This one is better than the first chapter for sure! But you need to remember to put spaces between the paragraphs, which you didn't in the last 4 paragraphs, between the 1st and 2nd paragraphs, and 2nd and 3rd paragraphs.
If you'd like any suggestions for what comes next then the most obvious thing would be is to write about the dinner, the room he will be staying in, the people he will meet, and you could describe what the palace (or whatever you would like to call it) looks like.
Did you really need: (this one feminine) <-- like that? Couldn't you have just fit it into the story instead of putting it into parenthesizes?
You could have put it like this: A feminine voice spoke with absolute athority...
Got anything else you'd want me to read? -kittykat
Our happiness here is all vain glory,
This false world is but transitory,
The flesh is weak, the Fiend is slee
Timor mortis conturbat me.
--William Dunbar
Righto, by 'review not edit' I'm assuming you don't want nit-picky details, but I may be completely wrong.
Either way, I'll leave that for someone else.
Some things you may want to consider about your portal-cutting sword:
I assume it cuts time (from the title of the piece), but does it also cut space? If Benu has travelled back in time, then the place he left from should be the ruins or whatever of the castle he lands in. Unless hes lso moved in space...
The peeling imagery in the first section is good, as it differentiates your idea from pullman's (which deals with a space-cutting knife). THis is more important than you might think.
I really hope you've spent time thinking about time travel if this is the kind of piece you're going to be writing. Travel into the past can be especially mind-bending.
Language: THe elves speak the same language as Benu, this seems unlikely. Neither even uses distinctively vernacular or archaic language, I'd advise this to add a touch of accent, or different sentence structure etc to highlight differences.
Other stuff:
I don't like the shift in pov to Illiana. If you keep it on Benu, the reader is still intrigued y the mystery of these elves, if you move the focus onto the elves so bluntly, they lose some of their mystique.
Elves? I mean, I'm using them in mine too....but at least try and mix it up a little, and maybe don't have Benu recognise the race immiedietely?
Anyways, cheers for your insight into my stuff, glad to return the favour,
Cheerio,
Rubric
P.S if you've got some new slant on time travel, or any plans to mess with it, please pm me, I'd love to get in on this!
So you're going to kill a god. Sure. But what happens next?
