2.5.10
on July 21, 2025
at 3:00 am
but what a relief it must’ve been for that emissary to realize his goddess wasn’t mad at him, she’d just gone fully insane and turned into a rampaging monster. that’s gotta be such a relief for the anxiety
First! And also wow!
Fish moment
For mobile readers.
Alt-text: the ocean is an abs-out kind of vibe
Image source: mad
Tomorrow, July 22, is the annual Festival of Everybody Yells at the Elemental Magus. (page 2.2.22 & comments)
Glorious
Going back to that page and through the comments, I’m impressed that Zaealix (bit over halfway down the page at the time of writing) correctly called that Dainix would end up getting thrown into the volcano.
Glad tidings abound
Erin, do a better job!
I’ll see you next year
Let the annual Festival of Everyone Yells At The Elemental Magus commence!
tumblr text: TURN DOWN THE MUSIIIIIC
. “We think it started in midwinter,” the white mermaid with the missing arm tells Alinua.
. “You’re not sure?” she asks, sitting and holding a pale green stone in her hands. Behind them, the deep blue mermaid who had asked about her spots examines Alinua while Selach glares at her.
. “Nobody was here to witness the change,” the white mermaid says. “The Wyrm is weaker before the ice melts, and the mountain is always more violent in the cold. It’s too risky to come here then. But winter is when we started to see the signs.
. “Shoals fled south, past the Reef. The lookouts tasted blood in the water. The deep-speaker was asked to reach out to the Wyrm, but he was very reluctant. Later he admitted he’d suffered a horrible nightmare some sefs before Ishva’s Turn.
. “Since then, he’d been unable to feel the Wyrm’s will at all.” The mermaid takes a breath. “He thought he’d done something to anger her, but after she attacked the Feast of the Fall…
. “She wasn’t angry. She’d gone mad. And she didn’t know us anymore.”
I have horseback camp this week, so I’ll be late posting these three pages 🙂
The blue mermaid is just so curious about alinua!
With good reason. It’s like she made herself into a chimera, but not deformed or anything. Or perhaps more like a Ferin but she is still a mage. It’s very unique and unprecedented.
Lesbian Awakening in progress, do not disturb
“wait so are the markings her spots or…”
Nooooooo, sea snek is in pain!
I’d like to quote Mat from two pages ago:
“Argist mentioned the Reefspire experienced chimeric activity around Ishva’s Turn. That’s about 4 sindahlans (i.e. months) ago.”
And for my own contribution: love deep-blue’s inquisitive look at Alinua after asking about her lack of spots last page.
And the look that Selach is giving HER 😂
Those are the background details I live for. Like Kendal befriending a local squirrel, or Falst witnessing Erin’s skill at diplomacy.
Squirrel?
I missed that! Link, please?
Page 1.8.1, Kendal is feeding a squirrel
It appears that Alinua is uniquely equipped to handle this issue, and can save both the underwater people and the Wyrm.
All according to plan.
Hmm… okay, so this places (I assume) Collie’s attack on the Northern Wyrm a few weeks before Ishva’s Turn, so this is well before her siege of Vash. The emissary is a Sekrai, but I’m fairly confident merfolk can be her emissaries as well. There is a merfolk god in the lore, after all.
Something I notice is that the Collector appears to have done her research, striking the Wyrm at a weak point when Rakhn is particularly angry and the Northern Wyrm isn’t empowered by the spring meltwaters.
Meanwhile, the Feast of the Fall sounds like a commemoration of Water’s First Invocation, when the city of what would become the first Sekrai sunk beneath the waves and the water mage used the power boost from the invocation to turn the city’s populace into water-breathers.
I keep wondering why Collie would attack the Northern Wyrm. But I think she may have assumed the same I did, that if a god’s vessel is mutated beyond their control, they’re ejected from it. So she hoped that the Wyrm’s soul would just spill out into the surrounding area, maybe? And then that didn’t happen, and she left, and figured the non-mutation route would be better, maybe?
It may have just been an ‘experiment’ of hers.
That makes sense to me. She started experimenting with gods’ vessels first, then moved on to the actual gods.
She might have been testing whether she could free Life by doing something to peoples physical forms without worrying about the soul, since its much harder for her to interact with that.
Exposition: Since winter came, the Wyrm is no more
Speaks not, and knows not, attacks what she loved before
Is Alinua’s healing going to make a Wyrm-godling in the same way she remade Kendal? Because this sea-serpent has enough floof to be worthy of joining the Squad.
Unknown tragedy
Months alone, trapped in madness
Lone elf carries hope
Here’s a question: In panel 2, is Alinua holding a conveniently-coloured rock or a conveniently-coloured little guy?
I thought it was a conveniently-covered piece of food, like an underwater pear or something. She hasn’t eaten in a while if the ~ boat montage~ was anything to go by
I am hoping for a cute little guy!
Red has confirmed on Tumblr: it is a jellified snack of some kind.
Sun’s out, guns out… and sun is always out in the ocean.
she doesn’t know what she has agreed to solve, but it’ll be fine right? i mean like it’s just a crazy goddess wrym
Well that’s properly horrifying
The giant shell is so pwety! :>
Maybe that emissary and Glenn, Vash’s trade emissary who was away at the time of the Collector attack, should form a support group.
