the-friendly-warden

[the-friendly-warden]

Zy holds the wiggling, fiesty little ball of fluff out so you can get a good look at her. "She hasss.... gvuhn." Zy has a heavy, hard to understand accent with their weird growling voice. "In size... aaannd att-it-uhd." In short, they confirmed that she has grown both in size, and attitude!

[the-friendly-warden]

Unfortunate news from the blog author

Shit has Hit the Fan

Shit has absolutely hit the fan over here. I got completely and utterly stabbed in the back and lost my financial security. I'm going to have to start doing commissions again to make ends meet, and I have been out of the game for a quite a while. I never thought I'd have to again, but it seems like I have to. It sucks. But it is what it is. Nothing I can do about it.

In short, there was an emergency. My brother made an attempt on his own life. He isn't blood related, but he was my brother where it counts. We have some doubts that he actually did it to himself, but that's something else entirely. My wife called a friend, who rushed over and saved his life. He had a business he started with my wife. It was doing quite well, but not quite breaking even yet and he was still helping to fund it while my wife worked on bringing in the money. It could have broken even by the end of the year, even with the expensive office space we had. But, he completely pulled out, blocked contact with us, and completely fucked us and our other business partner over. After lying to us for weeks, and letting all of his duties slip until things ended up in a bit of a hole. Long story short, we are losing the office space, and had to lay off our two employees. We are able to scrape together enough resources to keep going, and it should be making enough for a roof and food, but it's going to be extremely tight until we regroup and find a new groove. If he had just waited, money WOULD have come flowing back in, but he backed out entirely, without any warning, after lying for potentially weeks. If he had to back out, I wish he'd just said something, so we could scale back and be more prepared. I feel hurt deeply hurt, and very deeply betrayed. This fucked everything up for my wife and our partner, and has caused such extreme stress we're all basically shutting down. We had financial stability. We didn't have to worry about food in our stomachs or a roof over our head. We didn't have to worry about having running water, internet, phones and electricity and now we have to struggle to make ends meet while picking up the pieces. We poured everything into that business, and it was paying off. And then the person we thought was our brother completely abandoned us and fucked us over. My wife thinks we're gonna be ok, and I do agree with her, but having extra money will REALLY help until things stabilize again. I want things to go back to normal... but, they never will. I have to find a new normal. Anyway. In light of this whole shitstorm and the loss of my financial stability, I am going to start pushing my Ko-fi more. https://ko-fi.com/arthademon I intend to have commission discounts, both in stream and out of stream, discounted adoptables, free adoptables, free bases, discounted bases, and other perks. Every little bit helps and even a little bit of a steady monthly income will help relieve some of this stress.

I will be doing commission streams and getting my queue knocked out between streams. I just hope I don't have to do this long. I hope we can get our stability back.

[the-friendly-warden]

A big warden yawn! No warden in particular, just a sleepy one found somewhere deep down.

[the-friendly-warden]

The angry little shit has a new ref! They need a name. xD

[the-friendly-warden]

Anatomy breakdown for my version of a warden! Also some lore! Shows the way the bone areas work, as well as the mane The bone isn't actually bone, but rather a chitinous tough fungus of sorts, and actually has a slightly velvety texture to it, It is also flexible, so moves and flexes with the warden and its movement. The claws are the same color, but are long and incredibly sharp and tough. The structure of fungi, I have learned, is made of chitin, the same stuff that creates insect exoskeletons, just a different form of it, so I am running with that! Warden bones are made of chitin reinforced with tough minerals they extract from Deepslate with their sculk colony. The sculk colony is a part of the warden, symbiotically linked. The sculk grows special fungal buds that the warden eats. The sculk extracts minerals and elements from Deepslate, using these resources to form various proteins and nutrients a warden needs. Wardens often find dead things, deadwood, leaf litter, and other nutrient sources for the sculk to grow on and some will even set up shop far beneath bat colonies, as their guano also provides a lot of nutrition for the warden. The bats, of course, die of they make too much noise around the warden and piss it off, but generally they coexist alright. Wardens are able to create sentinels using their sculk, by inoculating corpses with spores, allowing the sculk to overgrow and replace the flesh. Freshly killed things make much better sentinels, and move more fluidly, since the sculk mimics the muscle structure, while skeletons overgrown with sculk move a lot more awkwardly as the sculk connects them and makes them move in its own way.

