The indigo fingers of night slowly crept across the sky, enclosing the daylight in their grasp. The landscape breathed a sigh of relief as it was enveloped by the darkness. It was a pleasant change from the blistering fire of summer, but soon the cold of winter would descend and plague those who had just grown strong again.
One weak shaft of sunshine still grazed the cedar treetops. It illuminated a scrap of papyrus inscribed with a tall, bent lettering. A peculiarly short man, dressed in bedraggled gray, fingered the script briefly, then pocketed it. The message was his employer’s name, and the sum he would be paid. He pocketed the paper and broke into a run, into the darkening forest that promised only his reward. The sun dipped below the horizon and his eyes adjusted to the evening shadows that hid amongst the trees.
Felix Norwood was a fickle, flighty man, prone to a lust for power and riches. Most saw him as a pawn to be played, an exploitable commodity, a nuisance. His employers usually set him to the most menial of tasks, like thieving and murder, as long as they might provide compensation. He drifted from inn to alleyway, widow’s home to boxcar. He felt no shame in his lifestyle, for all he sought was a pocketful of coins.
As Felix ran, slowly yet insistently, he felt less and less certain of this new job. Most of his business was with crooked sailors and opium dealers, not anonymous forest-dwellers. The scene whipped past him, obscured by a gathering mist. As he gained speed, he felt his clothing chafing him and his cravat constricting his windpipe.
Going blindly through the forest, it was not until he struck a solid, rather painful surface that Felix realized he had no idea where he was and where he was going.
Felix expected the hard surface to be a tree, but instead it was a tall, bear-like man, wearing an angry scowl. He flexed iron muscle under his evening suit. He was well-dressed, and wore an expensive top hat. Felix searched his brain for a name, for he remembered the face that sat on those shoulders. He was a Hazael, a Hiram, a Homer, perhaps? Yes, that was the one...
“Why are you here, you little sneak? I thought you learned your lesson the last time I was forced to deal with you. How not to dabble where you oughtn’t to.” Homer stroked his red beard as he spoke, and Felix recognized the smooth danger that punctuated his words.
“M-money tempts me again, Homer. Now let me pass.” He tried feebly to hide his unease.
“I know why you’re here. You’re here for Ezlel. For his little test, am I right? So you can earn a little cash, right? Right?” Homer snickered mockingly.
“N-none of your b-business.”
Homer roared with laughter and stood aside. He was obviously guarding something and saw that weak, pale little Felix posed it no danger.
“Go on, go on. I’d be more worried if it were a housecat trying to speak with Ezlel.”
Homer immediately bounded ahead, gesturing for Felix to follow as he turned. Felix followed with a grumble, recalling the last time he had met Homer. It was his first time on a proper job, back when he was still just a lad. It was a bit of grave robbery; decent wages, and a hot canteen of coffee to boot. He had come to his cemetery of choice, in search of the specially marked grave from which he was to obtain the bones. He knelt beside the grave, and saw it had already been stripped. He groped in the dirt, looking for maybe a discarded half-bone, until his fingers found the domed roundness of a skull. This was his lucky night; even the most experienced robbers found mostly thighbones and ribs. An unmarked whole skull would sell for almost four thousand sovereigns, if he was lucky.
As he swung the sack containing his find over his shoulder, a current of crackling energy ran through the dusk. A thick, red-bearded man materialized from the gloom, bursting forth from the dark. His lower half still had the texture of the background as he advanced on the teenaged Felix. After a rather brutal beating over the rightful owner of the skull, Felix was left in the grave itself, half-buried.
“I understand your predicament, friend,” called Homer over his shoulder. “We are all sorely enticed by the coin these days.”
What right did Homer have to Felix’s friendship? He gave another grumble as they plodded along, until Homer came to a circular clearing, rich with the tang of resin and mouldering scraps of life long-gone. There was a gang of dragons attached to studded leather leads, wrapped around a red fir. Their bulbous, scaly bodies were slowed by their short legs as they scuttled from beneath their feet, although one was too slow and felt Homer’s foot in its’ side. It gave a squeal as it came to earth with a thud and scampered away to join its’ brothers.
