Welcome to Nessa! Here in the market square, vendors hailing from all corners of the Four Kingdoms sell their wares, meaning if there’s something you can’t find, chances are you’re just not looking hard enough! With this, we are proud to kick off our next official chapter in the world of the Western Deep: Song of the Eastern Sands!

01_thumb

Is there any singing? Well, no, not really — this is just one tale of many that was crafted in the desert kingdom of Navran, and like the greatest tales from this land, they are passed down in song. If anyone was to properly tell this story in the Four Kingdoms, you can bet it’d be the Vulpin gypsies, who likely already have all the chords memorized.

The goal for this first page was always to sell the look, feel, and vibe of Nessa; to make it look different from everything we’ve seen before, but try and keep some familiar elements throughout. Where The Adventures of Cain & Yurk showed us Nessa from the tallest buildings, Song of the Eastern Sands is very much a story about being in Nessa — about being in the middle of the hustle and bustle. This first page was meant to capture all that.

01_color01

Jerome, Rachel, and I have been waiting to share this story with you all for the last 9+ months, and we’re all very excited to be kicking off this new tale that expands the world of Beyond the Western Deep eastward, introducing a bunch of fun new characters while also hinting at grander things to come for our protagonists up north. We all hope you like it!

This week’s page will fall alongside Halloween, which means I would be remiss not to share this super awesome and totally holiday-appropriate picture that was sent to us by reader and regular contributor Fourth Master! In it, we see the main quartet of Song of the Eastern Sands dressing up in themed costumes for the local Nessian Halloween shindig!

FourthMaster_SotES

While Halloween isn’t actually celebrated in the Four Kingdoms, there are very likely similar kinds of festivals across the land that have the same themes of celebrating/warding off the dead with fun costumes and various culturally-appropriate lanterns or baubles.

However, while the festival itself can be explained to some degree in-canon, I can’t for the life of me figure out how a classic 1980’s horror-comedy starring Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Dan Ackroyd that takes place in New York City could fit into the continuity. Also, the Four Kingdoms hasn’t quite discovered the secret of strapping unlicensed nuclear accelerators to things, so it’s a bit problematic either way.

STILL.

FOURTH! Thank you SO MUCH for this awesome picture — the cast of SotES would win any costume party they go to, and they’ve got the dry wit to match the classic Ghostbusters quartet! It’s also nice to see the cast getting guest art the week after they’re all introduced :) I hope everyone continues to like them as the story unfolds!