Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!
Anyway let's get right to it,
I hear whispering voices in the wind. I see shadows under the lit moonlight. Running down the steep hill, I quickly noticed a corpse. A corpse of a person, holding a shiny object in its hand. I slowly picked it up, observing the object. It was clear as water, shiny as silver, and inside the object in the middle... was a small purple heart. Wolfs howling, bears growling… I looked around to see if there was anyone here in these woods. I heard no people… so I came to a conclusion… that I was the only one of my kind. A dryad.
Uhh...this is a bit of an odd start. It starts out with some confusion and a person surveying their surroundings which appear to be fairly foreign to them. There's also a sense of something quite bad having gone down here with mentions of death and just generally usually evil imagery getting spread about here. It all comes together to create a pretty gloomy part. This all works really well for the start of a story, until we get to this actual, final line, where they decide that the last of the species and that they are a dryad. It just makes for a bit of an odd phrase there and its hard to see what they're trying to say here.
“Dryads, are creatures, actually, feminine spirits who care for nature in forests. We care for plants and trees. That is your job, Cayra, to protect our home… the forest.” I remember that saying. My guardian, Halia, told me I was a dryad when I was a little girl. She also told me that my father was human and my mother was a dryad, so this makes me half-human. I walk out the dark, depressing cave to see the morning sun. I breathed in the fresh air. Oh, that is right… I had run away from my home. It was because Orcs destroyed it. “We must protect our home from our arch enemy, the Orcs. Orcs are evil creatures, Cayra. They will destroy anything for power. Remember that.” Damn those filthy creatures. They killed my kind and killed my only family… Halia. I walked down the riverside and placed my palms in the water. The water looked so clean. I raised my palms, which was filled with clean water, and took a drink. Mmmmm, so good. I walked back to the cave. Crash. I gasped and quickly grabbed my dagger out of my traveling bag. “W-who’s there?” Crash. I started to shake in fear. Is it an Orc? Is it another monster? The creature came out. It was a boy. “Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to scare ya.” The boy had long, silky black hair. His ears were pointy and he was carrying a bow and some arrows. I put my dagger back in my traveling bag, sighing in relief. “Who are you?” The boy looked at me with such ease. “My name is Urúvion. I am an Elf. Who might you be?” I scooted one foot back. “M-my name is Cayra. I’m a dryad…” An elf, huh? Hmmm… “Cayra, if you ever meet an elf on your journeys, let the elf accompany you. Elves are very strong and intelligent. They can help you if you ever need help.” Thanks, Halia. Something tells me that I’m going to need this person’s help on my journey to kill the Orcs.
Hmm...the ending here deteriorates quite a bit. It just became far too infodumpy far too fast. The start was good besides that last line and it created an atmosphere built around a relatively slow pace, but here it picks up the pace very quickly and it seems like a classic case of you trying to show us the rules and details of the world, which is understandable, we all do that, especially in this genre but you've gotta be a lot more careful about how things like this come across here, you need to blend it seamless into the story, I can see you've tried by putting it as flashbacks rather than outright description, but still, this hasn't worked very well here. So yeah I'd suggest a bit of a rewrite here. Overall, this has a neat premise and it seems interesting enough that I'd potentially read it, but we've got some issue here and there.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
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