Homer led them to the center of the seemingly empty clearing. “Take a seat,” he warned. Felix backed up and sat cross-legged a few feet away.
Raising his arms heavenwards, as if in praise of some unearthly deity, Homer summoned a large gilt throne from the midst of the foggy woods. Felix knew this was Homer’s Skill; his special, elemental gift. He had the power to change and mask and disguise objects, people and even emotions, hiding them so thoroughly that they were nearly indistinguishable against any background.
Homer shuddered, using his Skill to its utmost. A man appeared on the throne, decked in silks and brocades. Homer’s knees buckled and he fell to the ground, his form heaving with exhaustion.
The man had an aquiline, clean-shaven face, almost sculpture-like. He seemed to be in thought, as though he were in silent debate.
“The applicant, sir. He seems like the first one.” Homer had pulled himself up and straightened his clothing, apparently to impress his master. Felix snorted at the obvious subservience. Why did such a powerful man bow to a small, less commanding man?
Ezlel snapped out of his revelry immediately, locking his eyes on Homer. His gaze darted to Felix for a split second, and then back to his guard.
“His name?” A foreign accent inflected his speech.
“Norwood, I believe. I have met him before, and I urge you not to trust –“
“Silence. His name is Norwood, correct?” Homer nodded. “Correct, sir.”
“That will do.” Now Ezlel turned towards his next applicant, with an expectant grin on his face.
“State your business, Norwood.” He said Felix’s name with a certain indulgence. Felix wasn’t used to this treatment, and he was rather taken aback.
“I have come for payment in exchange for my service, s-sir.”
“You are precise and determined, Felix. I admire those qualities,” he almost purred. |Felix wondered how he might have guessed his name.
“They are useful ones. Now, you are aware of what will be asked of you, in return for the payment you claim to hunt?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.” Ezlel’s voice had a soothing effect on him. He felt a sort of warmth welling up inside of him, although the biting cold and thin coating of frost on the grass would otherwise have penetrated his patched clothing.
“Then you will know that you are to undergo a test, of course. The test is not an easy one.”
“I understand.” Felix had no inkling of what lay ahead, but out of spite for his old adversary, he found himself speaking words he would never speak if he had a degree of sanity left. He would not let himself be bested just as he had been ten years ago...
“You may prepare yourself for a few moments.” Ezlel turned away as he spoke, and Felix assumed he too was readying himself for the test.
So Felix in turn prepared, measuring his nerves, rolling his head, cracking his knuckles as if he were a prizefighter rather than a short, sallow sneak-thief. He had barely a second before he was hit with some invisible force, nearly knocking his wind out. As he struggled for breath and felt the weight of this strange sensation overpower him, he tried to reach for something, anything, to hold on to. His hands cast about for something real, but his vision swam and all he saw was a rippling version of reality, as if he were underwater looking up. Just as the last air drained from his lungs, and his ribs were ready to splinter from the pain, he broke the surface of his unreal, liquid prison.
Thank you very much. I haven't had such a rigorous review for a long time
Anyhow, I will make sure to revise according to your specifications. You made me see a lot of things that I otherwise would have missed.
And as for Ezlel... well, I actually laughed my face off when you indicated he was gay. I mean, I never wrote him that way and never even thought of him that way. I mean, come to think of it I'm pretty sure he looks effeminate.I'll leave that as is, perhaps for the intrigue of a *gasp* possibly non-heterosexual character in a fantasy story! How crazy would that be.
In any case, thanks so much for the critique.
Hello, Fiction, looks like I'll be your first reviewer.
I'm very nitpicky and I go very in depth and I will tear apart your writing at the sentence level. I can write paragraphs about a single sentence. Don't be intimidated by the big walls o' text. ~_^
This image is an interesting one, but I'm not sure if that's in a good way. The language seems rather...over-the-top and overly flowery. I'd describe this as veering dangerously close to "purple prose." Then again, my preference is for a simple, understated style. But I would advise against beginning the story with a metaphor/personification, unless it's really unique and attention-grabbing.
I'm sorry to say but this kind of image has been used many times before. The image in the next sentence, with the land breathing in relief, works because it's different. But I swear I've seen "creeping fingers of night" imagery done to death.
