Moon 2

Moon 5 Part 2

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Moonstar gasps awake, sitting up so fast she rams her head into the thick underside of a low-hanging branch that she and her brother had spent the night taking turns sleeping under. They’ve been doing that, taking turns – who knows what things are lurking out here in the dark, so far from home.

If they can't go back, does it still count as home? 

“Ow…” Moonstar groans, a sharp throb pounding against her skull. What a way to start the morning.

Fogfreckle ducks his head underneath one of the branches, sweeping past the leaves to gaze curiously at his sister. He tilts his head questioningly, mouth open to ask what’s wrong, when the words die on his tongue and his eyes widen.

“Fogfreckle!” Moonstar mews excitedly, leaping to her paws. “You’ll never guess what happened!”

“Your– your forehead,” Fogfreckle croaks. “You… were visited by StarClan?”

“What about my forehead?” Moonstar asks, confused and distracted. She presses a paw against her head to see if perhaps she’s bleeding, but her paw doesn’t come away warm or wet. The rest of her brother’s words filter to her slowly through the dull throb of pain and the fog of the early hour. She pouts. “Yeah, Star– how did you guess so quick?”

“There’s– your forehead. You have a star. A leader’s star.”

Moonstar’s pout deepens. “Well. That kind of steals my thunder.”

“Moonpool, what happened?”

“Moonstar now, actually.” Moonstar grins. “StarClan visited me in my dreams and granted me my nine lives. Isn’t that crazy? I didn’t even have to– there was no–” Moonstar’s tongue can hardly keep up with everything that’s swirling in her brain, the experience of her leader’s ceremony playing back to her as if memory and not just dream. “NimbusClan lives on, Fogfreckle. In us, just like you said. We’re to lead NimbusClan into its new future.”

“‘We’?” Fogfreckle asks weakly, jaw slack with disbelief.

“Of course, ‘we’!” Moonstar laughs, bounding closer to her brother. She feels so full of life, coursing through her like the widest, wildest river. “I wouldn’t be here if not for you, you know that. Besides, what’s a leader without her deputy?”

“Deputy?” Fogfreckle repeats, dumbstruck.

“What are you, a raven?” Moonstar laughs. “Yes, deputy! As leader, I’m appointing you as deputy of NimbusClan, Fogfreckle.”

Fogfreckle swells with pride, pale chest fluffed out as he inhales a shaky breath. “I– yes, Moonstar. Thank you.”

“Don’t get all formal on me, now. You’re my brother first, deputy second.”

“So, we really are still a Clan.” He grins, then the expression fades from his face somewhat. His eyes take on an earnest shine. “Did you… I know you’re not supposed to talk about the ceremony, but… when you visited StarClan, did you… did you see our parents?”

Moonstar smiles gently, heart squeezing painfully in her chest. Dad had told her to tell Fogfreckle that their parents miss him, too, so surely StarClan won’t be displeased if she shares just that much? “Yes. I saw them. Mom and Dad. They told me to tell you they miss you.”

Fogfreckle hiccups, stepping close to push his head hard against Moonstar’s.

“I wish you could have seen them too,” She adds in a whisper, nuzzling into his dawn-warmed fur. The sun is just starting to crest the side of the mountain on its way up, crawling lazily into the sky. Greenleaf heat creeps on silent, soft paws across her pelt. It’ll be humid later, but for now, it’s pleasant.

“Maybe they’ll walk in my dreams one day, too.”

“I hope so.” Moonstar presses one more smile into his fur and then pulls back, squaring her shoulders in what she hopes is a leaderly fashion. It’s only her brother, but she may as well start getting used to playing the role. “Alright, deputy. What’s our first order of business?”

Fogfreckle grins. “How about breakfast? I could go for some eggs.”

“Perfect idea.”

Both cats stretch out their paws and take off, bounding up the mountain.

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Moon 5 Part 3

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Live in the Northeastern USA and want to save endangered golden eagles? Visit this link to see what you can do to help, or donate here!

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“The nose knows,” Moonstar boasts loftily as she follows the scent of bird over the crest of a cliff and into a nest large enough to easily fit her and her brother, who climbs up beside her a moment later.

“Ha! As if we couldn’t see this massive nest from halfway across the mountain before we even got up here,” Fogfreckle snorts, his eyes going wide as they land on the two cream colored eggs nestled together in the middle of the messy bundle of twigs and feathers. Light glints off of their speckled shells, gleaming in the Greenleaf sun. “Whoa, they’re huge! And look - one for each of us!”

“All thanks to my incomparable scenting skills,” Moonstar insists, muzzle curling up into a playfully smug expression that she knows will get under Fogfreckle’s pelt.

