Book One, page 58

bravo1102 on Aug. 10, 2017

The sound effects and second panel are meant to convey Searsha pounding the piss out of the spider's head with her claw. This won't be the last time she fights like that. In fact she has a punch and twist maneuver that is pretty nasty too. There's more to her claw than slice and dice.

Annah and some thoughts on gods

Her second wand is a wand of lightning. Since sorceresses are servants of Annah the goddess of lightning, it would make sense that they would have lightning spells. Since there are many Norse living on the Southern Island of Narthatheia Annah wormed her way into their version of the Norse pantheon. As the Mistress of Lightning she is the consort of Thor becoming an aspect of Sif. Annah's worship extends across the whole of the world in many different names and guises. Her name hints at a relationship to Isis, Astarte and Inanna who are all aspects of one revered goddess archetype between Egyptian, Semitic and Sumerian cultures. Later on Annah will also be revealed to be a face of Kwannon/Guanyin/Quan-yin as a giver of mercy as well as taker of vengeance. Know your archetypes! When it comes to deities those archetypes can meld and fold into one another among different interpretations and re-tellings of their myth cycles. After all there are a multitude of Greek myths and traditions that contradict each other. We're just all accustomed to Bullfinch's neat re-telling.

If you're going to create your own pantheon you can afford to be sloppy with retconing because that's how real faiths evolve over time. Original Judaism wasn't monotheistic. That was a retcon led by the prophets of the Old Testament. Yahweh had a consort as well as the angels who were once minor deities in their own right. But it all got cleaned up when they sat down to compose the Old Testament during the Babylonian exile (or thereabouts). Lots of time for soul-searching and wondering where they went wrong and they decided to write it all down. But until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls the earliest texts were from the early Middle Ages. And now the earliest ones are from the years before Jesus supposedly lived. And we know each and every step of the retconing that went on in Christianity from the apostles, through Paul to the council of Nicaea and after. More changes over time there than the whole of the DC universe.