Review of the Lords of Darkness series by Joel Levy
June, 2007

All right, let's see if I can avoid causing trouble this time out, hm? I think that was more excitement than any of us really needed. But hey, nature of the game and all that. Let's go on.

Apparently, the new "smaller paragraph styles" was a big hit (that is, instead of two people reading we had a whopping three people . . . but every set of eyes is appreciated!) so I'll be field-testing that technique in this column, to see if I can do my part to save everyone's vision, or at least reduce tension headaches caused by massive blocks of words cascading down the screen. That being said, I can't promise anything. You want guarantees, go talk to a car salesman. In the midst of all this crazy wackiness, anything is possible, darn it!

Ah. Yes. Speaking of going nuts, over the course of this hopefully not gigantic column, I'm going to attempt to do something that I haven't really tried before. That is, attempt to review all the parts in a multi-chapter story without breaking it up into several columns and thus having it take over a year at the current update schedule. That's just another way I work for the little people, to make their dreams come true. So in that case, I may have to dial the detail level down somewhat, which will probably bring about nothing but mass celebration. As I said though, we make no promises. When the thought catches me, I have no choice but to go with it.

A few months back, in the wake of that last contentious update, author and shared world contributor Joel Levy sent me some nice comments about my fumbling attempts to defend myself. In the course of that, he also expressed interest in seeing my opinions on his "Lords of Darkness" saga, currently sitting in four handy complete parts on the shared world section of the site. Go there, with a hearty "have at thee!" The rest of us will wait. Somehow, I avoided making a "Clearly, you've been drinking if you wish to ask such a thing of me" comment and totally offending him, and promised I'd get to it next update. Thus, here we are. See, I do keep some promises. Not all of the rumors are true, despite my best efforts.

So today's mission, if one chooses to accept it, is to ram through all four chapters, in a way that is both completely up to my usual standards and lacking in longwindedness, so that a prayer exists of people actually reading this. I swear this will not be thirty pages. That statement is worth absolutely nothing.

With that in mind, let us commence the madness!

Before we get too deeply into this, I should make a couple of overview type comments so I don't have to keep repeating myself over the course of this. Since I'm not your English teacher I don't normally go out of my way to point out grammar issues, but over the four chapters there are several places where more attention could have been paid to the structure and grammar. The first chapter is the worst offender, which implies it might have been written way before the others, but the same couple of problems keep popping up all over the place. Granted, it's possible that some of these are due to formatting errors when being transferred to the website and if that's the case, I apologize. I'm pretty sure the wacky paragraph truncating is a formatting issue, since I've experienced it myself.

The rest, however. A common problem that keeps popping up is using quotation marks for dialogue. There are a lot of sections where the quotes open up the dialogue but don't close it, making it hard to tell when we switch back to just straight narration. Now, you can dispense with quotation marks entirely, a lot of European writers do this (James Joyce comes to mind immediately) and simply use a straight dash to indicate someone starting to speak. However, most mainstream fiction doesn't bother with this and if you're going to start using quotation marks, you should go all the way. It does affect readability to some extent since you've got to keep checking to make sure someone has stopped talking.

Along those lines, commas belong inside the quotation marks, and you need one if the dialogue gets broken up by narration. "Like this," he said, "if I may illustrate thusly." And while I'm at it, for the sake of completeness, when people are speaking over multiple paragraphs not interrupted by narration, standard procedure is to leave off the closing quotation mark but then have an opening one for the next paragraph, so that people know that someone is still speaking. That only happens a couple of times but it's jarring nevertheless. Writing is more than just telling a story, it's following the rules that we've all sort of collectively agreed to follow, so little things like improperly placed quotation marks and whatnot do affect someone's reading of the story. Plus, it doesn't look as professional.

The other major grammatical problem I saw is a lack of consistency in using past or present tense. Unless you have some overriding artistic reason otherwise, you should pick one and stick with it. Some paragraphs are in past tense and some are in present tense, and sometimes it switches in the middle of a paragraph. There's nothing wrong with using both, but I would keep it the same in the same chapter at least. I know I'll write typically in past tense and then use present tense for just one chapter if I want a more immediate feel to the action at hand. And when doing stream of consciousness or otherwise thought intensive sequences you can probably get away with alternating the two. But barring that, it needs to be consistent or again, it affects readability.

But as I said before, the bulk of the problems are in the first chapter, although they do keep cropping up to a lesser extent elsewhere. Which suggests you noticed it as well and made a conscious effort to fix it. Or gremlins attacked the first chapter. But now I'm just indulging in idle speculation.

With that business out of the way, how about some introductory notes? What, don't look at me like that, those last few paragraphs didn't count. I like the overarching concept of this, following a family of necromancers (or at least the people who know a necromancer), especially one who seems a bit on the evil side of things. Fantasy is typically based around the struggle between good and evil, with good most of the time winning out. And while we see on occasion the evil side of the equation, we don't generally see them depicted as the actual protagonists and if they are, we don't see them winning. It's an interesting approach to take, as you are sort of warping the reader's expectations and forcing them to witness bad things being done to otherwise good people, and you're supposed to be rooting for the people doing the bad things.

This can present several logistical problems, in the sense of how to portray the "good" members of the story, knowing that they have to lose eventually. In most fantasy stories evil has the upper hand since evil by definition isn't going to play by any rules of fairness. When you want everyone dead or subjugated, being civil really doesn't come into the picture. Thus the "good guys" often win by being clever and taking advantage some previously unseen flaw or wrong step the enemy takes. In this case, the evil characters aren't going to take that wrong step and thus not be overcome. But at the same time you want to depict the good side as people giving it their all, instead of idiots who can't keep up with all the machinations. It's a tricky game, since you don't have the usual crutch of "the good guys always win" to explain why the evil side didn't really think things through. Evil has to be perfect, but good has to be near-perfect so that they represent something of a challenge and one side doesn't walk all over the other.

That said, as much as this story is all about lords of darkness and the like, it really doesn't go that route. Which we'll get into more as the four chapters unfold before us. Because there are times when I'm not sure if the story is telling us "See, evils is people too" or it just simply doesn't go far enough. But again, we'll get into more detail as we go. Oh, glorious detail. Where would I be without you?

So, chapter one! That only took three pages, which does not bode well. Right off the bat we're treated to a fair amount of exposition, which is actually done pretty well through the dialogue, introducing us to the main cast of characters. We have the aforementioned evil necromancer, his apparently evil daughter, his grandson (who wants to be evil) among the principles, as well as a host of others that are mentioned, including the love interest druid, who you think would stop being a druid when she started helping a necromancer perform unnatural experiments on animal life. Something tells me that's not really in the vows. Kitric's dad is mentioned but I don't think we see him in this chapter (or in the story itself, but I have to read it again). And a ranger is mentioned, who we'll see later. Off the bat we're given a pretty varied cast, the core family and a group of people who seem to have no problem dealing with an evil family. Go figure.

The thing with the whole "evil" appellation, though, and I might as well mention it now . . . for all the talk that Arkruel is evil, which he reminds us of at least twice in his opening monologue, we never really see him doing anything evil. Sure, he tells us about it, but I want to see it. I want to see these base experiments, I don't want to hear about them. I want to see him being debonair and cruel, casually manipulative, capable of sudden, shocking acts of violence. In short, I want to know that he's evil without having someone come out and tell me that, I want to pick it up for myself. In my mind, the story should start with the family doing regular family stuff, so you think, "Hey, these are nice people" and have Arkruel do something do something vile, to catch the reader off guard and say, "Whoa, what's going on here?"

