please delete post

Hi there!

This was really good. It pulled me in, kept me reading. The characters were interesting, but I would've liked to know more about them. Why did they have to leave? Where were they living originally? What was chasing them?

Miles away, the wind cried as it ripped through the branches outside the hovel built into the side of an oak.

“Gattlin, you fool,” he muttered, speaking as if he had a woman’s voice.

Well, I could totally imagine this as a movie, or a cartoon, or a comic book. Starts quickly, immediate crisis, hints of overal situation - good!

Here's my detailed semi-advice for the first two thirds of the text:

A young man stood on the boards of the Mylin city square, his feather cloak pulled tightly about his neck – public self-asphyxiation? The beast! Hihi, but really, sometimes a single word can unravel an otherwise quite good sentence.

The sky showed black clouds that signified heavy weather soon to come. – basically this is a sky showing clouds which show heavy weather is coming. You can either turn it inside out into a non-repetitive description like “black clouds rolled at the forefront of an approaching storm” or divide into little hard-hitters: “The sky showed black clouds. Heavy weather was soon to come.”

Miles away, the wind cried as it ripped through the branches outside the hovel built into the side of an oak. – too many elements and too much stuff taking place. There’s the wind, the branches, the hovel, the oak. Cries, rips, built. An unintended rhyme of ‘the side’ and ‘outside’. Suggestion: break up into something like “miles away a hovel stood, built into the side of an oak. Branches of the near trees whipped back and forth as the wind cried, etc.”

More unintended rhyming: carved with curving lines

and her blanket completed her packing – thus worded her blanket moves her aside and completes her packing for her
After everyone leaves the hovel, the environment through which they walk and then over which they fly and where the gale hits, are empty. You should provide a sentence or two of forest or whatever it is, in order for the reader to place the action into a specific space

The few families in their rural community met during crisis. – the ‘rural community’ is out of place, like the black clouds that ‘signify’ the coming heavy weather. It’s a question of a narrator. If the narrator will turn out to be an invisible scientist from our time, then the ‘rural community’ and ‘signify’ are fine, otherwise, if the narrator tries to blend in the with the world being described, then too modern sounding words and specific street slang should be avoided. Like knights in armor saying ‘OK’ or ‘sucks’, as an example, or a 18th century pirate talking of gender-based glass ceilings

The world was a blur of gray. She couldn’t see her own hands, just the gray – why is that? What time of day is it, anyway? You should spell that out while they’re still packing, or at the latest when they walk out of the hovel. As easy as inserting “dark evening sky” into “both leapt into the sky”. Maybe even ‘night winter sky’ just to spell out why it’s so cold and to prepare us for the snow mentioned later on

he opened her wings as wide as they’d go, tilting her body to gain altitude. But it wasn’t enough. Something hard, sharp, smashed into her face, stinging her eye – between the ‘wasn’t enough’ and the ‘something hard’ we’re missing a sentence of her falling and the ground coming up.

She caught one, dangling from it like a leaf – not really like a leaf though. Maybe like something else? Or does their world have five foot leaves? Or is she inches tall. Either way, spell out

It was a dozen hours later that her eyes cracked open – she can’t know that – the POV is shaky here. So either be a detached narrator who describes how the hours passed, with some details, like a squirrel sniffing at her, etc., or if you’re trying not to stray too far from her limited POV – first have her wake up, then realize that dozens of hours have passed.

his chapped hands cracking from the cold, dry air – it’s actually the skin that cracks, right? Not bits of hand falling off or hanging by strips of skin