Together with the awesome Justine Bergman from Whispers and Wonder and Nick from Out of This World SFF Reviews today we present to you the amazing cover of The World Maker Parable by Luke Tarzian! Make sure to check out their posts as well!
The World Maker Parable is the prequel story to the Shadow Twins trilogy and will be released on April 14th, but you can already pre-order it here!
The Author
Fantasy Author. Long Doggo Enthusiast. Snoot Booper. Shouter of Profanities. Drinker of Whiskey. These are all titles. The Khaleesi nobody wanted and the one they certainly didn’t deserve.
The Cover
The design was made by Luke Tarzian. Check out his other works on his website (btw, he takes commissions)!
The Blurb
Guilt will always call you back... Rhona is a faithful servant of the country Jémoon and a woman in love. Everything changes when her beloved sets the ravenous Vulture goddess loose upon the land. Forced to execute the woman she loves for committing treason, Rhona discovers a profound correlation between morality and truth. A connection that might save her people or annihilate them all. You are a lie... Varésh Lúm-talé is many things, most of all a genocidal liar. A falsity searching for the Phoenix goddess whom he believes can help him rectify his atrocities. Such an undertaking is an arduous one for a man with missing memories and a conscience set on rending him from inside out. A man whose journey leads to Hang-Dead Forest and a meeting with a Vulture goddess who is not entirely as she seems.
Q&A with Luke Tarzian
You designed your own cover, which in a way can be freeing. Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to see on the cover or have you experimented and it slowly came together? How much time did you spent on making the cover?
It was absolutely freeing, but it was also a challenge this time around. I wasn’t sure what I wanted initially so I played around with a few different designs before finally settling on what you see before you. I got the general idea from the cover for The Waking Land by Callie Bates. I’ve always really loved that kind of design, a silhouette with a full design hidden behind it. There’s something very evocative about it, like peeking behind a curtain. As far as time spent. I’d say between the background image and the silhouette, plus cover design, a good twelve or so hours, give or take a couple.
What is your favourite part about the cover making process?
I like the discovery aspect of it, seeing what I can come up with to represent the story, but my favorite is seeing everything (font, imagery, etc.) tie together in the end. I was extremely pleased with how the cover for The World Maker Parable came out; it’s probably my favorite thus far.
How does The World Maker Parable tie into the world of Vultures? Is it set in the same world?
So. The World Maker Parable is indeed set in the world of Vultures, but it takes place thousands of years prior. I fondly refer to it as my take on Dante‘s The Inferno. It’s an origin story for one of my favorite characters, Varésh Lúm-talé, who we met briefly in VULTURES. This story’s events tie heavily into the Shadow Twins trilogy, but the story itself can be read as a standalone; you need not have read Vultures to understand it.
Does birds (vultures specifically) play a significant role in your books? I suspect they do since they are on the cover. But why vultures? Does they have some meaning to you?
Birds do play a significant role in my work. I like the symbology and I like applying that to my stories. Vultures in particular are important in this world—they represent destruction, necessary or not, as well as past loss. The title Vultures came from a song of the same name, and I was especially inspired by the lyrics “These vultures burn the life right out of me.” In The World Maker Parable we get to see the physical representation of that anxiety and loss in the form of the Vulture goddess. Truth, morality, and power are extremely important themes in this story and she sort of represents the consequence of forsaking morality for power.
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