Its strange... to lay here with you, my daughter. Yes Midnight, I call you such, though not of clan nor blood, you are as my own. There is a question on your lips... it suits you ill to leave any query unasked, no matter the hurt or trouble it causes you.
You fear me? Why? Child, I cannot speak as to my heart if I do not know what might be abouts, so I may be angry, or sad, or...
I see... a bargain it is then? So be it... state your terms. You will speak in full... and ask in exchange I do the same. I don't understand. I have ever sought too be true in all things with you and your mother, so...
Ah, you mean my ways. You are not my only unicorn kin to take me to task on it... I should see your hide's tanned thinking to tell me anything you barely weened pups just out of den can say fuck all to my long toothed tail.
But so be it. Sit, drink. We will speak then of many things, and begin with a vexed filly taking offense at my countenance.
Ok, just to clear something up... This is going to get a bit... complicated. This story focused on three characters over three arcs and a final chapter where Midnight tells the story of the Crown itself to her grandfilly's.
It will feature three or four chapters to a Pegasus named Rose, a gryphon named Virgil, and finally one or two on Hurricane himself.
If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?
That should be "This was perhaps the first time..." It kinda looks like you started on one sentence and then changed your mind in the middle of it. ("Those were perhaps the first words..." Something like that.)
Also, I get that you're doing an In Medias Res sort of thing, but in this case your Medias is perhaps a bit too In Res. Is that first sentence intended to refer to the chapter title? If so, perhaps it could have been a bit clearer. Granted, so could a lot of things here, but more on that later.
You seem to have a bit of a tendency for run-on sentences and using a lot of commas. Given the first person perspective I'm willing to assume that may be peculiarity of your narrator, but even so it often gets problematic when it comes to actually reading this. A particularly noteworthy example:
This sentence is so fractured, I literally can't tell what the character is saying.
I'd say my biggest issue here is the severe lack of context. You focus very heavily on your narrator's thoughts while completely ignoring the location and situation. As such I find myself faced with an extended droning soliloquy where I have no idea who this individual is or what exactly he/she is going on about. My eyes started glazing over around the middle part since I just didn't have the context necessary to interpret it in a meaningful way. I mean, I can glean some of it from subtext, but not enough to make adequate sense of it, much less keep my attention.
It doesn't help that the language here is exceptionally purple, strangely structured almost to the point of stream of consciousness, and occasionally shifts from narration to what appears to be half of a dialogue with an unheard party. Honestly, it's more like reading some sort of blank verse poetry without a meter rather than a story. The result is immensely confusing and... I guess you must have meant it to be? I honestly can't see any other reason you'd write it this way.
Regardless, I find it very inaccessible. Not bad, exactly. Just very, very hard to get into. You clearly have a way with words, but you also aren't really using them to guide me through a comprehensible narrative.
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....It's going to get complicated?
See, if this is stuff you have to explain outside of the story, that's not really a good sign.
Needing to read a different story to get this one is also Not A Good Sign.
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It should of note I sort of did the first chapter bag of Vicodin style... Sorry, I may have flubbed the whole thing
But no, you don't have to read Lunar Rebellion to get this one. I think I'm going to do a fairly decent job explaining the clans, politics, so on and so forth as is. That was more a plug then anything. While it is set in the same verse, its another era (in short, you can appreciate this for its own thing, I pray and hope and dream
)
As for the rest... Thank you, oh God, thank you! This is the sort of helpful criticism I want, and by your accounts, need! You've earned a follower, good sir or madam!
Interesting way to format your story description; is it in verse? The writing style is nice but the meaning of the words are somewhat unclear.
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Very ambitious, keep it up!
Capitalization should be "I like Grumpy Shadow Better".
Also, writing is thick and verbose, makes it kinda hard for the reader to grasp the main details. A lot of run on sentences in this one that are hard to follow:
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Will do, thanks for the comment!
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Done! And thank you for the assist.
And, yes, in the Era they're in, they lean heavily on the olde time stuff. I expand on that more here
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/803573/in-regards-to-dialect
but the subsequent will be somewhat easier to read. Sorry about that
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If you enjoyed this, then please, do read Chengar Quordath's source material The Lunar Rebellion