Teaser for the Climax

…..
Footsteps echoed in the darkness. Verdeyan sat up, her head pounding with fear in her blood. The stiff pain of the lashes on her back ached. Someone was at the door to her closet now. Their fingers fumbled with the bar bolting the door. She cowered in the corner, her hands pressed over her face.
“Please!” She cried, tears beginning to burn in her eyes. The door swung open, silver-black shadows pouring in.
“No!” She began to sob.
She tensed, anticipating the painful crack of a whip over her shoulders, the blunt blow of a kick to the head—but instead, she felt only hands softly cupping her shoulders, lifting her.
“Please,” she trembled, “don’t hurt me anymore-“
She peered upwards, fearful. Instead of the blocky form of the overseer, she made out the profile of a younger man. Gattlin.
“Verdeyan. Hush, we must be swift,” he said, his hands carefully lifting her bound wrists towards the silver shafts of moonlight that entered her cell. His fingers were nimble, picking the bone pins from the knots and then untying them. As he tried to lift her, she groaned, “No! It hurts.”
Again, he tried to lift her. This time she screamed.
He clamped a hand over her mouth, saying “You have to come with me. Rosh will kill us both if he finds us.”
Muffled, she tried to articulate “Why are you here? She sold me.” Verdeyan trembled in Gattlin’s arms.
“Hush. We must go.” Gattlin held her over his shoulder, her tired body nearly limp in his arms. He felt the blood that oozed from the cuts on her back and arms, wincing as she moaned again.
He turned to open the door to the cell, freezing as the floorboards creaked beneath someone else’s feet.
The individual approached on quick strides, the door creaking as they grasped the handle. Gattlin shoved Verdeyan into the corner of the cell behind him, ignoring her groans.
The door was pulled open, the silhouette of a tall, powerfully built man leaning in.
“Who’s in here! Show yourself!” The man was Rosh. Verdeyan gasped.
Rosh reached out with a knife in hand, slashing at the form of two Fleirzon huddled in the corner. Gattlin stuck out his hand to parry the blow, groaning as the blade bit the flesh of his palm.
This threw Rosh off balance for a moment, and int hat instant, Gattlin mustered the strength to kick him in the gut, which sent him sprawling out into the hallway.
He heaved Verdeyan upright, as she gasped in protest, reeling forwards to the door and escape.
As she stepped out into the hallway, something made her fall. Gattlin pulled himself through the doorway to see Rosh clamping his hands over her neck, a terrified look on her face.
Gattlin took a deep breath before grabbing his knife from his belt, and dove with it for Rosh’s wrists. The man grunted, punching Verdeyan in the face as he relinquished her.
Rosh fumbled for his knife, and jabbed towards Gattlin’s ribs. Gattlin felt the blade pierce his shirt, adrenaline coursing through his body, grabbed Rosh by the shoulder and threw him against the wall. Boards behind him cracked as he smashed through, another kick landing in his ribs, then another.
Gattlin stumbled backwards, feeling blood trickling down his stomach.
He turned away, grabbing Verdeyan by the wrist, and stumbled down the hallway towards the open door at its end.
….
There was a rap on the door, a sharp sound pulling Olsvei from the warm reaches of sleep.
She threw her blanket about her shoulders, groggily trudging towards the draft that the door let into her warm flat.
She opened the door slowly.
“What is it? Is something wrong…?” She trailed off as she looked down to see the shapes of two people, a faint shadow of a girl’s frightened eyes, and a man behind her.
“Olsvei. Please, we’re hurt.” Verdeyan’s voice trembled.
Gattlin behind her groaned, “Is she letting us in?” He sounded weak, pain tingeing his voice in a way Verdeyan had never heard before.
“Verdeyan! What are you doing here? Come inside, quickly—and that man with you—come in!”
She pulled the two inside her door, shutting out the cold and uncertainty with the door behind her.
“Gattlin, this is Olsvei,” Verdeyan sighed, shaking rainwater off her drenched tunic.
Olsvei hurried over to the fire, lighting a candle, and turning towards the drenched pair of Fleirzon standing in her flat.
“Verdeyan, what is going on?” Her voice was shaking. “I thought Rosh had bought you.”
“Yes. But there is nowhere else for us to go. You must look after Gattlin. He’s hurt.” She bit her lip.
Gattlin collapsed onto the bed, moaning. Olsvei, her forehead creased in concern, kneeled by the bed where he lay. Verdeyan stood, watching, shaking in the wet servant’s smock she wore. Her back stung, blood mixed with rainwater.
She locked her eyes shut, sinking to the floor.
If there are spirits, she thought silently, we need their help.
…
Olsvei felt her hands shaking. Verdeyan, the slave, Gattlin her captor.
Rosh, the owner…blood –soaked Fleirzon at her door in the night. Something was wrong.
The man on the bed in front of her was soaked in rain and blood. His feather cloak was torn, and so was the shirt beneath it, gray fabric stained in crimson. Red covered his hand as well.
“Verdeyan, look in the closet behind you. There is an old blanket.”
Verdeyan wordlessly reached for the rough material and lay it on the bed beside Gattlin. Olsvei caught her breath as she saw the red spot had spread to the bedsheets.
She lay the blanket on Gattlin’s chest at the source of the bleeding and began to press down firmly on it.
He groaned, a horrible empty sound.

