot earlier. I guess in a way it’s obliquely foreshadowed as early as issue # 2 with the ancient box, but of course we don’t find out what that is for a long time.

Q. Throughout the series several characters have commented on Gabriel having given up in a sense, that since the tragedy with Epiphany and his part in it, he’s been looking for some kind of end.

I purposefully set that up knowing full well what was coming. Since she ended up in the coma he hasn’t really been living, he’s just been existing, he‘s just been taking each day as it comes, like he‘s stuck in some kind of limbo, either waiting for her to wake up or to die, and his guilt of being a flawed father plays a huge part in the choices he makes.

Q. If he goes to WinterSong he’s possibly walking into a trap but he goes anyway. Does he want to be punished? Is that a part of it?

That’s a huge part of it. He feels responsible for what happened to Epiphany then and to what’s happening to her now. He feels he failed her. He wants to make that right, he desperately wants her to understand. If that means him paying a high price then that’s what he’ll do.

Q. So, what happens is definitely very much an ending for him then?

Absolutely, that was always the plan. The Gabriel we’ve come to know for 42 issues has come to an end. He’s gone. It’s not the final end though, which is why I set certain things up, but this version of him is gone forever. It won’t be easy, if he does return he won’t be the angel he was.  

Interviewed by Jeff Scott

[activatebutterflyshield]

All of my character refs for my first Artfight!

Top to bottom, left to right: Robyn Farmer-Turnkey, Ernest Killingsworth, Zachary Zhou, Taylor Scott Victory, Paris Saint-George, Selene Velásquez, Prelude to Abbadon, Contradiction, Nocturne of Saturnalia, and Monument.

My user is ButterflyShield, let us see how long my supplies and hand last.

[activatebutterflyshield]

This is mostly about a single name I’ve been spinning in my head for the past 36 hours or thereabouts. Abaddon the Rhapsody, or Apollyon the Rhapsode if you want to get Greek about it.

It would be connected to Prelude to Abbadon, the little Scapegoat fallen angel who wanders the post-apocalyptic land of Layer Epsilon. Prelude was supposed to foretell the apocalypse, the Abbadon, but they arrived on the material earth about two years too late. And so something in the vast universe would have to form to replace the Abbadon they sing of.

That something would be the Rhapsody, neither fallen angel nor demon ascendant. A being from outside all but Human imagination. An existence that fulfills the role of “great apocalyptic change” in the minds of those who remain in a world ravaged by magic from across realities.

Angels on the brain.

[activatebutterflyshield]

Abbadon/Apollyon is the name of an angel of the void and the bottomless pit. The Rhapsode would be empty space given form, a lack of an apocalypse made manifest to fulfill the duty of its Prelude. And if Abbadon is a Rhapsody, its title would be fitting.

A Rhapsode is one who recites epic poetry, tales of history and heroes given rhythm and shape. Apollyon would be a saga made conscious, a function given form to maintain the reality its Prelude now sings in.

Angels on the brain.