Young Writers Society

Heya, Fel! Casanova here to do another review! I'll be taking this one piece by piece as well.

Let's get to the review!

A cold dawn streaks over the desert,

Lighting up the earth in a bright red glow,

And a mysterious wind is starting to blow.

Whipping up the grains into a dark cloud,

The sandstorm rolls over the bleak land,

In a wave of suffocating specks of sand.

Everyone huddles quietly in their homes,

Waiting for the violent storm to pass overhead,

Soon it’s over and the winds have fled.

But something is rushing towards the town,

Rapidly tunneling through the desert sand,

Weaving this way and that, through the land.

This is Kaos here for a review on this next part!

A small thing that I noticed is that the lines feel shorter in this one. The first thing that I want to bring up is emotional attachment, which is something that I don't have to this story. I haven't been given a reason to care for the people of the village or really the serpent because the reader hasn't really been given a chance to connect to them. The basis of the characters for me is, for the people, "Oh no there's a snake that's going to kill everyone" said in a nonchalant tone, and the serpent is, "I do evil things for no reason whatsoever." Give the reader a better connection to the story than this because I haven't found a reason to care that the people are going to die.

You go back to using a lot of adjectives to describe again, which is something that I think makes it weaker. I suggest broadening your vocabulary and using stronger words to better set the tone of the story. Word choice is something that may not seem important, but it's like punctuation, it makes all the difference. This also helps you with imagery as it gives you more ways to describe, which brings me to figurative language. I want to hear more similes and metaphors, since that's something you have a lack of and it would strengthen up how you're going to describe.

As for the story, it went in the direction that I thought it would and this disappoints me when I can tell what's going to happen. The serpent destroys the town, as the prophecy said it would, but I would like to touch on something now that it's set in stone. Make an emphasis on the helplessness of it. That's something that would be a good twist on it. Let the prophecy come true fully without any heroes to defeat the serpent or anything of that sort. I think that would make a good theme to run through the story, which is that the prophecy did come true and the serpent can't be stopped.

I'm hoping that's how it runs through at least, because it's going to make me angry if we get a "the-prophecy-has-been-broken" at this point of the narrative. Let them all die by now like it was said, and put an emphasis on how helpless they are to it. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered and I hope they show up in the next two parts.

I hope I helped and have a great day!