The ground starts moving, shifting around. Zuurith’s citizens shout in alarm, staggering. Veins seem to glow through the earth.
“It’s soft!” someone shouts.
“No!” the blue elf shouts, flat on their back, a chimera standing over them. “No no no no no-” Zuurith’s chain-whip comes swinging out of nowhere, beheading the chimera.
“Ngh-” Zuurith gasps. “I can… feel…! The mountains-!”
“Yes, I thought you might feel it,” The Collector says, re-forming next to him. “Intramuscular. A part of Stone’s body only exposed through injury.
“It’s not as fresh a wound as Vash, and your city festered for some time longer. It won’t heal over as quickly as Vash did.” Zuurith crouches on the ground, a hand over one of the wounds on his shoulder. “But really, that just means you’ll have longer to think.”
On the plus side, slower healing means more time for people to get away. If Zuurith gets stolen like Vash, he likely will be able to manifest himself wherever his people are.
Oh… wait a second. Zuurith made Dainix ‘his’ by imprisoning him (at least, from Kendal’s perspective). Does that mean that Dainix might carry a sliver of Zuurith’s soul within him. Could Zuurith convey info from inside the Collector’s prison to the group through Dainix? Or might he instead have more power over people like Shrike and the Junior Archivist?
This… probably isn’t what’s going to happen. Probably. Zuurith would likely cave before letting everyone get killed, no reason to protect the the group (except maybe to preserve his own salvation…)
I don’t think so, otherwise everyone who ever visited or moved away from or took a placement year of study in Vash could have potentially preserved his soul. I think it only counts if you live inside the city’s territory currently.
Frankly, I can’t really say for certain one way or another, we just don’t have enough about how gods are formed, just the general overview about ‘the combined souls of the city’s inhabitants’. It’s all a bit vague and mystical, as is typical of anything involving gods.
Oh well. It’s just a fun thought among many about where this story may go. If it goes nowhere, it’s only because something else happened instead (but if it DOES go somewhere, expect an ‘I CALLED IT :D’ from me 😛 )
Actually, I just noticed, Zuzu is probably “safe” from being stolen (which is to say she’ll instead wipe him from existence entirely if she destroys the city, so I doubt he’d be happy to know this… eh, we never liked him anyway)
Both her and Tahraim needed specially inscripted blades containing the epithets of the gods they were designed for in order to capture them (thanks to the lovely people deciphering the runes for letting us know about this!). I doubt she made one of those for Zuurith on the way here, so unless she was already planning to get him eventually, she shouldn’t be able to capture him at all.
I wonder if she’ll try to kidnap Zuurith like she did to Vash or if that is even possible (considering that we know for a fact that there are people of the city that aren’t in valley at this moment and I am sure some of the ones there will be able to get away) or if she’ll just kill him (again if that is possible).
The person Zuurith saved in panel 4 is the same person who was arguing that he doesn’t care about his citizens a few pages ago. Whether they’ll survive long enough to reevaluate their view of him in light of this action remains to be seen.
Hm… this makes it seem a bit as if you’d be fairly save from the Collector on Helm. It’s the top of stone’s helmet and apparently fairly intact. Not much there for her to heal…
I wonder if normal erosion and stuff counts as injury though? And I’m pretty sure Stone’s ‘armour’ is actually a part of its (his?) body. If both are true, then nowhere on the world (on solid ground) would be truly safe. …but, it’s a good idea, Helm is probably safe*r* than most other places.
I didn’t realise the Collectors powers work on the same rules as normal healing magic just on a grander scale, I thought she broke the rules entirely, but I guess stone’s wounds are more understandable than I thought.
I love the fact that different forms of earth are given anatomy names like intramuscular and that the Collector described Zuurith as an open wound, it really goes to show how she thinks of the place.
Wait . . . I just clocked the fact that the Collector is SO POWERFUL that she can heal the primordials . . . Oh no no no no NO! Who else reckons she’s going to have a role in separating them in order to bring Life back – inadvertently freeing Voidy?!
I also feel like I should have picked up on that earlier but hey I got it now 😅
Big Z’s floof is going limp and straight! That’s how you know he’s getting weaker.
I called it, quicksand and destabilisation of Zuurith’s domain, subjecting him and his subjects to a slow but sure demise; I’m reminded of the description of the stone sector of the Storm back in 1-4-2. Zuurith may have saved Elfalst from that chimera, and potentially changed their mind in the Zuurith redemption debate, but they and the other citizens are still sinking.
I figured Zuurith’s landscape would take longer to destroy due to being formed from natural erosion rather than meteorite, as she said “not as fresh a wound as Vash”. But the Collectors comments about the city “festering longer” also gives me the impression Zuurith is older than Vash by some margin. Another component of their rivalry of young, upstart god Vs. older establishment god I guess.
