I Have So Many Thoughts About The Lunatic Cultist...Purity-Town Specific Things Below:

I have so many thoughts about the lunatic cultist...Purity-Town specific things below:

Pre-cult and golden-blue robes, them wielding just a simple silver staff with a sharpened point on the tip, scratching out their spell circles by hand in the dirt, triple-checking they’ve written every rune correct. Carrying a pouch of chalk when they need to draw out a circle on stone.

Then, by hardmode, with the ancient spirits released, with magic once again flourishing in a way it hadn’t in 500 years, them being able to simply spin their staff or wave their hands to create it.

(Stardust dragon staff is there just because I wanted to draw it and it was fairly fitting since they’re a summoner/mage and the phantasm dragon has some strong similarities to the stardust dragon, plus the colors fit, but in the actual story they’d probably have another custom staff of their own.)

I imagine them as a sort of warlock, someone who even in pre-hardmode was able to study and manipulate magic in a way unparalleled since the spirits were locked away 500 years ago, learning and pulling together near-forgotten practices from all sorts of sources to come away with an incredible mastery over it all. Creating dolls and binding them to souls, granting themselves functional immortality, mastering magic (and stealing dark secrets from an eldritch god-level being at the expense of their own sanity), and reviving ancient practices.

(Just thinking of the visual similarities between the ancient manipulator and the demon altars...)