2.5.39
on September 26, 2025
at 3:00 am
last time I cavalierly write into my notes “and then the giant monster turns inside out” I’ll tell you what
Aurora
A fantasy webcomic. Updates M-W-F.
last time I cavalierly write into my notes “and then the giant monster turns inside out” I’ll tell you what
Yaaaaaaay! Wyrm is dead! Does that mean that the goddess is freed from her tortuous existence trapped in a body not her own? Find out on Monday!
I dont think so. Lore wise the only way thay life magic can effect someone without them being injured is if they have no soul like plants.
I think that plants might have a soul? But it’s just a lot simpler and weaker? Also: extremely strong Life magic can overwhelm the soul barrier through sheer force, which is how chimeras are often made!
Gods are different. Gods don’t need their body to live. This is contrasted with Dainix, whose soul was at risk of degrading while in rock form because he didn’t have a suitable body to keep his soul safe. Destroy the body, free the soul. This does not work for non-gods.
I think it would technically work on anyone… briefly.
To As the Light fades I’m pretty sure your right on the Money. If my memory is correct plants and living and some non living things, have soul energy exist in a specific pattern in their form, because the soul energy that exist everywhere accumalets and grows with living beings or accumelates like in soul crystal (I think that’s what ist called).
So yes plants have a soul, a more simple and flexible soul than animals and the races but a soul nontheless.
For mobile readers.
Alt-text: ask me how long it took to draw that last panel but don’t I’ll cry
Image source: shrip
The Prodigal Catchphrase RETURNS!!
tumblr text: now that’s what I call friday
Bluesky text: pop!
. The Wyrm writhes through the water as glowing lines snake over its skin like lasers cutting it from the inside out. Whorls and cracks appear as the merfolk watch in shock.
. Then the Wyrm rips with an objectively disgusting shrip sound, incarnation unraveling, glowing pieces flying off as they dissolve into the water, leaving nothing behind.
I honestly forgot about this page lol
I definitely DIDN’T do that last panel justice… I’ll think on how to make it more *horrific*
. Then the Wyrm rips with a thunderous shrip — incarnation unraveling, glowing pieces flying off as they dissolve into the water, nearly blinding with Life-light as it seems to turn inside out, but only revealing more flesh underneath.
That’s kinda better
To repeat myself:
How it feels to chew 5gum
Also holy shit that last panel is gorgeous
It really is! And its gorgeous in that special way that only grotesque things can be 😀
How it feels to _be_ 5gum, being chewed
Alinua / Life be like: “I CAST EXPLODE FLESH!!” Always love to see her go ham.
I cast Inflict Wounds with a 7th level spell slot.
And I rolled a Nat 20!
‘Heal’ spell on an Undead
i cast “power word: KABOOM”
More like “power word: SHRIP”
ouch
The seafloor scavengers are going to have a whalefall of a time with this.
Absolutely. Whalefalls are just fascinating.
Yeah, they really are!!
I’m suddenly very concerned about what eating flesh that’s had so much ultrapowerful, heavily-aspected Life magic pumped through it is going to do to the creatures doing the eating…
Okay OW. XP (well done)
Hm, I don’t think the Wyrm will be giving that meal a good rating
“3/10 tasted disgusting and ripped my flesh from bone but the light show was kinda sick”
So, previously, it fell apart where Alinua touched it, but I guess having her inside it releasing tons of Life energy meant that the energy couldn’t escape as easily? Resulting in it being conducted throughout the Wyrm instead.
Oh. Dear Jod. That is… oh my. So disgusting, and awesome, at the same time.
What a FANTASTIC panel that last one is, and the other ones too. But oh wow. Yeah. That’s…. some effort.
This isn’t too much worse than the cow goop fence? (assuming you’re talking about the same Jod I am lol. I realize this is a very weird sentence out of context).
Getting Shriped is officialy the worse fate to date
The water is gonna get sooo dirty
I think this would fix me
I’m still looking for her in the kaiju guts… it’s ok… it’s OK… she’s in there somewhere, or maybe she’s communing with the wyrm’s spirit. Ugh cliffhangers are gonna kill me one day.
