The Pleiades & a Plesiosaur?
The Cover and Map for Ad Maré: Song of the Pleiades.
A kingdom living in the shadow of a five-hundred year curse.
A people banished for protecting their home against it.
Seven stars gliding westward.
One ancient city has already fallen to the sea. The only hope to save Celae and her people lies in the sky overhead; in the star on one girl’s brow; and a haunting voice calling her over the sea. Only her worst nightmares could prepare her for what lurked in the ancient mist.
“For only the broken souls may shine with starlight.”
From the back cover of Ad Maré: Song of the Pleiades
Full of narrow escapes, ancient mysteries, unleashed curses, stars, chivalry, and archangels, Ad Maré is a great tale for those who love romantic epics. Originally intended to be a rewrite of The Song of Elbereth, which Grace wrote as a final for a college class on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, it’s become a different tale altogether, with only a handful of elements reminiscent of the original tale. You can listen to the audio drama today; it’s available on most podcast platforms.
(For a story with a cast spread out over the country, despite some individual audio issues, there was a lot of talent! It features music by Adrian von Ziegler, which I highly recommend.)
The artwork for Ad Maré is my favorite of all the covers I’ve worked on so far. Designed for another of Grace Bourget’s novels, I was given a few landscape photos that I was asked to use for the background. With blending and my own coloring and details, I sewed them together in one image.
As you can probably tell, the city is actually Mont St. Michel in France, which is apropos for this tale, both for St. Michael’s role, and the city that it here represents: Alultaurari, an ancient city lost to the sea.
On top of this, I sketched our hero and heroine, Arcturus and Pleia. Life-threatening seaweed and sleep-inducing, poisonous thorns flank them. In the distance, we can see the ought-to-be-dead sea-monster. . . aka, Pleisiosaurus Morsquasitor, the Death-Seeker.
Indeed, as in the formal image before them, Dà-El was forever depicted with bears and great cats, and a strange sea creature termed monstrous.
The carvings called it Pleisiasaurus Morsquasitor, the death-seeker. Seven bioluminescent patches on its head resembled the Pleiades; and a regal frill framed its sharply toothed skull.
It had terrorized the shore, and any ships sailing out, until Dà-El had dared to ride it, dropping from a ship’s mast, and with his courage and gentleness, tamed it, naming it Akhnett-Minazal. It had then become friend, such that the lower levels of the city were carved out into a home for it, where the people could watch her dance through the water, and she became a protector at sea, where she had once been enemy.
. . . .
Pleia, too, was lost in thought, but all the while, she had been glancing uneasily up and down the corridor. A sharp jab of the nerves in her scar turned her towards the glass.
It took her a full ten seconds to realize that the grinning visage into which she was gazing was that of the pleisiasaur. Eyes that were orbs of sickly chartreusian light, a frilled crown of blood-red, and the seven star-scars like exploded craters etched in blood and lava, and a hundred woven teeth sharper than the shock of finding out the ocean had a breathable floor and the sky was possibly blue.
Next, the map! This is the first map I’ve sketched since I was fairly little, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I didn’t know how well scribbling can represent trees... I made the initial sketch on paper, and sharpened all the details and shading using Krita. I also marked all the named locations at this time. It’s much clearer here than in print, due to the smaller size of the book, but it’s still neat to see. Naturally, I’m inspired by Tolkien’s maps of Middle-Earth. I enjoyed layering all the shadows and details, and using a speckled painting tool that I think lent it an older, ink-splattered feel.
And to top it all off, my copy of Ad Maré just arrived!
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