Bloodline 84
The language Flint is speaking is Runic, which an ancient language usually used to speak to the gods. Ember and Lupa have spoken it a little in the comic already, but this is the first time it’s had it’s own speech bubble. (If you’re interested in where it’s been used already, I’ll probably start tagging the pages with “Runic”).
To celebrate the new year, I’ve added new rewards and new goals to Bloodline’s Patreon! If you haven’t checked it out yet I recommend doing so, there’s plenty of exclusive content already set up for viewing ^^
I’ll also be posting some old sketches and incentives that never made it to my deviantart profile. Happy new year everyone!
RUNIC TRANSLATION/EXPLANATION:
-With some differences here and there, Flint’s Runic monologue here seems to basically be what he says in the following two English speech bubbles. (The ones with quotation marks).
-This page has the most Runic writing of all pages in the entire comic. Interestingly, this makes it simultaneously the most crucial page for deciphering Runic and also one of the hardest to fully translate.
As for deciphering Runic, the fact that Flint repeats a similar monologue in Runic and English on this page allows one to pick out words in the English speech and correlate them to Runic words, which in turn allows the specific attribution of Runic character combinations with English letters. Correlating the words “Shadows” and “Another” from English to Runic was essential for my translations.
However, this page is hard to fully translate since it has a number of oddities. Some words are translated no problem (such as “and,” “power,” or “blood”), but some others appear as nonsense (I could never find “pain” or “dark”). Words like “your” seem to appear, but in a severely shortened state (“yo,” “yors”?), and other words don’t seem to appear at all. There’s more to be said, but I suspect the real problem with translation of this page is that w0lfmare had perhaps not finished standardizing the Runic script yet, and also likely just didn’t want to spend a whole day perfecting it given he was still hand-writing all of it at this point (I’ve written out a little myself making my translations, it’s incredibly tedious).