Art wise I really love the vein and artery styling for the magic worked here. It has the pale glow of stone magic, but none of the regimented lines of Erin’s casting or the tight control of Shrike’s; this is still life magic after all, applied to Stone’s body. It’s a very unnerving and almost visceral effect visually, and for Zuurith it’s those things felt physically. Also helps drive home that this is an intramuscular injury as opposed to a wound on the skin like Vash was.
Prediction for next week: Zuurith caves in and agrees to tell her, on the promise she would leave him and his citizens alone. Though I get the impression, or at least hope, he’s only going to reveal the bare minimum about Kendal and his nature; he can leave out the fact he’s traveling in a group and could feasibly claim ignorance as to which direction they went in.
Re ‘festering wound’, I think it has more to do with erosion. The crater of Vash was relatively fresh and almost entirely intact, just a small cut that any life mage could heal if so desired. The valley of Zuurith, however, is almost entirely due to Water’s slow course over Stone, a much deeper cut that has been, well, festering since the beginning.
Which makes you wonder what the Collector thinks of Water; Her (I think that one’s a Her) body is much more fluid, so it ‘rotted’ faster and now it’s eating away at Stone’s body like flesh-eating bacteria. Can she do any sort of healing on Her? Would she want to?
I’m betting that the more amorphous Primordials (which is, uh, all of them except for Stone), don’t have much of an ‘original form’ to heal/restore them to (although it’s possible (and a cool idea) that they had organs of a sort, just not ones that held together so well after death). So its likely that this strategy of hers is primarily only useful on land (where erosion, as you say, has created ‘wounds’ basically everywhere). Then again, Life magic can manipulate living tissue, not just restore it, so maybe by that logic the Collector can indirectly manipulate all the elements (if the Primordials are/were ‘living’ in the sense that they had Life in them, is Voidy alive too, then? Can she manipulate elemental Void? Does she know it exists?). I’m not sure if the cave entrance that she used to attack Vash was only sealed as a one-time action (If so, why? She didn’t know Kendal was about to awaken.), or if she opened it in the first place, perhaps by ‘mutating’/expanding stone’s vascular system. …hm, THAT idea might imply that her elemental manipulation is largely restricted to large-scale moves, since the Primordials whose bodies she’s manipulating were such large-scale entities. Which would be a cool concept; she can destroy a city, but she couldn’t build a little stone house like Erin did. Too fine-detail, that would be like making a house out of a single mole on someone’s skin. Um, but that’s a rather baseless theory.
I might be creating too many tangents. To actually answer your questions; I’m betting that the Collector isn’t able to ‘heal’ Water (or any of the others) nearly as effectively, and I don’t THINK she’s actually particularly interested in actually reviving any of the Primordials except Life (Because, are they even conscious? Or even viably revivable? I got the impression that only Life survived because She’s alive by definition. Maybe only LIFE HERSELF could revive the others. …OK, this is also totally wild speculation.)
Yeah, Vash was a recent and fairly clean graze while Zuurith is an old open wound that’s only gotten worse overtime. Whether because they’re different sorts of wounds to heal, or a factor of Red’s art style evolving overtime, this healing process looks very different from when the Collector destroyed Vash.
Yeah, I find water does have a sense of strangeness to it. It can imperfectly mimic the other elements and their capabilities, yet one of it’s defining abilities seems to be slow but relentless erosion (I’m almost reminded of void). As for the Collector, we see her doing something to a source of water in 1-7-6 to get it’s god, so she must be able to disrupt water with her magic to some degree.
In the last panel of that page it looks to me like she’s turning that iceberg into water, which would make sense if Water was originally all liquid and the Collector is “restoring” her in that way.
The ground, the valley, it begins to churn
Beneath the citizens feet.
The Collector heals the flesh of Stone,
Round the city of the gods she beat.
His axe drives chimeras’ away from citizens,
But Zuurith lies crumpled, bleeding.
It heals slower than the crater of Vash,
But to the same dread fate is leading.
Keep in mind that she can still only use Life magic even on Stone’s body, so her “earthbending” is still mostly limited to healing Stone’s wounds (i.e. the valley that Vash’s city was in and now this wound here).
It doesn’t make me too happy that the Collector is probably about to learn of Kendal’s existence, but I don’t think he’d want an entire city dying for him. I wonder if Zuurith will be able to alert him. If he survives, that is.
Exactly. If Kendal could communicate with Zuurith right now, he’d tell him to just tell her; his “no one dies for me” mentality is still a significant factor of his psychology.
As for warning Kendal and the others, we know gods have some means of communicating with one another. Zuurith could alert all the gods he could of this development, word of that could reach Argist, and he could tell the gang. If he can track Kendal outside his domain, he could even tell he’s in Argist and contact him directly.