Quick question while I'm on a roll here: who the heck is Lord Drogo? Kitric asks right off the bat how did Lords Georginna and Drogo join up, and when Arkruel answers the question he only mentions how the druid came on board. That, and it seems like a strange question to ask unless Kitric just recently came to live with his grandfather. Shouldn't he knows this already, especially since he has the hots for the druid? The quick way to a fair lady's heart is to learn as much about her as you can, even if she does enjoy slaughtering her enemies with giant insects and other unnatural creatures. There might be a more organic way to dispense that information to the audience, that doesn't cry out "Tell me the backstory for the readers, grandfather!" Kitric, messing around with necromancy, could by accident conjure up the spirit of the druid's former husband and he could impart his the story of his death to Kitric, with a "Stay away, that lady is poison" warning, which would only make him more determined anyway.

Funny how Arkruel talks about the manipulation of human nature to get Georginna to fall in love with Kitric, when all he really does is make her stop hiding her feelings. See, evil necromancers are just big old softies. Being these people are supposed to be evil, or at least "not good", some actual manipulation would have been nice, with either the necromancer or Kitric playing up her fear of being hurt again to mess with her, breaking her down emotionally so that she runs to Kitric anyway, who gets what he wants but has to wonder if it's worth the price of making her nearly co-dependent. Can you get what you want and still not be happy, to paraphrase a better writer than I. That could be the question. As it stands there's not too much drama inherent in that conflict, we're presented with a "make her love me" dilemma, which could go somewhere dark. But what we get is "We're in love anyway! Kisses! Yay!" and while Arkruel's solution to the impasse is clever, neither of the people involved seem real shy, so it probably would have happened eventually anyway. Which of course could be the necromancer's plan, since he performed a simple task and got Kitric's fealty in return. So maybe that was the manipulation, so he really didn't need his grandfather's help in the first place.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, I know. That's in chapter two. Back to chapter one, the rest of it is taken up by a fight scene involving . . . um, lots of people. An aspect of the narrative you may want to dial back on is too many declarative sentences about the characters themselves, when it's better to let the story itself do the talking. Two examples that jumped out at me, when the cleric Innocenza first arrives, the narrative describes her right off the bat "undoubtedly the most feared personage upon the continent" like it's a fact and there's no room for arguing. Later on, we're told that the hyanadon Tarloc is "more intelligent than he looks", again by the narrative itself and not through his actions, or at least via other characters. When it comes to the characters, I think it's better to let their actions speak for themselves, other than coming out and simply telling us. Otherwise it makes the story sound like just bits of characters notes. Is Tarloc more intelligent than he looks? Then show us doing stuff that is intelligent, don't just state it and sit back as if there's no debate. Same thing with the cleric. Show her doing formidable, dangerous stuff, have one of the rangers go, "Whoa, what is she doing here, this must be big if she's involved." Stuff like that, so we have to do a little mental work.

Meanwhile, the fight scene itself is . . . problematic. As far as I can tell, the cleric is there with her half-ogre guards and some paladins to destroy some evil shrines. Fair enough. She's a force for good. Then the local ogre evil shaman shows up with his entourage and the rumbling commences. Got me so far. At which point Kitric and company decide to join in, on the side of the cleric, apparently. What the hey? I can see the ranger getting involved because they like forests and probably dislike seeing them be desecrated by shrines to evil. Tarloc apparently just likes to kill minotaurs which is a tad shallow but I can buy that, although you would think he'd hang back and just pick off any stragglers rather than jump full-bore into the battle and risk his own skin for a fight that isn't his.

Kitric's involvement I don't understand at all, unless he's just a sucker for adventure. He really has no stake in either side, unless he's just reflexively siding with his own species. There's no real discussion either, the three of them are hanging out and watching the cleric's party (why? curiosity?), in fact all evidence points to them waiting to see the cleric's party get its head handed to it when the shaman inevitably shows up. They seem to even be looking forward to it. And yet, when the fight comes down, they jump in on the side of the cleric of good anyway. Everyone kind of takes this in stride too, like it's a normal occurrence, with Kitric even inviting the cleric of good back to the residence of his necromancer grandfather, which blows my mind. That should be like matter and anti-matter meeting, in theory. Now, granted, you can make the argument that you're going with the classical definition of necromancy as opposed to the fantasy one, where the focus is more on speaking to the dead and so on, and it's thus not automatically evil.

Except Arkruel explicitly says he practices evil sorcery. Unless he's being sarcastic or otherwise facetious (or Kitric is being a wise-ass when he invites the cleric), we haven't seen him talk about one thing yet that wouldn't make a declared cleric of good want to annihilate him on the spot. The fact that everyone seems to just seems to accept the hyanadon is sort of odd, being that Tarloc is the product of unholy magic, something at least paladins tend not to go for. Look at it this way, imagine your local pastor being dropped into the The Island of Doctor Moreau, and how he or she might react to that.

The fight itself suffers a little bit from a lack of a central viewpoint for the reader to follow. Mass melees are difficult to write because you have to convey that a zillion things are happening at once while at the same time keeping it coherent. This one here though is all over the place, without any strong central thrust to drive it, whipping the reader around but not carrying any real sense of momentum. Instead we get "this happens and then this happens and then that happens and then it's over". Every person involved basically does one thing and once everyone has done that one thing, the fight is finished. The basic elements are there but they don't mesh together too well and make the whole battle both a little confusing and flat. There are points when it seems more like notes for a battle than an actual fight itself. Picking one character and following him or her throughout the battle, with everything else going on in the periphery, either witnessed or heard, might have been a better tactic. Sometimes it's better to think of it like a film or TV show, and have your one "camera" and imagine how that would snake through the battle and whip around, and what it would see.

Two questions then about said battle. So are the half-ogres just cowards or is the shaman dominating them somehow. Leaving aside the issue of whether a good cleric would have half-ogre guards to begin with, they stand there like they've never seen a fight before, which in itself is odd, before going over to the shaman and bowing down. Who then commands them to kill themselves (he asks them to confess before they do so, but they're never heard to confess, does the sacrifice count then?), which they do but with "looks of horror" on their faces, implying that it really isn't their idea. Yet, why go over and kneel down then, unless the shaman made them do that too. Or are they just doing what he says because they're stupid? Or are they just trying to side with the winner (if that's the case, Innocenza might want to either start upping the pay rate or institute a better screening process for guards) figuring that the shaman will show them mercy? Oops. That didn't go so well.

Second question, and then we leave this chapter. Who is the fighter that "lopes out of the woods"? It's not Dell the ranger because she's up in the trees firing arrows on everyone, plus she clearly doesn't come out until the fight is over. It can't be Tarloc, because he's already involved in killing the shaman. Is the fighter Kitric? If so, judging by earlier he would seem to be more magically inclined rather than carrying around a giant sword and swinging it around. But regardless, why not name him then so we know who we're looking at?

And, this is just nitpicking now, but if Innocenza is "undoubtedly the more feared personage" why does she need the help of three strangers to finish off what amounts to a handful of ogres and minotaurs? We see her waste one of them but she does nothing else for the rest of the fight. Maybe feared means letting everyone else do your work for you. That said, you'd think as a powerful cleric she'd know to take out the spellcaster first. Years of Dungeons & Dragons taught me that, it should be common sense to a native.

Rough start, in some ways. It introduces us to the main characters but doesn't really give us a chance to get to know them yet. Plus the action is a bit choppy. Kitric gets the most face time and he does seem like he might be the most complex of the lot, drawn toward evil due to his family but being halfway decent despite it all (though we never a good explanation as to why he helps out . . . goodness of his heart?). We'll have to see but it looks like so far the story is leaning toward the "evil is peoples too" theme as opposed to "let's see how the other side operates." But it's early yet.

Chapter two! This is going to be a haul of a column, I think. Ah well, once started I like to see these things through to the end. Everyone still with me? Good, then we'll keep on moving.

This chapter might actually serve as a better introduction to the saga as whole than the first chapter. For one, the prose is much tighter right off the bat, staying in past tense the whole time and having much greater clarity. In fact, if chapter one was rewritten to be more like chapter two in terms of style, it would be a big improvement since the prose is what dragged much of that chapter down. Sub-standard writing tends to call attention to itself when you want people to focus on the plot and story. Here, everything blends together much better and so we can pay more attention to the plot at hand, which seems to be ramping up slightly.

