(My apologies again for the tardiness this week! -Rachel)

Hardin makes his final offer to the conquered Ermehn – his tribe, the Sratha-din, is the only chance they’ll ever get to take the fight to the Canid and reclaim their lost culture. He definitely seems confident that for his plan to work, he needs but one single tribe’s worth of warriors. Exactly how this will be carried out is a topic for in-comic discussion!

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With his speech over, Hardin turns things over to three Sratha-din we’ve been seeing periodically throughout the scene. Rathik is one we’ve already met in earlier conversations between him and Ashtor, but the other two are introduced by name for the first time this week: Rhosyn and Bevan.

rhosyn

While I won’t be getting into any character-specific details about these two (since that will all happen within the comic itself), all of Hardin’s core Sratha-din, including these two, have been involved in the story for a very long time. A while back you may recall I posted an early concept image of Rathik and Ashtor watching Hardin’s duel with a mysterious third Ermehn standing behind them. That was an early look at Bevan before his final look came together. Bevan now favors a hood, as you can tell from the pages, meant to conceal his rather distinct facial tattoos. Why conceal the tattoos you might ask? Good question! … Moving on!

bevan

As a few of readers have noticed, Hardin’s Sratha-din all have their own tattoo patterns. While a normal Ermehn tribe would have a relatively consistent pattern across all members of the tribe, Hardin clearly has a different idea behind what makes the Ermehn in his tribe a cohesive whole. This also demonstrates the wide variety of tribes that Hardin’s Sratha-din hail from, and suggests how many different tribes there are across the Northern Wastes.