I cut the land shark from Phil’s first draft of this scene, Phil put him back in, and I just sorta rolled my eyes and let him. I’m still not super into the idea. Magick seems to require a little more… thinking than we generally see land sharks doing. Plus, there’s that “hive-mind” thing we established earlier.

I guess it’s best to think of this one as a bit of a mutant, like another extraordinary land shark we’ll meet later. And maybe there are a few others. Though maybe he’s the one we see in Cultist robes in a few more chapters. What the heck, I’ll name him in the tags. (Phil would probably object to this name, but haha too late.)

So yeah, Harky’s a little unsettled here but not flabbergasted. He knew that the original Peacemakers were up and kicking around (and therefore Iver and Auraugu knew too). Given that Byron already came back from seeming death once during the fight in Chapter 8 and how much that rattled Harky, I can very easily believe Harky had scouts checking on that gravesite until they found it empty. After all, E-Merl said people only come back from death if the circumstances are super weird… he didn’t say never.

(Although to be honest, part of the reason for this was that Phil and I just didn’t want to do a lot of “IT… CAN’T BE!! YOU’RE… DEAD!!”-type dialogue. It would have been neither dramatically effective nor much in line with the faintly RPG-like feel of the series.)