HEYHO MY CHILDREN!!!
I DID A THING!

So... you probably know Ruindir, right?
If not.... then you're new and I welcome you to this little Artbook of mine :)

Anyways, so as some of the real OGs now, Ruindir used to be called Eldred. And Eldred was an npc-character in a dnd campaign I ran with my sister! Eldred and his friend Kevron were Harath (a homebrew mixture between elves, humans and tolkien-elves) and Paladins, replacing more or less other players in the party, since my little sis was shy and too scared to play with other people >w<

Well, after that came to an end, I decided to write a Hobbit-fanfiction (yes.... that was during that phase...) and since I thought "hey! Eldred and Kevron would fit perfectly in here" I went ahead and made them the main characters of that fanfic.

So now I stumbled across this little picture I drew in 2018.... tbh it was so unfinished, that I'm just gonna post the sketch in here haha, so bear with me:

And after realising that this was made, whilst I was writing on the third book in the fanfic-series, which is around where I trashed the fanfic-concept and decided to just relocate everything into my own worldbuilding project and change everything up a ton, I realised just how different the Ruindir we know now, is to Eldred.

So fo funsies, I went ahead, dug out some real old doodles from 2017 and that old reference-folder for Eldreds design on my old-old phone and wanted to draw him in my current style, so we could compare the two, now completely different, characters!

So, Eldeth was born as the daughter of Eleanor and Bothor. She was their only daughter and heir to the Fireforgean Throne... which sucked, because that's literally what she didn't want in life.

Instead, she ran away from home, pretended to be a boy and joined the Order of Paladins. There she became hella famous under the name "Eldred" and found her best friend Kevron along the way, who developed a brother-like relationship.
A god also came along and gave her the power to shapeshift (thats what happened in her view), meaning she just turned into a male version of herself and ran around as Eldred completely, finding out that he may be genderfluid.

So that's roughly what then developed to be the main plot of the Paladin series!
Let's just get to the actual drawing though... more backstory will come in a sec, no worries >w<"

For the pose, I wanted to have something confident and relaxed, since that was more or less the whole vibe Eldred had around him. He knew his shit, he knew it well and that's all he needed, to get what he wanted.

>>yeets rough sketch in chapter<<

So after embracing his identity of being enby and feeling a lot more comfortable in an either male or genderless body, things went wayy too well. So he died. But got ressurected!
Which  then alsosucked, because he had no clue where to go, so he somehow found a way home as Eldeth, where her parents forced her to stay and later on marry this dude from the Frostbeard-Clan.
Then ther originally was a meeting in Middleearth that she attended, where she ran away again, met Thorin and voila! Hobbit fanfic.
Later in the edited version, she stayed at the meeting in now Oskari, became friends with Nauthir, who was the prince there, and ran away with him, to find his friend who got kidnapped.

As soon as they were away from the city Eldeth instantly went back to Eldred, and.. well..... super gay Nauthir instantly found his new best friend super hot, and kinda fell in love the more time they spent together, whilst Eldred was crushing a bit as well, but didn't really admit any feelings since he was indeed engaged and supposed to marry as soon as he was back home.

Now in the drawing, I tried my best to capture the fireforgean vibe. Nowadays, that's a lot of gold, flowy fabrics and deserty stuff, but back then, the Clan was heavily inspired by Vikings and Celts!
So I wanted to give Eldred some quilted fabrics, typica leather armour and some jewellery, since... well... he still is a prince. Also had to incorporate the paladins belt-thingy that still survived to this day!

Face-wise, Eldred was quite different to Ru. He had a broader face, bulkier nose, rounder chin with one of those chin ass-cracks and thicker eyebrows. Detail wise, a lot less piercings, simpler tattoos that had a lot more triangles (since that was the shape of the fireforges) long hair all around and calmer eyes.

Ruindir still is about as skinny as Eldred was, so... yeah.... still lanky boii

After they found out, that Nauthirs friend had been tortured and killed though, the two wanted to head to the Paladins in the South, to get some sweet sweet revenge in the second novel!

Wellll.... Eldred was scared, since the Paladins all thought he was dead, Nauthir was excited but still as calm as ever...... very fluffy, very gay moments happened.... and then Eldred woke up and suddenly knew he was the reincarnation of Meteori(tte) (now Volcan(is)), which made a lot of things a lot more complicated.

Can't quite remember anymore what happened then, so let's talk a bit about the flats, eh?

So since Freforgia was a very beautiful place, full of forests, grass, etc and Eldred was a noble kid, he's about as pale as I could draw, without him looking albino.
The hair colour is still more or less the same, except it's a bit lighter and more orange.

Tattoos weren't glowing for the longest time, so those were just a brown-orange >w<

Aaand... well.. the freckles were fun! Since El has a shitload of them everywhere, similar to the scars. Most of th facial scars are even similar, but the others? Not so much. At least he doesn't count the people he's killed on his arm anymore... that was some edgy 13 y/o there...

And.. uh... well then El and Nau went to the Paladins, met Kevron, lived and planned there for a whole while until Eldred was taken prisoner by Anthrax (the same god of madness we all know and love today :D), which is why then went on a rescue mission with the other gods.

Which was insanely interesting, since they had no clue where Anthrax or Eldred were, finding out, that he apparently settled down on the old, abandoned island of Meteorittes hometown!

And.... well.... I didn't develop the story further, since I then wanted to change another ton of stuff up.
I just knew that the end of the series would end at Eldreds and Nauthirs wedding, disaster striking and Eldred fullfilling Anthrax' prophecy and unwillingly destroying the universe, causing everything to split and projects slike Éscilia or Anderra to happen...

The rendering of the drawing was tons of fun!
Since I tried to get more blocky light in there at the end, I got some added visual interest, and attempted to somewhat have a similar vibe to that other drawing of Ruindir I fixed this month, whilst also making him look like smol-psy imagined him to be :)

And that's all I got for now!

I do intend to draw similar drawings for Cevrond and Kevron as well, since.... dang these are FUN. Delving back into old concepts and memories really is interesting and cool to look at, especially since I can now see how much Ruindir and his story actually changed over the years.

On that topic, since El and Ru are so insanely different, El deffinetely still exists as a character in Mesoria, and quite some of the story with Nauthir and so on will indeed still happen... I just shoved everything back by a bit, making Eldred the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Ru :)

>>cuddles, pats and wraps in blanket before giving a cookie<<

Hope you guys liked this little trip down memory lane as much as I did, and like good old Eldred as much as I still do >w<