The first half of a comic, drawn in a monochrome cartoon style with heavy black hatching.
In the first panel, an anthro rat man opens a heavy wooden door. The man is dressed in a ~1900s-era sack suit. He is surrounded by the light of the outside, but the inside of the manor is drenched in deep shadow. The door sits beneath an archway crowned with the emblem of a heraldic sheild and a baron's coronet.
In the second panel, the man ascends a flight of stairs. He uses a mote of light he has conjured from his palm to illuminate his surroundings: peeling wallpaper, dusty old painting, cobwebs. He's in a grand old manor, but a very neglected one. In the shadows, below his line of sight, there is another figure hidden in the shadows. His silhouette is that of another rat man, though rather than walking up the stairs he crouches and crawls, more animalistic, the lens of his glasses flashing like a predator's eyes in the dark. One can barely make out the fire poker in his hand.
In the final pinal, the first rat man has drawn back the curtain of a bed. His expression is one of horror; despite being indoors, his breath gives off a chilly fog. He stares down at the silhouette; it looks like the figure of a woman at rest. Behind him, the glasses of his pursuer glint in the pitch darkness.
Text boxes wind their way through all the panels, saying: "He knew he was not welcome. I had rid the manor of vermin before. Overthrown as patriach, he crept back as a thief, here to seize his 'entitlement;' my birthright. If he had not been stopped, he would have had me declared me. He would have taken my home away from me. He would have taken HER away from me."
SINS OF THE SON (1/2)
There is an infestation of rats in Northcrest manor. Which is the vermin and which is the exterminator depends on each one's point of view.
