Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for violence.
Author's Notes: 1,998 words. Edited on request. She originally said "I will kill everybody!". I always felt that line was out-of-character, so I changed it to something ironic. Also, I did not time this to go out on Halloween, but I will accept full credit for it.
A piercing scream threw a rock through the window of the partly cloudy, dreary night.
First responders awoke in their tents and jumped out in alarm when they saw flames emanating among the black soup of the sky as the large strategy tent burned brightly. Madeleine was being escorted - coughing, weary, horrified - from the expanse, questions thrust at her that she could not answer. Soldiers scampered to the lake with wooden buckets in hand, prepared to drain the lake as necessary to save the documents that were being grabbed in a hurry and rushed away from the building towards Alarick's tent. Alarick was trying to coordinate the effort, directing the fire mages to control the blaze and ordering everyone else to scour for water and the source of the shouting.
It was Terasu, who was hastily able to fit on a metal breastplate and arm herself with a long spear, who found the answer. She rushed over, as she had been commanded the previous day, to the wagon where the sort-of prisoners were being kept. That was when she saw Jonah thrust out of the back of the wagon and land on the ground, coughing and spluttering as he held a hand under a bleeding nose, parchments stuffed into his shirt. The blue-haired girl took a step back when she saw him convulse and writhe while trying to stand up. A pair of iris-less eyes glared at her as Jonah hissed a sentence in a language she didn't know, or couldn’t begin to comprehend, and Terasu was too disturbed to react as Eremia jumped from the wagon and landed on her brother, feet-first.
"Guards!" Terasu screamed as loudly as she could. "Apprehend that kid!" Soldiers began to rush out of tents half-dressed and armed with the nearest weapons of convenience as Jonah summoned a blast of black energy from his hand, propelling Eremia into the wagon. The snapping of wood prefaced her exit out of the other end, while Aquila, still tied up, tripped and fell on top of her.
Jonah stood up, head facing the ground so that its hair masked its eyes, and began to levitate, a column of pitch-black darkness forming under him. "I...Jonah," he croaked in an indecipherable accent, further shrouding its broken words. "Leashed...control!"
The gathered guards struggled to find any words or actions for this situation, and it was Terasu who was first able to break from this spell of horror and fear. She heaved her spear like a pole arm and sprinted in Eremia's direction. It came as little surprise to her when Jonah conjured massive black fists around his arms, captured the spear, and snapped it in two. However, she realized with horror that, whatever had happened to Jonah, or whatever he had become, it was quickly realizing how to manipulate its strength. Soldiers scattered as huge fists crashed against the earth, while the blue-haired girl knelt beside Eremia and lifted her head up. Eremia looked bruised and unconscious, with pieces of wood sticking out of her arm and back. Terasu swore. Where was a healer when she needed one?
Well, at least she could do something about Aquila, who was still struggling in his ropes. Terasu knew that she couldn't just drag him along and try to carry Eremia at the same time. At the same time, was it a good idea to let him go, especially as he could escape and report on them? Sure, they needed all the help they could get, but it was just as likely the survivors would be made prisoners. Then Terasu restrained a scream of dismay when she saw one soldier crushed by a black fist. That man had only joined two weeks ago, and had been a young, if not very bright, recruit under her command.
Aquila nearly started shouting when Terasu turned and began to use little wisps of flame to singe and weaken his ropes, particularly as she summoned a massive pillar of flames behind her, rising to Jonah's height and bearing down upon him. Magic was something that did not like to be restrained when a person knew their potential, and so this was a nice trick that also allowed her to invoke her massive amounts of anger. Aquila broke free of his bonds, and Terasu gestured to Eremia's limp form before screaming in rage and rushing into the battlefield.
"I'll help you!" shouted a loud and brash voice from behind Terasu as she struggled to repulse one of the hands. Jonah's too-fluid expressions shifted from stoic to confusion to rage as it tried to push against its small and seemingly young opponent, but made no progress. That inhuman face turned into a smile when a cloud of dust and loud galloping announced the arrival of a fully-armed Rowland, with sword and spear in hand.
Terasu, breathing heavily and sweating from the exertion, shouted to him, "Get out of here! He's gone mad! You won't be close enough to land a blow!" He just smiled and slashed at a tendril that had attempted to sneak its way towards her, forcing it back as it exuded black-colored dust. Terasu’s soldiers, seeing her valiance as she made to hold back both fists, joined her in the battle, rushing over to provide their own energy or slash at what they could find of the dark energy. Terasu smiled internally at their devotion, but it was clear that Jonah could easily brush aside their weapons and send their wielders flying when they were able to sink their blades into the black material.