Okay, now this is over-the-top. And rather vague as well. Who are these "those" exactly? And how is it even relevant to mention that winter's coming soon? Surely, if you want to make that point, you can do it in subtler ways that rely on specific details rather than broad pronouncements. Leaves changing color, the breeze acquiring a chill, the sky growing bleaker.
Actually, this mentioning of seasons is a non sequitur, since you were talking about night and day before.
You might enjoy toying with imagery and figurative language; we all do, it's a part of writing But the images have to serve the story, not the other way around. No matter how pretty/unique a metaphor you think you've created, if it's irrelevant to advancing the story forward, then it's a good idea to cut it.
Right now, I'll admit I don't find this first paragraph very engaging. You're laying the scene, but doing it in strokes so broad that it's less a scene than the concept of a scene. Hell, I don't even know if this "landscape" is a forest, a valley, or even a desert. Including specific details--the way the dying sun colors the treetops gold, or the hoots of owls waking up--will create a specific picture of the setting, more than grand pseudo-poetic language will. Readers like specifics! Don't be afraid to use them.
One last caution--think carefully if it's essential to the narrative to open it at sunset. Beginning a story at sunset is a cliche. It's easy to do, and I've done it on more than one occasion, but it's doesn't make for very gripping reading.
Ah, so in the next paragraph we zoom in (and discover that this "landscape" is indeed a forest). I can see what you're trying to do here and it's a perfectly valid way to begin a story--starting with a broad scene before zeroing in on our protagonist. However, this kind of opening only realy works if you paint a vivid picture of the setting first. That's where those specifics come into play.
Well, we meet a character here. And I notice the prose suddenly became a lot cleaner and matter-of-fact.
There's nothing overtly wrong with this paragraph (although I did have to read it twice to understand that the man was holding the scrap of papyrus, rather than it floating around in the breeze or pinned to the tree or something). However, I don't find it all that engaging. Thing is, you use a lot of adjectives but your verbs and nouns are weak. When it comes to description, it's a good rule of thumb to rely more on strong verbs and nouns than adjectives and adverbs that modify weak nouns/verbs.
It's easy in the first draft to sprinkle your writing with adjectives/adverbs, but when revising give each adverb/adjective a good once-over and ask yourself if it's really necessary. Do we have to know that the lettering is "tall and bent," or can you just refer to it as "scrawl?" Why not say "squat" instead of "particularly short?" "Gray rags" instead of "bedraggled gray?" You do use strong verbs throughout ("grazed," "illuminated," "pocketed," "dipped," "adjusted"), which means you're on the right track.
One benefit of using few adjectives and adverbs is that when you do use one, it stands out and is thus stronger than it'd be if it was just one in a sea of many.
Hmm, do we really need to know this right now? As it is, this paragraph is a classic infodump. We're told everything about Felix, but we're not shown any of it. Right now, I don't find myself not really believing that Felix is all of these things, because he's not been shown behaving in a particularly fickle, flighty, power-hungry manner so far. All he's done is pocket a scrap of paper. I have no opinion on him, and until he starts acting in a specific way, I won't trust anything anybody--even the narrator--says about him. Remember the old adage "actions speak louder than words?" Yeah, that applies even to writing.
Now, this is good! We're shown his uncertainty, and given a hint that he does business with unsavory elements. And we're even shown his fickle nature, because he's starting to have second thoughts about this job. I'd say you could eliminate the previous paragraph altogether and introduce Felix this way. It would also create a greater sense of mystery around the character, because we don't know everything about him yet. That sense of mystery will definitely compel readers to want to read further, if only to find out more about this Felix and what he's doing in the forest.
Nitpicks: watch for those adverbs, "less and less" can be replaced by "less" and means the same while using fewer words, and since Felix is our POV character there's no need to say "he felt" because we assume that any sensations are those that he's feeling.
"Where he was and where he was going" is awkward; I'm wondering if you could cut one of them because in this context, we can easily assume that one leads to the other. If he has no idea where he is, then he logically should have no idea where he's going; if he has no idea where he's going, he probably doesn't know where he is.
