When an ancient magical mirror of unclear function is unexpectedly uncovered on the edges of the Dragon Lands, along with hints that it might be originally of griffon construction, Gallus joins a small party sent to retrieve the mirror and bring it back to Canterlot, hoping to find out more about what it has to do with his kind and why it was found so far from his homeland.
What he learns instead was that the mirror should've stayed buried.
An entry in "The Discovery" Young Six contest.
Chapters (1)
Good story. I like it.
I enjoyed it. Nice little 1/6th slice of things.
Meh
This story was clever in how it tied into those hints we see in the finale episode. I also liked how faithful the new world building (things like the magical spear, the portal mirror) is to the show. That said, I didn’t understand why griffons all forgot about the big baddy. He sounds like the kind of monster they’d brag about beating. That didn’t distract me from the story, though, and it was a fun, adventurous read.
One last thing: between the fiery hellscape, the demonic voice, and Gallus blasting away magma-infused golems, I got some serious Doom vibes reading this story. So I “made” some “”fan”” “””””art””””” for everyone to
sufferenjoy.i.postimg.cc/W4XXt14y/End-Realm.png
10033082
Personally, I actually kept thinking of Half-Life the whole time I was writing the thing, so much so I was making a very concentrated effort to try and make it at least visually different, in terms of setting and such.
A fair point. My thinking as to why it was forgotten was just A: it'd been a really long time since that had gone down, and since then the Griffon Kingdom had sort of gone really downhill and weren't big on maintaining their records (I mean, you saw the state their library was in, right?) so eventually it faded from memory and B: Cherufe was a seriously bad enough of a baddie that they were left spooked enough afterwards that they deliberately buried the tale so nobody would know about it, and if nobody knew about it, then everybody would be far less likely to try and do anything that might let him come back.
I probably would've gone into more detail about points like this in the story if I didn't have a set word limit to adhere to for the contest.
Hey there! Thank you so much for entering The Discovery contest and for requesting a review! I’m Bachi, and I was the judge assigned to your story.
Let me start off by saying that this story stood out from a lot of other entries in the contest simply because of how ambitious it is. We get a lot of huge, cool ideas, and I’m always down for big double-helpings of worldbuilding and adventure. It’s also really neat that you tie everything back to the idea of explaining why Gallus joined the guard, so kudos for that!
Now, I think the way to take this story up a notch would be to focus a bit more on how you want your prose and your perspective to read. It was a good choice to make Gallus your perspective character, and I think it’d be a great idea for the story to really double-down on his viewpoint. Right now, the narration is mostly high-level stuff that’s more concerned with what’s happening rather than how Gallus feels about it. Which, of course, helps you explain all of the complicated ideas that you’re delivering, but this kind of prose also has a tendency to feel clinical or detached sometimes. I think this story sometimes struggles with translating its high stakes into emotional stakes, so maybe making Gallus’s feelings bleed a little bit more clearly into the text might help with that.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that it’s important to keep in mind your reader’s energy level throughout your story. This story really does crank the tension up to 11 pretty quickly, and keeps it there for most of the story. It’s fun, of course, but it can also feel exhausting if you don’t offer some kind of relief now and again in one form or another.
Both of these aspects of the story make it just a little harder for the piece to resonate as emotionally as it might be able to. I think you’ve done a great job at sorting out the logistics of your ideas and handling how you convey information to the reader, which is essential for this kind of action-adventure setpiece fic to work. The whole goal of any story (at least, in my humble opinion) is to make the reader feel something, so I hope it makes sense that I put a lot of focus on how this piece handles its emotions.
Thank you again for submitting to the contest! Please feel free to reply or PM me if you have any questions. I really hope you found this review helpful!
-B.
10156148
I'd like to think that, were I not writing on a word limit and had no need to fear potentially going over that, I would've done precisely some of these things. Honestly, the story was probably always longer than the fic ultimately ended up being, and probably would've only benefited had it been allowed to expand as such. But then that's exactly why I wrote it--I wanted to challenge myself, see if I could achieve that same thing but within the needed word limit.
All good points.
Points for me for me to consider for the future should I try something like this again, then.