You know when you eat/drink something and you get really bad indigestion?
This is why people don’t like life magic, kids. (And why souls stop magic)
That’s uhhh. Yeah that’s gonna hurt. On the bright side that’s whalefall x100
You know this is a good point. Web didn’t the Wyrm’s soul barrier stopped the Collector from doing this to her?
Aren’t soul barriers opened through wounds? That’s why you can heal injuries but other elements can’t control bodies, i.e. water mages using blood or stone mages using bones inside the body
Life magic can worm its way through the soul barrier better than the other elemental energies anyway, and any of them can get through the soul barrier through brute force if there’s enough of the energy — that’s one way in which elemental corruption happens. Thats also how chimeras are usually made — overwhelming the soul barrier
That worm has been giving me prince Ruperts drop vibes ever since Alinua first touched its tail. It’s nice to see it finally explode properly.
Caturus: S**t man, this wizard war is f**ked. I just saw an elf dive into the Northern Wyrm and say “don’t be afraid” or some similar s**t, and then the Wyrm turned inside out, had her body explode, and then disappeared. The camera didn’t even go onto her, that’s how common s**t like this is.
Yep, I knew Red’s drawing hand would be in danger this page, and what pretty, gory, swirly danger it is. While the last panel is chaotic, the interconnected and complete swirls across the whole Wyrm shows this is a deliberate act by Alinua; the Wyrm’s previous life magic swirls were all broken and chaotic, implying the healing was not controlled by itself.
The lack of SFX on the first two panels compared to the final SHRIP gives a sense of slowness to them; Alinua took the time to spread her magic throughout the Wyrm completely, THEN executed her spell in one stroke.
I was 50/50 between Alinua communing with the spirit of the Northern Wyrm and following her will and directive to reformat her incarnation back to what she wanted, or disintegration. Guess the later won out.
Mind you, if N.W. wanted to de-incarnate, then the complete dissolution of her current body IS what she would want Alinua to do. I suspected a few pages back that that want to de-incarnate was why Ali’s “feel it out” magic did what it did to her tail.
Prediction for next week: Out of the dead flesh of the beast rises the green glow of Alinua, who is then flocked by the mer-peoples thanking her as she tries to swim towards Selach and Valia to apply the healing. Maybe next Friday’s page will feature the Northern Wyrm re-incarnating in a new, uncorrupted body, to personally thank her too.
I cast power word pop
eeyouch
This whole fight needs “Murmaider” blaring in the background.
I would not have thought of that, but now that you mention it…
Red’s average number of pages this arc (excluding the interlude) is 41. Considering that we are now on page 39, we might be nearing the end.
Also, this page today is so beautiful; totally worth actually waking up!
Alright, if it wasn’t clear already, this proves that Alinua is by far the most powerful member of the squad. I see what Shrike was talking about now.
Ripping apart a mountain wasn’t enough for ya?
That at least took her awhile, plus Falst had to stop those rocks from falling on her. Now here she is literally one shotting a sea dragon
The worm has exploded, I don’t know if we can recover from this
I’m really curious about how this is going to unfold next, given all the (in-universe and thematic) clues that go againt each other.
(“Something that needs help” vs “it’s beyond saving”, the fact that magic can get in there saying that there is no soul vs the fact that the Wyrm[?] still controlled the currents)
At this point I’m good for a lore re-read on the specifics of this.
Still, my best guess is that there is… a smaller Wyrm? inside the big one that has been helped in all this mess.
Yes! That is my guess, as well.
And it would be adorable, since tiny is cute. ^_^
Yes! I predict that as the wreckage falls, Alinua will be revealed holding either a baby wyrm or an egg and tell the Sekrai and Merfolk, “Good news and bad news. Good news: the wyrm isn’t dead! Bad news: she’s not going to be available for a while as she’s a baby.” Then she quickly heals Selach and Valia.
Seriously, she needs to hurry with the healing, head injuries are no joke!
Uh.. I guess RIP the Wyrm in more ways than one
Ba-dum-tsss
how it feels to chew 5 gum
Fun fact:
Alinua scares me.