One thing I'd consider leaving off are the "editorial notes", so to speak, which really don't add anything to the story. The worst offenders are in the first section, with the note telling us about the battle in chapter one and the later note stating that we'd see the rest of a plot thread in chapter three. The "what has gone before" note was probably a good idea when these were first getting posted because of the gaps between updates but nowadays it's not really necessary and sort of takes you out of the story. If necessary, a simple "Our story so far" blurb at the beginning of the chapter might bring people up to speed, instead of just inserting it in the middle of the paragraph. And the "we'll get back to them later" type comment . . . say, people are only interested in the Valkyrie portion of the story. Why tell them to just skip all the way to chapter three when you can make them read all the other stuff in between to get to it? Granted they could just skim until they got back to it, but hey, you wrote the rest of it, make them read it. It's only fair.

I like how the chapter is broken up into distinct divisions, thus giving us a sort of cross-section of the plot and keeping all the balls moving. You do get a better sense of a lot of things going on at once and it definitively gives the chapter a better structure, which again was lacking the first time around.

Two bits jumped out at him during our introduction to the King of Vampires. One, how tough can he be if he's out killing infants? That's real sporting. Secondly, that's a wordy statement to be written on the wall in the blood of children on. You'd think the well of ink would start to run dry after the first few words. Maybe he writes really small. Neither of these observations have anything to do with anything except give me the opportunity for a pair of bad jokes. But we're on page seven of this and not even halfway through the story. Let me have my fun.

I do kind of like how the needle is cranked all the way up to eleven for just about everything in the story. Nobody here is "just" a paladin but instead they are "the most famous paladin of all". Not just vampires but their upper-case King. It's not just an inbred tribe but an inbred cannibalistic half-elven tribe. You could have gods but instead you have people with names like "the Granter of Unclean Lusts" and "Karx Blood Axe" so if the reader had any doubts whatsoever about their intentions, they clearly aren't reading carefully enough. There's a definite sense of wild abandon at play here in the ideas but strangely enough the story itself remains at least PG-rated, without any of the crazy graphic carnage the setup would suggest this would entail. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, it all depends on what the reader's appetite is for over-the-topness.

Again, though we're told that people are evil without seeing any real evidence. Olindara is stated to be "almost totally evil" but the only thing we really see her do is help children, when it should be the other way around, really. Wouldn't it be better for us to see her perform acts of sadistic evil, so we think we have her figured out, and then cut to a tender scene later where she's attempting to find a cure for the children. Something like that might throw off audience expectations and force them to reevaluate what they thought they knew. The same with Arkruel, we're told that he has basements levels of irredeemable horror but we really only see him as a relatively stern old man. Maybe a brief, utterly cold scene of torture might serve to reinforce the fact that he's evil? Or at the very least amoral?

It does seem odd that we're getting this introduction to all the manor inhabitants in the second chapter, when it might have been better placed in the first chapter, especially since we've seen a lot of these people already. Maybe chapter one would serve better as a prelude of sorts, opening with the brief chat between Kitric and Arkruel, perhaps where he retells the story of how he went into exile? Then shifting to Kitric thinking about the conversation as he's watching the cleric waste the evil altar and the beginnings of the melee at hand, sitting with his friends and ending the prelude right as they leap into battle? I don't know, it just seems odd to go through the entire first chapter and have it all re-explained to us in this chapter. But do what makes the story flow best.

I still can't for the life of me figure out what the heck Georginna is doing working with Arkuel. She's never explicitly described as an evil druid and by all reports seems quite nice when she's causing death by devourment. And yet she's helping the necromancer with his experiments in creating unnatural beasts, which doesn't really seem like a "maintaining the balance of the natural order" type of thing. Arkruel seems pretty open about the fact that he's creating an army to slaughter his enemies with, but what does the druid get out of it? Does she just like experimentation and isn't really thinking about what's going to be done with the results? Is she on-board with the whole conquering thing? Or does she just bite her tongue and say nothing because she likes being near Kitric, who we're told she has a thing for? What's in it for her, I guess is what I'm asking. Unless she has motivations we haven't been privy to as of yet.

I do have to laud Arkruel's out of the box thinking in bringing Kitric and the druid together, while it's a cop-out on one level because we're told that she's in love with him anyway and just hadn't gotten around to admitting it, on the other hand I think it's rather clever and very much in character. We've been told, or it's been implied, that the necromancer is a bit of a ruthless fellow and in holding up to his end of the bargain with Kitric we see the first evidence of it. He's emotionally manipulative here, although I might have held off on the revelation that Georginna is already in love with Kitric, if only to have her tell him later and letting Kitric realize that he didn't need to make the deal with grandfather after all. A small bit of irony. Even better, it could be made clear that Arkruel knew the druid's feelings when he made the deal with his grandson, and that eventually nature would take its course on its own, but he made the deal so as to seal his grandson's loyalty. Granted that would probably add an extra layer of conflict onto the story (if Kitric even cared about any of this) that it might not need.

You know, if Georginna doesn't want people to look at her like she's a amoral psychopath, she probably shouldn't tell everyone she meets that she killed her first husband and fed him to the insects. Not that Kitric gives a darn either way, but if she were making a list "Things You Should Know About Me" that would probably way down the list. Just sayin'. Fortunately she does show a bit of discretion with the priestess who marries them later. Maybe she's learning.

The vampire's motivations are a bit unclear, at least this early on. His opening scene has him eating babies and leaving notes daring people to stop him. Later on, in the conversation with the priestess, it seems that he has other goals, such as to turn people to the worship of Chemosh. And take over the entire realm. Perhaps not in that order. But if he wants people to renounce their proper gods and worship his god, maybe he should be a bit more explicit about that. Because when you're just slitting throats and leaving vague messages, people are more likely to start cowering in terror at the thought of you, or conversely, finding something very large and very heavy to hit you with.

I do like how the vampire is completely and unrepentedly arrogant. "Stronger than a dragon"? Yikes. That's a tall order. He does show a good amount of tactics at identifying Arkruel as the biggest problem to his campaign of terror. Granted, if he didn't, we wouldn't really have a plot. Though it would be interesting if Arkruel had to decide between getting involved or not, perhaps only making his decision when he realizes that the vampire is going to take over everything and leave nothing for him. Which is basically what the giant vampire realizes, making him a bit more proactive. And again, we're told that Arkruel likes torturing people in his dungeons, which is sort of generically evil. His manipulation of Georginna was much more evil in a certain sense.

Kitric actually takes a turn toward the "being evil" side of the spectrum in the brief scene with the mob, not really caring if the two men who are captured are innocent or not. He really only seems to be getting involved so he can snag his cousin as a witness to his wedding vows, or at least stops being concerned when he has a witness. Which is remarkably self-centered, bordering on the sociopathic. Though I do have to wonder how if the two men who are killed at tied to post to wait for the tide to come in, how do they burn to death? I know they got charcoal but if you're stuck in the middle of the harbor and tied to a soaking wet pole, how is it going to get dry enough to catch fire before the tide comes in (it's stated that it took a long time for the charcoal to heat up, if the tide still hasn't come in, how long did they plan on waiting originally?).

There's something about Kitric's dialogue that seems off to me. I really can't put my finger on it but it never seems to "flow" right . . . prose dialogue isn't going to totally reflect how "real" people talk, but a lot of times it doesn't seem like dialogue so much as the narration with quotation marks around it. There's a flatness to it, maybe because he makes a lot of statements without people answering them, so there's no back and forth to play off on that keeps dialogue from turning into monologues. Or a certain flippancy to his words that seems to suggest he's not taking his own story seriously. It's just statements, one after the other, without real sense of dynamics. Dialogue is two people playing off each other in their speeches, either chatting or dueling, dancing and dodging back and forth. The best way to figure out if the dialogue works is to have people read it back to you, or read it outloud. That might help you fine-tune it, and shift the dialogue from more expositional to conversational. Otherwise, why have anyone talk?

