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This is my first thread, so hopefully I'm setting this up right.

I'm working on my entry for Gower's 'Battle in the Ruins of an Ancient Civilization' prompt, Blade of the Hollow, over on Infinite Story right now. Hopefully it's OK that I write it there and enter from the CYS side even though I haven't even touched the story editor over here yet.

My current stats on it are 19 completed rooms and 13,951 words. I'm done with the first 'segment' - everything collapses into either death (rare) or into two main storylines at the end of the first segment, and I will probably stick with the branch then collapse format throughout until the last segment.

Since I'm done with the first segment, I would love a proofreader if anyone is interested that has an account over there. (I think there is a way to give other users permissions that I saw.) I've gone through it and (I think) caught most of the typos, but I've noticed 'it's' vs. 'its' is my bane. I mostly need a proofreader for world building consistency and pacing. E.g. if you get bored or confused in a spot or notice a glaring inconsistency, please let me know.

Blade of the Hollow is a Noblebright Fantasy (dark themes, but not as bleak as grimdark) with a dash of sci-fi. It got a lot bloodier than I first planned so it is an R for violence/blood/wyvern mauling/death/amputations/etc.

Here is the intro:

Aeron Silverhand is a thief. In the ruined lands of Vala, it is enough to survive, even if that means a life of crime and pain. When a sorceress takes his broken body and transforms him into a Hollow warrior, Aeron is given the power to fight the scourge of Wyverns and reshape the shattered continent in her name. But the price of his power is his freedom, and the price of his new body might be his soul.

Battle your way through the colossal ruins of an ancient civilization. Wield the legendary Void Blade. Journey as Aeron into a voyage of deadly beauty, horrific truth, shattered hope, and unlikely redemption.

Become the Hollow.

I will post the first page as a comment.

You awaken to a rare synchronized dawn, the light of the twin suns Lewa and Hari shining through the eye-windows of your home and casting eerie double-shadows on the stone. The inside of the head of an ancient idol might seem a strange and lonely place to live for some, but for you it's the ideal place - roomy, and isolated from the nearby town. Most of the townsfolk, even other thieves and those of more criminal intent, are too superstitious to come into the ruins. They call such places the Wild Lands - the crumbled remnants of the Ancient Empire of Orgull slowly reclaimed by the land. Where others fear ghosts and the blood of unthinkable crimes, you see a place of solace. The stomach of the colossal idol, lying a dozen meters away, was once a furnace of sacrifice into which even children were thrown. To you, it's simply your winter home, just as this breezy head is your place of rest in the summer.

You move aside the thin blankets and sit up to massage a kink out on your left shoulder. The muscles of the left arm always tighten when you sleep as phantom pain from your amputated hand is a frequent visitor of the night.

It's going to be hot. The double-dawn has already heated the air to an oppressive degree, and you clumsily peel out of your night shirt in response. Going to market is going to be awful today, as there is little shade in the town square, but you don't have a choice. No one will hire a thief, and so your curse is to just keep thieving. You pull out the box containing your silver hand and copper foot and note that the joints of the hand are tight. The box also contains a small bottle, your precious store of oil that keeps the metal hand and foot able to move to the small extent they can. You unstop the lid and rub a few drops into the joints of the artificial appendages. A noisy, clunky thief is a dead one. You pull them on to your left arm and right leg and strap them tight.

Noises push their way through the thick, hot morning air, not the bird song which you are used to, but the sounds of clanging metal and shouts.

What's going on out there? You breakfast on a crust of two-day old bread and try to make out what could be going on. Has the endless war found it's way here? The nearby town, Boga, generally stayed neutral when there was a conflict. And since it was essentially a trading town, the nearby Lords of various other towns generally left it alone.

You push aside the 'sunroof' - a board you slapped over a hole in the head, and climb through it onto the stone scalp of the idol. You look over to the nearby town of Boga and almost lose your balance. The plain west of the city is a battlefield. It's a bit far to make details out, but you can see flashes of yellow and black and blood red. You guess that it is probably Lord Bien, with his heraldry of the Bee, and High Lord Dugo who are fighting. There are always battles among the Lords of each town and territory, as there have been for centuries. Alliances are constantly being made and broken in an endless cycle. The shattered and scarred lands of the continent of Vala, coupled with far reaching superstition regarding the ruins, restricts the size most towns ever reach. Boga is a moderately sized town of a few thousand souls. A large town on Vala might reach ten thousand. But there are no large cities or fortified empires left - nothing like the ancient continent-spanning empire of Orgull that built towering statues and colossal bridges. You knock on the stone skull beneath you for luck, wondering if mankind will ever band together to built such wonders again.

Flashes of light spring to life over the battlefield, as if all the colors have taken up grudges against each other and gone to war. The air takes on the crackle of electricity, charging and rolling over your skin and leaving goosebumps in its wake despite the heat. Sorcerers and Mages, you shudder. Both sides probably have them working their dark arts. But the chaos gives you an idea. Battles mean dead bodies, and dead people are easier to rob than the living. With all the chaos of war and magic flying about, no one would notice you if you slipped behind the battle lines and helped yourself to some needed clothes and coin. Even if they did notice, they would be too busy to care.