Fun fact: yes.
Fun fact: after Red made a snarky comment about the Arenamaster’s green and purple colour scheme marking him as a villain, I joked that, by the same logic, Alinua would become the final villain of Aurora.
Several revelations about her, the Collector, and Life later, I am increasingly nervous my “joke” may hold a trickle of water.
I can absolutely see Alinua deciding she has to stop the rest of the Floof Squad from Saving the World… She’d try to be more of an antagonist than a villain, but Red has talked about how Alinua is very much neutral-good, and less concerned with the Greater Good than she appears. If their ideologies or worldviews shift apart, I can absolutely see Alinua, no longer holding back, holding off the entire rest of the Floof Squad, including future Squad members we haven’t unlocked yet.
Or maybe it’s an “I know you’re in there somewhere” fight, a trope Red loves, where Primordial Life is in full control and supporting the Collector without Alinua’s consent.
“And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin bint.”
bint 🤨
This so deserves an upvote
Narrator’s Voice: And on this day, Red swore not to do _that_ again. But as it would turn out…
This reminds me of a cartoonist that did a comic with her split in 3 different ways: the writer, the illustrator and the colorist. The writer was saying something like “We begin our story in the sprawling city of blahblah, with all these amazing spirals” and then the other two stop the writer saying how much work that single sentence is going to take for them.
I love that one. Reminds me of the gag in a movie (forgot the name) where the crew is making a romance tv show but the book has a flashback to the Waterloo. The writer has a hissy fit about the script but then they remind him they have a shoe string and bubblegum budget so the character just says “He saved my life at Waterloo” instead and that’s it.
this is really reminding me of the ending sequence of totk
jesus that is metal
THATS SICK
oh the grand comic tradition of a page of script turning out to be 5 minutes of work and on line of script keeping you busy for days…
I feel you.
thanks for the for doing it though.
looks awesome : D
NOOO i caught up after binge reading for a week streight ..good thing it was on a not so clifthangery pannel
Wow, that last panel looks cool. It’s worth the no doubt reasonable amount of time Red must have spent drawing it.
I read that as “chirp” at first glance.
Now I’m stuck perceiving this as the cutest kaiju explosion ever.
Okay I think its safe to say that its dead now.
I was waiting for the page to load like “this better be really gross” and gotta say, I’m not disappointed
Huh, a massive outpouring of life magic that turned a giant former-god wyrm inside-out
Yeah, I’m sure no one will notice-
WOAH WHAT THE FUCK
Hey, anybody here see that movie “Galaxy Quest”?
“Did you just say that the animal turned inside out and then IT EXPLODED!? HELLO?!”
“Did I just hear that the animal turned inside out, and then it EXPLODED?!”
whoa
That’s one gruesome image
it sure did get turnt inside out
I guess the Wyrm was deadly alergic – to greens!
Hahaha xD
What if the Wyrm was how the Collector figured out she needed to take the soul out? She tried to mess with it in the Wyrm’s body and it went poorly, so she took Vash’s out. The Wyrm went insane because the Collector basically bound her inside her very-malformed body.
Of all the noises that can come from a giant monster inverting. Shrip is rather, unique.
Oh. Oh, that’s right.
I remember long ago hearing Red complain about how, while she really enjoys drawing things that are extremely messed up and unsettling or gruesome, she usually can’t show that in any of her products, because her marketing image is all cute and wholesome and pretty things.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that “wyrm turns inside out” ends up looking almost like a splash page from Invincible.
My GOD that last panel is utterly gorgeous. That composition is so fucking satisfying!
Everything about this story really goes to show that Alinua is the scariest one on the team, but I guess that makes sense when you ARE one of the building blocks of the world
Power Word: Spiralize?
too spicy, makes me explode.
One day I would love to see a video of Red’s thoughts on her own comic. Really pick it apart by trope to see what makes it tic and her thought process in making things as they are.
Oh yeah, that’d be great!!
Last panel reminds me of a Snake.io death.
taking a page out of sun wukong’s book i see