Elaran was drawn long before it was ever built. Before the first lamp of the settlement lit up, it was a pencil sketch on somebody's desk. The Art of Dark Switch collects that work: 90 pages of concept art, creature sheets and world lore, with commentary in English and Russian.
The World of Nelaya. A planet that once every two thousand years spends a full century inside a current of the Shroud, where the only shelter worth the name are the Great Trees: titans hundreds of meters tall that drink light for centuries to give it back. The same chapter opens the ruins of the Ancients, who built colossal walkers, whole cities adrift in the sky and sky-whales called into being by will alone, and whom none of it saved. Ecosystem. The Shroud rewrote everything alive. Plants darkened to reds and browns to catch more light, animals twisted into chimeras, and almost every original species is gone. Our favorite page in this chapter is the Lullaby, a creature that can pass for a person lost in the Shroud. Areliyans and classes of settlers. How a civilization actually lives in a treetop: who fells the timber, why no title is more honorable than Craftsman, and how one archaic word, Ranger, covers a scout, a skywalker crew and the city guard alike. Above them all, Sorago rules fifty thousand souls through a high archon balancing twelve noble houses that never stop fighting each other. Characters. Portraits, early passes and the versions that did not survive the edit. Valfidis, obsessed with the legacy of the Ancients, left lame by the crash that took almost his entire family. Ginoa, the youngest captain in the Sorago fleet, who will stop at nothing to find her father. And the Legatus, whose faith allows no compromise and whose mercy allows no weakness. Technologies. Everything the Areliyans built to hold out. Luminaris with its three-meter Sun Seed, the rings of mirrors and lenses, and the ungainly prism on propellers hanging above the Tree. The walkers that work where people cannot, one cracking open gas pockets in the swamp, another chewing ancient wrecks into carryable pieces. And the skywalkers, from light scouts up to the Sunburst, a cruiser that is a mobile settlement in its own right. Buildings. A settlement drawn from the ground up: extraction sites below, kaleyards and farms among the roots, fishing boats on the water, and houses crowding the branches above, where space is worth its weight in gold. Food, production, population, research, light and defense each get their own spreads, and a single building can be followed from its first level to its last rebuild. Thank you to our artists, and to everyone who asked for a way to see this world up close.
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