So raidagu apparently felt that a belated birthday present turned Christmas present wasn't quite good enough, and went out and got this done as a Christmas present. It also turned out to be a little later than expected, so here I am with another! I'm feeling pretty fuzzy and fortunate to get so much art even while without a source of income (though I start my new job in a week, mother egg what the heck this is terrifying). I think it came out really wonderfully, and I'm pretty excited to be able to see a depiction of a cool red gryphon - there's not too many of those out there (even if it's definitely non-zero!)
Done by UpseTrex over on Twitter, it depicts raidagu's gryphon 'Leng'. It's based on an ongoing RP that he and I have that's been running for nearly a decade(??) now on and off. In it, Leng is basically a pseudo-sleepwalking dream creature, and I'm on the good old classic save the world mission while using a very magic book. I'm pretty dreadful at not getting sidetracked, though, but shh who's counting when you have a time-rewinding magic book?
Art © UpseTrex
Leng ©
Salrith and little vignette © myself and all, as always!
Butterflies © nobody because their brains are too small to comprehend sophisticated legal systems
* * * * *
The forest was quiet at this time of day. Soon, a bellbird would arrive and start chirping on one of the branches, hoping for a mate most likely. Perhaps food. Salrith wasn’t sure – they didn’t speak bellbird. After that, a wyvern would fly overhead and startle a large flock of birds from one of the trees, and the flock would dim the sun as they flew overhead.
Salrith knew this because this was a day they had been through before. They didn’t know how many times it had been, now. On the seventh day, Kuro would bring about the end of the world – this was, as one might imagine, something of an inconvenience. Luckily, Salrith held the panacea to this vexing conundrum, and the reason why they had lived this day before.
Beside the small creature, a large, red-feathered gryphon snoozed peacefully, head resting on his leonine forepaws. Leng’s eagle-like beak nudged against one of Salrith’s feet as the slumbering beast cooed quietly. Salrith let one lower grasper stroke the region where his feathers turned into fur, giving an idle smile.
One of the mysterious books of Endaneus sat squarely in Salrith’s lap, pages open to one of the many entries the azure-bellied creature had catalogued. The book was one of the most potent artifacts Salrith knew of – and among its overwhelming capabilities was the ability to transport its reader back to a fixed point in time.
One might think that this was ample to overcome practically any obstacle. Unfortunately, Kuro had one of the other copies, though it had a different array of abilities. Salrith was confident in their capacity to stop his groove-ruining plans, but hadn’t yet amassed the skills and resources to do so. Until they did, Salrith kept using the book over and again, reliving the same week in different ways.
“…watermelons?” Leng snuffled in his sleep, one hindpaw kicking idly and smacking Salrith’s hip. The chitinous creature snickered as they noticed watermelons around them both.
They had always been there, of course. Yet, they also hadn’t been. Leng had a tenuous connection with reality. After a long and involved journey to the dreaming world, Salrith had learnt that the red gryphon was, in a way, the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a dreaming god-like being. Leng’s ‘dream self’. When he slept, Leng the gryphon was in the real world – just like when Salrith slept, their dream-self might wander the dreaming world. When Leng ‘woke’ in the dreaming world, the gryphon would vanish, until he next went to sleep.
At least, that was what Salrith figured – it was somewhat hard to comprehend beings that lived in some kind of extra-planar space and bent the world around them without even realising it.
That dream-like non-logic tended to manifest around Leng in ways that he didn’t seem to be fully in control of. Things might suddenly spring into being, but the changes would sweep backwards through history as well, making it so it had always been so – at least, if that was what Leng’s ‘dream’ said ought to happen.
Salrith was only aware, as far as they knew, because of the equally dizzying protections that the book of Endaneus offered. A sort of inoculation against reality revisions.
CHEEP!
Salrith looked up. That would be the bellbird. The chitinous creature let out a fond sigh, then rubbed at Leng’s body again.
The dreaming gryphon’s reality-adjacent existence also gave him one trait that Salrith valued perhaps the most in the whole world: a nonlinear sense of time. His ‘real’ body – in so much as one could use terms like that with Leng – was in another domain of reality. Whenever he turned up, he seemed to have odd knowledge of things that had happened in other timelines, or that hadn’t happened at all… yet. He was the one creature that Salrith had always been able to talk to without having to explain the book’s time shenanigans to, first – or come up with appropriate lies, something the arthropodish creature was not very good at. Though, occasionally Salrith met an earlier dream of Leng’s, which was a mixture of both disappointing and endearing.
