Vengeance: Chapter One - Serialised fiction posted every Wednesday!
View this post on Hive: Vengeance: Chapter One - Serialised fiction posted every Wednesday!
View this post on Hive: Vengeance: Chapter One - Serialised fiction posted every Wednesday!
I am surprised that out of 268 upvotes there was not even one comment.
You have a very broad vocabulary and, as a non-native speaker, I had to go to the dictionary quite often. This is more of a compliment to you, while, at the same time, it is an explanation for why it was not so easy for me to follow.
As I understood, this is a scene from some fantasy, based on the medieval period. Since you are not offering a very precise description of a weaponry, such as the length of a sword, whether it had a long double-handed handle, whether it had a wide or a narrow blade, whether it was sharp on both sides, etc. it is hard for me to place the action in time. Because it was steel blade rather than bronze, at least I can place it within roughly 800 ac and 1400 ac. After that, there would already be muskets and I don’t see any muskets used in your narrative.
Another thing that made the reading somewhat difficult is that you enhanced almost every word with an adjective. You might consider use them sparingly, and only in places where they are necessary. Also, some comparisons seems not very precise and are hard to imagine.
She gulped for breath, inhaling the lingering shreds of decay, and her stomach churned as she risked her escape, clawing through the warm, dead flesh of the bodies that bore down upon her, surrounded and suffocated her.It is clear that there was a smell of decaying bodies but it isn’t very clear why “shreds of decay” are used in this comparison. Is this smell any different than the smell of the entire dead body? In addition, it takes about 6 to 8 hours for a corps to rot. Thus, it is not clear what happened to the protagonist during this time. Was Lyria unconscious?
Later when she is mad about Lord Andru not caring about the villages. It was not clear whether she was naïve and didn’t know how the raids are generally conducted or she knew of the actual instances of Lord Andru’s indifference. If it was a matter of knowledge, then you could have dropped some reference to it.
Later in the scene of revenge, it would be nice to present a more detailed account of what exactly Lyria did. The most natural in her situation would be to quietly crawl to each of the drunken and sleeping men and quickly cut their carotid artery. In the scene, it seems she went to a rampage. That’s very nice for a cartoon, but is hard to imagine in reality. Unless she was some awesome ninja. In that case, though, it is not clear how her father and his soldiers were taken so much by surprise.
Other than that, it looked like you put much hard work into this piece of writing. Kudos!
Thank you for your very thought out comment! I appreciate it so much. :) I'll try and address each of your points one at a time and hopefully I can explain them well.
The time period is purely fantasy and I can't give an exact time period for our own comparison. The main weapons are swords, of many shapes and sizes, bows/arrows, and magic. The period in this chapter is known as '40 AE' - which is 40 years after the Gods first arrived. When the Gods arrived, they brought with them a strange magic. In coming chapters we will discover that Lord Andru disdains the Gods' gift to the extent he wiped out whole family bloodlines who harboured the magical blood.
The "shreds of decay" was written explicitly to open another arc in future chapters also. Because the men Lyria has chased aren't just mere men... there is more going on, the "shreds of decay" is an allusion to a future plot device, as it later on when she's in the village and she's "near expecting the dead to rise". And how the strength of death gets stronger as she closes in on the murderers. Purposeful comments. :) Lyria was unconscious during the time in the corpse pile. But the stench isn't her family and friends, but those who performed the deeds.
We find more about her ordeal in a following chapter when she's forced to speak with Lord Andru. Lord Andru DOES actually care about the villages, but in Lyria's current point of view as she's filled with grief and repressed emotion, she doesn't believe that and we're only getting her current thoughts.
With the revenge scene, she did go on a rampage. She has the Gods' blood flowing through her, she's one of the forbidden mages that Lord Andru despises. She closes her eyes, prays to her God, and feels her blood-blessing burst into life. The world slows down in response to her ability and she takes all the men with ease before they even know she is there.
Her father was the only soldier in charge at the settlement, he and volunteers make up the rudimentary defence. There was no time to react to the offence as the "men" who attacked literally came out from no where, as we discover in future chapters when I bring in the antagonist.
I'm trying to weave the story in a way so that there are questions the reader asks and hopefully the reader remains curious enough to read the next chapters as I post them. Fingers crossed anyway! I could just be annoying the reader, which , as a writer, I really don't want to do. :(
Thank you once again for leaving such an in-depth comment, I am really really happy that you read my story and left such a wonderful comment. I didn't really think ahead for non-native English speakers and didn't realise my vocabulary was a bit too much. I'm sorry. :(
Just adding that I clarified it a bit on my WordPress version of this. I stopped calling them "raiders" and instead am referring to them as "murderers". Except in the one instance when she's talking to the burnt man in the other village, when she demands to know where the raiders went, and he tells her that they're not raiders, they're monsters made flesh.
:)
I see. So it is all complete fantasy - a mix between Greek mythology and Game of Thrones. ))) Indeed if Gods provided the weapons, why look a gift horse in a mouth?
You don't need to apologize for your great vocabulary. It's an asset if anything.
Well, good luck to you! I'll be waiting for a continuation.
Kind of! :) I've honestly never read or watched Game of Thrones, but I feel it's in the same sort of universe. My work is inspired by a fantasy novelist, Louise Cooper, who I read when I was 10years old. I wrote a fan-fiction of her story when I was a child and over the past twenty years it has since evolved into my own proper creation.
I do feed from a lot of mythology though. Perhaps Greek, with a few Celtic influences also.
Thank you for your luck! And thank you once again for reading and leaving such an in-depth critique. My following chapters are less adjective-filled; this first chapter was supposed to be a little sudden with everything going on at once and I really wanted to paint the scene, but hopefully the following ones are a little easier to read.
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