Ooh, that really makes me think that the Collector won’t want to keep him (or any of his people) alive after she gets the info. Hell, they could just send a wind lacrima if nothing else, right?
Yeah, both Vash and Kendal would tell him “just *tell* her!” I’m pretty sure. Especially since they’ll be out on the water soon, and she’ll likely have issues following them.
Like I said earlier, some objectively important characters conveniently left Zuurith in the interlude, so him getting stolen by the Collector would not rid the story of any super important characters. Evil tree makes a good point, he could still probably cave in and tell Ms. Eldritch Horror where Kendal went, but I don’t know enough about the Collector’s morals to decide if she would spare Zuurith or continue with her god stealing.
Making us sympathize for the rules-obsessed god we were previously incredibly frustrated with? After he seemed to be turning over a new leaf? How dastardly and devious of you, Red!
This is fantastic, I’m so excited for the next page, but ugh, it’s 3 whole days away instead of 2!
Yyyyep, Astor, Prophet of Doom just started playing.
You know what would be really funny? If the Collector finds the floof squad, they tell her that they aren’t able to summon Vash again, and she accepts that and leaves them alone. That would of course probably not happen, but it would be funny.
It’s still unclear if the other Primordial Spirits are still able to “wake up”. They didn’t just fall asleep, they were killed. Life seems like a special case to me, because it’s philosophically impossible for the personification of Life itself to not be living anymore. Even if their Truenames and Great Runes can be invoked, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re alive, just that they still exist in some form (although I’m not sure what difference this makes.)
Either way, if invoking Life’s Truename is whta woke her up, then the others should be awake already (if they can wake up at all), since their Truenames have also been found.
eh, doubt zurrith will create an autonomous vessel, seeing as the only reason kendal was able to stay alive was because
A) vash designed his body to last long during fights, while zurrith instead designs his bodies to be simple and take a more managerial role, rather than an outright combat roll (he mentions this somewhere in his first appearence, when he confronts kendal)
B) Kendal imedeately got healing from alinua which also went wild, and seeing as alinua is currently a few cities away and in full control of her magic I doubt that would happen
I do think it would be fun to have another autonomous vessel, I really doubt that the story will go this route (plus it would remove a bit of what makes kendal unique)
You gotta admit, though, there is some interesting plot that could be told with an incarnation of Zuurith’s realizing. It might be cliche, admittedly, but a new vessel could serve as a dark mirror to Kendal, given that they would be influenced by the Collector in the same way Kendal was influenced by Alinua, and they would likewise have copy of Zuurith’s memories, which could mean a rivalry with Kendal as their templates had–so there’s a potential arc about learning to let go of family grudges, and to become their own person. Not to mention realizing that the Collector is Evil, and having to work out their loyalties…
How about if something else interesting happens to Zuurith’s kusari? Perhaps the Collector turns it into an ally… she could likely create a similar effect to what Alinua did to Kendal, but do it on purpose!
Or, perhaps it just becomes some sort of unique artifact, a god-weapon without its god… what would that be like? This is all assuming that because the kusari displays many similar traits to Kendal the sword, it’s a similar artifact with a similar history.
Is your artist side arguing against your writer/director side Red?
Fool:”Boss, Boss there is an undead starfish at the quarry!”
Sherriff: “Flee you Fool!”
Fool:”Boss, Boss, the ground’s all slippery!”
Sheriff: (insert quip here). “*!’
WELL THATS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING PAGE. Red, I applaud your dedication to the art: the effect works REALLY WELL.
This feels different from Vash’s death, both due to the fact that it’s slower/through a different process, and, we get a more ground-zero look through the people about to die, and their god with them. Zurrith can’t really do anything to stop this, just like Vash couldn’t; but he knows what’s coming and trying and still failing, which is almost sadder. Vash’s death felt like shock/disbelief; this is sadness. (…Are we going to go through the seven stages of grief through god reactions to their cities being destroyed? /j)
So, we can’t kill her by stabbing her, cutting her into little pieces, or crushing her into jelly. That means drowning probably won’t work, and neither will regular fire or other forms of disintegration. Starfire might stand a chance, but I’m beginning to think the best option is to shoot her into space, preferably straight into the sun. If she’s not in contact with any of the primordial corpses anymore, she’s got nothing to work with.
Or Alinua could drain the Life out of her. That’s probably more likely to happen, because I doubt Red wants to draw death by explosive decompression.
I think the most interesting possible outcome from an Alinua vs. Collector fight would be the Collector having to confront that Life doesn’t *want* what she’s doing and is actively trying to stop her. We have yet to see the Collector ever get more than slightly miffed, so the epic freakout when that composure breaks is going to be *amazing*.
We might also get to see Erin let the Void Dragon try to *eat* her, which would *also* be interesting. Potentially having Voidy working with Life for once….
