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small wounds's avatar

Oh, that was a really great ending! For a non edited piece already looking promising. Your writing is immersive. Just go a bit deeper into your worldbuilding and it will be insane.

Hai Dang's avatar

Thank you so much!!!

The Calm Riot's avatar

This opening is ferocious and tender all at once, the way you force Kerrigan to stare down the cost of power while still wanting to spare her from exactly this life hits like a wound that’s already deciding who she’ll become.

amazing how Regboren’s voice enters as something vast and wordless, learning humanity drop by drop through rain, roots, oceans, and finally blood, until Verika’s grief and fury become the only lens big enough for it to inhabit.

That last image of her own reflection rising from the muddy pond and calmly telling her, “You have no choice. Enmavi has chosen you,” feels like the perfect curse for a war-mother who thought she’d already given everything...what happens to a woman built on control when even her soul is no longer solely hers?

Hai Dang's avatar

Thank you Eddie. Always a pleasure reading your comment. I was thinking of Gandalf when writing Regboren and what if he didn’t become a wise wizard but inhabit a grieving mother in a grimdark world, and there it is, this chapter took shape.

Pray for Gandalf the grimdark.

Kostiantyn Dmytriiev's avatar

Great piece. Really loved the ending!

Hai Dang's avatar

Thank you so much. I reread it and it's so rough... well, at least I think the build up to ending is okish and the chapter basically satisfies opening chapter job.

Kostiantyn Dmytriiev's avatar

Yeah, I guess the others pieces of yours I’ve read flowed a bit better. But also, this is a battlefield, leaving a child and some kind of revenge mission. It can be not that smooth of thinking.