You head down to the ground, heading for the entrance to one of your 'secret tunnels.' It's not a proper tunnel - just a system of old covered roads now mostly buried by dirt and plants, but the network serves your purposes of getting in and out of town well. You weigh your options. Should you go Northeast and look for merchants and tourists in town to rob as you generally do, or take the path west to the battlefield and raid the dead?

I like the setting and description of the environment and main protagonist. Though at times I think that a lot of information has been laid out by using too little words, so at times it's a bit difficult to perceive all the information at the required pace. On the other hand, a good pace is required and maybe it's just a personal preference of sorts for me to read slower paced stuff. 

"You breakfast on a..."

Using breakfast as a verb  sounds a bit off, I think something like 'you have your breakfast' or 'you eat your breakfast' would suit it better.  

Also maybe you could add a bit more emotion as to whether the protagonist finds it practical, or disgusting or at least any emotion towards robbing dead bodies.

But the introduction is good, and definitely gets the job done with wanting to put the reader on the right track. I'm not the best person to approach when it comes to grammar and punctuation so I might've not noticed a few errors, if any.

Breakfast can be a verb, too, like "we will breakfast at eight, lunch at noon, and dine at six." It might be a bit too formal though, hmm.

Emotions are tricky, though. My preference when reading interactive fiction is to not be frequently told how a character is feeling - that makes the choices feel forced on me and I end up mentally 'arguing' with the feelings of a character. That aversion to explaining emotions might come out in my writing, so I will have to watch that. (One half of my story does include more mention of emotions, since they are literally 'forced' on the character in a sense. E.g. he cannot help but feel or think a certain way at times.)

The guy starts as a thief who lives inside an idol once used as a sacrificial furnace, though. Overall he's pretty detached and practical at the start. And currently where I am in the story (at least the current thread, his personality changes a bit based on choices) he's gotten a bit bloodthirsty.

I'm enjoying your writing style a good deal; you have good control over your style, and you know how to use inverted and cumulative sentences.  I would probably recommend considering thinking about some variety in the rhythm of your prose--the longer descriptive sentences in the first and third paragraphs would benefit from sometimes being broken up, pacewise, by a few shorter one-clause sentences or short additive sentences.  That will give the bravura sentences you are writing here more punch.  You actually do this in the sixth paragraph really well--the pacing of the sentence structure is quite good there.

This looks like tons of fun so far.  I can't wait to play it!  It's so vivid, and you are hitting the theme perfectly.

My only large-scale comment is about the smartness of entering an active, magical battlefield to loot the dead.  It seems like a pretty bad idea on the face of it, and considering that one of the two options looks like you'll choose *not* to do that, perhaps you could acknowledge, in your penultimate paragraph, that this could be unwise?

The muscles of the left arm always tighten when you sleep as phantom pain from your amputated hand is a frequent visitor of the night.

Meaning, I assume the wrist part of the arm tightens?  Or is there some other aspect of phantom pain that involves tight muscles that I don't know about?  I couldn't 100% picture how the tight muscles and phantom pain connected.

Minor stuff:  "The plain west of the city is a battlefield." -- I would reword that to avoid a misread of "plain west" meaning "ordinary," which is how I read it twice.  Maybe "The plain, west of the city, is a battlefield."

Not sure about "flashes of light spring to life" followed by the "taken up grudges"--something about that feels like a mixed metaphor, of the light suddenly born, but also having been dealing with long-simmering hostility.  Maybe it's me.

"With all the chaos...flying about" hits my ear oddly.

Typo:  Has the endless war found it's way here?   (its/it's)

moderately sized --> moderately-sized

built such wonders --> build such wonders

 

Thank you, this is very useful. I'm about 21,000 words in deep now and plan to do a larger proofread when finished, but varying sentence length is something to keep in mind. And I learned something new - I didn't know moderately sized needed hyphenated.

Here is my updated version. I reworked a few sentences to vary the length, added a few clarifying phrases, and redid the pros/cons about raiding the battlefield:

You awaken to a rare synchronized dawn, with the rays of the twin suns Lewa and Hari shining through the eye-windows of your home. The sunlight casts eerie double-shadows on the stone. The inside of the head of an ancient idol might seem a strange and lonely place to live for some, but for you it's the ideal place - roomy, and isolated from the nearby town. Most of the townsfolk, even other thieves and those of more criminal intent, are too superstitious to come into the ruins. They call such places the Wild Lands - the crumbled remnants of the Ancient Empire of Orgull slowly reclaimed by the land. Others fear ghosts and the blood of unthinkable crimes, in the ruins. You see a place of solace. The stomach of the colossal idol, lying a dozen meters away from the head where you sleep, was once a furnace of sacrifice into which even children were thrown. To you, it's simply your winter home, just as this breezy head is your place of rest in the summer.

You move aside the thin blankets and sit up to massage a kink out on your left shoulder. Phantom pain from your amputated left hand is a frequent visitor of the night, but you cannot soothe a hand that isn't there. Instead, you try to stop your body from remembering by keeping the rest of the arm as relaxed as possible.