Leng rolled over, sprawling his large, gryphonic bulk beside Salrith. One of his black-striped ears twitched and his tongue hung out from his beak, drooling onto the ground. Salrith snickered, then turned back to the book.
Only for Leng’s tufted tail to fhlump over the pages, utterly obscuring it. Truly, he was living up to his feline half, today.
“Leng, I’m trying to read,” Salrith grumbled, patting his tail. The gryphon snored. Loudly. Salrith’s eight eyes rolled, their chelicerae twitching idly.
Suddenly, the watermelons were gone. Instead, there were books all around Salrith.
The four-armed creature groaned quietly, feeling a soft headache suffuse their thoughts. Memories that weren’t quite right overlapped their mind, and Salrith suddenly remembered carrying a whole stack of books with them. They had asked Leng to carry a cart full of them, after all! A cart? Salrith blinked blearily, looking off to the side where, sure enough, a wooden cart rested – still packed with various books.
Salrith didn’t remember ever seeing any of them.
Until, like honey oozing down over their head from above, Salrith did remember them.
“Leng,” Salrith hissed in disgruntlement. The book of Endaneus gave Salrith just enough reality awareness to recognise what was happening. Without it, Salrith wouldn’t even know that this was ‘new’ – this would be their new reality. It would be how it had always been. They knew this because they’d seen how other people were affected by Leng. But even so, it did feel real. They knew it was new, but it felt like what had really happened, too. “You know it’s kind of silly to sleep in your sleep,” the azure-bellied creature chided. “At least have a nice dream?”
Leng wiggled his rump in a very feline way, then fluttered his wings. He rolled over again and once more lay his head on his forepaws, his tail curling around Salrith.
Other bellbirds began answering their obnoxiously loud, shrill calls as the shadow of the wyvern swept by overhead and startled a large flock.
Four days until Kuro snuffed out the world with a mindbogglingly overwhelming display of magic. Four days until Salrith used the book’s most potent spell and went back for another try at things – a new direction to seek out knowledge or help. Though they had gathered a lot of information, they hadn’t yet gathered enough to be able to outdo the red-eyed world-ender.
That was okay, though. When you had at least one friend who didn’t fade away at the end of the week, it made things much more bearable.
Suddenly the books were gone. What books? Salrith sighed, shaking their head. They tried not to let the malleable adjusting of the world bother them too much. It wasn’t too hard when it was things like books fading in or out – it was much harder when Leng’s dreams involved Salrith directly. One time, he had dreamt that Salrith spoke bird primarily – and Salrith had been rather alarmed as spoken language faded completely from their mind, leaving them only able to communicate in suddenly intelligible bird whistles.
No, if not for the book of Endaneus, Salrith probably couldn’t be friends with Leng – it would be a little too dangerous, even if not intentionally so. They were grateful for their literary anchor to ground zero.
“…silly bug…” Leng mumbled, beak yawning. He didn’t stir, but suddenly Salrith saw a stream of brilliant, yellow butterflies starting to flutter out from behind the tree. They weren’t like any that Salrith had ever seen before – almost more like insects made of light. The four-armed creature gave a faint grin, then lifted the book to swat gently at one. On contact, the book’s pages fluttered, and it began to etch a new entry for the mysterious butterflies in golden, cursive lettering.
Somnolescent Butterfly, the entry read, listing various titbits and useful information about them. Salrith wasn’t even sure if the entry would remain once Leng’s dream shifted. It wouldn’t matter if he was awake or not, either – Leng always seemed to be operating on dream logic, and facts were as transient and easily forgotten as one would expect in a dream.
It made him equal parts frustrating and delightfully fun to talk to.
Eventually, Salrith sighed. They reached down and pressed two arms to Leng’s barrel-like chest, then began to shake the avian creature.
“Leng,” they said. “Leng.”
“…no milk in the bucket…” the gryphon yawned sleepily, stretching a little. Salrith ignored the metal pail that suddenly was beside the two of them, empty from the milk they had both spent an hour drinking from fine wineglasses that now resided under the tree. The insectoid also ignored the feeling of milk in their stomach. It would fade. Probably. Hopefully.
“Leng,” Salrith urged. They shook him a little more firmly.