"I'm not that easy to drive off," remarked Rowland as he neared Terasu. "What kind of little girl fends off an evil abomination all alone, anyway?" He smirked as he hacked through more of the tentacle-like tendrils, and Terasu smiled at the corners of her mouth while she cupped her hands and forced a wall of flame towards the head of the massive, dark creature forming around the boy. The entire figure was pushed back, hands and all, and those said hands rushed to cover the thing's face.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps to the Terasu’s right, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Alarick, hands cupped around his mouth. "Are you daft? I've ordered an evacuation of the area; this thing is far too strong for us. I will not risk the lives of my generals and soldiers for this foolish sense of bravado and chivalry!"
Terasu grunted as her strength began to wane. By now, some of her fellow soldiers had been picked off, and the ground smelled of blood. It was disgusting and tiring, and she was beginning to regret having picked a fight with this creature. It, too, was beginning to weaken, however, particularly due to her efforts. The dark man's energy faded and grew smaller, yet kept pushing outwards, waiting for a chance to strike. "I...wish...it were that easy," she shouted in response to her lead general as she kept the fighting going. "But...the damage...this thing could do...if we can't...stop it!"
"Exactly!" agreed Rowland as he hacked at a spear that one of the tendrils threw, almost striking his head. "If we give up now and make our retreat, it could stab us all before we take ten steps! Think of this as our heroic sacrifice, so that we can move everyone away. Come now, old man - surely you haven't lost your spirit! Join us!"
Alarick’s eyes widened and he rushed forward, waving his arms frantically as his horse whinnied and followed him. "Step back! Look out!"
Unfortunately, Rowland was too busy laughing and saying, "I jest! I jest!" to notice. He parried another tendril offhandedly while staring at Alarick, his smile momentarily fading before he winced, and stared down at the spike of dark energy now embedded in his chest.
"Rowland!" yelled the girl in such a loud and high-pitched tone that even Jonah was repulsed, forced back a few inches by the overwhelming noise. However, its massive hands could now force back the wall of flames being thrust against it, and so it fell upon Terasu, who jumped out of the way as fire cascaded upon the grassy earth, scorching it and forming a massive semi-circle around her. She sat up, hands outstretched to where she had last seen the young man while Alarick rushed over and grabbed her, lifting the girl up. She persisted to shout in horror, a tear slipping from her face as she struggled to break free from Alarick, who proved too strong for her.
After a few seconds, the flames dissipated into a cloud of smoke, and through it they could see the towering figure of what was once Jonah. The figure was cradling the bleeding body of a limp Rowland and a perforated horse in its humungous hands, and looked upon the duo on the ground with contempt. "Fools...," it breathed, a voice like sandpaper being ripped into pieces and thrown over a fierce wind. "I...they...called... ...am Renewal, and...should do nicely."
"Give him back!" Terasu screamed, shooting a pillar of fire towards The Corruption. It began to take steps back, and dodged the relatively weak blast, its range and ferocity waning as Terasu grew more tired. "Give back my boyfriend! My...my..." she began to enter a phase between raging and crying.
The center of the darkness, now engulfed by a massive mask imitating its expression, made an audible, gasping breath. "My cause...begins here. I am...weak, I...go." Its eyes seemed to latch onto the stretcher that had been suspended by two guards as they carried Eremia's weak frame over to a makeshift tent by the burning one. "This sister...his...what a fool...why did...listen?" The creature swiftly turned, growing shorter and shorter by the second, and carved a path through tents and among screaming and terrified soldiers, making for the southwest.
Terasu started laughing. A long, eerie, broken one, in-between fervent tears and grabbing for anything she could find. Alarick looked down upon her, but she craned her head around and smacked him on the chin. She was strong enough to force him to let go, and he held the injured part of his anatomy while she sprinted furiously towards the stretcher, fireballs appearing on her hands. He dashed after her as the guards brandished their spears with her arrival, but a mere touch of the wood sent the weapons ablaze, and the soldiers cast them aside in exchange for swords.
"What do you know?" Terasu screamed at the half-awake Eremia, inching flames closer to her face. Terasu cackled. "Did you let him die? Why did you let him die? Why!?"