It's going to be hot. The double-dawn has already heated the air to an oppressive degree, and you clumsily peel out of your night shirt in response. Going to market is going to be awful today, as there is little shade in the town square, but you don't have a choice. No one will hire a thief. The irony of that being that you must keep thieving. You pull out the box containing your silver hand and copper foot and note that the joints of the hand are tight. The box also contains a small bottle, your precious store of oil that keeps the metal hand and foot able to move to the small extent they can. You unstop the lid and rub a few drops into the joints of the artificial appendages. A noisy, clunky thief is a dead one. You pull them on to your left forearm stump and right shin and strap them tight.

Noises push their way through the thick, hot morning air, not the bird song which you are used to, but the sounds of clanging metal and shouts.

What's going on out there? You breakfast on a crust of two-day old bread and try to make out what could be going on. Has the endless war found its way here? The nearby town, Boga, generally stays neutral when there is a conflict. And since itis essentially a trading town, the nearby Lords of various other towns generally leave it alone. What's happened?

You push aside the 'sunroof' - a board you slapped over a hole in the head, and climb through it onto the stone scalp of the idol. You look over to the nearby town of Boga and almost lose your balance. The great plain, west of the city, is a battlefield! It's a bit far to make details out, but you can see flashes of yellow and black and blood red. You guess that it is probably Lord Bien, with his heraldry of the Bee, and High Lord Dugo who are fighting. There are always battles among the Lords of each town and territory, as there have been for centuries. Alliances are constantly being made and broken in an endless cycle. The shattered and scarred lands of the continent of Vala, coupled with far reaching superstition regarding the ruins, restricts the size most towns ever reach. Boga itself is a moderately-sized town of a few thousand souls. A large town on Vala might even reach ten thousand. But there are no large cities or fortified empires left - nothing like the ancient continent-spanning empire of Orgull that built towering statues and colossal bridges. You knock on the stone skull beneath you for luck, wondering if mankind will ever band together to build such wonders again.

Flashes of light spar above the heads of the soldiers, as if all the colors have taken up grudges against each other and gone to war. The air takes on the crackle of electricity, charging and rolling over your skin and leaving goosebumps in its wake despite the heat. Sorcerers and Mages, you shudder. Both sides probably have them working their dark arts. But the chaos gives you an idea: battles mean dead bodies, and dead people are easier to rob than the living. With all the chaos of war and magic, no one would notice you if you slipped behind the battle lines and helped yourself to some needed clothes and coin. It would still be dangerous, and perhaps disgusting to touch the dead, but it might also be more lucrative. It would also take less planning and effort than robbing a mark in town.

You head down to the ground, heading for the entrance to one of your 'secret tunnels.' It's not a proper tunnel - just a system of old covered roads now mostly buried by dirt and plants, but the network serves your purposes of getting in and out of town well. You weigh your options. Should you go northeast and look for outsiders and tourists in town to rob as you generally do, or take the path west to the battlefield and raid the dead?
 

I really am looking forward to this. It's so cool to have a competent person just show up out of the blue...although it's been happening a bit more often lately. Used to be noobs needed years of regular beatings just to get the basics down.

I really like the change you made setting up that choice in the penultimate paragraph--now it feels like I understand the stakes better, and the pros and cons, as well as the sort of adventure/danger I'll be getting myself into.  This is a solid revision.

Can't imagine there's too many tourists hanging around a perpetual battlefield though.

---

The city isn't a perpetual battlefield (it's usually neutral) though the continent overall sees endless fighting. But good point - people aren't going to be traveling over a war-torn, dangerous continent to sight-see. So, no tourists. Also, that does make me realize that the sudden battle would probably affect trade for the day, which I need to reflect in the first few pages.  E.g. less outsiders in town, the  western gate would be closed, etc.

34k+ words, now. I'm slightly behind where I want to be since I spent some extra time on a story within the world (which I posted the first draft of over in the 2,000 word story thread,) Still on track to finish, though. I've learned the wonder of coffee naps. Drink a cup of coffee (fast) then sleep 20 minutes. Instant refresh. I hate coffee, but it works.

I've decided that instead of doing five main plot sections as I originally planned, I only need to do four. The same content will be there, but in a sort of 'party split' fashion in one section where you can pick (or it's chosen for you, depending) which sub-quest you will go on. That should cut down a bit on the branching, give more replay variety, and help show the delayed consequences of certain choices better.

Currently at 43k.

I'm a bit worried as while the writing is going fairly fast, IS is a bit cumbersome when it comes to trying to search around what I've already written, so the organization of various plot threads that share some content is taking longer than I planned. I'm still not quite done with the second section because of this, and I'd hoped to have that done by now. Still, my later sections should be less convoluted than the one I am working on now. (What threw me off in this section was the little bonus lore pieces and stories I wanted to throw in as well as having particular encounters at different times of night which play out differently depending on your weapon and status in the group. That might be easy in a game with inventory or time tracking but doing it manually is hard!)