No, if Voidy is scared of Alinua, there’s no way he’ll try to EAT the Collector – unless in self defence. Also, given that Erin is the body for Voidy right now, I don’t want to think about the implications there, and I’m sure Red doesn’t want to draw them either.
I have a theory about that. We know that since the primordials fused together to make voidy’s prison, then the collector reviving one or more of them would likely destroy or at least weaken his prison, (that’s why VD took Erin down into the caves in arc one) so my bet is that “life” that the collector says she communicated with was VD in disguise. I could be wrong about that, though.
Makes sense; he’s partially inhabiting it at the moment.
Genius loci characters are fun like that. They’re not limited by trivial things like biology, so they can, depending on the writing, manifest in as many places in their domain as they want, with various levels of awareness. I’ve got one who can maintain a three-way split, though he can’t do it long, and the third manifestation is much weaker than the other two.
Oh. Ohhhhh. I feel like a lightbulb just went off — I understood that what the Collector had done at Vash was heal the stone, but didn’t put it together until now that what she’d ACTUALLY done was *heal the Stone Primordial’s body*, which is the ENTIRE planet. Holy crap. Also, I’m running out of curses for how bad the situation is getting.
Was not expecting the feels for Zuurith, but seeing him so desperate to try and protect his citizens is definitely giving me empathy for him. The idea of him having to watch his people slowly drown in the mud, or eaten by the Chimeras, is horrifying. Well done, Red.
My only question now is, will she let them live if he tells her about Kendal? Or is Zuurith (the city and the god) already toast?
Part of me says ‘Just break and tell her omg’ but the other part of me questions if that will actually make her stop. She’s never said anything to the effect of ‘tell me what I want to know and your city lives today’
Thinking on it…. I can actually kind of sympathize with the Collector a bit. Based on what she’s said before, it seems like what happened was that she woke Life up and….well, metaphorically speaking, Life was a giant tied down by tons of tiny people who’d build a city out of her.
Anyone’s initial reaction to seeing that when they first wake up, would be horrified screaming and struggling to get free. If the Collector has just had Life’s first screams echoing in her head for hundreds of years, unable to die or contact Life directly….well, it’s no wonder she’s doing what she’s doing, even though Life has calmed down and started trying to understand what was going on since then, even going so far as to “create” Alinua, presumably to try to stop or communicate with the Collector.
My prediction for the next page: He’s going to spin around and blindly attack her, and she’s going to tank it and have some “smh that was a bad idea” monologue
Honestly, I think they’ll be safe because it would be a real dick move writing wise to spend multiple chapters trying to save the city Zuurith from Tynan only for it to be destroyed later in one scene.
We already know that the Collector has different goals for Life, the entity, than Life the entity has for herself. If Stone the entity were awake and alert, would he agree with what the Collector considers “healing”? The primordials all worked together to defeat Voidy, but we don’t know their attitudes towards what has happened since then. The Collector reminds me of some environmentalists who would like a pristine earth with no people at all… (except themselves, one assumes), because there would be no human influence to “sully” the landscape. It’s just possible, you know, that the earth was intended to have life and that some damage from that life doing what life does, is part of the deal. To make an omelette, you gotta break eggs…
For mobile readers.
Alt-text: whaddup girl your powers are really annoying to draw
Image source: heal
Twitter Text: “oh yea lemme just draw a complex magical effect that permeates the ground of an entire city. Easy Peasy”
Tumblr text: That’s probably fine
Poor Zuurith…
The ground starts moving, shifting around. Zuurith’s citizens shout in alarm, staggering. Veins seem to glow through the earth.
“It’s soft!” someone shouts.
“No!” the blue elf shouts, flat on their back, a chimera standing over them. “No no no no no-” Zuurith’s chain-whip comes swinging out of nowhere, beheading the chimera.
“Ngh-” Zuurith gasps. “I can… feel…! The mountains-!”
“Yes, I thought you might feel it,” The Collector says, re-forming next to him. “Intramuscular. A part of Stone’s body only exposed through injury.
“It’s not as fresh a wound as Vash, and your city festered for some time longer. It won’t heal over as quickly as Vash did.” Zuurith crouches on the ground, a hand over one of the wounds on his shoulder. “But really, that just means you’ll have longer to think.”
OH SHOOOOOOOOOT
Oh dear.
On the plus side, slower healing means more time for people to get away. If Zuurith gets stolen like Vash, he likely will be able to manifest himself wherever his people are.
Oh… wait a second. Zuurith made Dainix ‘his’ by imprisoning him (at least, from Kendal’s perspective). Does that mean that Dainix might carry a sliver of Zuurith’s soul within him. Could Zuurith convey info from inside the Collector’s prison to the group through Dainix? Or might he instead have more power over people like Shrike and the Junior Archivist?
