Cerulean's Voice On The Matter #9 · 4:57am Mar 8th, 2015

You can blame Dash The Stampede for this new blog title.

So, I’ve submitted a story to the March mini-fic writeoff. I stayed up all night until 4am (who loves Australia?) when it opened, polished it, made it all pretty, and finally submitted it after a couple hours. Let’s see how it goes (I actually don’t think it’ll do as well as Crystal Legacy did, but time will tell).

A few more reviews today, including another one of those confusing tearjerker/heartwarmers. I’m in really good company lately.

Story: All the Mortal Remains

Author: Cold in Gardez

Synopsis:

Twilight Sparkle is a happy pony. With the help of her friends she defeated Tirek. She has a shiny new castle, the kingdom is safe, and she knows the reason behind her ascension. What more could a young princess want?
She is happy, she tells herself as she digs through the ruins of her home. She is so happy she can barely smell the ashes any more.
But in those ashes she finds something unexpected: a small porcelain vase, and with it a decade's worth of unspoken questions. A mystery hiding beneath her hooves, waiting to be put to rest.

Current Length: 9,035 words (one-shot)

Status: Complete

Review: So this is actually the first CiG story I’ve ever read. At this point, I have to wonder—why? This is writing at the highest caliber. Perfect amounts of detail are applied to just the right situations. Twilight and Spike act exactly how you would expect them to after such a disaster, without coming off as angsty and despairing for the sake of it. The fic is well paced, as each scene covers what it needs to and then moves on, without being overly zealous or descriptive. The mystery of the urn piqued my intrigue about a third of the way through, and it only deepened as I followed Twilight’s attempts to solve the mystery. There’s so many little tiny details in this story that really bring it to life. I mean, damn. Everypony has a different idea of what Page Turner was like, who he was, what he did for the town. The world-building is really quite superb, especially the scene with Fluttershy and the Manticore. And then we get to Pinkie Pie… I mean, there was a real “hand-to-mouth” moment there. Only one question really remains unanswered: who actually had Page Turner cremated? I’m leaning towards Pinkie, personally. Bloody brilliant story, and you can bet that I’ll be reading more CiG from now on.

Story: Cold Hearted

Author: Europa

Synopsis:

She is the last. All her kin are gone. They'd either been blown apart by the Friendship spell so many ages ago or, in the case of her sister, changed their diet from hate to love. Cryoxia is the last of the windigos, but she is determined to be different, to never go back to those days ever again.
She'll make friendship from hate. She'll adopt an alicorn foal as her sister. She'll take physical form and learn how to move the celestial orbs with her mind. Celestial... has a nice ring to it. And she'll ally with the other nations in the world, establish friendship and preach harmony, no matter how they may diminish her food source. She'll make a world so wonderful that it will starve her to death.
Or die trying.

Current Length: 11,936 words over 3 chapters, averaging 3,979 words per chapter

Status: Complete

Review: Start’s a little wobbly, but this is such an imaginative concept that I really don’t mind. I mean, how often do we read about windigoes from their point of view? Oh my, but the end of that first section gave me a shudder. Luna’s speech feels a bit strange; her archaic talk is not quite executed properly. I’m not feeling the way the author is trying to repeatedly emphasise the “Celestia is a windigo” thing with throwaway lines like remarking on how warm ponies are and how odd food feels sliding into one’s stomach. 2500 years have passed: she’d have stopped giving them any thought after months, much less two-and-a-half millennia. That said, I like how her struggle to fight her self-inflicted, ever-present hunger is depicted, but it also makes me wonder why ~~she never changed her diet to love like her younger sister, C(h)rys[t]alis~~ wait never mind that gets explained. I liked what I believe to be a subtle nod to the comics, specifically Friends Forever #9 with Granny Smith and the Flim Flam bros. It has its slips in grammar and suffers from a few other technical impurities, but it’s not a bad read and you have to give the author props for trying something original, particularly regarding Twilight and Discord’s gift to Celestia. If you’re a fan of Princess Celestia: the Changeling Queen, you might like this one, although I personally consider the longer one just that bit superior.

Just two today. More tomorrow, since, y’know, I don’t have work or anything else to do for another 50 hours… Oh, wait, I forgot about the writeoff. I guess I’ll have to do reviews of those minifics I get assigned as well.

Enjoy the last vestiges of your weekend, guys.

Adren