[the-friendly-warden]

The unspoken rule of not moving when your cat is in your lap is enforced with said "cat" is a several hundred pound eldritch mushroom cave lion monster.

Keira has things she needs to get done, Azraketh doesn't seem keen on letting her little human get up quite yet!

[the-friendly-warden]

((This is a warden and fey that aren't a part of this blog, but they don't really have a blog of their own anyway, so I am putting this silly doodle here. I have enough shenanigans with these two in mind that I might actually add this to the Azrimar blog! Why? Because the fey here is actually the sibling of my other character Adamai, who is a main character in the Azrimar blog. Means I have three blogs with wardens. But. Ya know. I like wardens a lot. xD This cranky mofo is more indigo in color... I wanted to play with other warden colors! SO they are almost purple, not quite blue, with indigo speckles. They'll probably get names. The warden's face in this cracks me up xD))

[the-friendly-warden]

((Finished the main part of this story about how Azraketh's life was saved, and the first steps of Zy getting used to people when they were a little cub! I might add more to it as well as a few little one-shots about Azraketh and Zy when they were young. Azraketh is askable! You can also ask Keira things too, especially about her bond with the warden. She's in her 40's now, but it seems having a bond with an Eldritch creature has had some sort of effect on her because she seems to be aging a little slower. Azraketh is a bit territorial and very protective of the town. They saved her life and take care of her now that she's lost her tendrils, she returns that by quickly dispatching anything that threatens her rather odd "pride"))

[the-friendly-warden]

Another backstory piece for Zylarath. They are the little cub being carried, the injured one is their mother, Azraketh. The miners managed to make a stretcher using planks of wood from an old mineshaft, rope, and two minecarts, and get the nearly dead warden onto it. The tiny cub screamed its little head off almost the entire way, causing many nervous looks towards the motionless Terror of the Depths, laying there silently aside from weak breathing and its glowing blood dripping in a trail along the path they were walking along. Afraid it could wake up at any moment, hear its distressed baby, and end them right then and there.

[the-friendly-warden]

Redid this! This is a bit of Zy's backstory, their mother protecting them when they were a tiny cub. You can read some of the story here (I plan on there being a little more, but I've been distracted by art)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/48989665/chapters/123593815

[the-friendly-warden]

Zylarath hasn't slept in a bit over a week because of their new cub, and exhaustion has finally taken over. They are out cold. The cub, though... is bored with its parent fast asleep and has wandered off. What sort of trouble will the little shit cause?

[the-friendly-warden]

Seraphis tried to challenge Ophelion It didn't exactly go in his favor. Sera got his ass kicked to the surface and back again lmao

[the-friendly-warden]

C'mon, Steve! Give the warden some pats! They won't hurt you!

[the-friendly-warden]

It's ok, Steve! They just want pats!

[the-friendly-warden]

It's now been over a week since poor Zylarath has managed to get any sleep. Their tail is sore from the cub constantly pouncing and biting, their head hurts from the exhaustion and constant screeching. They don't know what to do, so they are just sitting there, holding the little thing by the scruff because at least then it's quiet and not biting!

[the-friendly-warden]

Zylarath's cub woke up and chose violence xD Zy didn't bring it fungal buds from the nest fast enough because the poor thing had started to doze off... BITE TIME!

[the-friendly-warden]

The cub seems calm... for now. Munching on one of the fungal buds growing in Zy's nest. The little shit may be cute now, but it'll be growling and biting in no time xD