Decided to design one of my unused Heart of Karis characters who was planned but never made it into the final story- an old Pegasus named Penelope. In my very VERY early versions of the story, SHE was the one who was actually the queen of what would become Concordia (yeah, the original Karis wasn’t even of royal descent).

As the story evolved into its finalized 2017 version I thought of changing her role into more of a soothsayer or royal advisor who was somewhat of a mentor to Karis, and she’d be the one who’d tell Iris to encourage the Concordians to fight back in the climax, but the latter was changed since I wanted to give Iris more character development rather than give someone else agency over her. I couldn’t fit the royal mentor thing anywhere else in the plot either so Penelope was subsequently cut out of the story altogether.

Penelope would still probably exist in the final story’s universe now that I’ve drawn her, probably just a background character who was one of Theia’s royal staff along with Iris. I always used to picture her as just a stark white pegasus but I figured that’d look too boring, so I googled some bird species and thought that a white-tailed tropicbird would be a lovely design to draw inspiration from.