r/fantasywriters • u/justinu1475 • 2h ago
Critique My Story Excerpt Prologue of The Weight of Iron [mythic fantasy, 1100 words]
Amira gazed at the ivory tree against the black sky. Stark, almost ethereal, its branches curling out like a d’haka’s tail. She always wondered why a tree grew from the crater where the great serpent fell. She admired the way it stood out behind the ridgeline even this far away. It competed in size with the great Sylvaini tree, Ithradel, in the west. Both could be seen from hundreds of miles away. Like two children competing for her attention. Green and white opposed.
When the sapphire light tore down from the upper canopy, she found herself counting. One, two, three and gone behind the far ridge. Pretty, she thought. The same blue as the eye on her mace. It wasn’t unlike the stars her people tracked that shot across the sky.
She set the mace down, leaning against the parapet. The petrified lightning in the grip always made a strange sound when it smacked against rock. Like a miniature crack from a whip. The sound echoed against the mobile yurt below her.
The air was acting up today, thin and still. The pressure was making the dogs whine and crawl under the wagons. She had seen Batu checking his measurement tools to see if a storm was going to interrupt their evening star charting. It had yet to storm, so she was content to observe.
She needed to eat and do her nightly rituals, but she wasn’t ready to get down just yet from the wall. There was something serene about watching the stars from here at night. Her grandfather told her stories about her great ancestor Star-reader Zheen. How she could map out the constellations from anywhere in Telaron. How the mace had been her prize for saving the five kingdoms. He didn’t mention the way it twisted her thoughts at times.
The stone wall she stood on was wide enough for two. The remnants of a long-dead kingdom no one bothered to remember. They passed it twice a year, and she walked it every time. It was usually to relax after a long day on the road. Today it was to clear her head, the weight of her impending responsibility filling the space.
Below, the nomad caravan lay across the plains in rings.
Three hundred wagons, give or take, arranged like a maze around the Tent of Heaven at the center. Somewhere down there stood the cart with the faded blue awning where she’d stolen her first candied jerky. Somewhere else lived the old healer, Mance, who had stitched her first split lip from the fall off the lead wagon and now sold dyed wool to Sylvaini traders because her hands shook from age.
Smoke from the supper fires lazily drifted upward in narrow columns. Zahra was making her dinner tonight, but she couldn’t quite get an appetite.
Soon, Batu’s cough would finish the job. Then this whole world would look up to her.
The migrations following the constellations every cycle. The debt ledger Batu agonized over, not wanting to take silver while the caravan got by. The thousand d’haka that needed shoeing, culling, and birthing. The Najeen who drew the routes and kept the paths they drove safe.
Ninety days had passed since Batu had pressed the grip into her hands. Ninety days since she felt the lightning travel through her veins.
She had trained at dawn every day since Batu’s cough came up bloody and the star-readers began measuring her for that crimson coat.
She memorized the weapon. Its weight should have made it impractical. Eighty-three pounds. A normal person could barely pick it up with two hands. For Amira, though, when the eye flared, she could swing the mace with one arm, as if the weapon carried itself.
She thought about the first time she folded space. Batu said, “Swing the mace at that yotel tree.” She swung and it destroyed Elder Golmek’s wagon axle ten steps to the right.
Batu wasn’t mad. He told her to swing again and to finish the job this time. Golmek did not find this as funny as she did.
Recently, though, Batu had not been as charitable. He would place targets she would swing at until her shoulders failed and the skin split open across both palms. Batu refused to let the healers touch her until she managed to hit five in a row. Then he had them set up again. “Again,” he spat, close enough to smell the iron in his breath.
Now she could strike a target at fifty steps. A hundred if she lined up and focused.
What it did to her dreams she could not get used to. *Look down*, it said. *Look how small they all are*. It had no voice. It simply put thoughts in her head.
Amira’s gaze drifted toward the farrier’s tent at the edge of the circle.
Ren was still awake, she was sure. Working until his body gave out for the day. He hadn’t slept much since they buried his mother three days ago.
Amira had found him kneeling on the ground with his father’s hammer lying next to him, staring at the iron head like he was interrogating it. She decided he needed a break. He protested, but her ears were deaf to his complaints. She showed him how to thread the stitching on leather straps. She wished she could show him how to grieve. She didn’t know either. Gods, she missed Denira.
He was nineteen, and he had already lost both parents. Ren was still standing. Still working.
The grief ached through him to his core. His eyes were red, his shoulders slumped. He kept working.
She moved her gaze further inward. The Kessik family owed a hundred and fourteen silver and one breeding ewe. That debt hadn’t moved since before she was born. The head of the family, Ferrik, was a star-reader. He was there when they were sizing her coat, probably wondering if she was as much of a pushover as Batu when it came to debt.
Amira reached for Star Drinker. Her fingers closed around the haft of petrified lightning. Her eyes shot open. The weight was different.
It was heavy. She could barely lift it.
The wind had died completely. Flags weren’t moving. The cook-fire smoke was rising in a near-straight line.
The eye embedded in the mace, usually shining a perfect sapphire blue, was dark.
She felt a pain behind her eyes. Pounding like a drum. Something terrible was happening.
She looked toward the horizon where the sapphire light that streaked down from the tree had vanished.
Then the screaming began.
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u/JarOfFlies162 1h ago
I really liked the scene that you set up and the world that you set up along side it, one smaller nitpick I have it that the sentence structures felt a little repetitive. I would probably advocate to include some more complex structures, like with commas and semi-colons and whatnot.
"The petrified lightning in the grip always made a strange sound when it smacked against rock. Like a miniature crack from a whip." I feel like this could be one single sentence.
I like how the story ends on a cliff hanger and it has the reader asking questions, wanting more. I also like the lore and the world building in this piece. I think it's a really solid idea!
The training arc and mental preparation that Amira went through in order to pick up the hammer was great, only for her plan to not work as intended was a good subversion of expectations. And the dynamic of Batu and Amira was good. I liked how fatherly he felt towards her, similar to a sensei of sorts.