This… probably isn’t what’s going to happen. Probably. Zuurith would likely cave before letting everyone get killed, no reason to protect the the group (except maybe to preserve his own salvation…)
I don’t think so, otherwise everyone who ever visited or moved away from or took a placement year of study in Vash could have potentially preserved his soul. I think it only counts if you live inside the city’s territory currently.
Frankly, I can’t really say for certain one way or another, we just don’t have enough about how gods are formed, just the general overview about ‘the combined souls of the city’s inhabitants’. It’s all a bit vague and mystical, as is typical of anything involving gods.
Oh well. It’s just a fun thought among many about where this story may go. If it goes nowhere, it’s only because something else happened instead (but if it DOES go somewhere, expect an ‘I CALLED IT :D’ from me 😛 )
Actually, I just noticed, Zuzu is probably “safe” from being stolen (which is to say she’ll instead wipe him from existence entirely if she destroys the city, so I doubt he’d be happy to know this… eh, we never liked him anyway)
Both her and Tahraim needed specially inscripted blades containing the epithets of the gods they were designed for in order to capture them (thanks to the lovely people deciphering the runes for letting us know about this!). I doubt she made one of those for Zuurith on the way here, so unless she was already planning to get him eventually, she shouldn’t be able to capture him at all.
I wonder if she’ll try to kidnap Zuurith like she did to Vash or if that is even possible (considering that we know for a fact that there are people of the city that aren’t in valley at this moment and I am sure some of the ones there will be able to get away) or if she’ll just kill him (again if that is possible).
So, we gonna talk about Zuurith saving the life of the blonde elf that was just trashtalking his budding character growth?
Say what you want about him, but he’s not *that* petty.
I thought you said Zuzu was’t pretty and I was *this* close to throwing hands
Would have been deserved, though I’d say zuzu’s more handsome than pretty.
No, we all saw how he made his incarnation. He’s literally a material girl.
The ground is alive with the sound of screams~~~
With Zuurith they have lived for a thousand years–
The person Zuurith saved in panel 4 is the same person who was arguing that he doesn’t care about his citizens a few pages ago. Whether they’ll survive long enough to reevaluate their view of him in light of this action remains to be seen.
Um I can’t physically take this anymore
Hm… this makes it seem a bit as if you’d be fairly save from the Collector on Helm. It’s the top of stone’s helmet and apparently fairly intact. Not much there for her to heal…
I wonder if normal erosion and stuff counts as injury though? And I’m pretty sure Stone’s ‘armour’ is actually a part of its (his?) body. If both are true, then nowhere on the world (on solid ground) would be truly safe. …but, it’s a good idea, Helm is probably safe*r* than most other places.
Wow I haven’t been this early in a while.
I didn’t realise the Collectors powers work on the same rules as normal healing magic just on a grander scale, I thought she broke the rules entirely, but I guess stone’s wounds are more understandable than I thought.
I love the fact that different forms of earth are given anatomy names like intramuscular and that the Collector described Zuurith as an open wound, it really goes to show how she thinks of the place.
I am glad I don’t know enough geology to start tearing my hairr out over the implications of ‘muscular stone’ 😛
Wait . . . I just clocked the fact that the Collector is SO POWERFUL that she can heal the primordials . . . Oh no no no no NO! Who else reckons she’s going to have a role in separating them in order to bring Life back – inadvertently freeing Voidy?!
I also feel like I should have picked up on that earlier but hey I got it now 😅
Big Z’s floof is going limp and straight! That’s how you know he’s getting weaker.
I called it, quicksand and destabilisation of Zuurith’s domain, subjecting him and his subjects to a slow but sure demise; I’m reminded of the description of the stone sector of the Storm back in 1-4-2. Zuurith may have saved Elfalst from that chimera, and potentially changed their mind in the Zuurith redemption debate, but they and the other citizens are still sinking.
I figured Zuurith’s landscape would take longer to destroy due to being formed from natural erosion rather than meteorite, as she said “not as fresh a wound as Vash”. But the Collectors comments about the city “festering longer” also gives me the impression Zuurith is older than Vash by some margin. Another component of their rivalry of young, upstart god Vs. older establishment god I guess.
Art wise I really love the vein and artery styling for the magic worked here. It has the pale glow of stone magic, but none of the regimented lines of Erin’s casting or the tight control of Shrike’s; this is still life magic after all, applied to Stone’s body. It’s a very unnerving and almost visceral effect visually, and for Zuurith it’s those things felt physically. Also helps drive home that this is an intramuscular injury as opposed to a wound on the skin like Vash was.
Prediction for next week: Zuurith caves in and agrees to tell her, on the promise she would leave him and his citizens alone. Though I get the impression, or at least hope, he’s only going to reveal the bare minimum about Kendal and his nature; he can leave out the fact he’s traveling in a group and could feasibly claim ignorance as to which direction they went in.
