Study After Priestess Leoba Ascelina the First Witnessed Leandrade

Study After Priestess Leoba Ascelina the First Witnessed Leandrade, 2025. Brown ink on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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Leoba is the most devout and scrupulous of the three priestesses in Ashes and Dust. During her childhood, she had spiritual visions of the goddess Lucca and the Returned, episodes that embarrassed her wealthy burgeis family and led to her being sent to an Enshrinement academy to train as a priestess during her 12th reading. At the academy, her visions grew less and less frequent, and Leoba believed that she had done something wrong and lost the goddess’s favor.

Assigned to the ruined shrine in the war-torn city of Zabool after her ordination, Leoba rarely leaves the shrine’s grounds and spends her time in quiet contemplation and prayer while making sure the candles and incense cones stay lit. She wears dozens of medals of the Returned on and under her clerical outfit, along with several portable reliquaries containing their remains. She even gave up her family name to take on the name of one of the Returned in the hope of regaining the goddess’s favor and experiencing spiritual visions again. She still has occasional strange experiences, though — the game begins with Leoba having a prophetic dream:

“Oooh, ash blew into the shrine from under the door and formed a pile in the middle of the sanctuary! The ashes came together to form the body of a girl! She tried to say something, but all I could hear was, ‘ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh!’ She was standing on her tiptoes and gesturing like she was saying something important, but I couldn’t understand any of it! Then her body exploded and sent ashes all over the shrine, and Archpriestess Vinfrithe made me clean it all up!”

— Leoba

Leoba’s brother, a military officer, taught her how to do “knife tricks” with balanced throwing daggers. Leoba claims to have the goddess’s protection and to never have been hurt while juggling knives, but because she wears silk gloves that she never takes off when anyone else is around, nobody knows if she has any scars hidden underneath or not.

This drawing is a new pen and ink drawing based on an in-game graphic of Leoba from 2020.

Study After Priestess Teccla Kitzingen

Study After Priestess Teccla Kitzingen, 2025. Brown ink on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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The Vaster Conspiracy is hardly the only story set in the world of Neith. Two years before beginning that novel, I worked on another story, Ashes and Dust, which was meant to be an adventure game featuring three priestesses of Lucca who the player could swap between to solve puzzles and open locked reliquaries to unveil a larger mystery.

Some of my designs for Ashes and Dust, such as Enshrinement clerical outfits, phylacteries, reliquaries, and shrine architecture, have persisted and show up in The Vaster Conspiracy when Vaster visits a shrine and meets the priestesses Cinehilde and Miccola.

Teccla, one of the game’s three playable characters, is mentioned in the scene in which Vaster meets Archpriestess Cinehilde:

“Meissa leaned in and examined the cover of Cinehilde’s book, which featured golden Zeelean letters embossed into the brown leather. ‘Oh... Teccla, did she send you more books?’

’I don’t know how she gets away with misusing shrine funds to send me these all the way from Zabool, but I appreciate it!’

’There are shrines all the way in Zabool?’

Cinehilde set the book on her lap and looked up at Vaster. ‘There are shrines in every city on Neith. The Enshrinement maintains the Goddess Lucca’s presence in the world, all across the world.’”

This drawing is a new pen and ink version of a pencil sketch I initially did of Teccla for the game in 2020.

Study of Walcher Balgrave the Augur

Study of Walcher Balgrave the Augur, 2025. Brown ink, Conté, colored pencil, and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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In The Vaster Conspiracy, Walcher Balgrave serves as the shadow of the protagonist, art counterfeiter Vaster Vrain. An astrologer/fortune teller with an uncanny ability to remember flashes of possible futures, Walcher seeks to control the course of history by manipulating people and events according to his predictions and those of his blind sister, Elsasara, who has even stronger prognosticative abilities. This is in direct contrast to Vaster, who becomes obsessed with hallucinating events from the past to solve a deeply personal mystery.

Vaster and Walcher shadow one another in other ways, too: while Vaster dresses in flashy designer clothes he can barely afford, Walcher wears the humble ink-dyed robes of an augur despite his wealth; while Vaster has a self-destructive taste for Sperrin whisky, Walcher exclusively drinks medicinal Kinarin tonic.

Study of Balladine in Brown Ink

Study of Balladine in Brown Ink, 2025. Brown ink and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.

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This is the first work that I’ve made in color since August of 2023. According to Pantone, brown is a color, right?

Balladine changes her look from time to time: I wanted to see how she looked with her hair worn back rather than parted in the middle as usual.

I went on to develop this into a charcoal, mixed media, and gouache drawing. See my post about it or the finished drawing.

