The sound of rainfall. The splash of feet hitting puddles, as a child sprints down the sidewalk. Dark spires reaching up to an empty green sky. The child weaves in and out of shadows, as he runs past one streetlamp to the next. He clutches his coat tightly, as his only ward against the chill of night.
A voice calls out from somewhere down the road behind him. "Don't let him get away! Kill the Witch!"
He grips his coat tighter, and runs faster. Underneath his coat, his fingers wrap around a brass stopwatch, squeezing tighter, and tighter, until his knuckles turn white. He takes a turn around a corner, and the dark spires give way to the horizon of a green sky.
He sprinted even faster, but then stopped dead in his tracks, as the street abruptly ended, with a steep drop off into the void. He stood still, at the edge of the cliff, panting. A pair of footsteps came up behind him. Turning around, he saw one of the men who was chasing him; a man with short black hair, dressed in an ornate black coat, with gold buttons. There was a badge pinned to his chest.
"Soul Hunters Association"
"Nowhere left to run." The man said, drawing a pistol, and aiming it at the child.
"Wait.. Wait! Don't shoot!" The child yelled, gripping his pocketwatch even tighter. "Please don't shoot!"
The man hesitated, and then sighed. "You knew this was the way it would have to end the second you cast that spell."
The child's expression turned from one of fear, to one of rage. "Is this how it had to end? Or just the way you wanted it to?"
The man closed his eyes. "I never wanted any of this."
A gunshot. A child dies in the middle of the night. His hand falls limply to his side, and a small brass stopwatch tumbles out of his palm, onto the cold pavement.
Then there was a long silence, broken only by the sound of rain.
~~~~~
[i]"It was four hundred years ago. The world ended. Nobody really remembers how, all we remember is what came next. Humanity refused to face its own extinction, and made a desperate last call for help. Their calls were answered by Death, who appeared before them, and offered them one last salvation. The souls of humanity were saved, and transferred to to a grand metropolis floating somewhere in an astral void. The City of the Dead.
In the City, we could live our lives like normal, with one catch. We were only souls, and to remain in a human form, we required a Keepsake. An item, that could be pretty much anything, to keep on our person at all times. They tethered our souls to this world, and allowed us to stay human, even in this world after death.
But, with the Keepsakes, came one other consequence of our postmortem existence. It was possible to extract the years of someone's life from their Keepsake. To channel more years into one. Suddenly, the years of a person's life became something to be traded. Gifted. Stolen. Yet, as it always seems to, life went on. Order managed to persist, even with this new grim reality.
Until they came. They were called Witches. Nobody knew where they came from, or what they wanted, but somehow, they found a way to sacrifice their own years in exchange for powerful magics. As one might imagine, this also led them to the murder of innocents, to make up for the years they spent on their spells. Death ran rampant throughout the City. Beggars were killed in the streets, homes broken into and families murdered in cold blood. All in the name of fueling their dark magics.
The Ruling Council was intent on putting a stop to this, and to counter the Witches' dark magic, they formed the Soul Hunters Association. Equipped with an arsenal of elite weaponry, the SHA waged war against the Witches, driving them back to the edges of the City. Now, they're reduced to huddling in dark rooms, plotting from the shadows, and the SHA stands proud as the new saviors of mankind.
That should have been the end of it, and then she rose from the ashes. The Dark Witch, Nyx. A merciless killer, and the greatest master of magic I'd ever seen. Under her guidance, the Witches have become a threat to the City once again."[/i]
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7 RepliesIt's been a few weeks, but i'm so glad i took the time to like the post so i could find it again! In this bit, your sentence structure is top-tier. Those fragments at the beginning seem like such a simple trick, but it's so effective at grabbing attention. Love that wordbuilding as well; the summary hit all the major points without going full textbook, so the edgy tone stayed intact. Beautiful work! I have 4 critiques, all little stuffs, and some of it's grammar. My first point is the first description of the sound of rain is too vague. I live somewhere where it rains [i]a lot[/i], and you wouldn't believe how different it can sound depending on the conditions. Heavy, thunderstroms makes this -blam!- [i]pppsssshhhhhhh[/i] sound, while lighter rains may be uneven sequences of [i]bloopbloopbloopbloopbloop[/i]. The surface also makes a huge difference; a metal or window in lighter rain will make a [i]pit patter patter[/i], whereas a soil will make more of a [i]splash[/i] or [i]plap[/i] depending on how muddy it is. I know it seems like unnecessarily specific, but i find that the type of rain fits better for different stories. For this one in particular, i'm thinking it shoukd be described as a sheet-like thunderstorm, where the rain sound is the nore -blam!- [i]psshh[/i] symbolizing a tragic indifference of the world towards the child-witch's death. Whereas, the classic crying in the rain scene would be somtheing a bit lighter, still a heavy downpour, but the rain sound would a little more distinct per droplet. Second bit, i'm pretty sure the word huff is a verb/noun, not just an onomonopeia sound or a dialouge, so you don't have to put it in quotations. Third, and i can see why this makes tbe scene more dramatic, but why does the Soul Hunter close his eyes before he shoots the witch? Does he not need them to aim? I can see why you put that in, and it does make the scene more emotional, but it's a little silly if you think too much into it. The final thing i wanted to mention was the transition point in between the storytime in italics and the main plot. Usually, when i encounter something similar to what you did in italics (i don't know what to call it lol), it's followed up by a scene of what happened after the speaker told the story. This type of scene creates a very fluid transition. Here, the narrator and audience is a complete enigma: we know the italics is happening in the story because it's told in first-person, but the reader cannot possibly know by whom or from what perpective because the next section is Hazel going pretty much solo. The italics section could also be used as a prologue/pre-chapter, but i don't like using something like that as a prolouge, because introducing with a ton of world building without having any context is a little too textbook-y. Imo, a better transition would be if an old crone is recounting the tale in the tavern when Hazel walks in. Then, you could do the fighty bit from an omniscient perespective, then transition towards Hazel's perspective. I personally don't think you'd miss much, especially if the details in the first two paragraphs after the italics were reinforced after Hazel walks out. Oh, and is this going to be a series, or are you just giving us a little taste of your next project? I'd love to see where you go with this!