Edited Ver. 2
Clara limply walked her way out of Gondraville’s obsidian high gates, bloody. Ashy smoke rose behind. Her veiny red eyes sharply contrasted with the dark slit of her azure pupils which she received from her father. The flowing coal black hair which her mother used to comb, now disheveled. Her scorched brown dress revealed the occasional bristles of tiny brown scales as she moved. Her gaping wounds wider than the cracked earth behind her.
She paused and looked back.
The surrounding cave mouths around her met the same fate like her clothes, scorched. Scales, flesh, and bones scattered on the broken ground. Enormous torn wings of colors and sizes, tattered. Fiery embers dancing on them, until it was blown by the wind and ceased to exist.
An long red and scaly tail swished from her lower back. Painting a line of crimson road on the limed-yellow path. Her eyes flashed with light, but all of a sudden, she plopped in the ground on her stomach. A little smile surfaced from her tired young face.“My brethrens, I’ve finally avenged you.”
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,804 Reviews
Hey there, Cloud! I thought I'd drop by for a quick review on this lovely review day.
) But in this case, your sentence fragments made the text feel choppy and stilted, and you had more fragments in this story than complete sentences, which isn't what you want.
First off, what I really liked about this piece was the imagery. You do a really good job of including a lot of detail and painting a picture of the scene in the reader's head. You set up this scene of destruction, with what seems like a lone survivor, and then reveal she was the one who wrought the destruction. Nice job.
I'd say the main thing you could work on is flow, and how your grammar affects your flow. You had a lot of sentence fragments here, like "Her gaping wounds wider than the cracked earth behind her." Now, sentence fragments do occasionally work well in fiction to create an effect, because they stand out. Draw attention to something. Create a rhythm that shapes the tone. (see what I did there?
All of these were also fragments - you need to say "were scattered," "lay tattered," and so on to make them complete sentences.
Part of the reason the sentence fragments didn't really work is because sometimes your sentence itself is a bit confusing. For example in the sentence "Fiery embers dancing on them, until it was blown by the wind and ceased to exist," what is "it" referring to? What are the embers dancing on?
I'd highly recommend reading your story out loud, to hear the places where the words just don't quite sound right, and if you aren't quite solid on what makes a sentence fragment or where commas go, to head on over to the Grammar Section of YWS's Knowledge Base - there's a lot of great articles that can help you with that.
Anyway, this is a cool piece of flash fiction. Again, I really loved the imagery and how you created the world with just a few details. Good luck, and keep writing!
Overall it's really great! I feel that you've managed to capture my attention by the description of the protagonist, and also some sort of suspense in wanting to find out where/what 'Grondraville' is.
And while this may seem cliche, I feel that you could use more 'show not tell', for example, the part where you wrote 'With some scattered scales, flesh, and bones', the sentence seems kind of bland, and out of place from your previous paragraph's descriptions. But the rest of the imagery are quite detailed!
Oh, and something else, for the third paragraph, the first three sentences are, if I might say, disconnected and awkward. For the first sentence, I feel that instead of 'various mouth of caves', it should be 'various mouths of caves' since there are many cave mouths? Also, it might be just me but I feel that 'various cave mouths' is smoother, but like I said, it could be just my personal preference, so it's just an opinion, I guess? And for the second sentence, I think starting it with 'with' sounds very disjointed and kind of confusing, because it could be referring to that the scales, flesh and bones are scorched, OR that they were just also present at the cave mouths, because when you put a full stop and start the sentence with a non-sentence starter, the next sentence is seems to be continuation of the first, and the full stop is put for a pause in reading and emphasis on the next sentence. Not to mention, it also makes the paragraph seems kind of bumpy? For the third sentence, I think it should be 'an enormous wing' (singular)? ( also, sorry, a quick question here, is there a reason there is only one pair of wings, like are the others already burnt or is there only one person living in the caves, because you also mentions torn from the bodies? Thanks)
Um, lastly (opinion here), in the last paragraph, you wrote 'plopped in the ground on her stomach' and the image I'm getting is kind of hilarious (probably due to the 'plop') instead of the overall serious mood of your piece so I'm not quite sure if this is intentional?
But generally, this was great, and I loved the not-really-plot-twist at the end (last sentence)!
Thank yoj for the review