old p:f // Wolves in the Dark (abridged)

[ASGetty ((Zovo))]

This sounds like the kid of post to elaborate on and put in the Methodology thread!

And who is "we?" I didn't realize this was a joint effort.

[Kaez]

May 26, 2010 19:48:48 GMT -5 ASGetty ((Zovo)) said:

This sounds like the kid of post to elaborate on and put in the Methodology thread!

And who is "we?" I didn't realize this was a joint effort.

Oh... well, yes, I'll elaborate in that thread and explain.

[James]

May 26, 2010 19:48:48 GMT -5 ASGetty ((Zovo)) said:

And who is "we?" I didn't realize this was a joint effort.

Hello there!

[Kaez]

SO HEY YOU GUYS.

Looks like I lied.

Wolves might well be finished after all. Well, kind of. Sort of. I'm rewriting it. The whole thing -- not a single word will remain the same. It's going to be in a new setting with new characters and a much deeper, more complex, more realistic world. This is basically, as per my current vision, like looking at Eragon and saying, "Okay, that was the rough draft for Star Wars". The final product here is going to be -very- different, but the basic plot is going to remain quite similar.

Which means... I could really use as much information as I possibly could in regards to what, plot-wise, worked here and what didn't. What seems interesting and what just wasn't interesting. High points and low points, etc.

So... if any of you lovely people find yourself bored over the next few days? ... Input would be -amazing-. I'm really aiming for publishing, on this new one, so... consider it an important step to getting your name on the 'people to thank' page of what might one day be a real, live novel? XD

[theredbaron]

((

Given your capriciousness, I kind of doubt this will be anymore than a good way to vent creative energies.

I kid, I kid. I shall help you in your endavors. I just have to read it first. . .

))

[Kaez]

Jul 22, 2010 21:24:00 GMT -5 @theredbaron said:

((

Given your capriciousness, I kind of doubt this will be anymore than a good way to vent creative energies.

I kid, I kid. I shall help you in your endavors. I just have to read it first. . .

))

I physically narrowed my eyes. That was my body's response.

[theredbaron]

I specialize in being a little shit.

*bows*

[Kaez]

Thanks to the spectacular kindness of Agro, Schro, and Zovo -- I've gotten what I need. Spent about four hours this morning reorganizing and adapting an outline for an updated version of Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 have some work needed, but basically, I'm half-way through with the outline.

Which means, if all goes according to plan, re-writing (and, well, -writing-) of this might start come.... Sunday? Somewhere around there.

:]


EDIT: Finished the whole outline, actually! Kind of! Sort of! I left the last few chapters up for grabs. I can't really choose a fitting ending until I go through the whole process of writing it all. Logically.

[theredbaron]

Awesome. I just finished reading it.

I'd review it, but it seems like the people you mentioned above already did, and there's not much I could say that they probably haven't already said, and said better.

Good luck with the new version. Hope your outlining doesn't implode and release a warp rift that leads to Tzeetch's Impossible Foretress.

[Kaez]

Jul 24, 2010 0:22:41 GMT -5 @theredbaron said:

Awesome. I just finished reading it.

I'd review it, but it seems like the people you mentioned above already did, and there's not much I could say that they probably haven't already said, and said better.

Good luck with the new version. Hope your outlining doesn't implode and release a warp rift that leads to Tzeetch's Impossible Foretress.

UHM ACTUALLY WAIT.

...

If you're not busy, I'd still love input? Reviewing is great on the off chance they missed something. I was basically just saying that so nobody considered this a top priority.

[Kaez]

Rewriting has officially begun. Chapters 1 and 2 were rewritten, and so chapters 1 and 2 are both down. I'm going to be slowly taking every chapter down so that reading this now is... basically impossible. But I'm doing it this way because it's a practical means for me, so... piss off.

:][:

[Kaez]

First eleven chapters = fully edited. Moving along nicely.

ALSO: I've got an idea for a prologue. What do you lot think of it?

Seven years prior.


The looks on their faces made him nervous. Mærin Ysguld could see it plain as day in the man’s paranoid eyes. His fingers were red from the excessive clenching of his fists and his jaw trembled. He blinked constantly, those beady blue eyes darting about in every direction. Sweat glistened off of his neck and he chewed relentlessly on his bottom lip. This was not, like many of the time, a man who feared for the collapse of the economy or for the decline of the empire. He feared desperately for his own life.

Ysguld contemplated granting the frightened man some sense of comfort in these, the last moments of his life. To say to him in a compassionate tone, ‘there will be peace before long’. After all, that was not a complete lie. The Prophet said that any man who lived a free life had earned comfort in death, and would find just that. The young slavemaster enjoyed the thought. He could think of no reason why the scared and sweating fellow did not deserve such a comfort.

In fact, Ysguld did not know anything about his soon-to-be victim at all. Each night the man walked into the watchtower and each morning he walked out. That was the extent of his existence in Ysguld’s mind. But of course, there was more. He knew he had kin, and that they likely loved him – perhaps a wife, and children. Like all of those who fall victim to the sin of war, he had much to live for. But oh, Mærin thought, how he had so much more to die for.

