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Concept Art 64: Uriel
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 20:49:43 +0000 UTCThis Reaper is the Guardian of the Advent Tree of Valdosarel's capital (Tentative name: Ulrica or Orb Helgen) where our healer Leila lives.
The reason why Uriel is a dragon is not that attached to the source of Magh but to his role of punisher of the sinful and pagans. In many ways, dragons might be metaphors for natural disasters, and that is the case for Valdosarel since this dragon causes the eternal storm with its 6 wings.
Formerly Uriel was going to be a bird type of beast, but I wanted to include a dragon so badly somewhere and I didn't want to implement it without it being meaningful. So I started investigating more to see if there were any ways to use it and then I remembered that Drakengard had this concept of dragons representing Fallen angels, which tickled my fancy and led me to investigate more about Seraphims and then everything clicked. You see Seraphim are entities heavily connected to Fire to the point they are called "burning ones", and not only that, there are Gnostic texts that refer to the Seraphim as the ones in charge of burning Sodoma and Gomorrah with Fireballs since they use fire to purify. In addition, there are some obscure religious representations of Serpahims as winged snakes (the reason as to why I didn't give it lower extremities) which to me was the cherry on top, it made sense for this particular Seraphim to look like a dragon.
Seraphim are also depicted with 6 wings and eyes all over their wings. Although the 4 faces are normally attributed to Cherubim (I swear I read somewhere some seraphim also had it) I decided to incorporate that detail, making the faces in its chest, the one in its core, and the dragon face.
The design was inspired by the dragons in Drakengard, Final Fantasy's Bahamut, and the Mass production of Eva units from the End of Evangelion.
As the last piece of info: The seraphim Uriel was chosen as the name since its meaning is " fire of god" and also being called the Angel of Salvation.