Re ‘festering wound’, I think it has more to do with erosion. The crater of Vash was relatively fresh and almost entirely intact, just a small cut that any life mage could heal if so desired. The valley of Zuurith, however, is almost entirely due to Water’s slow course over Stone, a much deeper cut that has been, well, festering since the beginning.
Which makes you wonder what the Collector thinks of Water; Her (I think that one’s a Her) body is much more fluid, so it ‘rotted’ faster and now it’s eating away at Stone’s body like flesh-eating bacteria. Can she do any sort of healing on Her? Would she want to?
I’m betting that the more amorphous Primordials (which is, uh, all of them except for Stone), don’t have much of an ‘original form’ to heal/restore them to (although it’s possible (and a cool idea) that they had organs of a sort, just not ones that held together so well after death). So its likely that this strategy of hers is primarily only useful on land (where erosion, as you say, has created ‘wounds’ basically everywhere). Then again, Life magic can manipulate living tissue, not just restore it, so maybe by that logic the Collector can indirectly manipulate all the elements (if the Primordials are/were ‘living’ in the sense that they had Life in them, is Voidy alive too, then? Can she manipulate elemental Void? Does she know it exists?). I’m not sure if the cave entrance that she used to attack Vash was only sealed as a one-time action (If so, why? She didn’t know Kendal was about to awaken.), or if she opened it in the first place, perhaps by ‘mutating’/expanding stone’s vascular system. …hm, THAT idea might imply that her elemental manipulation is largely restricted to large-scale moves, since the Primordials whose bodies she’s manipulating were such large-scale entities. Which would be a cool concept; she can destroy a city, but she couldn’t build a little stone house like Erin did. Too fine-detail, that would be like making a house out of a single mole on someone’s skin. Um, but that’s a rather baseless theory.
I might be creating too many tangents. To actually answer your questions; I’m betting that the Collector isn’t able to ‘heal’ Water (or any of the others) nearly as effectively, and I don’t THINK she’s actually particularly interested in actually reviving any of the Primordials except Life (Because, are they even conscious? Or even viably revivable? I got the impression that only Life survived because She’s alive by definition. Maybe only LIFE HERSELF could revive the others. …OK, this is also totally wild speculation.)
Yeah, Vash was a recent and fairly clean graze while Zuurith is an old open wound that’s only gotten worse overtime. Whether because they’re different sorts of wounds to heal, or a factor of Red’s art style evolving overtime, this healing process looks very different from when the Collector destroyed Vash.
Yeah, I find water does have a sense of strangeness to it. It can imperfectly mimic the other elements and their capabilities, yet one of it’s defining abilities seems to be slow but relentless erosion (I’m almost reminded of void). As for the Collector, we see her doing something to a source of water in 1-7-6 to get it’s god, so she must be able to disrupt water with her magic to some degree.
Maybe she used her earth powers to clog the river or contaminate it, thus weakening the god? Hmmmmmmmm…
In the last panel of that page it looks to me like she’s turning that iceberg into water, which would make sense if Water was originally all liquid and the Collector is “restoring” her in that way.
You did call it, Evil Tree, or close enough that it definitely counts. Contrary to what I said in my own post, below.
ZUURITH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The ground, the valley, it begins to churn
Beneath the citizens feet.
The Collector heals the flesh of Stone,
Round the city of the gods she beat.
His axe drives chimeras’ away from citizens,
But Zuurith lies crumpled, bleeding.
It heals slower than the crater of Vash,
But to the same dread fate is leading.
As the muscles of Stone come back to life
So does Zuurith tremble though attempting strife
Well, now we know how her magic works. She can perceive Stone as a body as opposed to rocks, thus her magic can affect them.
Keep in mind that she can still only use Life magic even on Stone’s body, so her “earthbending” is still mostly limited to healing Stone’s wounds (i.e. the valley that Vash’s city was in and now this wound here).
DUDE YOU CAN’T WIN, JUST TELL HER
It doesn’t make me too happy that the Collector is probably about to learn of Kendal’s existence, but I don’t think he’d want an entire city dying for him. I wonder if Zuurith will be able to alert him. If he survives, that is.
Exactly. If Kendal could communicate with Zuurith right now, he’d tell him to just tell her; his “no one dies for me” mentality is still a significant factor of his psychology.
As for warning Kendal and the others, we know gods have some means of communicating with one another. Zuurith could alert all the gods he could of this development, word of that could reach Argist, and he could tell the gang. If he can track Kendal outside his domain, he could even tell he’s in Argist and contact him directly.
Ooh, that really makes me think that the Collector won’t want to keep him (or any of his people) alive after she gets the info. Hell, they could just send a wind lacrima if nothing else, right?
