June 7th, 2020
7 Jul 2020 · page 1002 of 1306
Choosing.
Cast: Arpana Sherpa, Jack O'Malley
Comments (44)
Events
ThoughtBubble
14 Nov 2026 – 15 Nov 2026
Harrogate Convention Centre
Manchester Megacon
31 Jul 2027 – 1 Aug 2027
Manchester Central
Mal isn’t quite used to belonging somewhere, but I trust that he’ll find his way from ‘everything else feels bad’ to ‘this is good.’ Eventually.
Belonging somewhere is an extremely bizarre feeling. For someone who's never felt it before, it's understandable that their assumption would be that they should leave.
"A Witch will always see the knots. See the thread. See the danger of all of it unravelling from careless action... or malicious intent.": Yeah, you know, like something happened at your Anchor about three years ago... :/
It's bothered me a little that as the witch she could see (or hear I guess) that Voss's emotions would awaken Envy, but didn't do anything about it except for a half-hearted verbal warning.
It's possible she didn't think Voss would be stupid enough to take such a deal. Or maybe his envy flared up a bit after he went in and had some time to sit and think about his lot in life, so she didn't realize how powerful it was.
Still feels weird that she didn't stop him on his way back out. Maybe Envy had some way of hiding?
> Or maybe his envy flared up a bit after he went
> in and had some time to sit and think about his
> lot in life
Yeah, it's remarkable that Envy appeared just after Voss's "They'd have never had Wolfe do this crap."
Still it was strong enough for Arpana's making a warning to Voss... just not a kind of warning Voss could get.
> Maybe Envy had some way of hiding?
Well, malform!Envy was able to hide from Mal's Sight for a while, but I'm not sure it could hide its "sound". Maybe, the "general level of envy" about Voss didn't change much after summoning Envy, so it was almost the same volume of "Envy Noise" for Arpana.
Worth mentioning that the last City Witch is why Lust was even free in the first place.
Good point. A reminder that witches are fallible like everyone else.
(Izzy's story suggests it was foolishness rather than intentional, although Izzy's story comes from the witch in question who could easily have retroactively changed her story after it became obvious that freeing Lust was a bad idea.)
I don't remember that, where did we meet the last city witch?
We've only ever seen her in impressionistic storytelling flashbacks, but this page and the next one do depict her: [https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015")
We didn't, but we found out in Find the Lady that Isabelle (thus by extension the Barber siblings) are all descended from her.
[https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015")
We did not meet her, but Izzy told Henry about her in this comic [https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015") and the one following it.
Arpana may not have known a Deadly was waiting to be summoned in her anchor. Her warning is really general for anybody approaching an anchor--you never know how it could react to strong emotion (look how much it took for Pride to be summoned--had to have two people with heightened emotions at a point of stress plus constructs imbued with the emotion for that Deadly to show up). Voss had the authority to go wherever he wanted, and Arpana already steered him away from the anchor himself to the chamber--"the closest safe place."
If Arpana knew that Envy was just waiting for Voss to show, I doubt she would have called the chamber a "safe space" when it actually was the opposite.
[https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-23rd-2014 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-23rd-2014")
EDIT: She also could be speaking from her own experience. We never saw what happened when Voss left after making the deal with Envy.
_Three_ people, imho. ;) Just proves more that Voss's feeling of envy was really powerful.
Well, the anchor is on the top of the mountain, and Voss himself decided to not inspect it. :)
She called the chamber "the closest safe place", true, but she added "you should unburden yourself before you enter the place" after that. And as Voss clearly shrugged that off, she was just "Suit yourself". Maybe she couldn't really stop him, but a stronger and clearer warning at least? ("I've warned you" as the last line?)
Voss did have the authority, yes, and it's a part of the question I am pondering at now: What degree of responsibility and authority does the Witch position imply?
Voss's feelings of envy were strong enough for his spirit to appear more vulpine than human. Can't remember many people that could be said for. (Then again, this was after spending I think years with Envy.)
Actually, the first time we see Voss's spirit in Mal-o-vision is here [https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-9th-2014 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-9th-2014") before he is sent to Chomolungma, and it already has kind of a vulpine look.
As I said, that warning is a general one for anybody approaching an Anchor--it's not specific to a Deadly who might be there. It's just a good idea to keep your emotions in check when getting near an Anchor. A witch is attached to an Anchor, or more accurately, belongs to it. They don't appear to have any political authority.
Pride was summoned thanks to three people with a strong sense of pride plus a number of constructs that were imbued with the same emotion; in fact, Sidney asks Lei what they were imbued with when he realized what was happening, so the implication is that they were the main reason Pride was summoned.
Voss is a single man who wasn't even going to be in the Anchor itself, just a chamber safe enough to be open to the public (including a gift shop!). Envy was bound, and while its strength would be greater closer to an anchor, the binding would be stronger, too. The Barbers figured out that Envy and the others broke out when they did because a new witch showed up in Widdershins and by his mere presence, changed the binding spell enough to weaken it.
[https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-16th-2016 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-16th-2016")
Also, the binding wasn't Arpana's, so she probably couldn't do anything about it. That's why she and the Island Witch didn't directly help Mal in fighting the Deadly.
As I wrote downthread, I feel the answer to that is "a lot" and "not much", respectively.
I may misremembering things about the Widdershins universe, but while witches are powerful, I didn't get the feeling their power is really officially recognized, the way a wizard's power is accepted.
