The cover art is inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts and marginalia, if you're not familiar with the style. I highly encourage you all to look it up, there are many delightful drawings.
Cypressfoot marks the second blood of BarrenClan. Oh, darling, I'm so sorry to lose you.
Thank you all for your patience while I worked on this! It's the longest issue of PATFW to date, so I hope you understand why it took me so long to produce. At the current pace it seems like issues will come out about every three weeks (or a little more), which is a bit funny to me. I called them "issues" as a reference to comic books and now look where I am. Full circle.
The boys are having a rough time of it, though, unfortunately. If it wasn't already abundantly clear, Cormorantpaw has some pretty severe abandonment and trust issues, which led to him keeping secrets from Pinepaw out of fear that he'd be left once again. But it's hard for Pinepaw to see that perspective when he's just lost his sister, and thinks that she possibly could've been saved... bad situation all around.
At least Thrasher is finally dead! That's worth celebrating, right? Both he and Crow died from a kick to the head, by the way, and the deer who killed Crow is Wild Rose's son Hyssop.
Here we are! The start of something great and terrible! Defiance has arrived, and we have no choice but to wait and see if anyone makes it out alive.
I never quite got to work Hush Puppy's fate as much into the comic as I wanted, so I'll go into it a little more here. She did starve to death, like Egrettail says. As Thrasher put more time into "training" his growing kits and less into hunting, Hush Puppy got less food and gave up a lot of her own for the kittens. A combination of that and pure stress just sapped everything from her.
Also, I feel this may need to be said; yes, the dream canine with blue eyes is Rainhaze, not Prowl, but Pinepaw doesn't know that. It is dramatic irony.