Slowly, the gryphon opened one eye, then the other. One yellow, one white, like the sun and the moon.
“Salrith!” he chirped, yawning much more vociferously this time. He smacked his beak, somehow managing to smile broadly despite its inflexibility – another perk of being a little loose on reality. “When did you get back?”
“I never left,” Salrith chuckled. Leng blinked blankly, then pressed one large paw to Salrith’s face. They smelled of cashews.
“You have to! Otherwise you would always be right and always being right is illegal. Silly bug.” He brought his paw back and scratched himself idly. “And when did you get blue?”
“Well, that’s true,” Salrith said. “I’ve always been blue, though.”
“Oh! Okay,” Leng said. He leaned in and bumped his beak against the blue of Salrith’s belly, leaving the chitinous creature wriggling where they sat. Salrith pushed his head away, then stood up. Oof, they really shouldn’t have drunk all that milk. If only they actually had, and had gotten to enjoy it. Salrith couldn’t ask him to ‘undo’ that change, though – he probably wasn’t even aware of it, himself. They could only gently guide his thoughts and behaviours away from it … but that only worked with some distraction and finessing. Some things were easier than others. Salrith didn’t even know how to inch him away from something as plain as milk, though. It mostly happened incidentally, if they were being honest. “You shouldn’t be so blue. Have you tried being red? Remember red, not dead, because that’s illegal!”
“You are so daft,” Salrith smiled, chelicerae twitching. “Do you feel ready to move? I want to reach town by nightfall.”
“Okay!” Leng chirped. He swivelled his ears, then looked around with bright eyes. “Shouldn’t you have clothes on, though? Sometimes I go into town without clothes, and the two leggers get very mad at me or put me in the stable and ask me why I don’t have pants. But I don’t know if I would wear pants like this, or like this!” He wobbled his legs two at a time. Salrith shook their head, smiling mildly. But he had a point. Where were Salrith’s clo—
Of course. Salrith sighed. When they stopped and thought about it, they had been wearing a cloak – until they bumped into Leng earlier in the day. Now, it was gone. Or perhaps Salrith ‘never had been’ wearing one – the resistances granted by the book sometimes made it hard to discern between stealthy vanishings and subtle timeline revisions.
“…I’ll figure something out,” Salrith sighed. They stood up, then beckoned Leng onwards. Together, they set out into the woods.
Done by UpseTrex over on Twitter, it depicts raidagu's gryphon 'Leng'. It's based on an ongoing RP that he and I have that's been running for nearly a decade(??) now on and off. In it, Leng is basically a pseudo-sleepwalking dream creature, and I'm on the good old classic save the world mission while using a very magic book. I'm pretty dreadful at not getting sidetracked, though, but shh who's counting when you have a time-rewinding magic book?
Art © UpseTrex
Leng ©
Salrith and little vignette © myself and all, as always!
* * * * *
The forest was quiet at this time of day. Soon, a bellbird would arrive and start chirping on one of the branches, hoping for a mate most likely. Perhaps food. Salrith wasn’t sure – they didn’t speak bellbird. After that, a wyvern would fly overhead and startle a large flock of birds from one of the trees, and the flock would dim the sun as they flew overhead.
Salrith knew this because this was a day they had been through before. They didn’t know how many times it had been, now. On the seventh day, Kuro would bring about the end of the world – this was, as one might imagine, something of an inconvenience. Luckily, Salrith held the panacea to this vexing conundrum, and the reason why they had lived this day before.
Beside the small creature, a large, red-feathered gryphon snoozed peacefully, head resting on his leonine forepaws. Leng’s eagle-like beak nudged against one of Salrith’s feet as the slumbering beast cooed quietly. Salrith let one lower grasper stroke the region where his feathers turned into fur, giving an idle smile.
One of the mysterious books of Endaneus sat squarely in Salrith’s lap, pages open to one of the many entries the azure-bellied creature had catalogued. The book was one of the most potent artifacts Salrith knew of – and among its overwhelming capabilities was the ability to transport its reader back to a fixed point in time.
One might think that this was ample to overcome practically any obstacle. Unfortunately, Kuro had one of the other copies, though it had a different array of abilities. Salrith was confident in their capacity to stop his groove-ruining plans, but hadn’t yet amassed the skills and resources to do so. Until they did, Salrith kept using the book over and again, reliving the same week in different ways.
