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Originally Posted by TheAverageFan
How is Ahnvad a better villain in this than in the story where he's the actual living main antagonist? In Valkyrie he was just kind of some bad guy. This is making a lot of content-of-interest out of relatively little which is certainly efficient.
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It's probably because he's connected to the protagonist on a personal level, and actually feels far more dangerous because he's literally still winning from the grave. Neither of which happened in the prequel - he was indeed just some random bad guy. At least as far as the story revealed.
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Geren kind of shows up to chat for a bit and then dies shortly thereafter. I'd have thought Runa helping him earlier might've had more payoff but you can't win them all I assume.
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My initial instinct with Geren was that he would change and come over to Runa's side completely, at least in terms of thinking if not actions. But I've noticed that people in my stories (at least the unimportant side characters) seem to make decisions or change their minds too quickly, changing shape to fit the needs of the story. I tried to make Geren more realistic - perhaps understanding Runa and feeling sorry for her, but not changing his mind after he's been hunting people literally his entire life.
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I don't know how Taelord hadn't seen crossbows before though: surely some of Anvahd's troops had them in the Volcarren...?
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Ehh... yeah fair point. That's an oversight. Especially given that he was at Srung so frequently, and definitely spent some of that time in the armory...
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Ch. 30: I was surprised to learn that Jandar really did take the wellspring water, when I had assumed that Vydar or Einar would've been the ones to do it in some effort to contrive the circumstances to become Valkyries themselves
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Going into this, I knew that Jandar would have to end up a Valkyrie, because only a Valkyrie can open a Wellspring. If the Empire never had a Valkyrie, Utgar would just destroy them. Exactly how it all played out did take some while to wrangle into shape, and at one point I considered Einar playing a part with some elaborate deception involving stealing Wellspring water. Eventually the only thing that made sense for all parties involved was the way it ultimately turned out.
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The story kind of comes to a quick collapsing close here. It really reads a lot like the ending of Dilmir 3, except for that we had the assurances of a sequel already whereas this might be the last we see of this world. Because of that it doesn't quite land as well to me, with the characters mostly shrugging and saying "Well we should have hope, even if there seems to be no reason to have any right now, 'cause why not you always gotta have hope."
It feels like an attempt to have a happy ending, but it doesn't quite work. This got a lot bloodier than I was expecting and we all know it only gets worse once the war of the valkyrie starts proper—I don't quite see the hope they're going on about. Ilrin had her own little arc leaving her with cause to hope in Dilmir 3; Runa and Taelord can't say the same here 
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Well that's kind of the point: there is no reason to hope. Taelord chose to hope anyway, realizing that without it, there really is nothing. Just a 'Dawn of Darkness' like Runa said. You might as well be like Fera, and live every day like it could be your last.
The entire story is built (loosely, I'll admit) around getting Taelord to stop relying on evidence for hope. So that at the end, when there truly is no reason for hope, he can keep going anyway. Because without it, there's just... nothing.
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I'm surprised Utgar didn't give wellspring water to Vydar and Einar to help counteract the coming war against the Empire's valkyrie.
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I'm actually surprised you would say this. Hasn't Utgar demonstrated enough just how little he trusts people? He already has Jandar on his hands; in his eyes, more Valkyrie would create more potential enemies, not allies.
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This Epilogue is a satisfying conclusion for showing the end result of what the disaster of war (and the poor decisions that led to it) would ultimately bring to Valhalla, but it's like an entire third entry waiting to be that you're summarizing here. I'd read this in spread out book form: it's just another step in getting us from Valkyrie Utgar to Heroscape Utgar and it sounds interesting. This Epilogue could be a third entry with relative ease.
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That third entry was originally the second half of the story. It got cut for two reasons: Firstly, it didn't serve the story. It was 'history', my idea of how the opening of the war went, and not actually relevant to the story. Not a lot happened during that part in terms of character or even plot. It was just people going from place to place, fighting battles, Utgar steadily going downhill and Taelord kind of just shaking his head at it all.
The second reason was because as I fleshed out the first half, which was originally spent in Taeleron, everything started to escalate towards the coming war. And then at the middle, when that happened... all the tension was gone. The thing the story had been building up to happened, but then the story just kept going, and it felt flat as a result.
For these reasons, I cut the 'campaign'.
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I'm going to give this one a 9, perhaps closer to an 8.5
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I initially really liked the story when I realized I had to cut that second half, thinking that the first half would be way better for it, with lots of edge-of-the-seat reading as the tension mounted. That seemed to lessen somehow as I wrote it, and by the time I was finished, I was sure I was looking at a solid 7. So I'm very surprised - but pleased - by a 9.
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I'd be genuinely curious to know how much of this story percent-wise is just Taelord or G'shar talking to him about not joining the Rebels. It's mostly the characters wasting their breath in vain, and is probably the reason why I wasn't too upset when he got killed in the end.
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Just under 5% of the outline, counting every instance of Rehs supporting the rebellion and/or someone questioning it. Which kind of sounds like a lot, but actually only equates to about 7.4 pages out of a 147 page story.
As always, it's interesting to see what stuck out to you versus what stuck out to me. I focused more on individual words - like 'Laborers' and 'Workers' and 'Mother' and things I thought were there over and over, and which I subsequently worked on a lot. But what you actually noticed as repetitive seems to be elements which don't change as the story progresses, like attitudes and points of view.