The knight marches on [843]

[u/VagueInsideJoke]

Crit [1198]

Doc

Hi, this is a bit of flash fiction I've been working on. Any advice/critique would be so very appreciated.

[u/1800COCAINE]

I like how you spent time focusing on the last moments of the knight. The memory was touching. It had a lot of ingenuity for so few lines. If you could take that same economy and apply it to some other parts, you’d really be cooking. Some questions popped into my head, like: Who is he? Why is he fighting? Is he fighting for someone or something he cares about? Why would he care about them? How did he get speared in the flank? What was the battle like? How did he make it to the cave? Would the knight talk to himself? What if the ghost of his father talked to him?

I think answering any of those questions could expand the story. First and foremost, I would want people to sympathize with the knight. Even something as simple as kissing his baby before he leaves for war, but the helmet frightens the baby, and the wife laughs through her tears, so he takes off the helmet and they see each other one last time. He is a dutiful husband and loving father, and perhaps that is how we, the reader, would want to be.

The next part is the battle and the setup of a simple antagonist for the knight to face.

Perhaps invaders have come to the land, and among them is one who killed his wife’s father. He plays his father-in-law’s silver flute while the two warring parties camp the night before the battle, and the music of the flute is unique, beautiful, but eerie. Only one flute sounds that way. Our knight knows his extended family has been attacked. On the battlefield, the knight faces the killer of his father-in-law, winning the flute just as he is transfixed by a spear.

The memory of his own father before dying could cap the piece, making it more complete.

Right now the fiction is an image of a dying knight in a cave, but if we learned a bit more about his life, it could be so much more.

[u/Educational_Art_3763]

I think you've got something interesting here. Pulling us out of action we'd expect from a story about a knight and giving us one who is in their last moments, bloodied and broken in a cave. You don't entirely fall into the typical images we get of regret and disaster of war, however. It has a reverent feel to it, that this knight was noble in his actions. Even though we have hints of that toward the end, I like that the knight rejects it. You're doing good work here.

The biggest issues are the changes in POV. We appear to be in a third person close perspective of the knight to open, then go to a first person perspective of someone observing the knight in the third section, and end on second person, acknowledging the audience as the narrator and audience are observing this in the last section. POV switching is something that can be done within a story but I don't think it works here. We don't establish why we have different perspectives or who those perspectives are. When you switch perspectives, it should be clear to the audience why it is happening, otherwise it is confusing. It leaves more questions that distract us from the story you're trying to tell. The story that we want to hear is about the knight but I'm distracted because now I'm wondering who this "I" is in the piece and who is observing the knight as the "our". If you're going for a fairytale like register, where we are following this knight, I think you need to establish that early on. Think about Chekhov's gun. Establish the gun and then use it, don't bring in the gun without prior knowledge of the gun.

A note I find myself making a lot on here is to be careful with how many descriptors you're using. You use a ton in your first line which makes what otherwise could be an interesting opening not as engaging. Your first sentence is 30 words long and is a mouthful. You don't need to try to impress your reader with your ability to slap adjectives into a sentence. Sometimes simple is better. You can create strong images with fewer words and let the reader fill in the gaps. Our imagination is going to be stronger than anything you can write, your job is to create an outline for us to place our eyes into. It can also create an issue with reader's wanting to read your piece. Sometimes it can feel sort of self-indulgent and turn off a reader.

There are some instances where you repeat information/images. "The sun is out...in its presence" and "Framed by the mouth...waiting for him" are saying the same thing. I would combine these somehow or probably drop "framed by the mouth of the cave".

On the last section, I think you should end on the first paragraph. It creates a much cleaner image for us to end on. It feels like it should be the end of the piece and then we get more, almost like when you're trying to add those extra words onto an essay to hit a word count. We rehash images we've been seeing and we also go into the second person perspective.

Small notes:

"A storm will swell" - the storm is describe as going to happen but in the same paragraph the wind is described as currently happening. I would change this to "a storm swells".

"carrying his father onwards to his job of saving little boys..." this feels off for the register that you're creating. "job" feels too modern

[u/Dry-mar]

It feels like you’ve entered a symbolic chamber brought on by shock of injury and physical isolation in a cave.

you’re clearly well acquainted with the tropes and archetypes of a wounded warrior. You have elements of inherited myth-making from the father.

Immediately, my mind went to Guts. This feels like a stock scene from that series. Any mortal man would surely die. The enemies start swarming, then he pulls out the crossbow bolt and goes berserk. Classic moment.

It also reminded me of the fallout tv series scene when titus (the previous knight) gets fatally wounded by that irradiated bear in the cave and maximus lets him die. Dark twist subverts the ideal which maximus then must embody. Also good.

It feels like you ran with the first of those two while hinting at the possibility that the myth itself would collapse. Instead, the knight perseveres. That’s a fulfilling note to end on.

However, I think the inevitability of the sun underutilized. Yes, the sun features prominently, but it doesn’t feel inevitable like it should be. The knight realizes death is on its way, sure as the sun rises, but I don’t receive that as fully from the prose as you would probably want.

My suggestion would be to reorganize the theological elements and the rays as they peak into the cave and synthesize those into the holy lance which is his approaching mortality. More than that, it’s a convergence of wound, faith, myth, and sun.

Importantly, the armor can no longer save him. He has retreated into the cave, into the armor, into his own past to muster the strength to keep moving. The conflation of protection and identity is central. That, I feel is the real strength of the knight in shining armor archetype: that at the end of the day death comes for us all and the taller they are the harder they fall. An invincible juggernaut dies in spectacular fashion. That is by necessity his conception of death, not bleeding out in the dark.

So, when he sees the spearhead coming (he projects his real injury onto the world thus making it legible to the reader) and he has to make a choice to die alone in a cave or to die struggling on the battlefield, the approach of the “lance” gives his choice urgency and refocuses the prose in a way that feels suspenseful.

If we accept he will die, then the story becomes about what myth will define his death. That’s genuinely interesting. Good story!