“…watermelons?” Leng snuffled in his sleep, one hindpaw kicking idly and smacking Salrith’s hip. The chitinous creature snickered as they noticed watermelons around them both.
They had always been there, of course. Yet, they also hadn’t been. Leng had a tenuous connection with reality. After a long and involved journey to the dreaming world, Salrith had learnt that the red gryphon was, in a way, the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a dreaming god-like being. Leng’s ‘dream self’. When he slept, Leng the gryphon was in the real world – just like when Salrith slept, their dream-self might wander the dreaming world. When Leng ‘woke’ in the dreaming world, the gryphon would vanish, until he next went to sleep.
At least, that was what Salrith figured – it was somewhat hard to comprehend beings that lived in some kind of extra-planar space and bent the world around them without even realising it.
That dream-like non-logic tended to manifest around Leng in ways that he didn’t seem to be fully in control of. Things might suddenly spring into being, but the changes would sweep backwards through history as well, making it so it had always been so – at least, if that was what Leng’s ‘dream’ said ought to happen.
Salrith was only aware, as far as they knew, because of the equally dizzying protections that the book of Endaneus offered. A sort of inoculation against reality revisions.
CHEEP!
Salrith looked up. That would be the bellbird. The chitinous creature let out a fond sigh, then rubbed at Leng’s body again.
The dreaming gryphon’s reality-adjacent existence also gave him one trait that Salrith valued perhaps the most in the whole world: a nonlinear sense of time. His ‘real’ body – in so much as one could use terms like that with Leng – was in another domain of reality. Whenever he turned up, he seemed to have odd knowledge of things that had happened in other timelines, or that hadn’t happened at all… yet. He was the one creature that Salrith had always been able to talk to without having to explain the book’s time shenanigans to, first – or come up with appropriate lies, something the arthropodish creature was not very good at. Though, occasionally Salrith met an earlier dream of Leng’s, which was a mixture of both disappointing and endearing.
Leng rolled over, sprawling his large, gryphonic bulk beside Salrith. One of his black-striped ears twitched and his tongue hung out from his beak, drooling onto the ground. Salrith snickered, then turned back to the book.
Only for Leng’s tufted tail to fhlump over the pages, utterly obscuring it. Truly, he was living up to his feline half, today.
“Leng, I’m trying to read,” Salrith grumbled, patting his tail. The gryphon snored. Loudly. Salrith’s eight eyes rolled, their chelicerae twitching idly.
Suddenly, the watermelons were gone. Instead, there were books all around Salrith.
The four-armed creature groaned quietly, feeling a soft headache suffuse their thoughts. Memories that weren’t quite right overlapped their mind, and Salrith suddenly remembered carrying a whole stack of books with them. They had asked Leng to carry a cart full of them, after all! A cart? Salrith blinked blearily, looking off to the side where, sure enough, a wooden cart rested – still packed with various books.
Salrith didn’t remember ever seeing any of them.
Until, like honey oozing down over their head from above, Salrith did remember them.
“Leng,” Salrith hissed in disgruntlement. The book of Endaneus gave Salrith just enough reality awareness to recognise what was happening. Without it, Salrith wouldn’t even know that this was ‘new’ – this would be their new reality. It would be how it had always been. They knew this because they’d seen how other people were affected by Leng. But even so, it did feel real. They knew it was new, but it felt like what had really happened, too. “You know it’s kind of silly to sleep in your sleep,” the azure-bellied creature chided. “At least have a nice dream?”
Leng wiggled his rump in a very feline way, then fluttered his wings. He rolled over again and once more lay his head on his forepaws, his tail curling around Salrith.
Other bellbirds began answering their obnoxiously loud, shrill calls as the shadow of the wyvern swept by overhead and startled a large flock.
Four days until Kuro snuffed out the world with a mindbogglingly overwhelming display of magic. Four days until Salrith used the book’s most potent spell and went back for another try at things – a new direction to seek out knowledge or help. Though they had gathered a lot of information, they hadn’t yet gathered enough to be able to outdo the red-eyed world-ender.
That was okay, though. When you had at least one friend who didn’t fade away at the end of the week, it made things much more bearable.
Suddenly the books were gone. What books? Salrith sighed, shaking their head. They tried not to let the malleable adjusting of the world bother them too much. It wasn’t too hard when it was things like books fading in or out – it was much harder when Leng’s dreams involved Salrith directly. One time, he had dreamt that Salrith spoke bird primarily – and Salrith had been rather alarmed as spoken language faded completely from their mind, leaving them only able to communicate in suddenly intelligible bird whistles.
