Dion! My Last Addition To FFXVI Character Series ☺

the responsibility of nobility and all that

My contribution to this year's secret santa over on the PhoenixFlare discord server! And it has some bite 🦇

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Rating: Mature

Category: M/M

Relationships: Dion Lesage / Joshua Rosfield

Characters: Dion Lesage, Joshua Rosfield

Additional Tags: Vampires, Alternate Universe - No Ultima (Final Fantasy XVI), no magic, at least not in the canon sense, First meetings, Pining, Angst and Romance, Hurt/Comfort, And a tiny dash of smut - oops, nvm there's porn in my plot now, Anal Sex, Biting, Phoenixflare, PhoenixFlare Discord Secret Santa 2024 (Final Fantasy XVI)

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It should have been a normal journey. A favour to his old mentor, an opportunity to get away from his overbearing family for a while. But when Joshua travels to a secretive little village to study some peculiar local legends, he soon has to learn that some legends are far more real than he would have thought.

This particular legend turns out to be hungry - and unreasonably handsome.

These two *clutches heart*.

Commission for @neutronice 's fic Fool's Gold. ✨

Happy Fanfic Writer Appreciation Day!

So back in May/June I finished my first playthrough of Persona 5 and fell HARD into the shuake/akeshu ship. This fic was one that I read and immediately messaged the author about doing for this event.

And it turned into probably my favorite book I've made yet. The one I am happiest with overall.

The series (both fics are in the book) is First Step. The main fic is "the first step to find your way is to mark where you have been" by @futuresoon

It's a fantastic post-Royal fic that explores the idea that Akechi's spirit is trapped in a Palace, and Akira has to work through the Palace of Akechi's trauma in order to save him.

Also thank you to @munidraws for letting me use their fanart for the fic.

Process details under here

The typesetting was designed based on both canon elements from the game and motifs from the fic. The fic is set mostly in a labyrinth of black stone walls, so I used that for the chapter openers. And the Chapter titles and text messages in the book use the actual fonts from the game (or ones recreated to be very close by fans).

Text messages are shown in very stylized black and white boxes in the game. I decided I couldn't recreate the shape of the boxes without both a lot of work and taking up a lot of page real estate. So I settled for plain black and white boxes. Shoutout to Manda and Des from Renegade for teaching me how to do these easily in Affinity.

The title page took me....more time than I'm willing to admit. Because of the labyrinth theme and long title I wanted a winding brick path for illustration but it proved really difficult to find anything like what I wanted. So I went through a lot of image manipulation to get something like what I wanted. (Shh, it's not a snake.)

I did my first solid painted edges, with a couple fails until I went and bought some black acrylic ink, which worked like a dream. The endpages are linen textured cardstock.

The case is bound in black bookcloth and marbled fabric made into bookcloth. I used purchased black bookcloth for the author copy and made my own paperless bookcloth with acrylic medium and paste from some thrifted fabric. You can tell the difference in person, but it's subtle. The marble is quilting fabric from Joann's which I also turned into paperless bookcloth and then folded and glued down as a strip.

The spine is titled with heat foil quill in red foil. It's not perfect, but came pretty close for using foil that is not fantastic in quality.

encounter

[FF16] flowers

Orpheus and Eurydice

6/100

When bathing with the Phoenix one can always be assured the water stays warm~

Another hug!