“Sure,” He grins back, expression going just as playful. There’s a teasing shine in his eyes. “Incomparably foxdu–”

Moonstar inhales loudly through her nose to press her point, inadvertently drawing a bit of loose, fluffy down towards her that sticks to her wet nose. Her eyes cross as she attempts to look down at it, rearing back a little in surprise. The down feather is tipped gold and sticks fast, following her as she pulls back.

Fogfreckle laughs, nearly falling backwards out of the nest. “You’ve got a little something,” he snickers, “to the left–”

A sharp, stuttered cry from above slices across the cliffside, silencing Fogfreckle mid sentence. The sound lances through Moonstar, freezing her heart.

Ears pinned back in terror, Moonstar flattens herself against the floor of the giant nest, squinting past the glare of the sun to see an eagle diving towards them. Moonstar spares a half-second glance at the eggs that were going to be her and Fogfreckle’s breakfast and thinks, briefly, mousedung. This must be a mother in fierce protection of her babies. Her feathers shine burning gold in the sunlight. 

They should have just rolled the eggs out of the nest and left - they shouldn’t have been joking around like this; like kits. She’s the leader, for StarClan’s sake - she should know better. She should have done better.

The width of the massive bird blots out the sun; a giant, winged shadow that dwarfs the two cats. Moonstar is frozen in fear, her mind all at once racing and yet painfully blank. She doesn’t know what to do, there’s too many things to do, too many plans of action, and she can’t make herself move to act on any of them. Fogfreckle is stiff against her side.

As the eagle dives closer, she can see the slanted amber of its furious eyes. Quite suddenly, as Moonstar is bracing for impact, the eagle takes a bank left, predatory gaze shifting to her brother, extends its talons, and descends upon him in a frenzy of flapping feathers and unholy screeching.

Fear and rage at last boiling over inside of her, Moonstar’s muscles unfreeze and allow her to launch into action, screeching at the bird and slashing at it in an attempt to shoo it away from Fogfreckle. Blood thunders in her ears, the cacophony of Fogfreckle’s hissing shrieks and the bird’s cries sharp against her eardrums. She can't tell if her blows are even landing, or if Fogfreckle is holding his own. The giant bird's wings are everywhere, battering against her face and throwing up loose feathers and down from the nest that cloud the air.

Fogfreckle yowls as the bird sinks sharp claws into his back, and lifts his writhing, twisting body into the sky with powerful strokes of her wings. Moonstar jumps after the bird, horrified, screaming for her brother, but her outstretched claws don’t reach. She lands in the nest, hard, twigs snapping under her weight, and watches in open mouthed horror as the bird lifts her brother higher in the sky.

He twists in her grasp, a furious scream ripping from his throat, and slashes his claws along her belly. The eagle shrieks in pain and releases Fogfreckle, who falls, and falls, and falls.

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I've been spending so much time hunched over my drawing tablet that when I stand up straight my spine cracks

Have a cute lil thumbnail sketch from the upcoming moon while I spend the next billion years trying to finish 8 panels lmao

moon 0, page 12.

>putting the cat before the paws.

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with that, moon 0 is done!! thank you all for your patience! depending on whether i get any lining done today, i may take a small break to get the next couple of moons sorted. if i do, the next page will be up on sunday, march 9th. if i dont, the thursday/sunday schedule will continue as planned! from hereon (until i change my mind) pages will be double length to try to cover a little more ground with each update. thanks for sticking around so far!

🌍 and ✍️!

-Direclan

i'm gonna put some of this under a readmore because it got SO long hahaha

🌍 What are some of your irl inspirations for the lore/worldbuilding of your comic?

hmm! this is tough, i'm not sure if this includes media (but if it does i'm going to include it later because i'm in a rambly sort of mood, haha).

so as far as the kitty cats go, i definitely take a lot of inspiration from my own dreams. i am very bad at taking my medications at the correct time and i currently take one where the first withdrawal symptom that makes me definitely aware i forgot to take it is that i have really vivid, sometimes very scary dreams. i kind of seek to depict these vivid dreams, so i will likely be doing a lot of experimentation during future dream sequences to capture that feeling of dreamlike unreality.