Their magical/metaphysical power may be acknowledged by local authorities, but witches don't seem to derive much legal power out of it. Especially in current times, when the Widdershins witch position has been vacant for some time.
tl;dr: if an official holder of law & order tells a witch to scram, the witch's only choices are either to diplomatically get out of the way, work from the shadows, or go into open rebellion.
I'm pretty sure she meant physically safe. Like "you won't fall off a cliff or get buried in an avalanche like you might if you tried to climb the mountain."
she did mean physically safe, yeah. like it's essentially not even as high as base camp, in my mind- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_base_camps#South_Base_Camp_in_Nepal "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_base_camps#South_Base_Camp_in_Nepal")
She gave him fair warning. At the end of the day, it's all about free will. She's there to protect the fabric of reality, not to tell people how to live their lives.
And at least it shut that bloody violin player up. :-)
"She's there to protect the fabric of reality": actually, we don't know (yet?) what's witches' job is. Are they supposed to protect "the fabric of reality", their own Anchor, people around it, anything at all?
"She gave him fair warning": "you should unburden yourself before you enter the place", really? Let's suppose even that Voss did listen to her, can you imagine that someone so wrapped in a self-destructive passion could get rid of it in a moment, just because he was told to do so?
More fair warning would be "Don't enter that place because you can bring a mortal danger onto yourself and others". Yeah, most likely, Voss would ignore that, too, but still.
And it's not (only) about Voss and his free will, it's about people he would hurt with Envy's power (a sarangi player included). [I don't mention Seven Deadlies Reunion arc here bc one can argue that in long run Voss's deal with Envy turned out to be a blessing in disguise.]
Also I don't think guarding (your, in a sense) potentially dangerous magical area (like, not letting some kind of people close to it) is a violation of free will. They do let anybody (paid for a ticket) come into the Widdershins Anchor, true, but Widdershins had no witch before recent time.
Though I can imagine that witches, like, are not supposed to prevent anyone from approaching their Anchors, but I'm sure they aren't supposed to let dangerous (Deadly) malforms leave their Anchor.
Really liking her character right now, but also wonder why she let Voss waken Envy. Perhaps she saw the eventual good that would come of it, but that's a stretch.
Might be the sensory limitations of her own witchery. Easier to bear, but harder to interpret the sensory input properly.
Or she could have just screwed up a little and misjudged the situation. I mean, nobody's perfect.
I'm also pretty sure witches don't have the authority to arrest anyone. The power, yes, but not much of a recognized status (well, maybe they had, once, in the Widdershins universe, but right now...)
Legal authorities tend to take a dim view of self-styled prophets attacking private citizens going about their business.
Doubly so when the citizen is a soldier. Even some git like Voss.
Simply put, Arpana may not have had many options, other than gentle warning and outright assault. The latter option being a one-way trip to jail. Or an early grave.
Voss was a German Prussian soldier in Tibet... so not jail, since he wouldn't have had police powers. I dunno how much social standing the Chomolungma witch has locally, so up and shooting her for trying to stop him could have either been hunky-dory or have led to difficulties. Although whatever local or regional authority exists either invited occasional review of the anchor by armed European soldiery, or had neither the ability nor inclination to stop them, it seems.
(*) I originally hadn't looked up the army in which Wolfe and Voss served; but by chance was reading through that part of the archive. The flag flown is that of Prussia.
Arpana did say, "You here to check on us?" Voss was ordered as a solider to "assess the Eastern Anchor", and while Tibet probably isn't a Prussian protectorate in this universe, he does probably have some political authority to be there. Physically assaulting a foreign soldier on official business probably would have landed Arpana in serious trouble.
Since Envy knew there was a witch who knew what she was doing at Chomolungma and that there either was no witch or a very inexperienced witch at Widdershins, it probably hid as well as it could during Voss's exit. So there is a good chance that Arpana did not realize Envy got loose with Voss.
Although the blue scarf, respite music box, and note suggest that she and Nyree knew something was going wrong at Widdershins by the time of Curtain Call.
Did she necessarily see that, though? It's a bit of a leap from "This person has intense feelings of envy" to "...and will therefore be targeted by the actual, literal vulpopomorphized manifestation of the feeling, which will then proceed to use him to steal people's talents."
"vulpopomorphized"
I like it!
I would upvote this for vulpopomorphized alone, but while I can still post as a guest I do not appear to be able to upvote comments without a Disqus account (which I have managed to avoid getting).
I commented as a guest for the first six months or so after I started following the comic, then finally gave in and made a Disqus account for exactly that reason.
This works both ways, though. The city could be nicer to Jack.
Maybe it doesn't know yet, though.
Mal is being unusually self-aware in panel 5. Good for him!
"Perhaps we can help" said just as the door to the island opened. Arpana could feel that Nyree and Harry were about to arrive.
I like to think she heard a faint 'Oh. BUGGER.' resonating through the ether
Now the question is: Can Harry resist the tobacco pipe?
According to this strip [https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/march-6th-2016 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/march-6th-2016") she already had, although I admit that the temptation is probably higher now. I suspect the time from arriving her to getting to a tobacconist will be low enough that she will be able to wait.
I've read every panel of every Widdershins tale, but I don't have near the memory for details that most of you seem to.
Psst....I cheat.
Now that all of us are here we can call this meeting to order. First order of business, new kid has to make the tea.
"Hey, Harry. Some Yank put your dog in a freezer."
says nothing, loads gun
Listen to granma