Did the tower guard know? He wondered. Could he possibly have? Did he know that as his body fell limply to the floor, the heavenly uprising would begin? Did he know that as the blood seeped from the wound through his corpse that no call for help would be signaled, that in the end, his death would mark the beginning of the grandest turmoil in centuries? That it would mark the beginning of glory and power for the God-appointed Mærin Ysguld?

Perhaps in death, he would be so blessed as to look on at the scene that unfolded. With tears upon his eyes, he might watch as the youthful slavemaster of the Northern Reaches took up arms alongside his own slaves and with their Prophet as they sought their destiny. He might watch as the manors burned and as the hideous souls inside them were torn flesh from bone. Deep inside of him, he might know then, that he died for purpose. That he died in the cause of freedom, justice, and in the name of God.

After all, it had been the Holy Prophet himself, chosen by their Maker to carry the slaves into their deserved freedom, who had tasked Ysguld with this duty. The icon of faith sat there in the filth of the fields not one hour ago, a chain wrapped taught around his ankle, his eyes illuminated with some beautiful essence, like beams of sunlight breaking through a canopy of trees. “Go, Mærin,” spoke the slave-prophet to his bowing owner. “God has shown me that you will be the one to birth our almighty conquest. Take up your blade and make it so.”

He would do as he was told. Ysguld stood on firm legs. He had expected that his arms might shake, but they were steady. He had expected that his heart might pound in his chest, but he was calm. The graze of sword against its hilt was muffled to his victim by whatever words he spoke – the slavemaster did not hear them. The last words spoken before their heavenly transcendence would be forever forgotten.

But never in his life would he forget the feeling of holding the sword at his side. The thin blade seemed such a fragile thing. His eyes followed the path he walked, and remained there on the tower guard’s back. The shirt he wore was of a thin, off-white fabric. Ysguld remembered it for the contrast of the deep, crimson blood which would come to grace it. Within two steps, he stood behind him, close enough to hear his heavy breathing. He stood so closely that just as he drew the blade back, he noticed the man’s head turning but a hair’s width to the side.

He had turned to look behind him. And at the moment, the would-be Commander of the Rebel Forces knew that he was killing a man who was well aware that he was being killed. As the resistance failed and the cold metal encroached the fragile body of an unfortunate soul whose name he would never know, some other existence, some sentience entirely separate from his own, knew what it meant to die at Ysguld’s hands.

The blade withdrew and, inanimate, the body simply collapsed. It fell straight back, the skull cracking against the floor with a loud smack. It lay there at Ysguld’s side, eyes staring wide at the ceiling, a gaping wound in the center of its gut, a thin puddle of its insides expanding out. He loomed over it for what might have been hours, watching as the man’s flesh grew continually paler, his lips turned to some sickly shade, and as the stench of exposed organs filled his lungs. The spilled blood swamped over the floor.

The most likely outcome, he and the Prophet had discussed, would be that these northern towers would become markers of the border between slavemongering Rosia to the south and the new, free state to the North. What better baptism of the battle-lines than this? The necessary and vengeful blood that would be spilt this day would mark the first of a long tradition of lives cut short for their cause. The tower guard’s was the first of tens of thousands of deaths that the war would see. The first of millions of lives irreversibly changed in both the present and the future, had been ended. A path had been chosen, and a thousand others were permanently terminated. This was their journey now, and there would be no turning back.

In time, Mærin Ysguld would walk out into the evening, as the crippled sun dragged over the cold fields. Five hundred slaves would turn to him: men, women, and children alike, and as he solemnly hoisted the blood-stained blade high into the bitter air. They would know that the chains they wore were impermanent things, and that soon enough, this all would pass, and they would turn to freedom. Then men amongst them knew as well that they would soon lay down their lives for this cause. And they roared with a primal joy.

Somewhere deep within that smiling crowd stood two sixteen year old boys, still fresh with grief over their father’s death: Venneth and Wilam Flecter. In the years to come, the pair would fight side by side in two dozen conflicts, earning battle scars and growing up all too quickly as they strived for their freedom. By the time that young Wilam Flecter would be personally called upon by Commander Ysguld to hunt a traitor of their rebellion, his brother, Venneth, would be dead – shot through the chest by a Rosian archer. Wilam would not even have the opportunity to seek his revenge.

The traitor whom the commander would find so problematic as to call upon Wilam’s aid not a week after his brother’s untimely death was, on this autumn day that marked the birth of their rebellion, still behind the cold steel bars of a prison cell. He looked through the metal barriers and out into the eventide sky, layered with cloudy ribbons of pink and gold, and longed for a day when he might yet again roam the open countryside.

Neither knew where their journeys would take them. War, it would seem, has a way of changing people.

[Kaez]

The entirety of Part 1 has been editted! 31,800 words.

W00t? :]

[tamwyn]

So I put this on the review thread, like you asked. But you said you took down chapters...and I am confused.

[Kaez]

Jul 26, 2010 15:37:14 GMT -5 @tamwyn said:

So I put this on the review thread, like you asked. But you said you took down chapters...and I am confused.

Yes, well...

... decisions were made hastily. So, uh... you can feel free to take it out. >.<