Byiral, Goddess of Honor

Lore

Byiral (/bjiɾɑːl/; byee-RAHL) is the goddess of honor.

The presence of Byiral is indicated by three great tower shields arranged in a triangular cylinder, slowly rotating. All three shields reflect every conceivable color, creating an intense, rapidly oscillating rainbow effect. When Byiral deigns to become fully corporeal, the shields’ rotating colors cool to become static, and three female humanoid figures with deep black skin wearing light silk gowns appear within the rotating shields, each attached at the wrist. All three figures speak in perfect simultaneity, each offering a different piece of the harmony.

Atlas of Central Fao, Gods of Nivost: Ancestral Deities

Techniques

This is one of the earliest paintings to make it into Atlas of Central Fao, and unlike much of what shows up in the book, it’s almost entirely hand-painted other than some textures being thrown in here and there, primarily for the mountains in the left midground and (I think) the foreground warrior’s hair. I took the shield designs directly from the symbol for Byiral I’d already drawn, then transformed it into perspective. Getting the three manifestations of the god correct was very tricky, mostly because getting reference images for three different Black women at different angles was unfortunately much more frustrating than it should have been.