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Everlasting night is established with Nightmare Moon victorious. The newly crowned queen takes on a corrupted Twilight as her pupil. Yet amidst the darkness, a small spark of light comes to life. Will it be enough to vanquish the night?
(Thanks to the wonderful EverfreePony and Melodiac for helping me edit these chapters.)
(Also thanks to Clorox for drawing the cover art image.)
Sequel can be found here.
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There are things that I like here, but this definitely didn't make as good an impression as I think it could have. There's two red flags, I would say, pretty much right away.
The first one is the author's note. I'm probably more obnoxious about this than most people are going to be, but I'm quite reluctant to put one at the beginning of the first chapter. At this point, one way or another, you've convinced someone to give you some of their time and click on your story. The way I see it, giving them anything but the story right after that is an annoying distraction, doubly so when you do something like this and tell people to go and do some other thing. So unless the author's note is essential, and I don't think this one is, I'd suggest cutting it entirely or at least finding some other place for that information.
The other one is the first sentence.
This is a run-on sentence. I didn't see many others throughout this chapter, so I'm willing to believe it's accidental rather than ignorant, but still. Triple-check your first paragraph. They're short enough that you can and should strive for grammatical perfection.
Less of an issue, but also with this part of the first paragraph:
The phrasing here feels odd. I think there's a disconnect between foals running into the room and the room being full of bubbling energy. The language to describe the former isn't particularly evocative of the latter to me--running can be a bubbly, energetic thing, sure, but it can also not be that. So I'd probably want to expand on where that energy is coming from. Smiles or laughter or something like that would be quite an improvement, or even just elaborating on the foal's motions in a way that suggest more merriment would probably make for a more cohesive paragraph.
There's also two more systemic issues I had with the dialogue. One of them is the absence of contractions.
This is a really fast way to stop your dialogue from sounding natural. Which might be a good thing, in some contexts, but here it comes across to me as a mistake. Especially since everyone does it; if you wanted to use it for effect, it's diminished by being widespread. I didn't see any instances of it where I'd want to keep it.
Certainly not with the foals. It's tough to be certain since their exact age doesn't seem elaborated upon, but their dialogue in general I thought sounded a lot more articulate and erudite than I would expect children to be, and was often jarring as a result.
The other recurring issue I had was with the dialogue tags. Again, I'm probably more annoyed by these then most people are going to be, but I think this chapter illustrates how an aversion to "said" can be to the story's detriment.
So, here's the thing. When you use "said," or something similarly plain, that's a very neutral expression. So what you're doing is you're asking the reader to infer things. It's an unbiased way of presenting information and allowing people to draw their own conclusions. Here, you're telling people outright how this dialogue is meant to come across and what the speaker's motive is. But I think it's obvious from the dialogue that they're pleading. So I just think it's redundant and almost patronizing to spell it out explicitly like this.
And to add a counterexample where I think not using "said" does add something:
Nothing about the dialogue here is particularly evocative of a sigh. So the use of that word instead of "said" does do something useful, because it suggests a tone and rhythm that would otherwise be absent.
My last criticism is the names of the foals. They don't feel like pony names at all, and it's jarring to me. I expect it'll be a very small issue, since the framing device here makes me expect we're not going to see a lot of these foals, but it's still an issue I'd prefer removed.
All that aside, though, I actually liked this. I went into this without reading the description at all, and that last line definitely made me curious to see where this was going. And the dialogue once Velvet turned up, I like quite a lot. There's some nice details to help build up some anticipation, with how everyone talks about the story, and these lines in particular
I thought these were really sweet and endearing and suggested a lot of history very concisely. Good stuff.
To be blunt, I don't know that I'm likely to read much more. As I said, I actually did find the ending of this chapter a good enough hook that I'm interested, but my reading experience tends to suffer when I have to wait for updates, so this being currently incomplete is off-putting for me. But I hope you find some of this helpful.
10585469
First off thank you, most of the people I share this with simply say it’s nice but hold back on criticism. I have attempted to implement your suggestions, and will try to continue to make those changes in future chapters. As for it being incomplete, it actually is complete, but I am uploading 2 new chapters every week until everything is uploaded.
As for the names, I hadn’t thought too much on them, so they could easily be changed into something much more in-world friendly.
10585566
Oooh, good to know! Will keep an eye on it, then.
An interesting start; the introduction of Velvet helped draw a link to the rough timeline and the Canon show, or lack thereof of its similarities.
Perhaps a future note for your writing — consider slowing the pacing of the story down to allow the fear and anxiety to seep into the reader.
So, across the first two chapters, I see that you forget to give a line break when a new character was talking and you also missed an" here:
It's a bit early to tell anything else, So I just continue reading.
10869477
I have definitely been working on that for future chapters. However, since these were the first chapters of the the story that I had written, I did not know the ropes of good storytelling and simply rushed from one plot point to another without taking the time to actually paint the scene well.
11167822
I think my editor actually talked to me about that. I believe the general rule is that during speeches, you do not have to place the quote " at the end if you are going to continue with the same character speaking in the next paragraph. I believe a " only goes at the end of a character's monologue once they have finished speaking, signifying that someone else may speak again.
Well, this is probably the most we see from blue blood. But I'm rather curious as to how exactly the spell work again? Somehow, Shining armor knows his experiences but not his sisters name? I hope it gets touched on later a bit more.
And I'm not sure whether Nightmare moons creativity was a something very intended or something you stumbled upon and used at your advantage. But either way, I suppose a thousand year of moon living does that to you.
Why does everyone get a moon attachment when Zecora gets her name reversed. Is she black with white stripes or white with black stripes now?
Valgor seems to be a fun antagonist honestly. I hoped the hoof to hoof fight lasted a bit longer than that but I suppose we will be seeing more from him.
I would have enjoyed the first part with Rarity more if there was a bit more time given to make us think whether it's valgro or Sinning.
And, in this chapter, we mostly just talked to the team and the offer. Honestly, there could have been more with how they responded to shining armor or more drama for the to accept the offer. Just my personal preference.
And I suppose, the spell wipes the memory of the names but not anything else, which is... Interesting.