Hail, Fellow Order member! I have come to liberate this forlorn chapter of yours from the Green Room, as is our shared sacred duty!
I believe I may have reviewed the chapter right after this, which made reading this chapter interesting because now I know a little more about what lead to the events in that chapter I reviewed a while back. XD
With that said, this chapter surprised me with how short it was. Now, I happen to like short chapters (especially when I'm reviewing ;P), but this chapter felt a bit too short. You do a lot of telling infodump-style, and it isn't all that interesting to read. Instead of just giving your readers the information all in one go, I'd recommend alternating these pieces of information with the character's actions. Taking the first paragraph for example:
At the City Guard barracks, Jack was reading the file on Auxi. She was well known to the City Guard, first as an unruly child, then as a disruptive orphan with magpie-like tendencies. At ten, however, she completely disappeared from the city. Someone had slid a note into the file saying that she had probably left the city to visit her parent’s tribe, one of the forest tribes to tell them of their death. Jack didn’t think that that was true. Auxi didn’t seem like the kind of person t leave the place she had always lived in, especially after her parent’s death. So something else had happened.
If you were to mix in a bit more of Jack's actions like so:
At the City Guard barracks, Jack was reading the file on Auxi. He started with the oldest reports, skimming over the accounts of an unruly child turned disruptive orphan with magpie-like tendencies. There were no reports of when Auxi was ten, and someone had slid a note into the file saying that she had probably left the city to visit her parent’s tribe, one of the forest tribes to tell them of their death. Jack didn’t think that that was true. Auxi didn’t seem like the kind of person t leave the place she had always lived in, especially after her parent’s death. He suspected that something else had happened.
It's not perfect, but you get the general idea. Having a whole bunch of information clumped together is a bit tiring for the readers to read, an so alternating information with character actions keeps things less like a history lesson and more like a story. You have a little bit of this, but you could use a bit more incorporating of Jack's actions into the narration since right now, it's heavily slanted towards info, info, info. Including more of Jack's (and other characters') actions would also help characterize them indirectly, which is a very good thing as most of the things we learn about other people aren't told to us; we learn them by watching those other people. Weaving in more of the characters' actions into the narration would help give readers something to watch and learn about the characters from, which in turn will make the characters feel more real to your readers.
Points: 72525
Reviews: 1220
Donate