In my idle brainmeats, ideas constantly form, tumble and roil.

A constant cacophony of half-formed stories, narratives, concepts and designs, ideas shaking loose in the empty space between my neurons. They usually bounce around there for a few days, a few weeks. Eventually they all die, strangled by the fact that I just don't have the time, the motivation, or even the willingness to use them in anything. Sometimes they're nothing but a cool embryo, a single nugget of something great that amounts to nothing but itself and has no greater fate than to be a single flash in the darkness, a fleeting sparkle that fades instantly.

Sometimes, when new ideas arise to take their place, they cannibalize the old ideas. They feast on the rotten bones, devour the carcasses, and steal the best bits to adorn themselves. This thing's appearance, that one thing's main design element, maybe whole histories. Sometimes everything is stripped and thrown out but a name, a title, or a single-word concept. The ideas are churned, recycled, remixed. Characters are stolen from their birthplaces and necromanced into whole new identities. Clones are grown, mutants are formed.

And then they too die, and the cycle repeats.

Sometimes, among the primordial maelstrom, an idea is born with enough force and brevity to materialize itself, to push against my eyeballs and beg to be let out. Springing fully formed from the folds of that wrinkly raisin inside my skull, Shining bright enough that they stain the vaults for a long time, short enough that my hands can make them real before they fade too. The single image, the silly joke, the one ambitious project that stirs me to action. Those are the lucky ones, who get to live on and escape the feast.

The Seer, The Vacant, The Clad-in-Dust are a rare breed. Born, consumed, recycled, forgotten. Picked up once more, fleshed out, left to die once more, again and again.

They might have been hidden gods once, or fragments of a single shattered god. Possibly merely metaphorical titles given by a fate called the meta-narrative and applied to actual characters. They were many things, they were never anything.

They are now an excuse to play with wildly varying body types, if only for a single image. They never looked like this before, they never looked like anything before. But now they do. Maybe they'll keep looking like this for a while.

My reasons for drawing them have already faded. The steam ran out before the end, and only the fumes kept me going. The fumes, and the next image I want to draw already pushing against the doors. Had the fuel run out at any earlier point, they might have never seen the light of day. I have so many abandoned images hanging out half-formed on my hard drive, they wouldn't have been the first. Fortunately for them I was already so far ahead that forcing myself to finish was only a small effort.

So here they are, and I'm overcome by a strange melancholy. Why did I decide to draw them? Why did any single part of this image come out the way it is? Why did I coward my way out of giving any of them visible eyes? I'm not sure myself.

Don't let The Seer and The Vacant fool you; they are just as much corpses as The Clad-In-Dust. Remains of ideas, thrice-chewed by the jaws of oblivion eternally churning in the depths of my mind. Who they are, what they want, and what they represent eludes me just as much as the next person. They are nothing, they are empty of meaning, and I'll likely never give them a purpose.

Solo versions:
The Seer: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37476712/
The Vacant: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37476753/
The Clad-In-Dust: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37476800/