Nitpicks: "Going blindly"--surely there is a single verb out there that means the same thing? "Rather" is useless filler.
Surely, you mean "muscles?"
Also, the fact that he's well-dressed should be implied by the fact that he's wearing an evening suit. Which makes me wonder who would wear an evening suit in the forest, of all places.
Okay, this is a very odd and creepy image. I know what you're trying to say, but all I see is a disembodied face sitting atop a pair of shoulders. Doesn't the man have a neck and head, too? XD
You could just as well say "for he remembered the man's face." Says the same thing, minus the unintentionally creepy image.
I like this dialogue. It feels very natural, and I think underscores my point that you didn't neefd to dump a thing about Felix in the first place. Felix has a reputation as a sneak, he's tempted by money, he's viewed as weak. This is all revealed in a natural way, through dialogue and character interaction. See why it's almost never preferable to use infodumps?
I do find your descriptions a little overstated. "Weak, pale little" is over-the-top; when people "roar with laughter" they're usually so overwhelmed that they can't walk (I envision rolling around the floor, pounding fists kind of laughter...), and "obviously guarding" is overstating something that would better be implied.
Don't worry too much that I'm ripping into your descriptions. To be honest, they look a lot like my descriptions before I begin revising. There's nothing wrong with pumping out weak writing on the first draft--that draft's for just getting your thoughts on paper. And I'm sure this first-draft review does not have the strongest prose, either. Just keep in mind to refine your prose through revisions.
Also, I like the sense of mystery in this dialogue. I'm powerfully curious as to who this Ezlel is!
I question the necessity of this flashback. Surely, right now all we need to know is that Homer and Felix have a working relationship. The flashback can be put in some future time when we need to know more about their dynamics.
As it is now, the flashback is also badly segued into. When writing a flashback, a general rule is to separate it into its own scene and maybe even italicize the whole thing; if you want to write it from a "character looking back at that instant" POV, then you have to convert the tense to past perfect. "It had been his first time on a proper job" as opposed to "It was his first time..."
But at this point I'd suggest removing the flashback from this scene entirely. It doesn't really do anything but provide information that I think would be better explored in the future.
Ah, this is what I'm talking about when it comes to specifics--nice image, the "tang of resin." I can definitely picture (er...smell) that. However, it might be a good idea to specify just what forms of life long-gone these moldering scraps came from. Dead animals, rotting fruit?
The reaction to this line should be, "Cool, dragons!" but instead it's more something like, "Huh?" I was confused when I first read this and I had to read it twice to figure out what was going on. Thankfully the problem with this sentence is easily fixed. You started the sentence with "There was." It's an easy thing to do when you're searching for a way to begin the next sentence in your rough draft, but there'd better be no "there was" sentences in the final draft.
Something along the lines of, "A gang of dragons were attached to studded leather leads that wree wrapped around a red fir" might work, but even that feels overly verbose. Then again, I'm not here to revise the story for you! All you need to do is center the sentence around the dragons (rather than this nebulous "there") and change up the syntax a little, because as it is now it's confusingly and rather awkwardly stated.
I read this three times. It still makes no sense. Rule of thumb: read your prose aloud while you're revising. Rewrite any sentences you stumble over. This one is a definite stumbler.
(Also, I think you mean "Its" without the apostrophe, yeah?)
How is this a warning? I fail to see.
The "raising his arms heavenwards, as if in praise..." part is another example of overstating. You might as well just cut out the "as if in praise..." part because it adds nothing to the sentence, and the sentence will still have the same meaning without it.
Okay, I did raise my eyebrows slightly at the sudden gilt throne appearance, but the way it was written was rather underwhelming. Come on, you just showed us magic! This is the first time anything magical has appeared in this story, so it'd be a good idea to describe it in a little more detail. Does the throne emerge slowly, or does it suddenly pop in place? Does it glow for a little bit? Does it rise out of the center of a tree? All sorts of little images that will make the scene more real for us, even if you are depicting an act that could never happen in the real world.
