Last Watch Before Dawn: Volume 1, Page 18

I’m still two pages ahead, and I’m hoping to get a third done this weekend.

After this, there are three more pages in this “chapter,” and then we’ll meet another protagonist!

Warning for more fire. The page is below the cut:

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Table of Contents

Back to Page 17

Forward to Page 19 (forthcoming)

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Image description:

A seven-panel, black-and-white comic page.

Panel 1: Resunotek turns away from the doorway, standing on the platform outside. She bends her head and covers her nose and mouth with her mittened hands. Smoke pours across the panel from the left, tinged orange and full of sparks. The sound effect “cough cough” appears close to Resunotek. At the back corner of the platform, a smoldering post stands jutting into the clouded sky.

Panel 2: The tiny figure of Resunotek makes her way down a carved set of stairs. The rope guard seen in previous pages has burned away, and she keeps one hand on the cliff wall. A thick cloud of smoke surrounds her.

Panel 3: She arrives at the barn. Facing away from the viewer, she places both hands on the wooden doors and pushes. Smoke hovers around the arched opening above the doors.

Panel 4: The shelving holding the shrine’s eggs has burned away. The right-hand half is completely gone, with only the vertical supports remaining, though they are actively burning. On the left, the eggs are intact, though fire climbs up the leftmost support. Toward the center, the eggs are scorched gray, and three of them are reduced to smears of burnt sludge. The fire is rendered in yellow and orange, and the remaining eggs are a translucent green.

Panel 5: A closer shot of Resunotek. Her face is covered in soot, and her tears have left white streaks through it. She covers her mouth with one hand, out of shock or to protect herself from the smoke. Her mittens are also mottled with soot.

Panel 6: A half-body shot as she reaches into her straw cloak, pulling it open with her right hand.

Panel 7: She pulls on a face-covering hood made of straw with large, oval, insect-like eyes of shiny dark glass. A crescent-moon crest sits on top of it, giving an effect somewhere between a samurai’s helmet and the antennae of an insect.