No, if not for the book of Endaneus, Salrith probably couldn’t be friends with Leng – it would be a little too dangerous, even if not intentionally so. They were grateful for their literary anchor to ground zero.
“…silly bug…” Leng mumbled, beak yawning. He didn’t stir, but suddenly Salrith saw a stream of brilliant, yellow butterflies starting to flutter out from behind the tree. They weren’t like any that Salrith had ever seen before – almost more like insects made of light. The four-armed creature gave a faint grin, then lifted the book to swat gently at one. On contact, the book’s pages fluttered, and it began to etch a new entry for the mysterious butterflies in golden, cursive lettering.
Somnolescent Butterfly, the entry read, listing various titbits and useful information about them. Salrith wasn’t even sure if the entry would remain once Leng’s dream shifted. It wouldn’t matter if he was awake or not, either – Leng always seemed to be operating on dream logic, and facts were as transient and easily forgotten as one would expect in a dream.
It made him equal parts frustrating and delightfully fun to talk to.
Eventually, Salrith sighed. They reached down and pressed two arms to Leng’s barrel-like chest, then began to shake the avian creature.
“Leng,” they said. “Leng.”
“…no milk in the bucket…” the gryphon yawned sleepily, stretching a little. Salrith ignored the metal pail that suddenly was beside the two of them, empty from the milk they had both spent an hour drinking from fine wineglasses that now resided under the tree. The insectoid also ignored the feeling of milk in their stomach. It would fade. Probably. Hopefully.
“Leng,” Salrith urged. They shook him a little more firmly.
Slowly, the gryphon opened one eye, then the other. One yellow, one white, like the sun and the moon.
“Salrith!” he chirped, yawning much more vociferously this time. He smacked his beak, somehow managing to smile broadly despite its inflexibility – another perk of being a little loose on reality. “When did you get back?”
“I never left,” Salrith chuckled. Leng blinked blankly, then pressed one large paw to Salrith’s face. They smelled of cashews.
“You have to! Otherwise you would always be right and always being right is illegal. Silly bug.” He brought his paw back and scratched himself idly. “And when did you get blue?”
“Well, that’s true,” Salrith said. “I’ve always been blue, though.”
“Oh! Okay,” Leng said. He leaned in and bumped his beak against the blue of Salrith’s belly, leaving the chitinous creature wriggling where they sat. Salrith pushed his head away, then stood up. Oof, they really shouldn’t have drunk all that milk. If only they actually had, and had gotten to enjoy it. Salrith couldn’t ask him to ‘undo’ that change, though – he probably wasn’t even aware of it, himself. They could only gently guide his thoughts and behaviours away from it … but that only worked with some distraction and finessing. Some things were easier than others. Salrith didn’t even know how to inch him away from something as plain as milk, though. It mostly happened incidentally, if they were being honest. “You shouldn’t be so blue. Have you tried being red? Remember red, not dead, because that’s illegal!”
“You are so daft,” Salrith smiled, chelicerae twitching. “Do you feel ready to move? I want to reach town by nightfall.”
“Okay!” Leng chirped. He swivelled his ears, then looked around with bright eyes. “Shouldn’t you have clothes on, though? Sometimes I go into town without clothes, and the two leggers get very mad at me or put me in the stable and ask me why I don’t have pants. But I don’t know if I would wear pants like this, or like this!” He wobbled his legs two at a time. Salrith shook their head, smiling mildly. But he had a point. Where were Salrith’s clo—
Of course. Salrith sighed. When they stopped and thought about it, they had been wearing a cloak – until they bumped into Leng earlier in the day. Now, it was gone. Or perhaps Salrith ‘never had been’ wearing one – the resistances granted by the book sometimes made it hard to discern between stealthy vanishings and subtle timeline revisions.
“…I’ll figure something out,” Salrith sighed. They stood up, then beckoned Leng onwards. Together, they set out into the woods.
Category Artwork (Digital) / General Furry Art
Species Unspecified / Any
Gender Multiple characters
Size 1280 x 755px
Some dangerous levels of cute. Not to mention bug. Much bug~.
<3
<3
Indeed! Though there's a certain bug with a beautiful carapace that I was referencing to~
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