I am confused by this. Reading the coming sentences, I understand that Homer's exerting himself to the limit to summon a human, but it's not really clear. This sentence is vague and rather tell-y. Don't just tell us he's using his Skill, show us the cords standing out in his neck, the sweat shining on his face. Another place where specifics would work wonders.
Quibble, but I am under the impression that brocade is a form of silk.
I don't think the "almost sculpture-like" is necessary. If you want to keep it, I'd suggest a more natural phrasing would be "like a sculpture's."
Yikes, this is so far the most egregious example of overstating I've seen in this story. You're saying the same thing twice in one sentence. Pick one or the other, but don't use them both.
I find this rather overstated as well. The fact that Felix snorts should imply already that he's disdainful about Homer's deference to Ezlel. Don't feel like you have to spell everything out for the reader. We're smart enough to figure some things out on our own. ~_^
This is a rather clunky piece of writing. I can see what you're trying to do here, but it doesn't really work.
Whenever another person speaks, start a new paragraph. I think you know this already; is this a spacing error?
"Now" is another one of those words you have to look out for when you're revising. Heaven knows I abuse that word like no tomorrow. Also, I'm a little wary of the description of Ezlel as "grinning." So far, he seems a guy who's in control of himself and doesn't show much emotion, so it's incongruous to have him grinning, which implies giddiness.
? I don't quite follow what you mean by "a certain indulgence."
I should warn you that I'm seeing a lot of Ho Yay here. If it's intentional, more power to you.
Holy crap, if my gaydar wasn't pinging before...
I mean, if you intend for Ezlel to be gay or effeminate, then I have no problem with that. I'm just pointing out these little hints in case you didn't intend for him to come across that way.
This could be a powerful image but it's stated in rather vague terms. I think the worst offender is the "a sort of warmth" part. It obviously is warmth, so why bother couching it in such wishy-washy terms? Yes, "a sort of" is one of those phrases like "there was" and "now" and "rather" that should raise alarm bells when you're revising.
There are also many different kinds of warmth. The warmth of drinking hot soup, the warmth of sitting by a fire,the warmth of being wrapped in a well-knit sweater. Consider using a simile here to make Felix's warmth feel more real to the reader.
Nice cliffhanger, if a little sudden.
I think I've stated everything I need to about prose above. Be more specific, less vague and rambly, read aloud your prose, show instead of tell, storytelling comes before pseudo-poetry, etcetera.
Other than that I don't have much of a problem with this story. I hate to play the age card, but you really do have a phenomenal understanding of language and imagery for your age. There are some nice images in here, and your dialogue is all very natural. I like your main character; he's substantially different from most "poor chosen one farmboy" so popular in fantasy. This world also seems to have a more eighteenth/nineteenth century bent than the typical medieval/Renaissance fantasy setting, though a forest is rather a cliche place to begin the story. And you've done a good job building up mystery around Ezlel and this mysterious task that Felix has to do.
The one major problem I have, aside from the prose, is that Felix seems to have no motivation. Yes, I get the feeling you're trying to keep his reasons for dealing with Ezlel secret, but you'd do well to at least mention them. Or is he only doing it for the money? If that's the case, it needs to be made more clear. I also had a hard time believing that Felix would submit to Ezlel so readily; though others think he's weak he does seem the type who does whatever he wants without caring about what other people think, so it's very odd that he would just happily do whatever Ezlel said. Maybe you're trying to show that Ezlel is all powerful or whatnot, but even then Felix's submission came too easily.
Look, you have interesting characters, but it seems you're not letting them be characters. You're treating them as plot devices. Felix submits to Ezlel because he has to in order to move the story, he seeks out Ezlel for the same reason. And for the reader it rings very false. The pinnacle of every story, even a fantasy tale, is the characters. It's bad enough when the characters are ciphers, but even worse when they clearly do have personality but are forced to act in nonsensical ways to serve the plot.
Motivation's the key. Without motivation, your characters are just puppets doing random things. The characters' motivations and desires should drive the plot, or at least their actions in the plot. Right now, I don't understand Felix's motivation or even if he has one, and that's ruining my enjoyment of this story.
PM me if you have any questions, or if you want to yell at me for being harsh, that's fine too. Good luck with your writing!