That said, how the heck did Kitric know that Aleta was his second cousin? Cousin sense, tingling? He never really explains that and she seems to buy it without really questioning, even saying, "Oh, so you're my cousin Kitric! I haven't seen you since you were a baby!" or something so that we see she's not just accepting this on his say-so.

I like the scene but it does seem somewhat expedient, not really conveying the utter horror of the mob's justice or the depth of the young couple's love. It's just like, "We have to get this out of the way, so here goes" without any sort of build-up, the descriptions perfunctory (it'd be nice to see the captured men's fear contrasted with the desperate need of the mob to see something happen, even if it's for the wrong reason . . . or the city guards doing their best not to get involved, or even Kitric hanging out with Georginna and hearing the noise out the window and saying, "Hold on while I take care of this") and dialogue simply meant to convey information without any real character to it. Which sounds like I didn't like it. But I did, I think it just needs a few more details to spruce it up and make it come alive a little bit. Right now it's like those shoebox dioramas you did in elementary school, all the elements are present but nothing is moving.

Back to the manor. I like the little slice o' life scene but I think it needs more details (I'm going to say this a lot because I'm a freak for detail . . . other authors may differ on the amount, so keep in mind this is me just speaking personally), even if it's just brief descriptions of the bargains involved, some sense that Arkruel has some grand plan he's working toward. Because right now all we get is the occasional "He wants to take over the land" without any real sense that it's a conscious goal. Except when we're reminded that it's his goal. And being I know you said you wanted to portray a historically accurate necromancer, let's see some actual necromantic rites and see how that fits into everything. Or just to give us some local color, to flesh out the bare bones of what we've been told already.

What exactly is Olindara's problem in that scene? Is she mad because Kitric and the druid got married? That makes the most sense but at the same time I don't quite understand it, since her only comment about the druid early on had to do with her wanting Kitric to ditch his crush on her and find a woman who could actually return his feelings. Well now, it's clear that the druid does and so now that he's found someone who will stay with him forever, she's mad anyway. Um, what? Unless she just doesn't like Georginna to begin with, or she thinks that the druid will slaughter her son like she did with the first husband if he steps out of line. But it's not even said what exactly she's angry at, just that she's mad "at the two of them". The couple in question seem to know but they don't really let the audience in on it. The implication is that their relationship is the source of her ire, but again, why? It's an avenue worth exploring further.

The problem with the dialogue quotation marks rears its ugly head fullforce in the attack on the manor scene and does do a number on making it harder to read. It's something to work on, because it's a fairly basic rule of writing that can't really be ignored. We're quirky that way.

And then comes battle! Someone finally decides to move the plot forward as the king vampire goes to take out his only real rival in a fight to shock the imagination! Yeah, basically all hell breaks loose. Though a quick question, technically wouldn't cannibals be the type of people who eat their own species? That's the definition, right? So wouldn't massing a large amount of them together be a bad idea, because what's really going to stop them from just eating each other instead of doing what they're told? I know, I'm nitpicking again. But this type of thing really does bother me. Sorry.

My biggest concern with the battle (and you knew I was going to have one) is sort of multi-pronged. The first prong is that it the outcome really never seems to be in doubt. Two paragraphs into it we're told that the "tide is already turning" before we've even gotten used to the fact that a massive fight is going on. Everyone is so capable and so effective in their given fight that there's really no tension. I don't get a sense that anyone in the battle might lose, or even break a sweat. It's almost comical that everywhere Kitric runs, people are like, "Yeah, I've got this . . . keep going." And if that was the point, then it succeeds. But if you're trying to convey a desperate fight for survival against a sneak attack that nobody was expecting, then it needs a little more work.

One problem is, as I mentioned earlier, is that nobody is having a rough time of this at all. Every obstacle, barring the final vampire/Arkruel struggle, is dealt with in a matter of a few sentences, dissolving any possible tension or doubt that might have taken place. Kitric runs into a bunch of cannibals, chops off their hands and runs. He runs to his love, but she's well guarded and throwing giant millipedes at the invaders (and she should know as a druid that millipedes aren't bugs, they're arthropods . . . told you I'm picky . . . but she's probably just keeping it simple for Kitric, who could care less about animal phylum). His mom is doing aces, and Kitric even notices that he's being followed by the resident killer for hire. What can't these people do? Ironically, the one who is the least successful in battle is Arkruel, who gets the stuffing beat out of him by the head vampire. Everyone else brings their A-game to bear right away and mops the floor with everyone.

Which granted, and I'll give you this, may have been the plan all along, to distract everyone else with minor attacks so that nobody stands in the way of the vampire going after Arkruel. If that's the idea, then I can buy that, because what happens is that only Kitric can stand with his grandfather against the vampire, and he basically fails when the vampire takes a chunk out of grandpa. So they do suffer a loss even if it's not fatal and the manor ultimately survives, which I'm not sure if that was the vampire's goal or not. He wanted to destroy them but I think we can see that the family is more than the resident necromancer and the rest of them are going to be pretty pissed now.

Is there any particular reason that the witch riding the wyvern is referred to as a "witch/bitch" at least twice? Because it really doesn't add anything and to be honest, just seems kind of petty. Again, show not tell. If she's a bitch, we'll figure it out, given the proper evidence.

The second prong of my concern with the battle is what appears to be a lack of . . . I don't have any better words so I'll call it urgency. Things seem to happen in a very linear fashion in the fight, when battles tend to be rather chaotic affairs, people all over the place, screaming and shouting and blood and limbs flying . . . on some level it's just like Kitric is strolling through a tableau that only comes alive when he comes near. The closest it does come is the fight between the paladin and the wyvern, which is sort of happening between all the other sections of action. I guess what I'm saying is that maybe more background detail is needed to make the scene really come alive. Try imagining Kitric's point of view almost like a movie camera, and as he winds his way along the battle on whatever path he goes down, imagine what he sees and hears and throw that in. We want to get the sense that a thousand things are happening at once, even if we only get detailed descriptions of a few of them. Otherwise it seems less a pitched battle than some minor skirmishes that Kitric skips by.

The vampire's strike against Arkruel is actually really clever, and takes advantage of the fact that the necromancer didn't think to cast a spell of protection against living beings (which you'd think he'd at least consider, unless he's positive that only undead are coming after him). Though being that the necromancer is supposed to be powerful, you'd think he could come up with something that would obliterate everyone in the room and not have to rely on his grandson and pet assassin to come save him. Or at least set up a teleport spell (the best spell nobody ever uses) to bail him out if things got too rough.

Otherwise, not too much to comment on in the battle itself. I find it a bit odd that Kitric can fight his way to the center where his grandfather is so easily, considering that the king vampire is between the two of them. And some more description of the wounds that Kitric sustained during the fight might be nice, nothing too graphic but a little more than "a terrible physic[al] beating" and "waves of pain" . . . what exactly are they doing to him? Being he's just standing there and taking it, I imagine it's somewhat brutal.

But the aftermath of the battle, with Kitric collapsing, feels right. As much as the battle seemed easy, the cost was fairly high and I get the sense that this is only an opening salvo. Next time the head vampire might start a little earlier and not so close to dawn. Why not kick off at midnight? He would have probably won if that was the case, though I do like how his counterstroke wasn't completely physical. That was a nice touch. What exactly did Arkruel do during the battle though? Whatever it was didn't work very well. Again, I'm a detail guy, so take those comments with a grain of whatever. It's a thing with me.