Yeah, both Vash and Kendal would tell him “just *tell* her!” I’m pretty sure. Especially since they’ll be out on the water soon, and she’ll likely have issues following them.
….Beating them to Helm first, however….
Like I said earlier, some objectively important characters conveniently left Zuurith in the interlude, so him getting stolen by the Collector would not rid the story of any super important characters. Evil tree makes a good point, he could still probably cave in and tell Ms. Eldritch Horror where Kendal went, but I don’t know enough about the Collector’s morals to decide if she would spare Zuurith or continue with her god stealing.
Oh no
Making us sympathize for the rules-obsessed god we were previously incredibly frustrated with? After he seemed to be turning over a new leaf? How dastardly and devious of you, Red!
This is fantastic, I’m so excited for the next page, but ugh, it’s 3 whole days away instead of 2!
Oh snap
OH NO. 🙁
Yyyyep, Astor, Prophet of Doom just started playing.
You know what would be really funny? If the Collector finds the floof squad, they tell her that they aren’t able to summon Vash again, and she accepts that and leaves them alone. That would of course probably not happen, but it would be funny.
I wouldn’t put this past Red. The other shoe would drop eventually, but it would be an extreme case of just the kind of aversion she seems to like.
Welp things went downhill real fast didn’t they
Ohhhh so it’s like she’s harnessed Life energy to the point that she can ‘heal’ the other old elemental gods like stone.
You could say that healing all the Elemental beings is a byproduct of her intended actions. I wonder what will happen if other Spirits wake up?
It’s still unclear if the other Primordial Spirits are still able to “wake up”. They didn’t just fall asleep, they were killed. Life seems like a special case to me, because it’s philosophically impossible for the personification of Life itself to not be living anymore. Even if their Truenames and Great Runes can be invoked, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re alive, just that they still exist in some form (although I’m not sure what difference this makes.)
Either way, if invoking Life’s Truename is whta woke her up, then the others should be awake already (if they can wake up at all), since their Truenames have also been found.
She won’t just “wake them up” she’ll separate them to restore Life and free Voidy 😟
There once was a god of stone
Who was in danger of losing his home
Unless he betrays
Vash’s strays–
And he can’t beat the Collector alone.
Zuurith’s magic chain whip/axe thing is so freaking cool.
…Kendal pt.2 electric boogaloo? Zendal?
eh, doubt zurrith will create an autonomous vessel, seeing as the only reason kendal was able to stay alive was because
A) vash designed his body to last long during fights, while zurrith instead designs his bodies to be simple and take a more managerial role, rather than an outright combat roll (he mentions this somewhere in his first appearence, when he confronts kendal)
B) Kendal imedeately got healing from alinua which also went wild, and seeing as alinua is currently a few cities away and in full control of her magic I doubt that would happen
I do think it would be fun to have another autonomous vessel, I really doubt that the story will go this route (plus it would remove a bit of what makes kendal unique)
You gotta admit, though, there is some interesting plot that could be told with an incarnation of Zuurith’s realizing. It might be cliche, admittedly, but a new vessel could serve as a dark mirror to Kendal, given that they would be influenced by the Collector in the same way Kendal was influenced by Alinua, and they would likewise have copy of Zuurith’s memories, which could mean a rivalry with Kendal as their templates had–so there’s a potential arc about learning to let go of family grudges, and to become their own person. Not to mention realizing that the Collector is Evil, and having to work out their loyalties…
How about if something else interesting happens to Zuurith’s kusari? Perhaps the Collector turns it into an ally… she could likely create a similar effect to what Alinua did to Kendal, but do it on purpose!
Or, perhaps it just becomes some sort of unique artifact, a god-weapon without its god… what would that be like? This is all assuming that because the kusari displays many similar traits to Kendal the sword, it’s a similar artifact with a similar history.
Does anyone else imagine a movie soundtrack while reading this? This page has something that’s kinda high-speed & desperate as everyone sinks.
I pictured a slow rumbling or plodding beat that builds to cacophony then crescendo. Think King Crimson for the sound.
Oh, and panels 3 & 4 had hero music for about two seconds 🙂
Is your artist side arguing against your writer/director side Red?
Fool:”Boss, Boss there is an undead starfish at the quarry!”
Sherriff: “Flee you Fool!”
Fool:”Boss, Boss, the ground’s all slippery!”
Sheriff: (insert quip here). “*!’
‘
WELL THATS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING PAGE. Red, I applaud your dedication to the art: the effect works REALLY WELL.