Eremia, still bleeding and disoriented, only mildly raised her eyebrows. "Jonah? Where is he? Did you...love him?"
Alarick locked his arms around Terasu's shoulders and pulled her back as she bellowed in rage, flames fired into the air and landing all about her. He gestured the guards to take Eremia away, and they wasted no time in running as fast their legs could take them. "She did nothing," Alarick said in his booming voice. "You know as much. I warned you, and you underestimated that...creature. You risked your life needlessly, and he had to die for it. Terasu, you killed your boyfriend."
"Wasn't it obvious?" she responded, persisting to laugh. Tents burst into flame as she was pulled back to the original battlefield, the earth becoming blacker with each step. Alarick was determined enough to ignore the overwhelming heat and smoke. "He was horrible, and he was stupid, and he was brave, but didn't I love him? And didn't I see myself in him? And didn't we love each other? How could I see him off? I have lost everything, and I will not lose anything else! I will kill her, and I will kill that creature, and nothing will stop-!"
She was struck in the back of her head with the flat of Alarick's blade, and collapsed face-first onto the ground.
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,801 Reviews
Hello. Haven't read previous parts, just going off what I see here.
I can tell what you were going for, here, with rich description and emotive writing. But you're not quiet there.
For starters, there are too many descriptive words per line. Because your sentences run so long, any sense of fear and adrenalin is lost because we end up breathless from the description. The sheer number of descriptive words, focusing on many things at once, muddy the image— just as we start to picture the first part of the sentence, we have to imagine a brand new thing.
The images end up scattered because they're not whole images. They're parts of images, each individually described, without that stitch to tie them together. There's also how the background is described last, so there's no natural sense of layering where we imagine things from largest to smallest.
There's also the fact nothing is given the space to be reacted to. Take this sentence:
In here we have:
1- character is thrust out of a wagon, on the ground— I want to react that this is a possible escape? A possible uprising? But before that can register, there's
2- The fact he's bleeding, which means he might've been ambushed, or he got hit with something, but before I can register that, there's
3- He's saved some of the paper they were trying to rescue? Or is it incriminating documents?
And I have officially taken in too much stimulus and I can't sort out what just happened there.
Short, single-topic sentences are not the enemy, here. It's okay to have sentences be a few words long. Every time you deliver a major clue to what the scene is, give us a new sentence so we have the mental break to piece together the picture.
Write simple prose first. Write the barebones, like bullets. Fire one idea after the other. One metaphor per sentence. Describe one thing at a time. Big things first, then small things. Journalists use the inverted pyramid for a reason; it sets the stage properly. Once you've mastered that, start to stitch them together and add richness.
This is suffering from something I suffered from a lot before I got to college and had to do technical writing: the concept of "the character saw this all at once so it must be presented all at once."
This is the reality-breaking part of fiction, and where you have to bend how neurology works in order to get a proper flow for reading. Pick what the character sees and reacts to first, then build everything off that detail. You'll have much stronger point of view and a stronger characterization by determining how they take in an image, because we see what's important to them. Then, you build how they react to it, and we're immersed in a world.
Start doing that for your descriptions and watch how the prose smooths out. You don't have to do everything all at once. Build stuff slowly. It's how you create magic.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
(I should have responded to this sooner, but today's been an odd day.)
This is quite possibly one of the best reviews I've received in a while. You delve right into the reason I despise much of my older writing (and my present writing, since I don't believe I've stopped doing that). I like your suggestions on proper flow in action scenes, reducing sentence length, and presenting ideas in ways that readers can easily adjust to. I'm not sure what else to say beyond that - this is a comprehensive and effective review. Thanks!
Sentence length is your biggest%u2014 and most underrated%u2014 method to generate proper emotion in a scene.
If you're not familiar with "this sentence has five words", you can read it here. It's the single most transparent piece of explaining this concept I've run into, and it illustrates the point. (Also notice that the very long sentence is still single-topic, just more involved)
Short sentences create a fast pace, where ideas are coming in shots. Snap. It broke. Snap. Rumble of thunder. Snap. Stomach dropping. Rocks rolling down a hill. Run.
This, as evident by my poorly executed example, is also why fragments are so lovely. Not every sentence needs a subject, or a verb. So long as you've created the right context, you can put 2 and 2 together very, very easily.