Still, no real complaints about the end of the chapter. The bit with the tarantula made me laugh and helped give Georginna something of a personality, a quirkiness that comes with her being a druid . . . whereas before she was defined by the fact that she had killed her husband and was in love with Kitric. What I would like to see in the last two chapters is more of a struggle for Kitric and everyone else . . . getting his ass whupped in the vampire battle was a step in the right direction but thus far every scene with Kitric has him overcoming every obstacle in a near effortless fashion, which makes him seem somewhat obnoxious at times. Conflict builds character and all that.

With that in mind let us conflict our way over to chapter three. Good, we're moving right along, maybe I'll have this finished by the end of the month. We can only hope.

After the all out pyrotechnics of chapter two, the next chapter eases us into a quieter series of scenarios. I like the pre-credits teaser opening intro, although the description of the paladins as "more traditional heroic good girls" seems out of place and thus a bit jarring. A lot of times in the story it seems that the narrative or the characters say something anomalous that serves to take us out of the story . . . in other words calling attention to the fact that this is something you made up, as opposed to a story you're merely relaying to us. There are a couple places where you have this fantasy world but you describe something or compare it to a distinctly modern artifact or setting, which makes the tone inconsistent. But the earlier talk of what the town was like I enjoyed, even if it was brief, it gave a bit of local color to the story.

The chapter is split between the action packed adventures of Women With Swords and Kitric apparently manipulating everyone in sight, which is a good way to structure the chapter, as it gives the happenings a sense of momentum, that a lot of things are going on at once. I'll even forgive the fact that all the shenanigans with the Valkyries don't seem to have too much to do with the main plot (depending on how one interprets the main plot) given that we still have one more chapter to go. Although the fact that they are searching for the vampires suggests a tenuous connection, which will do for now.

Still, again we're summarized action when a little more detail might help make the scene come to better life. In the opening action packed scene, the paladins come across some ogres, who we're immediately told "are no match for the speed and ferocity of well trained human fighters" . . . and I have no problem with that concept. These are highly trained warriors, so not every battle is going to be an epic struggle. These are only ogres so yeah, it's going to be easy. Or easier. But we're just informed it's no struggle instead of showing us the paladins trouncing the ogres in quick and efficient fashion. That would establish the paladins are formidable fighters, so that when we see them struggling later, it means something because we already know they can hold their own normally. But instead, we're just told, without being given any memorable imagery to go with it.

Before I really get into Kitric's letter . . . is everyone related to him? Holy crap. I know there's some historical precedent for this, with European monarchs marrying each other and mixing birthlines so that most of them were related, but it seems like every person he runs into winds up being a distant cousin. It doesn't really mean anything (i.e. it's not a serious criticism) but I just wanted to point that out since it leapt out at me.

I like the idea of Kitric writing letters that are vaguely threatening but at the same time it's seems both too brash and too vague. He more or less admits they are going to take over everything and how, as if he never expects anyone to even bother thinking of stopping him but instead of hiding a veiled threat in the letter itself, he tells the assassin to make the threat of ruination clear, which is odd considering how much he blabbed about creating horrid beasts and manipulating the gem market. Does he trust his cousin that much or is he that arrogant. I mean, with the gems what is to stop the king from simply spreading rumors that the emeralds from Kitric's family are cursed, now that he knows what they are about to do? Besides, the value of something only means anything if you're trying to sell it. The king could just hide the jewels somewhere until the whole market corrects itself, as it would inevitably do.

You would think bankrupting the kingdom and then taking it over wouldn't be totally smart, since at best you'd be inheriting a, well, a bankrupt kingdom. It's still broke, and its people are probably pissed at being broke and now you come in to take over? Good luck with that. What I get out of Kitric and I'm not sure if the story is going to address this or if it's the author's intent . . . but I get a sense of overwhelming over-confidence out of him. He's seventeen years old and he's already trying to manipulate courts (in a not too subtle fashion) and thinking that people with vastly more experience at this than he is (like his cousin is any stranger to intrigue) are going to be at all cowed by his rather blatant threats. The keep just got wrecked by vampires, what leverage exactly does Kitric have to make people think he's going to pull this off? He's already admitted that the most powerful person in the keep is severely wounded. Unless he suspects that the others sense blood in the water and he's trying to bluff himself into a position of power to buy time until he can think of something else.

This is what I mean I guess by everything coming too easily. Kitric says or does something and there's no reactionary consequences, everyone just falls into line. All of his schemes work out, there's no sense that he's even working very hard at this, he's got it all figured out right away. He might be gifted but he's still green. And if everything comes easily, then there's no drama and if there's no drama, why are we still reading? Granted, there's still one more chapter where things can fall apart and Kitric has to struggle to put it all back together, but what are the chances at this point? Who knows, so let's keep going.

Meanwhile, the Valkyrie and company fall into a trap. There's not too much to comment on in this section, actually, I probably would have used a little more detail and some dialogue. However, I also would have probably made it fifty pages long, so take that bit of advice for what it's worth. Two things that are kind of odd with this whole quest portion of the chapter . . . didn't we see the three vampires die already? Which explains why they aren't home when the crew shows up, but since they are dead doesn't that make the whole quest kind of pointless? I can understand that the Valkyrie may not have gotten the memo regarding that, news travels slowly in the days before electronic mail. So hopefully it will connect to the main plot then at some point, because if we're read all this about the Valkyrie engaging in a quest we know the outcome of anyway, so it can end with "Boy, guess someone got to them before me. Anyone else want a drink?" you're going to have some unhappy readers.

Second odd thing: a whole group of warriors and near-warriors roaming through the forest and not a single one noticed six hundred people hiding nearby waiting for them to enter the tower? That's a lot of warm bodies to conceal, although conceivably they could have withdrawn to a few miles away and rushed back when word came that the Valkyrie's crew had arrived. I can buy that, but still . . . none of those rangers could figure out that a large group of people might be somewhere nearby? They're not worth half what they're being paid. Geez.

And back to the happy couple. Now, I know this is a world of magic but . . . brain fluid? My God, and he consented to it? I can't even imagine how you'd pull that off, even in a fantasy world, which just shows my limited imagination. Still, how advanced is science here, if people are aware of things like brain fluid? I hope Georginna was careful though, there was an episode of Doctor Who where the Rani was removing brain fluid for experiments and all the miners became aggressive and violent. That might put some spark into the relationship.

I really don't get Kitric though, he's all over the place. In his letter to his cousin he talks about getting all the provinces together by invitation, but says he'll only attack with the huge army he's admitted he's going to keep breeding "under direst provocation". Like if they tell him to go sod off with his invitation? Then he tells Georginna he has no desire to make war anyway but what the hey, we'll just keep breeding creatures. What does he want to do, exactly? I mean, he says he wants to keep snogging the fair druid again and again, which is fair enough, and kill the king vampire. Great, so let's see him work toward it. In the beginning he pledged to help his grandfather if the necromancer would help him win the druid's heart. That happened but now that his grandfather is out of the picture he's gone all John and Yoko, but with magical beasts. Okay, he is presumably helping Arkruel make the transition to undead, I suppose that counts. But Kitric just . . . I don't know. He's just so . . . and I hate saying this . . . shallow.

I really want Olindara to do something evil before this story is over, because every time we see her, we're told "Oh gosh this is so out of character for her because she's so evil!" Though I guess the fact that she will soon be sleeping next to a living magical corpse will be evil enough. Ew.

The battle is typical of all the other battles thus far in the story. More detail would still be nice . . . you tell us people "died messily" but how? Describe brains coming out ears and men choking on the blood oozing from their own slit throats. All the screaming and the horror, skulls cracked, bones broken, limbs severed, stumbling over entrails and lost weapons, being caught in the middle of something where all you know is that you have to keep swinging at anything that moves until people stop trying to kill you.