This feels different from Vash’s death, both due to the fact that it’s slower/through a different process, and, we get a more ground-zero look through the people about to die, and their god with them. Zurrith can’t really do anything to stop this, just like Vash couldn’t; but he knows what’s coming and trying and still failing, which is almost sadder. Vash’s death felt like shock/disbelief; this is sadness. (…Are we going to go through the seven stages of grief through god reactions to their cities being destroyed? /j)
So, we can’t kill her by stabbing her, cutting her into little pieces, or crushing her into jelly. That means drowning probably won’t work, and neither will regular fire or other forms of disintegration. Starfire might stand a chance, but I’m beginning to think the best option is to shoot her into space, preferably straight into the sun. If she’s not in contact with any of the primordial corpses anymore, she’s got nothing to work with.
Or Alinua could drain the Life out of her. That’s probably more likely to happen, because I doubt Red wants to draw death by explosive decompression.
I think the most interesting possible outcome from an Alinua vs. Collector fight would be the Collector having to confront that Life doesn’t *want* what she’s doing and is actively trying to stop her. We have yet to see the Collector ever get more than slightly miffed, so the epic freakout when that composure breaks is going to be *amazing*.
We might also get to see Erin let the Void Dragon try to *eat* her, which would *also* be interesting. Potentially having Voidy working with Life for once….
No, if Voidy is scared of Alinua, there’s no way he’ll try to EAT the Collector – unless in self defence. Also, given that Erin is the body for Voidy right now, I don’t want to think about the implications there, and I’m sure Red doesn’t want to draw them either.
I have a theory about that. We know that since the primordials fused together to make voidy’s prison, then the collector reviving one or more of them would likely destroy or at least weaken his prison, (that’s why VD took Erin down into the caves in arc one) so my bet is that “life” that the collector says she communicated with was VD in disguise. I could be wrong about that, though.
I love how in panel 5 the sentinel’s posture mirrors Zuurith’s.
Makes sense; he’s partially inhabiting it at the moment.
Genius loci characters are fun like that. They’re not limited by trivial things like biology, so they can, depending on the writing, manifest in as many places in their domain as they want, with various levels of awareness. I’ve got one who can maintain a three-way split, though he can’t do it long, and the third manifestation is much weaker than the other two.
Aaaaand I’m caught up. Dammit.
Welcome to the Aurora fandom!
Oh. Ohhhhh. I feel like a lightbulb just went off — I understood that what the Collector had done at Vash was heal the stone, but didn’t put it together until now that what she’d ACTUALLY done was *heal the Stone Primordial’s body*, which is the ENTIRE planet. Holy crap. Also, I’m running out of curses for how bad the situation is getting.
Was not expecting the feels for Zuurith, but seeing him so desperate to try and protect his citizens is definitely giving me empathy for him. The idea of him having to watch his people slowly drown in the mud, or eaten by the Chimeras, is horrifying. Well done, Red.
My only question now is, will she let them live if he tells her about Kendal? Or is Zuurith (the city and the god) already toast?
TL;DR: Troglodyte medic at it again, giving unauthorized healing to a dead god.
Oh, so this is like, *bad* bad.
Part of me says ‘Just break and tell her omg’ but the other part of me questions if that will actually make her stop. She’s never said anything to the effect of ‘tell me what I want to know and your city lives today’
Thinking on it…. I can actually kind of sympathize with the Collector a bit. Based on what she’s said before, it seems like what happened was that she woke Life up and….well, metaphorically speaking, Life was a giant tied down by tons of tiny people who’d build a city out of her.
Anyone’s initial reaction to seeing that when they first wake up, would be horrified screaming and struggling to get free. If the Collector has just had Life’s first screams echoing in her head for hundreds of years, unable to die or contact Life directly….well, it’s no wonder she’s doing what she’s doing, even though Life has calmed down and started trying to understand what was going on since then, even going so far as to “create” Alinua, presumably to try to stop or communicate with the Collector.
oh shit
The fact that Kendal would probably WANT him to tell The Collector everything for the chance to save the city from the tragedy that occurred at Vash
My prediction for the next page: He’s going to spin around and blindly attack her, and she’s going to tank it and have some “smh that was a bad idea” monologue
That would be so Zuurith!
Zuurith’s valley is a wound, a gash in Stone’s body, therefore the Collector can entomb the city by healing that wound.
Oh, well played, Red. Well played! I don’t remember anyone coming up with such a prediction, in all of our Wild Mass Guessing!
Honestly, I think they’ll be safe because it would be a real dick move writing wise to spend multiple chapters trying to save the city Zuurith from Tynan only for it to be destroyed later in one scene.
We already know that the Collector has different goals for Life, the entity, than Life the entity has for herself. If Stone the entity were awake and alert, would he agree with what the Collector considers “healing”? The primordials all worked together to defeat Voidy, but we don’t know their attitudes towards what has happened since then. The Collector reminds me of some environmentalists who would like a pristine earth with no people at all… (except themselves, one assumes), because there would be no human influence to “sully” the landscape. It’s just possible, you know, that the earth was intended to have life and that some damage from that life doing what life does, is part of the deal. To make an omelette, you gotta break eggs…