The poisonous influence of Allsherjargoði Jurva has been well known for quite some time now. He turned the Olenian church from the bedrock of society to insatiable mouth eager to consume everyone.
The changes he enacted have repulsed many former members from the church. Some chose to retire, some were chosen to be killed. One pure soul have taken up task of preserving the purity of the gods teachings, far far away from the watchful eye of Jurva.
For the time being, it seemed to be working. His little community shines like a beacon among the tides of darkness. His renown however just reached a pair of ears eagerly listening for any sound of hope, in this clamour of desperation.
And what can one mere deer do when history herself is knocking on his door?
Takes place in the EaW universe, written for the 2021 EaW write-off.
Special thanks to Dice from the EaW discord channel for pre-reading the story.
I really enjoyed this. I like how you characterized Velvet and Jaako, this is an incredibly well weaved story.
10753255
Well, thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
A curious read, good but not outstanding.
The concept is very interesting, but it deserves a larger framework to exist within. As it is, the story reads more like a slice of life than a drama because at the end the real conflict is left unresolved. Jurva is still in Hjortland. That is not to say it is bad, as truenorth mentioned, the characters are well-written, even if I feel Velvet was trying to be Vetinari and falling a little short (there are few indeed who could match the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, so no shame there either).
My one real complaint is the tensing, you kept skipping into present tense at random, especially in the middle. Also, Jaako turns female at one point on the very first line of the story: 'He woke up at sunrise, did her morning stretches'
Incidentally, I'd suggest bumping the rating up to teen, some of the stuff Velvet talks about toward the end is pretty grim.
10771545
Thanks for the review. Sorry for getting back at you so late, but life caught up with me.
A few notes:
The story actually exists in a larger framework it's part of planed but probably never finished (or started for that matter) epic about Johan of all deer. Since I couldn’t really come up with good story idea about the prompt I figured this was a pretty good scene to make it as a stand-alone entry for the contest.
But as I started to write it I ran into a number of problems which I had to resolve on the fly for the most part. One of which was of course that the characterisation that exists in EaW wouldn't really make it believable to have Johan come to end of the world just to recruit someone for his administration (a problem I would have solved in my theoretical novel) so I had to change him up with Velvet who is a much more caring person by default. I also had to shove in like pages of exposition about the religion that I could have explained in details much better during a longer book. Which was where the idea of having Velvet come in disguise came from, because then I had a character who needed to be introduced to the religion much like the reader. So in short it was a mess.
I think still managed to do some of the ideas some justice, I definitely liked what I did with the history and relationship of Jurva and Jaako, but overall, the pacing was off. Or more like it was cut off.
The reason I’d still call it more of a drama than a slice of life that there was a lot of drama within Jaako as he struggled with his decision. Or at least there was supposed to be if I was not confined by the wordcount, and the fact that I had to spend half of it on setting the whole talk in Jaako’s cabin up. But solving the Jurva crisis was never my intention, and I think I made that abundantly clear.
About the tense switches, my only defence is that in my native language every present perfect sentence would be translated into past tense, so when I want to use past tense I randomly mix these two up. The same goes for the gendered pronouns. We don’t have them (which makes American’s obsession with them all the more ridiculous) so I stumble up on them a lot. A lot less than I used to, but still I reliably make one or two mistakes every thousand or so words. Sometimes I can spot them, sometimes I can’t.
I’d suggest if you enjoyed this one, you read my other story, that one shows what I can do when I’m not crushed by the wordcount.
One last fun note: When I showed my original concept about Johan to one of my friends, he suggested that I should read up on the exact same character. Given that Velvet is basically a stand in for Johan in this story I’m pretty pleased I managed to make to completely different people think about the same character. To me that says I have a pretty clear and coherent picture about Johan I can effectively convey to others. As for him/her not living up to their famous counterpart… well while I don’t want to claim I’m as good of a writer as Mr Pratchett, Velvet by nature was a bad vessel to enact some of the more… intricate plans of Johan. But at least now I’m sure I should read up on Vetinari before I start my real story.
10787717
Thanks for taking the time for such a detailed reply!
Ah, much about the story becomes clear. Expansion of Olenian culture would be very interesting to see, I don't think anyone else has done a big Olenia fic before. As for the pronouns, interesting. Which language is that, if you don't mind my asking? I've not heard of that before somehow, though my knowledge of languages isn't exactly stellar, much to my shame (I'm British, btw).
Heh! That is indeed fun! Vetinari is a fascinating character, I highly recommend that course of action and potentially looking into some of the Watch books as well, since those generally give the most Vetinari page time and are generally excellent stories.
10788024
I'm Hungarian. And I don't think knowing about obscure European languages gets you anywhere, so unless you're planning to move here, (which unless you have a well paying job opportunity here I can't recommend.) it would be weirder if you knew anything about Hungarian.
10788762
Fascinating! That explains it then. I do wish the educational system here would cover more of the eastern parts of the EU, it's an unfortunate gap.
Interesting.
11274160
Well, thank you. I hope one day you'll share why you find it interesting :D