CLOAK OF DRAGONS / DEMONSOULED gag

Apropos to recent posts about cover design, in CLOAK OF DRAGONS I wrote an in-joke about cover design. It’s in a scene where Nadia is walking through an art gallery’s exhibit of Russian art:

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My eyes fell on a painting of a knight on horseback facing a carved standing stone. The knight looked weary, his head bowed, and there were bones scattered around the base of the stone. Something about the knight’s weariness spoke to me, and I had a disquieting memory of the Eternity Crucible, of repeating the same endless death over and over again.

I shoved aside that train of thought before it could get up to steam.

The accompanying plaque said that the portrait was a reproduction of a painting called “Knight At The Crossroads,” and the original had been painted about a hundred and thirty years before the Conquest by some guy named Viktor Vasnetsov. There were quite a few paintings by Vasnetsov throughout the exhibit, most of them showing either bogatyrs or figures from pre-Conquest Russian history.

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I added that scene because way back in 2011 and 2012 I couldn’t afford to use stock images for cover design. What I could afford to use, however, was public domain artwork from the 19th and early 20th century. One of those was Viktor Vasnetsov’s “Knight At The Crossroads”, which I used for the cover of DEMONSOULED for a while in 2012:

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-JM