Cuckoo (all names are temporary)

Gyu’en's granddaughter- Dogun infects her with corrupted blood of his evil pet cat and commands her. She's agile and fierce.

For her look, I wanted a bit of a feral like wild appearance. And I also gave her long limbs for a ghastly look. Her design is based on this older drawing of her.

Iron 13 The Wanderer (all names are temporary)

An observer and recorder of history and events. Iron 13 wanders the land with his pupil, Cricket. He's a man with a past, also kind of a wise-man.

He's design is roughly finished (for this version at least). Still have to work in a background for him (by the way, a lot of the backgrounds I use are places I imagine would be used in the story, so they are not just there to look pretty:)

Sing (all names are temporary)

Sister of Pao. She tails her sister, Pao, tracing her every move and following her. Her personalities are very much opposite of Pao's. At one point Pao encounters Dao and fights him. Sing enters and saves Dao.

For this design I wanted to give her a look fitting for a close quarter combat fighter. She uses her dagger/sword to disarm/stagger her enemies and she counters their fighting moves with her bare hands.

Pao (all names are temporary)

She seeks Dao for vengence. Her whole existence is to kill Dao and she has reasons to.

She's one of those tough big-boned female characters. And so the weapons she uses are both pretty heavy and big. She mainly fights with her lighter sword (unnamed yet) but she uses her heavy stone sword to crush her enemies. Her stone sword attacks are so strong that she's able to destroy most enemies weapons in one hit.

Since she's going around the land seeking Dao, I give her almost a vagrant look. Since her weapons are heavy, she only wears light armors where they would be needed to protect her.

Dao (all names are temporary)

A man with a mysterious past. He's sort of an ancient detective. He works for the O'ethla empire. In the story he's an accused criminal and is being sent to his execution. 

After a certain event, he escapes his fate and became very much involved with Jan and the gang fighting the villains and discovering the whole mystery of the rise of the fiends. 

He was a government official so his design has a sturdy look even though he mainly wears cloth. He's head dressing is part of his governmental identity, so are the decorations on his weapon (it's a O'ethlian military weapon). He also wears light leather armor under his jacket. The red cloth on his lower body symbolizes his patriotic root.

Jan (all names are temporary)

Jan is the main character of the book. The inspiration of this book and this character's story as well as her design come from 2 drawings I did 2 years ago (see below). At the time I was inspired to do these drawings in the style of ancient art almost like woodcut. I really wanted to illustrate a strong sword wielding woman using a long sword, and a short sword. After I drew Qiān Jian (translates to Thousand Swords), I was liking the style very much that I then drew another, Yuki. These 2 are the same character. I used wood photos as textures to color these drawings to give them that old style drawing look. So these 2 drawings gave birth to the idea of telling a story of her.