Valkyrie - A HeroScape Fan Fiction

[TGRF]

Thanks for the feedback!

Originally Posted by TheAverageFan

As usual your writing skills stand out to me: things like "the words tumbled out of her mouth" are so visual and strike me as things I myself would never come up with as a writer.

These just come naturally; they are likely an effect from having read so much. Read what you want to write, and you'll pick things up.

Originally Posted by TAF

There were a few things that bothered me: The fact that we never really see Runa interact with Ahnvad considering what he did to her. She really freaked out over the other guy who tortured her but every time Ahnvad shows up she's just already unconscious. Obviously they can't interact that much because she'd just melt his face but I'd have liked to have at least seen some POV from her regarding him at some point in the climax.

Now that I think on it, this makes perfect sense. If you have characters which interact, you should definitely show their reactions to that interaction, especially if they are PoV characters. I'll add that to my list of things to watch out for.

Originally Posted by TAF

And then there was Taelord enacting his plan once Runa tells him where the Wellspring is at, when to me it seemed that she was just saying whatever she could to keep him alive. She had no way of knowing what she said was true, and I assume most people would rule out her home's water because there was no indication that Utgar was a Valkyrie at that time. I guess it's part placebo?

That's one of those effects of the twists; I was trying to keep it hidden until the last possible moment, so the way it was revealed does make room for that reaction on Taelord's (and the reader's) part.

One of my fears when coming up with these twists is that I won't anticipate every way they could be seen or interpreted.

Originally Posted by TAF

The rules of the wellspring waters weren't particularly clear to me. How did Ahnvad seal it; how can he seal it when he doesn't really know where it is? How does he know that Utgar's powers would kill everyone in the cave? Has he seen a Lyr Valkyrie before?

Well it wasn't shown in the fiction (again, next story), but my idea of Ahnvad is that he has been obsessed with Wellsprings for years, and he's studied everything he can about them in his frenzied search to find one. A side effect of all that study is that he knows a lot about them, how to control them, and how the magic they grant works.

While developing, I realized that Ahnvad letting Runa go (even if she was powerless) was dead stupid. She could find the Wellspring and drink it before he got there. So I needed a way to ensure that couldn't happen. So the idea is that Ahnvad found an archkyrie spell which can connect to a Wellspring through the Valkyrie who has drunk of it, and by using that spell, he was able to lock it down. As he said in the climax, this spell dies with him. This is also how he knows Utgar would kill everyone in the cave; he's studied Valkyrie.

Originally Posted by TAF

And then like the first story this feels like the end of the first Act of a much larger story. Utgar is a villain: I wanna see how he becomes the chiefest of the evil Valkyrie in Heroscape. Tell me the story you tease ...Ok, those expectations are my own fault, but seeing these characters as heroes while the story is ongoing does make the reader occasionally reflect on Heroscape canon and go "I wonder how we get from here to there..."

Well, knowing you would be wondering that as you read, I put in things which were meant to indicate exactly how Utgar turns. Utgar has his primary character arc, but there's a whole second arc going on under the surface, meant to show how he's changing into the Valkyrie he will ultimately become. I won't explain more, just on the off chance that I write a sequel, but it's there. Watch the fighting scenes. That's where it is.

Originally Posted by TAF

Anyway it was an improvement over the first story by no small amount, and I was glad to have something Heroscape to read again. Maybe one day I'll actually write something Thank you for sharing.

~TAF, 7/10

So this was an improvement, but you gave it a 7 when you gave the original an 8? Say what?

~TGRF.