i also have a small document that includes a list of common foliage in the alaska wilderness. i so far have not taken a whole lot of time to depict it in my art but the chugach mountain range has been a particular focus of mine when i do research about shrubbery and tree diversity. i was a dual ecology & math major in college, so if there's anythign i'm kind of determined to get at least sort of correct it's the environment. (that said, there are tidepools on the coast of this setting where reefclan hunts, so take it with a massive grain of salt. it's fantasy)

my partner's d&d campaign has also had a massive (and i really do mean massive) impact on just like. how i create and how i conceptualize characters, symbolism, colors, and the rest of the works. we've been playing a 1-20 campaign since 2017 and we're in the end-game right now--it's a world-spanning, time-spanning adventure and i am NOT the same person i was coming out as i was going in. half of that is other life stuff but the other half is just that it's made a very profound impact on me as a person, and i consistently seek to emulate the sheer depth of the world he has built, the decades of thought he put into it, the strength of even the most convoluted mechanics and stories. it's rock solid. i'm normal. i'm so normal I PROMISE.

and, as far as media goes, i've definitely taken a lot of inspiration from the lore and worldbuilding of the destiny duology. it's kind of hard to get a handle on the story, but once you do, it really opens up into this incredible saga and some of the worldbuilding is just, SO sick. the idea that you could use conway's game of life as the origin myth for a whole universe really gets me so good. i said this earlier but i have a degree in applied math and i NEVER looked at any numbers or proofs and thought "i could make an origin myth out of that" and it's just SOOOOO cool to me that someone did do that. also it's like sword and sorcery with guns. which rules.

there might be some visible star trek (tng/ds9 specifically), bloodborne, nier automata, pokemon, ffxiv, and hollow knight, but it might be a bit of a challenge to point to anything directly. i think it corresponds to what i've made playlists for, really, hahaha.

✍️ What inspired you to make your clangen comic/ other media?

i've been wanting to publish a comic for a really long time! i've always been hesitant to because i have a really hard time sticking with anything long-term--i tend to cycle between several activities, where i do one or two very intensely for a few weeks to a few months and then switch. not something i do consciously, it's just naturally how my interests tend to manifest. you can actually see my first attempt @/starclan-clangen, which............................. i plan to return to eventually but lost the file for hahaha.

but i never wanted to do a comic sort of half-interested that way--i always wanted to make something that was good, that i could be proud of. it wasn't until i saw other folks making clangen comics that it clicked for me that a comic doesn't have to be my magnum opus and that i can just have fun with it if i want to. folks like @/ranchclan, @/direclan (hehe, thats you), @/nimbusclan, @/cutieclan, @/fallenclan, @/splinterclan, @/sporeclan, @/juniperclan, and @/vaporclan helped me realize i could just... do it, that i didn't have to wait until my art or my writing were more honed in order to like. make something i liked and have fun with it. there are SO many more that i haven't listed here that i love very dearly. the clangen community in general has been such a wonderful galvanizing force for me.

other inspirations that aren't clangen-related include my friend earthtonequeen on comicfury, who does more short story comic work. they've been making comics for a long time and their work is such a huge inspiration to me--i love the stories they tell.

@/jumalanpelko, WOW. the style is so gorgeous, their color work is absolutely phenomenal, and i love love love the worldbuilding.

@/whatlurksbean, what lurks beneath was HUGE for me in the past year or so. i found them after there were already like 500 pages and binged the entire comic. they write characters with such skill, it's incredible to see a story where there's such nuance to each player.

@/thewhalesheart is such a beautiful comic. i love the way they draw lambpaw, it's influenced how i differentiate characters!

@/milosfromhome is a HUGE inspiration to me. this is one of the comics that helped me really decide that comics were what i really actually wanted from my art, and helped me realize that seeing someone's improvement throughout a comic is actually really sick, so i just gotta hit the ground running. huge, huge inspiration for sure hahaha.

the comic "i didn't know" on comicfury has also been a recent but huge inspiration, it addresses real-life issues in a very nuanced way with kitty cats and i'm a huge fan.

@/caemidraws has been an inspiration to me as an artist in general and recently she's started her own comic so i recommend checking her out too! her compositions and general symbology are SO cool.

if i think of further inspirations i may come back and add them but off the top of my head, those are the ones i've been checking back with regularly recently! thank you so much for the ask, i love your work! <3

The mentors are bonding! and friends are being made.

But so are enemies... hopefully the new mediator can help them. SerpentWings ref under the cut

A former rouge waits by the border asking to join the clan.

Its currently spring (I dont read the books so I'm choosingto ignore the 'newleaf like words')

they way I draw, the size of text etc are subject to change. I can't stay constant for to long.

Might be a bit quiet around here for a while - I'm moving! I thought I'd have a bit more time for the comic in between packing and cleaning and whatnot, but I've been busier than I expected.

Regular activity here may not pick back up 'til late May, once I've gotten settled in, but we'll see! I'll make an effort to be present in moments of downtime. :)