It is a nice cross-section of the battle though, it flows a bit better than the attack on the manor by taking us to different parts of the battle, giving us a sense of a lot of things happening at once, so it does convey the resultant chaos fairly well. The sudden shift to the squires outside in the woods is a bit jarring though, I think it would have done better had you left us with a cliffhanger at the tower and then changed over. Because it seems to just cut away without any warning or reason, with a "And now for something completely different" type of change. Have Raquel still be captured and everyone rushing to keep her from being eaten. The battle does nicely teeter on the edge of "we're going to win this" which is a hard balance to get right. I don't have any doubt that they will win, but the battle does go straddle the middle enough that for a few seconds it seems plausible they might lose.

However, if the cannibals and minotaurs do lose it's because they are idiots. So you're smart enough to figure out how to hide six hundred people in the forest and put them into position for a surprise attack when the company enters the tower. But you aren't smart enough to think to surround the tower because people might try to sneak over the back wall. I'll allow for the possibility that they did have to evade some small force but given that their retreat strategy is described as "running in the opposite direction" I suspect that nobody was really back there. If they are, it isn't mentioned.

And we end on the most fantastic pickup line of all time. Sadie Hawkins, eat your heart out. What's hyanadon for "I'm going to undress you with my eyes."

From there, thus shall come a climax! Or, chapter four. The seemingly pointless attack on the tower does start to make more sense, since it serves to bring the two parties in the story together. Granted there was no reason why they couldn't run into Dell anyway when they were wandering around but I'm not going to argue against balls-out sword swinging action, fantasy style. To each his own and all that.

Three days? Whoa, that's quite the delay in getting help but realistic in terms of turnaround time. Not being a military historian I have no idea if the Valkyrie's crew is equipped for any kind of siege, it's not like they were going to weigh themselves down with rations while out combing the woods. Nor does the offending army really seem to be suited for hunkering down and waiting, it appears their strategy was more the timeless "get 'em!" Still, the half-elves could just eat all the dead, I suppose. Mm, people. The meal that keeps on giving. So they're basically sitting around waiting for one of the sides to finally say "the heck with this" and make a mad dash for the opposing army.

The descriptions of the battles actually get a lot better as the story goes along, and the battle at the tower has your best descriptions yet. I like how you lay out exactly who goes where and what they're doing, so that when the armies crash together we have no doubt about what is going on. It seems to end a tad quickly but I guess since we're only talking about a force of six hundred or so enemies to begin with, we're not talking Battle of the Bulge. More Battle of the Somme, judging by everyone getting wiped out. And that's my obnoxious historical name dropping for today. I hope you enjoyed it.

Throughout the story I've found the fact that the druid uses millipedes as her multisegmented weapon of destruction interesting. Something about it kept bothering for some reason, though, so I went and looked up some information on millipedes. Turns out they really can't bite anything, they apparently eat plant matter by softening it up and then scraping it from the leaf. However, they can sometimes, depending on the species, exude a poison that can be caustic in large doses. Given that we're not talking about giant versions of these creatures, large doses here we come. Still, we are discussing fictional giant millipedes in a fantasy story so we shouldn't get too crazy and I have no idea how "realistic" you want to get. I'm not even getting into the "collapse under the weight of their own exoskeleton" aspect of becoming giant-sized because (all together now) this is a fantasy story. Even if historically they did get that long, they probably were only a few inches wide at best. But again, fiction.

Still, speaking strictly personally, I like following the laws of science for most "normal" things, that way the magical stuff seems more believable. Plus, it's always nice to figure out the details of it, instead of just getting to "Giant arthropods! Fantastic!" and stopping. But I read more into this stuff than most people. Such is my curse. To me, though, it's more interesting that if you're going to specifically use giant millipedes, have them kill people in a fashion that might be unique to millipedes, perhaps to explain why Geogrinna used that particular class of animal as opposed to say, giant dung beetles.

But then, this story is not called "Georginna the Druid and Her Giant Segmented Animal Fetish", is it now? So back to the Lords of Darkness!

Battle's over! All right! Bonded as brothers and sisters of the great vampire hunt, everyone sits around to discuss how to make the you-know-what hit the fan for the bloodsucker. This is a fun idea because it brings some of the more prickly personalities together and forces them to hash out their differences. Except we more or less get the Valkyrie vow to destroy the Black Manor for reasons that boil down to "you are evil and thus I must fight you" which are a bit . . . generic. Have we ever seen the Black Manor do anything explicitly evil? Yes, we're told that the necromancer wanted to conquer the surrounding lands and Kitric was quite open about it but that really doesn't have anything to do with him being a necromancer and more to do with him being a power-hungry bastard. They breed dangerous creatures but I suppose how evil you find that may depend on you feel about research without a proper control group. She doesn't really give us anything specific, so the statement lacks a bit of fire and in fact comes across a bit hollow.

"I vow to destroy you for wanting to subjugate us all!" "I vow to destroy you because of your unnatural experiments with nature!" "I vow to destroy you for all the souls you've kidnapped and tortured on a whim!" "I vow to destroy you because, frankly, you block my view of the river with your giant castle!" Anything along those lines and less of "Necromancers and witches must die!" at least not without something in the story to back up that attitude.

That said, Kitric gets a nice zinger in return and it may be the only bit of his dialogue in the story I can honestly say felt "right." Sarcastic and mocking, it does fit his character. It does seem a bit odd that he'd say she got lost when she was looking for the tower. They were combing the woods for clues as to where the vampires might be, found the half-elf/bait and he led them right to the tower. The squires might have been lost but they were all also running away from a fight, so cut them some slack. In all fairness, Kitric might not know the entire story. I'll give him that.

But, as with everything else here, it gets resolved all too quickly anyway. Tempers prepare to flare, swords are ready to be drawn, lines getting ready to be crossed, and evil Olindara makes a comment, everyone laughs and suddenly the world is full of buddies. The room is suffused with agreement. It sucks a bit of the tension or drama out of things, which gets even worse when Raquel then proceeds to fall in love with the awesomeness that is Georginna and Kitric.

Now, I have no problem with bisexual (or omnisexual, if you want to get cheeky) paladins, I personally think fantasy should explore homosexual themes more than it already does, and not in a "lesbian wizards are so hot!" kind of way. And there's probably a good amount of historical precedent for it. Yet . . . it feels unearned. The Valkyrie experiences love at first sight, and the narrative heavily implies that she does so because they are just too damn hot for words. There's no build-up for it and it once again sort of highlights how everything comes too easily for Kitric. We've seen him earn utterly nothing so far in this story, and he's barely exerted himself. Whatever he wants, gets accomplished. His enemies are either crushed or agree with him, or, in this case, fall madly in love with him. But the only time we've ever seen him do something thus far, which was the manor fight, he screwed it up. It reaches a point where you start to go "Oh come on." You keep waiting for a character to call him out as an arrogant snot and beat the piss out of him. And I could deal with him being an unlikable arrogant snot if he had some cleverness to go with that. But no, he just does things and it falls into place. We never really see him reacting to things and figuring a situation out.

The scene between Ginger the Wonder Assassin and the Valkyrie of Love (I apologize heartily for that, call it a passing whim) is a bit odd in that, once again, it appears to come out of nowhere. We know that Ginger is reasonably honorable in that she worked for Arkruel and wouldn't betray him . . . but she was also getting paid by him, presumably. That tends to do a lot for loyalty. Now all of a sudden we see Ginger feeling quite remorseful for offing the vampires before Raquel got a crack at them. Why would she even care? It doesn't seem to be a natural extension of the character so much as the plot requires her to feel bad about and thus she does.

Raquel actually comes across as the reasonable one in this scene, though it seems to mix up the idea of a "vow". I didn't think it was like calling dibs on something, more like, "My life's quest is to make sure these creatures are dead." It doesn't mean you are claiming that you are the only ones who can exclusively attack them until the end of time. They got killed, so now the quest is over and you find a new one. It seems simple and that's how the Valkyrie seems to interpret it. I just don't get why it's a big deal to the assassin, unless she's got a crush on Raquel. What the heck, join the club.

