WBFH23: pages 23~26 + sketches.

Finally, the happy reunion (TwT) Spoilers ahead, please read the pages first before reading my comment.

As you can see, Ragnar didn't kill them in the end. It's not that because Ethan was saved they were forgiven, it's just that the momentum was broken the moment Yule delivered the news and Skye ran into the house. I had to do a time skip for narrative reasons, but I want to write a short story (novel style) from Ragnar's point of view regarding what happens while Skye's going to meet Ethan and what his reunion with Yule is like.

Regarding Axel, he's completely broken. If you've read past R18 scenes, in the one where we see how Axel and Lars got together you saw how Axel, even though he liked Lars quite a lot, was hesitant to do anything with him because he was scared of trying and then realizing he wasn't in love. That was what Ragnar had done to him (it was different, but you know) and he hated him for it, so he didn't want the same thing to happen to Lars, because that would make Axel the villain in Lars' life, and that was something he wanted to avoid whatever the cost. With the current events, he feels like he became indeed the bad guy in Lars' life: he tried to seduce Ragnar (only so that he could be the one to ditch him in the end and feel like he "won") and he almost got Lars killed. He's feeling extreme guilt for the first time in his life and he doesn't know how to deal with it because he's used to considering himself the victim. This would be a good time for Axel to go to therapy, but since there's no therapist in the forest (nor is that a concept they know about), Axel's gonna have a hard time recovering from this. It's not death like most people wanted, but it is indeed a punishment (to me it's worse than dying because death is the end, but in the current situation Axel is going to suffer for a long long time). What will Lars do? We'll see on next update.

Next weekend I'm travelling to Milan to sign books at Milan Games Week, and on 6th December I'm travelling to Barcelona to sign books at Salon del Manga. That's some weekends I won't be able to work on the comic, but I'm still going to try to deliver some pages during that time. Maybe I'll post in batches of 3 instead of 4 pages, I don't know yet.

For now, this is the schedule I'm planning:

• 25th November: 3 comic pages for November's R18 scene (for 5€ tier Patrons).

• 29th November: short novel from Ragnar's point of view about what happened during the time skip in these pages.

• 4th December: next batch of pages from chapter 23.

Thank you for your patience! We're so close to the end already... This chapter has 40 pages in total, so there are 14 more pages to go.