#also i will put koschei in a box. and then i'll put that box inside another box. and then -

[picnokinesis]

Immediately looked up the quote you put below the zine art and 👀 good quote choice!!!!

Ahh thanks!! I did a dive into russian folklore a while back when I found out that the name 'Koschei' came from the story of Koschei the Deathless, and I immediately had to know what that entailed, naturally. That quote is, as you probably noticed, slightly changed from the original, but that's because (as I said in the tags) it's actually something I had planned for a doctor who fanfic based on the folklore. It's a fic I would love to write some day but alas, I only got so far as chapter 1, but it basically involves the Doctor diving into the Matrix to find the Master after TTC, and there's just russian folklore everywhere. Tecteun is Baba Yaga, the Timeless Child is the Firebird, the Doctor is mostly Prince Ivan (and the magical stead is the TARDIS), but sometimes Marya Morevna, and the Master is mostly Koschei the Deathless but also sometimes Marya Morevna too. I'd probably have the wizards who marry Prince Ivan's sisters as previous incarnations of the Doctor as well, but I hadn't thought that far.

Anyway, part of the reason it's doomed to never be finished is because I was going to do art for it based on Ivan Bilibin's illustrations of the original stories. I only ever ended up sketching one, but funnily enough it was the one for that quote that's on that other art! In the original story, Prince Ivan comes across a battlefield full of dead and dying soldiers, and asks who killed them - and they tell him it was the person in the white tent, who turns out to be the warrior princess Marya Morevna. In my fic, I was planning for it to be that the Doctor steps into a new part of the Matrix and finds the battle field of Skull Moon, or some other battle in the Time War - and, of course, asks who killed everyone. And the answer given is 'the man in the barn' - which turns out to be the War Doctor, of course. So that then sparked the idea of 'child, it was you' - originally, for that print, I was planning to write that entire quote in gold Gallifreyan, because I liked how it kind of referred to both the Doctor and the Master as children of Gallifrey, but also kind of twisted them both together - both the destroyers of the planet, mirroring each others, the same in more ways than they can stand. And that's kind of the meaning of that piece of art.

Anyway - here's the sketch that I did for that fic, and the original Bilibin illustration it was based on!