Then there was a knock at the door.

Well, seeing as this is from the middle of a piece and not the beginning, I was a little lost. My knowledge of fantasy carried me through to the end, but because I don't know what's happened up to this point, I'm not going to comment on anything story-related, really.

Just some tech/mechanical stuff.

First, I think you need to decide on a narrative. As far as I can gather, you were going for a third-person limited sort of deal. But, you switch it every few paragraphs, sometimes within a paragraph. One minute, we're following V (can't remember her full name), then G, then Rosh, then G, then V, then Rosh, etc. And it's incredibly confusing.

You could do a true omniscient and get in everything--or swing the other direction and head for third person objective. But, omniscient can get clunky and slow, which is usually not what you want for a climax or modern fantasy in general, and third person objective is not what you have going here at all, so I suspect you don't want that.

So, evaluate the perspective each of your characters has on the situation and choose one to be a narrator for a good while; if you want to switch, use a line break to signal your reader, but be aware that excessive switching can grate on readers' nerves. After deciding, weed through the text and make sure everything noted is something that the chosen one can sense, or something that the chosen one knows. The idea with limited is that the reader knows only what the character knows.

Also on that note, it helps build character if you make sure that what you're writing via your chosen narrator is actually what that character would sense/deem important. Which is not always what you the writer want to share, or what is actually important (some poor writer in the world is stuck with a shallow, mindless drone who thinks of nothing but the colors of people's clothing, I'm sure)

Next, dialogue formatting.

The two types of dialogue tags, which assign a bit of speech to a speaker, are direct and indirect.

With a direct tag, you the writer say that Joe Bob is emitting a sound and that the sound he's emitting is "This." In other words, you have a speaker, some sort of verb that means to make speech, and everything inside the quotation marks is the direct object. And because the stuff enclosed inside the quotations, no matter how long or short, is part of the grammar of the sentence, it's punctuated as such:

"I hate you," he said.
He said, "I hate you."
"I hate you!" he yelled.
He yelled, "I hate you!"
"I hate you?" he asked.
He asked, "I hate you!"

With indirect tags, the stuff inside the quotation marks is NOT part of the grammar of the sentence. The connection between the speaker and the stuff spoken is, well, indirect. Implied. A product of an unspoken agreement between writer and reader.

"I hate you." He spat at her feet and walked away.
He spat at her feet. "I hate you!"
Etc., etc.

Some people try to get creative with their tags, usually because some English teacher mentioned that you should only ever use 'said' once. I'm of the school of thought that the less pretentious the tags, the better. But even so, one cannot physically tremble out "Please" (to use an example from your piece) or countless other things.

I hope all of that made sense. Please tell me if it didn't and I'll explain better.

Also, I'd like to see this from the beginning if you haven't already posted that up.

Rach

Thanks for the edit.

I must admit, speech tags are my bane. I'll have to go through and re-work the point-of-view thing, which as you pointed out is choppy.

This is the link to the novel.

novel.php?id=195

Thanks for the review!

-Voxina