This scene also gives me a chance to point out something else that has been ringing odd with him for most of the entire story. I've noted my issues with the dialogue already, in hideous, tedious detail, but I don't think I've ever been able to totally nail what else bugs me about it. With this scene, I figured it out . . . the tone is inconsistent. You have people in a fantasy story talking like people in a fantasy story but then you have Ginger responding with a far more modern "That's the situation in a nutshell." Kitric saying "Wars are so last millennium." His sister using the phrase "knocked up." And other little example that I don't feel like combing the entire story for. You're attempting to create the atmosphere of a fantasy world and people suddenly throwing in modern colloquialisms can throw you out of the story completely. Even the narrative, like the point where it states "everyone finds the bad boy and girl irresistible" sort of breaks into what was trying to be a serious scene and calls too much attention to itself. People using complex archaic fantasy type dialogue suddenly coming out with stuff I might say to my friends only chips away at the illusion you're trying to create of a living, breathing fantasy world.

For a good real-life example, listen to a reading of Macbeth one time and note how the actors all use the proper iambic pentameter that it was written in. In the play it sounds perfectly natural, even if we don't talk like that. Now fast forward to the part where Hecate starts talking and it's not in the same meter, it's like rhyming couplets. I'm not a scholar but when I first heard it the change is immediately noticeable. It makes a huge difference and does sort of throw you off because it's shifting gears without warning or reason.

And if you don't like that example, take any random Shakespeare play and have characters occasionally end their lines with "dang, yo". Doesn't quite have the effect that the Bard intended now, hm?

I'm not sure if the phrase "massive astral cock" is over the top genius or simply horribly inappropriate. I shall leave it to the discerning reader to decide for oneself. I am simply pointing it out.

I give Olindara a lot of credit for her lateral thinking on the scrying . . . though how is scrying specifically a white magic endeavor? It's not like you can decide intent via the spell, it's like looking through binoculars. You can spy on Nazis or watch sorority girls in the shower. But the medium of viewing itself remains steadfastly neutral, right? I know, I'm nitpicking again but I tend to run these concepts about in my head and put them all together so that the story at least exists in a consistent framework. That doesn't take away from her looking for the absence of magic, though you'd think high level concealing spells would account for that. Or maybe Olindara is just cleverer than the average spellcaster. I can believe that.

I like the idea of Kitric not being above emotional manipulation to control the Valkyrie, knowing that she's consumed with desire for he and his future wife. At one point the narrative certainly hints at it, but I think it would make Kitric more of a bastard if that were more explicit, especially since we have no real evidence that he really thinks anything of the Valkyrie. I mean, he says he loves her but men say that all the time and don't mean it. Except for any men reading this. I'm sure you're all totally sincere.

Kitric does have guts for attempting the attack at night, against all other logic. His sudden necromantic abilities are astounding, since he couldn't even hold back the Master Vampire earlier and he's had no one really to learn from since he grandfather decided to embrace becoming a living corpse. Now he's able to overcome the will of the head vampire and compel all the other ones to come bust the doors open? That's quite the jump in abilities, though I'll buy the self-learning route, even though he really didn't seem that interested in learning from Arkruel in the first place (only agreeing to in the beginning for his granddad's help in earning sweet destructive Georginna's hand). But desperate times and all that.

Where did Kitric's team get the half-elf cannibals from who are holding down the backend of the fort? Didn't they work for evil and more specifically the vampire? Or are they like mercenaries that are willing to work for the highest bidder? Their presence on his side, being that Kitric has spent a good portion of the story killing them (at the manor and at the tower) should either make him reluctant to use them or they to work with him. But again, we'll say desperate times and move on.

I'm going to have to be nitpicky again, but when you describe the sword as "sentient but not thinking" isn't that a contradiction? I mean, the definition of "sentient" is basically that something is self-aware and that implies some level of conscious thought. To say that it simply hungers suggests that its operating more by instinct, not unlike any other animal. Like, say, a giant millipede. You may have something different in mind but the wording struck me so I thought I'd point it out. Like the sword is intelligent but not sentient, maybe? After all, dolphins are smart but I don't think they're considered self-aware. Again, it's one line in a four chapter story but I figured I'd mention it while I'm here and being complete. Make of it what you will.

The breakneck race to the top of the tower and then back down it again is actually pretty thrilling, those bits are written well to capture the frantic pace of the battle. I assume he's going that route to avoid the crowds at the entrance and not simply because he enjoys the challenge. The scene with the vampire child is a bit odd as well . . . he immediately knows it's a trap (nice visual image though, that was a good touch) because he's Kitric and awesome, which I'm used to by now . . . then he correctly indicates that the kid will probably attempt to rip his throat out . . . and then he throws the kid over his shoulder, where she's in a good position to indeed rip his throat out. Um, what? Either Kitric is wearing a neck guard or he is supremely confident the kid isn't going to attempt to kill him. Sword or no sword, that's not going to help when you practically stick her face near your neck.

And speaking of the sword, I know it's probably in character for Kitric but it may not be a great idea to announce, "See this sword right here, it's designed to kill you so don't take it away from me!" because chances are the vampire is going to try and do just that. What is it with everyone telling each other their plans. But, like I said, judging by what we've seen Kitric do so far, this is more or less along the lines for his typical behavior.

I'm not sure if the way Kitric stops the witch from opening the portal is supposed to be funny or not. Because you have this huge buildup about a portal to hell opening and letting demons in . . . and our young necromancer just flings a sword through her skull (and how does a sword go through someone's ears on either side and still hit their teeth . . . that's either an angle that doesn't exist in geometry or it's a very broad blade) and that ends that. Which gets me back to my comments before about problems being resolved all too easily. And again, if the intent was to go against reader expectations, then I'm all for that, but the way it's written it seems more like "We're getting close to the end, so let's just get this out of the way." And I'm not sure how I feel about that.

See, now if this were D&D, this would be a fantastic moment for one of the good oriented characters to cast a Globe of Daylight spell and clear out the weaker vampires, thus rendering the fight with the lead vampire much easier. Everyone roll your saving throws! Apparently the king vampire gets initiative and life gets unpleasant for everyone else, here at the climatic battle. Everything more or less has been leading up to this, ever since the second chapter when Corollus decided he wanted to throw down with the necromancer. It'd be nice if we got some of Kitric's thoughts in this moment, with the long(ish) quest about to be over, his grandfather avenged, the big threat to the kingdom averted and the path clear for him to do whatever he wants.

Instead we get Razor failing her saving throw. Yikes. Considering this is a character who technically has been with us throughout the entire four chapters, her death/undeath doesn't really have any emotional heft and the narrative really doesn't dwell on it. I'm not expecting sheets of emo rain to start pouring from the skies upon her demise but nobody even seems to really care that much, a theme I'll get back to shortly. Granted, if asked to name one defining characteristic about her, I'm not sure I could. On that note, where is Dell the Other Ranger during this? Why was she even in this story?

Why does the vampire throw his sword to Kitric? One last gesture of "Son, you truly are awesome" before he gets beheaded. He never says anything and if Kitric thinks this is strange, he really doesn't comment on it. As with everything else here, the vampire is then summarily dispatched with a strange ease (he had no spells to cast? Why live that long if you're not going to learn how to cast magic?). There's not even a brief scene of the crew surveying all the destruction and commenting on it. Just one more bit on the checklist.

So, wedding then. I'm assuming the wedding comes nearly nine months after the battle with the vampire, given that the paladin is noted as ready to give birth. Giving the baby up actually makes sense if she's going to go wandering around on adventures and whatnot. Besides, I've heard giving birth in the saddle is unpleasant.