In Dreams: David Lynch In Memoriam

A notification from the Times stunned me into awareness from an afternoon nap with its deadpan delivery of crushing news: “David Lynch, avant-garde filmmaker, dies at 78.”

I’ve written about Lynch and his work on several occasions: most notably, I reviewed his 2019 exhibition, Squeaky Flies in the Mud, at Sperone Westwater for Hyperallergic. I had the privilege of meeting Lynch during the show’s opening reception. I wish I could say that we had a deep conversation about the nature of creativity, but we briefly talked about furniture and whether one of the lamps in the exhibition had been used as a prop in Twin Peaks: The Return or not.

More recently, I wrote about how Lynch ended Twin Peaks: The Return for Digitally Downloaded. I hadn’t imagined that this would be the ending not only of Twin Peaks, but of Lynch’s cinematic oeuvre. A state of confusion, a scream, and the lights cut out. The end.

Aside from Twin Peaks, the Lynch film that affected me the most was Blue Velvet. In his autobiography, Lynch wrote about filming Blue Velvet after the commercial and critical failure of Dune, a quote that resonates with me and my present life situation:

“After Dune I was so far down that anything was up!

So it was just a euphoria.

And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment.”

— David Lynch

When I started outlining The Vaster Conspiracy, I wanted the viewpoint character to be an art and artifact counterfeiter, but I didn’t want his motivation to be solely financial. I wanted his life and career to have a hidden layer lurking beneath the surface, something that bubbles up at the most desperate and inconvenient moments, motivating him beyond the mere acquisition of funds.

Two coincidences turned Vaster Vrain into the character he is now. The first was a placeholder line that I wrote in the first draft without even thinking about it:

“Following a twisting hallway that had recently been repainted bile green in a failed attempt to hide generations of graffiti, Vaster took his keys out of the side pocket of his steel-colored Rasalhague suit pants and pushed on the door to an apartment. It swung open.

’Lexie? You still alive?’ Vaster slammed the door shut and clicked the locking mechanism in a single motion and threw his keys back in his pants pocket. ‘Didn’t burn the place down yet?’”

I never intended for that last line to have any deeper meaning than a snarky throwaway comment, but as Lynch would have put it, I had caught an idea on the hook, and as the draft developed, I reeled it in. It ended up being a big one.

The second coincidence involved Blue Velvet directly. As the first draft progressed and I fleshed out Vaster, I found myself increasingly inspired by Frank Booth: the character’s volatility, paranoia, and fundamentally weird relation to sex ended up meshing with my vision for Vaster the counterfeiter.

Blue Velvet’s paradoxical “In Dreams” scene has always affected me: what is it about this song that so deeply cuts through Frank’s layers of psychological scar tissue and psychopathy? Characteristically, Lynch never answers this, making the scene far more powerful for it.

As a nod to my inspirations, I ended up giving Vaster his own “In Dreams” sequence, a moment in which he tries to pray at a shrine of Lucca: “A silent prayer, like dreamers do.”

“As Cinehilde and Meissa whispered words in a language he didn’t understand, Vaster stared at the gleaming pillar, at the flickering candlelight bouncing from its white polished surface, at the red dancing flame atop the tallow candle and the liquified fat oozing down its sides and sizzling as it hit the cool metal pan of the candle holder. He held his other hand open and imagined her hand in it, stubby little fingers pressing into his palm. The burning wax and fat and incense caught in his throat as he remembered the last time he saw her. He remembered how she held her copy of Ashera against her chest, the well-worn book he had read to her over and over when she was little. He remembered how he had promised to read it to her again after he returned. But he returned to an empty loft with no sign of her or Ashera. Both had vanished. Another bead of fat liberated itself from the tip of the candle and worked its way down. Maybe she was somewhere better. Somewhere with greater freedom and less pain. Somewhere where his own failures and fuck-ups couldn’t hurt her anymore. The bead of fat fell from the candle and hit the pan with a soft sizzle.

Cinehilde released Vaster’s hand. ‘Do you feel better?’

’Not really.’

’Good.’”

Once I started drawing the characters and scenes from The Vaster Conspiracy, I wanted to do an homage to the scene in Blue Velvet that inspired this sequence and my vision of Vaster as someone with a secret kept locked away beneath layers of criminality and substance abuse.

Study of Vaster Praying at the Shrine of Lucca, 2023. Charcoal, black chalk, and gouache on vellum, 8.5 x 11 in. Private collection.

I could spend hours writing about how Lynch’s style has affected my artistic practice: doubles and doppelgangers, actors playing actors playing roles, the supernatural lurking beneath the surface of reality, the significance of dreams and hallucinations, fragmentation and allowing the audience to participate in the formation of the work… But, for now, I will mourn the loss of a great artist, filmmaker, and person. “And now it’s dark.”