Seashell architecture, eh? Looks good, and I like how the entrance isn’t on ground level; no reason for it to be really. I wonder, was the shell made by the mer-peoples, or grown by a giant sea creature? Do they have to fend off similarly giant hermit crab-like beasts that want to repossess their property?
As much as this looks and sounds like the Collector’s work, I’m still struggling to figure out a motive. Best I can come up with is that this was an attempt to take the Norther Wyrm’s soul that went wrong.
The methodology lines up, wait until the Wyrm is at its weakest and with fewest people around to disrupt her; taking advantage of a god’s routine and personality like she did when baiting Vash out of his city. Since destroying the Wyrm’s realm, i.e. a literal ocean, was unfeasible, she may have thought that mutating/destroying the incarnation itself would be enough to force its soul out. But looks like she failed and so moved onto Vash.
I wonder if Alinua will find a Collector dagger in the Wyrm, explaining why the deep-speaker can’t communicate with her. Might we get a Androcles’s lion-type situation?
Having villain plans that didn’t work, not because of the hero’s actions, but were just unviable, makes the world feel more real to me. It also introduces the scary possibility of more of these failed, but still dangerous, experiments around the world. Or, since the Collector is looking for Kendal now, will she notice Alinua saving the Wyrm and decide to check it out?
Your and Mat’s comments are kinda warming me up to the idea that this was the Collector.
If it was her, I’d think she believed that the weakening of the Wyrm’s domain in winter and due to Rakhn might be enough to take her soul with one of her soul-stealing knives without destroying the whole domain. Maybe a little bit of environmental destruction, as a treat, but the Collector can’t destroy an entire ocean current. So she used her power to weaken it even more.
Wyrm gets angry, incarnates (if not already incarnated) and attacks her. All according to her plan, the Collector stabs the Wyrm – nothing happens. She bit off way more than she could chew and was now in trouble. As a last resort to defend against the very huge, very powerful, very angry god in front of her, the Collector mutated her incarnation beyond recognition and skedaddled in the confusion.
Because that failed, she went to look for a smaller, less powerful god with a more manageable domain she would be able to destroy, and ended up in conveniently-shaped Vash.
Don’t you hate it when the new Neighbours are having a loud party, and you have to go all Grendel on their feast?
That mermaid in the second panel looks like she has only one arm. I wonder if she was born with one or lost it somehow.
It looks like there’s scarring there — so she probably lost it
Its so nice to know its not a you problem, its the god’s problem
So they call their emissaries deep speakers that’s interesting, like they view gods as beings of a greater depth and so name the ones who can talk to them accordingly, that makes me wonder if other cultures name emissaries uniquely like what would the flying islands call the people who talk to their gods.
I’m sorry, all I can think about is that guy’s cape. Peak of fashion.
Probably smart for an underwater cape to loop around the arms instead of the neck since increased drag. But I’m also amused he’s even wearing a cape.
I think that the pale Mermaid is an elder in this community, however old and/or involved that is for Seafolk. That amputation, or one of their other injuries, could very well predate the Northern Wyrm’s enmaddening.
I noticed that the ratio of the comic pages’ side lengths is root 2. Aurora is truly amazing at ALL levels, especially since Red is in the US. US paper usually has the rather awkward side length ratio of 22/17, right? (Does anyone know why paper in the US has this ratio? Is it a metric vs imperial system kind of thing?)
I wonder if we’re going to get names for the seafolk soon, or will we have to make some up?
I seem to recall Gleicann the forest god explaining that large amounts of life magic could chimerically mutate his incarnation and rip it from his control causing his incarnation to run wild, however he incarnated into that form (which he had no control of the appearance of) earlier that day.
Now Red on tumblr explained that some gods like Tahraim never dis-incarnate< they stay in their incarnated form most if not all of the time.
The Mer-folk seem to believe that the Wyrm is trapped in her mutated incarnation and if that is true I posit that it is because chimeric mutation effects gods incarnated forms differently based on how long the god remains in the form, if the god remains dis-incarnated most of the time than the god feels naturally inclined to remain permeated throughout their domain but if they stay constantly incarnated then perhaps the god has more difficulty being separated from their incarnated form and can be trapped within the incarnation against the gods will.
Just a thought but maybe that's what's going on with The Northern Wyrm.
This is the only time i’ve ever felt bad for an Aurora character, somehow.
i know none of this is good news but man the aesthetic is great here
Did Alinua just pick up a random egg/ seed? She is cradling it like a baby.
According to Red on tumblr, its a jelly snack! She says that underwater ‘cooking’ is mostly limited to things that can be made through simple reactions rather than fire/heat.
Interesting, Thanks!
Tasting blood in the water? Posted just in time for Shark Week 2025??
Coincidence? I think not!!
I love this.
Really like all the character design in this chapter so far 🙂
Me too!
Bluesky text: chomp!
i wonder what the lil thing alinua is holding is
Jelly snack! https://comicaurora.tumblr.com/post/789697122543058945/whats-alinua-holding-here
Midwinter start, they speculate, devolved the Wyrm to current state.
Away fled fish, blood mixed with salt. Attack upon the Feast of Fall.
Deep-speaker severed from her mind, madness makes strangers of their kind.
Happy festival of everyone yells at the elemental magus! I forgot about it until I saw it in my calendar yesterday, and then again when someone mentioned it on the tumblr.
Happy festival!!
The wyrm is so radioactive right now you have no idea
This can’t be happening! I can’t have caught up!!! Gods what will I do now