Sorry about the delay, everyone — this week’s page gave us a bit more trouble than usual.

Anyway! This week’s page marks a return to our Sunsgrovian trio at the gates of Deltrada. As the parallel storylines of Beyond the Western Deep begin to converge, the stakes rise ever-higher for both sides of the conflict — and finding just the right cutoff points for each side’s storyline has proven to be a very fun element to the scriptwriting process!

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One thing you’ll notice in this week’s page is the inclusion of trained birds. As with any fleshed out world featuring animal-like characters, an important element to consider is the food chain and how the heck that works. TV Tropes calls it “carnivore confusion” and it can pull observant readers out of a fantasy world very quickly. In the world of Beyond the Western Deep, fish and birds remain in the food chain as “normal” animals, which can be caught and eaten (or in this case, trained as messengers).

Aside from fish and fowl, there is the wealth of fruits, grains, and vegetables to make up the rest of the diet. As seen in the tavern in Chapter 1, this is not a world without its culinary delights!

A last bit of guest art this week from Jerome Jacinto — the doodling is done and he has moved on to layout out his piece for the book. I’m not sure I’ll be posting any sneak peaks of that (gotta leave SOMETHING for the book, yeah?) but it’s already proving to be an incredible piece that I am very excited about.

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More Ermehn, of course! They are, after all, the subject of the piece. Bevan is looking rather charming there, with a tankard of what I imagine is either a mead or barley wine. Ashtor and Hardin seem to be looking at something fondly on the left there (a smile from either of them seems an odd sort of thing, doesn’t it?) and Rhosyn seems to be giving Rathik a piece of her mind over there on the right. Not sure what the big guy said, but let’s pretend he deserves it!