More art from 2016! I was apparently on a huge kick drawing Alter, and was also having a lot of fun adding a bit of digital color to my traditional sketches! I'll put the old dA description here:

A partially polished sketch from earlier that got a little out of hand! I had fun trying to mess around quickly with this but still make it look nice.

Basically, illusionmasters have this weird kind of mercurial blood that is full of magic and does whatever the hell it wants. Floating around while bleeding up AND down probably seemed like a pretty cool idea at the time! Newtonian physics are for chumps.

(another illusionmaster fact: a lot of them apparently delight in being edgelords. I get a lot of horrific imagery regarding them in general, and I feel like they both A) enjoy being awful sometimes, but also B) unsettling visual displays may be a good way to keep people from actually engaging you in a fight and/or deter potential predators? A show of "strength" to make you reconsider your options, as it were! Or maybe just to help you with the realization that you have Just Made A Mistake™)

*whispers quietly* hello dodge/burn my old friend~~ (someday I need to learn how to properly render metallic liquids, but today is not that day!)

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I now know that illusionmasters have a thing called 'hallowform' they enter upon any injury to them that draws blood- usually passive magic consumers, this activates a more active magic drain effect on their immediate surroundings- or opponents. It's basically kicking the boss fight up a gear, drawing energy in to either counter their wounds or to boost whatever they're going to do next. Most fights Between illusionmasters don't reach this point, or at least, aren't supposed to- they prefer to instead put on flashy shows of illusion to outpace their opponents, and the risk of a sudden 'blood in the water' moment of a magic-based, magic Eating being bleeding magic around others of its kind that also eat magic is best to be avoided.

Alter regrettably likes to goad opponents into drawing first blood on them, because they have fun amping things up a notch.