before they get to the market, benika smells something. it's hard to tell if it's really coming from the market or from the refugees' fire. somehow it looks to me like it's coming from the fire. but in reality, burning meat doesn't smell like BBQ... so it's hard to tell what was being burned.
i don't think piled up skulls have to mean something bad per se. in some countries, there are bone houses where skulls and bones are piled up to the roof. and that's not a sign of poverty or anything. it's usually the case when you don't have enough space in the cemetery, e.g. in a mountain village or something like that. and since the refugees don't have much space anyway, they don't "waste" it with (big) cemeteries. that's also a reason why i think that part of the fuel will be human remains, and not just in the "prison" from the vigilante force....
and the skulls are housed here in something like bone houses, which are simply open (building materials are rare?), and they might even have written down the names, which is not done in every bone house. on the contrary, you see it rather rarely, because in a bone house there are usually so many bones that the space on the walls is not enough to write down the names, usually the names are somewhere in the church books. all in all, the piled up skulls don't have to be an malicious sign. the same goes for the possibility that they use human remains as fuel. it can all just be a sign of how bad the refugees' circumstances are...
If anything, it looked more like a snake to me.
i agree. a lightning bolt is rather not drawn like this.