Then we have the brief coda, showing the paladin riding away with the assassin (now they make a cuter couple) and confirmation that Kitric is raising his grandfather up to be a dreaded lich. The paladin still can't bring herself to kill the people in the Black Manor, though in all fairness what does that vow mean now that's broken her vows by her own admission? She isn't even really a paladin anymore, technically, right? But although we're told she's contemplating this new status quo, we don't get to see any of her thoughts on it. She just rides off and leaves us none the wiser. And thus the saga ends.

What do we have then, after twenty one single spaced pages of rambling about this, of pointing stuff out and poking at things to see what happens . . . what does this story tell us, overall? Hm. Mixed bag, really. I have no idea how this was written, if it was assembled over a long period of time, or bits of other stories were used . . . it really doesn't matter. This is the finished work and this is what we have.

And what do we have? The stated purpose of this story was to present a family of necromancers and I imagine to also invoke high adventure. Did that happen? I'm not sure. The family itself and the bones of the dynamics of it are actually presented but nothing is really done with them. We're shown the family in the beginning (and is it ever stated what happened to Kitric's father?) but from then on the focus turns purely to Kitric with everyone else dropping in for what amounts to extended cameos, either to drop a one-liner or move the plot forward an inch or two. Even Arkruel, who the story is theoretically about as the patriarch, vanishes from the story after chapter two and never appears again. We barely get a sense of the family at all as a family. They just come across as a bunch of people who happen to live in the same house.

A lot of the more interesting relationships are left unexplored or undeveloped . . . Arkruel and the druid, Kitric and his sister, Olindara and Kitric, all these people with strong personalities who could play off each other are barely in the same room. Instead, it's "Kitric and Georginna are the Best Couple Ever" and we don't get any sense of the rest of the family. And for a story supposedly about family, it's a hole that stands out. Because you have this family of basically evil people, people who are just shy of being sociopaths or at best amoral, who are manipulative and cruel at times, who put their own interests over anyone else's . . . but at the same time they're family. They live and exist together and it'd be interesting to see how that worked, what it's like to grow up in that environment, where cruel and kind exist in random and equal measure. We don't get any of that.

There are two ways to really go at a story, and that's to have the characters determine the plot, or have the plot drive what the characters do. We have a lot of characters here, maybe too many for this short a tale, because none of them ever really get developed. After four chapters I barely get a sense of any of them, a real sense of them as people, except what the narrative outright tells me and that's not good enough. The best we get is Kitric and that boils down to "he can do everything, because he's awesome." And I'm not sure if that's what you meant for me to get out of it, but that's how it came across. But beyond him, everyone else is just sort of . . . there, without much to distinguish them. Arkruel had the best chance but like I said, he vanishes anyway. The rangers function as window dressing, the Valkyrie gets some face time but uses it to fall in love with our protagonists.

We're never let into anyone's thoughts and hopes and plans, except for sometimes Kitric. But the story isn't supposed to be about Kitric, it's supposed about his unorthodox family and the ripples they create doing their thing. We see some ripples, but not really dramatic ripples, it's all stuff that works out the best for Kitric. What makes a character based story work is the interplay between the characters, the relationships and the tensions and how they bounce off each other, how people trying to do what they want affects the people around them, and the consequences and reactions of it. We don't get that as much here so by default the story must be more plot-based.

But, is it? Again, yes and no. The plot appears at first to rest upon the machinations of Arkruel as he strives to take over everything in sight, but that gets sidelined quickly as the vampire subplot rears up and takes over. I'd say the main plot was the struggle between the family and the giant vampire, but that sort of turns into "Kitric versus the giant vampire with everyone he knows along for the ride." The vampire attacks them, they attack him and the story is over. Boiled down, that's the essential plot, although of course more happens than that. The thing is, it doesn't seem to unfold completely naturally, some parts seem like, "This has to happen, so it's going to happen" as opposed to sort of organically growing from the elements already set up previously.

What doesn't help is the lack of character progression. A less than complex plot is okay if the characters show a lot of growth and/or change during the course of the story. Here, everyone at the end is basically the same as when the story started, with no real sense that the events of the last year and a half at all affected them in any deep way. Or any way at all. Kitric changes the most on the surface but he's still the same arrogant snot he was when the tale began, he's just an arrogant married snot with a pregnant wife. He was already in love when it started, as was the druid. Arkruel showed maybe the most chance but he goes into plot limbo and we never see him again. And changing into a lich doesn't count. How does Olindara even feel about that? The Valkyrie sort of changes but she's not a main character and the love at first sight aspect isn't really explored, nor are the consequences to breaking lifelong vows that she took. Everyone is the way they were before, even though a year has gone by, even though they've been through a series of serious events, some of it life altering.

It becomes a question of scope then, if the story is going to be broadly epic or intensely personal. And as such it sort of straddles a strange middle ground, where the sweeping effects the family's actions have on the kingdoms around them are boiled down to a few fights and a snotty letter Kitric writes. If the family were kept removed, only seen in strange tantalizing glimpses while the little people on the ground were shown to be scurrying about trying to live their lives in the wake of that, attempting to make some sense of the bizarre events around them . . . that's one tactic. But we don't get to know the little people, the peripheral characters remain at the periphery. The hard focus remains on the core cast but we don't really get to know them too well either. They all remain mysteries to us, judged only by the surface actions. Which may not be enough, in the end.

The overall concept here is fascinating, and I mean that sincerely. The central idea of following this segment in the lives of some necromancers is inspired and something that hasn't really been done before in fantasy without overplaying the goth aspects of the concept. Here there's more of a chance of focusing on the people that make up the family, who happen to be necromancers, instead of making that the defining trait of their personalities. The opportunities and possibilities for telling a multilayered and complex story, with everyone manipulating everyone else, the action pivoting around the vampire and the family trying to kill each other, the people caught in between machinations, you could go miles with this and still have plenty of room for more material. It could be equal parts action and drama, alternating scenes of great cruelty and humanity in equal measure, sketching out a place where strangeness is the norm. The difference between the people who create the events and the people who are at the mercy of them.

Reading this, all of those scenarios are possible. But in the end I think it needs more focus and more detail. Exactly what kind of story do you want this to be? About a family, yes, but what about the family? How they stay together, how they fall apart, how they react to situations that may be larger than they are? You could make this tale as simple or as complex as you'd like, as brutal or as ornate as it needs to be, whatever story you want to tell is in here somewhere. It just needs to be chipped out and brought into a finer focus.

I've said a lot of nitpicky things about this story, a lot of comments that aren't exactly showering certain aspects with praise but above all the thing that kept me reading was the potential that is inherent here. As it stands now, it's an okay tale, haphazardly presented and on some level lacking emotional involvement . . . but there are a lot of stories in that vein that are never going to be anything more that. Which isn't the case here. I don't know what story this could ultimately be, it's not my story and thus I can't say, but it could be anything you want it to be. And not just a good fantasy story but simply a good story overall. There's ambition and imagination here, and with a rethink and a sharper presentation, I think that will all too apparent.

I've gone on for a while already and I shouldn't go on for too much more, because I've said mostly all I have to say. I know, how preposterous. The saga was a quick read, a decent read and one that I'm glad I was able to accomplish. We may disagree in the end on the exact nature of the story, on whether it has reached its zenith as it stands now, or that its ultimate form lies buried in here and needs to be teased out. It may come to nothing, because you've moved on, taking whatever lessons you've learned from writing this and applying them to other works. But I don't know any of that. What I know is we've got this and what it is and what it could be. And it's the intersection of those elements that fascinate me, long after the story itself is finished.

Thanks for coming along, anyone who made it this far down. I hope I didn't bore anyone too much, I hope I said something at least remotely interesting. If not, well, um, sorry? I'm not sure what else to say. Oh. Yeah.

I promise the next one will be shorter. There. That should make people happy. Or at least the nearest reasonable facsimile.

This was fun, I hope we get to do it again someday.

•  MB

5.16.2007

"Give me one good reason why I should be going home, if I really wanted to leave I would already be gone . . ." – Peter, Bjorn and John, "Falling and Passing"

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