Also, I'm going to use your first line as an example, because I couldn't figure out how to turn it into an example at 3 am when I reviewed this:
The word you're looking for is "shattered", not "threw a rock through the window." Means the exact same thing, gets your point across much faster with less tongue-twisting homophones.
Just like you want short ideas for the full pictures, it's almost always better to use the short version of a description instead of the long. If you can use a verb instead of a metaphor, use it. If you can stick to a single concept in the metaphor instead of using two , use a single concept.
Simple. Even Douglas Adams analogies, which run on the complex side (in that they require a certain amount of pop culture references), are simple. Take, for example:
"He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis."
"He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off."
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don%u2019t."
Now, this one is a bit different, and I'm going to break down why it works:
"If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly - again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly."
Notice the layering. The first sentence establishes how hard it is to peg down, opening yourself up for the room to go on a metaphor ramble. The second one is an emotion. The third sentence is describing types of cold. And so on. That's exactly what I'm trying to get across when it comes to how to layer metaphor. Set the stage, and make each topic its own sentence, and take us on a ride that way.
*nods* Sounds pretty good! I'll keep that in mind in my writing (and I should pick up HGTTG sometime, because I've always wanted to read it).
This isn't a review, but I just wanted to say that this chapter really took me by surprise - in a good way! I can't wait to find out what happens next.
...Well then. That happened??
Technical Comments:
1. For some reason, this chapter has a lot more helping verbs and 'was's than the others. Or maybe I just noticed more of them here.
2. I have a problem with ellipses just in general, so take this one with a grain of salt. If someone is having difficulty speaking, often they won't speak in proper sentences. I'm one of those people who tends to talk while exercising with a partner (I know it's not good, but I get bored easily), so I know from experience that, where possible, the person I'm talking to will resort to weird looks or just condense what they're saying.
After all, if you're not talking a whole lot, you can think more about the words that are absolutely necessary.
In writing, I tend to avoid ellipses by starting with, ending with, or inserting actions during the dialogue. It gives a greater amount of separation between words and phrases, and helps give a better picture of what is causing the difficulty in speaking. Things like gritting teeth, panting, gasping, etc, all tend to get the point across pretty well.
Plot, Characterization, and Misc. Items:
1. So this chapter basically throws the entire book into a different direction, which is fine. Plot twists are great! But I didn't feel that there was enough foreshadowing.
Yes, we had the mind games with Jonah in the last bit, but that was literally the first time any of this wacko Super-Jonah stuff came up. It was never hinted at before then (at least in a way that I could tell or recall), and so seeing such a devastating and immediate effect IRL made this event seem a little rushed. Obviously this is a first draft, so you are excused for suddenness, but I think a little more planning could have been useful.
Same goes from Terasu and Rowland in this chapter. I don't remember any mention of them being an item. I do remember them being close, but there could have been more hints about their togetherness earlier. (Also tbh the term 'boyfriend' threw me off. I don't really associate that with the period or proper language that's been used in the previous chapters.)
2. Whose perspective is this from? The jumping around that's been happening made it easier to digest the fact that we're not in Eremia's head for this part, but it's generally good to have consistency regarding who narrates when, and I was under the impression that Eremia typically did the storytelling for the snippets involving her and the rebellion. Plus it'd be a little weird for you to be in third-person omniscient when you've been doing third-person limited for pretty much everything else.
I think that's it from me here. I'm hopefully going to use the long weekend to fully catch up on reviewing your chapters (and hitting up some other NaNo works), since I actually don't have much homework.
Best of luck with NaNo!
-Buggie
Yeah, like I said before, the third-person omnisicent is jarring, but I chose to follow it because all people involved either are knocked out, not available for a long enough amount of time, or have spoilery thoughts. To fix it would take a lot more editing than I can bear at the moment, so I'll have to leave it be for now, or perhaps more readily imply a shift in third-person limited perspective between a few characters. Otherwise, yeah, I threw around a few hints early on in the story that something wasn't right with Jonah, as indicated by his weird spells of violence. I probably should've included more at a later point, so this wouldn't be so jarring (though I'm happy that it's unexpected and flips the direction of the story). Aaaand the "boyfriend" thing is a last-minute addition, and I should've thought about how inept past me was at conveying that relationship. Nevertheless, the chapter's not bad, though its significance could've been shown better, and I'll keep in mind your grammar suggestions and advice. Thanks for the review!