Review of " L5Hounds The Herald of Ash 2ndish draft. "

The Herald of Ash

Chapter 1

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So first things first, I am going to examine the name of the short story/chapter book and do some thinking about what it could be about, first impressions type stuff.

"priestess seeking vengeance for a dead woman in a strange and fucked up land/"

Okay, so already I know you took this writing really seriously, but considering it's just a second draft, I think It's going to need to be like a fourth or fifth draft. Seriously, people who make millions of dollars have editors, and the editor will straight up cut out like 20% of the book or more, because it doesn't fit, etc etc. That is what editing it, it's not just grammar or spelling.

I'm going to assume for now, that the MC is this "Herald", like a messenger or bannercarrier, for an "Ash" who I presume is this dead woman. Having been told someone is dead, there is vengeance, and the land is "fucked up" I am assuming horror or dark fantasy is the "genre". I've put reading this thing off about two hours, because reading stuff is an emotional journey, reviewing or examining it doubles the exposure, and if it's horror or dark, it makes it a lot rougher. It's kinda like someone just started playing the sadess fucking music ever when you're in the middle of something and then you cry for like an hour or something. Yeah...
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Evening, with its gossamer and twilit fingertips, had slid along the edge of the horizon, inching its way across hills and plateaus red with clay and the blood of bygone eras. Sunlight glinted and shifted, refracting through unnatural particulates affixed within the air. The earth went the color of blood to purple with the passing into night, with shining remains of forgotten epochs jutting out from the sand. Vegetation lined various spots upon cliffs, hills, and roads, withstanding the darkening of the day with their defiant hues of whites, greens, and brilliant blues.

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So my software tells ,me this is 9 minutes of reading, is 2K words, and is a 12th grade level at most. Already, I can see the 12th grade part, with the usage of gossamer and "twili" as meaning "lit by twilight". I think I learned what gossamer meaned like five years ago, and I've never seen it written down since then. It's a really metaphorical and complex word here, so I've having to look it up again and think about it.

Overall, I imagine that lots of people get chills or a "Description boner" from this, but I don't have a minds eye, so this is like watching porn after you've had sex like six times. I'm not getting anything out of this.

I have no idea if this is beautiful and intelligent, and poetic...actually, I'm going to pass this paragraph to someone else.
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This land was old, so old that the past was no longer chronicled for the sheer vastness of its volume and for fear of realizing how much had been lost. Countless cultures have risen and fallen, the land having been molded in as many ways before its present state of beautiful ruin. Signs of chthonic wonders and the detritus of ages past need only be noticed with nary more than a wandering eye.

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My software, grammerly thinks "chthonic" isn't a word, I had to Google it. I had to look up "detritus" as well.

Overall, I think this is a much more interesting paragraph to me. Like this description could work now, only we have books, the internet, and historians.

I used to have a college reading level in like 10th grade, so the fact I don't know those two words likely might be a bad thing...for like you or whatever. I might be wrong, but I think there are a dozen other words people would know, that could be used instead maybe? Maybe something like "Wonders built for those who are now nameless, and the erosion of ages past" (I know it doesn't give the same description, I'm just showing there are ways to use slightly more known words).

Overall, I think this is a tone I've seen in like many fantasy settings before some empire falls or long after civilization had fallen...Maybe like a post Bronze Age Collapse period, or like D&D where all the good gear is in ruins.
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All of this was beheld by a woman hitching a ride on a wagon, letting the winds between worlds guide her. It was a large wagon, heaped with scrap metal and alien electronics, ambling along an ancient road, on a path paved less with tar than the crushed remains of the past. The beast that hauled the wagon forward may have once resembled a horse or hound. However, eons of genetic manipulation, mutation, and untended adaptation had molded the creature into something that spat in the face of biology and common sense.
The beast carried on, a small forest of bone and vegetation thriving on its back, supported by 4 wiry legs, and a boy maintained its steady pace with a snap of the reins. Though unfamiliar to this land, the woman could tell that the boy was pressed into manhood too early by several seasons, that his world scarcely permitted long childhoods. Like the wagon he rode on, the boy looked sun-beaten and had far too many things tied on. He wore rediscovered wonders and patched materials, countless charms that hung from his neck and arms, even symbols tattooed into his flesh.  The woman sat behind him, sitting in the shade and silence of the wagon as it rolled down the road, seeing all the things she remembered, yet never witnessed.

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These two paragraphs were humping each other, might need to space them.

Andddd the setting is post apocalyptic, and I have no idea how advanced it was when it all fell apart. Considering the situation, either the world is nowhere close to recovering and it's been at least a 50 years, or this is the third world, and things were kinda bad before the fall anyways. How far down can Haiti fall anyways?

I like the use of language in these paragraphs, it's words I understand, but feel smart for knowing. I like "Ambling" a lot.
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“So I says to ‘em, ’this is a good haul, yeh dirty goatfucker, you ain’t gettin’ outta givin’ me my proper share a’ this,” the woman heard him. She understood him to be a scavenger, an apparent rarity since the relics of this world claimed lives as often as gift them. The boy was waiting for her response, curious of the person he encountered earlier in the day along the roads he traveled. He remembered the old scav tales. Even if you’re filled with loot, a stranger shows up in the wastes, clothed in ways stranger still, you make room, share food, and give them a lift. Such were the ways of his kin and himself, since heeding them had saved his life many times over. The woman was certain she knew the person that created this story.

“I’m still listening,” she said, her tone cordial. The boy could see no expression on her face, mostly because there was no face for him to see, hidden behind a hood that hung low upon her. The boy told more of the deal between him and the dealer of whom he accused of lusting after livestock, of how he made out with more in the trade by dint of his negotiating skills and the audacity of his countenance.

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Okay, so I was on board for audacity, but I don't know what countenance means.... Couldn't you have used "Features" or "Profile"?

Overall, I think the use of um...? Writing like Mark Twain, trying to get across the accent, works well.

I have no idea what person this is in, because it seems like it's mean to be based around the hooded female....but like it keeps being all like "Oh this guy thinks this, and he does it for this reason, and I the narrator am God, so I know the whole culture, etc etc." Is this third person? Second?

Maybe a little of "She could peer into him and see" or "She had heard his people believed," etc etc. How can she see his face if he can't see hers?

Oh and I heard back from one person, seems your "Description Porn" would work for some people. I'll let you know what anyone else thinks. Maybe it's done really well, idk
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The woman wore a hooded robe, black as a smoke-filled night, with strips of white cloth sewn on in such a way that they trailed down her shoulders and along her arms as well. From seeing her bare hands and feet, the boy could tell that her skin was darkened to a shade he never thought possible. She wore no shoes, yet there were no signs of burns or roughness of one who travels the desert in such a manner. Her weapon was laid low to the floor and obscured by the shadows in the wagon.

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I think the description of how dark it is works really well. I kinda wonder if like...is her cloak "vantablack" or "Black 2.0" or whatever? Is it so dark you can't tell if it's folded or wrinkled?
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“Even then,” he said, looking past the bone-branches of his pack-beast, “found somethin’ one time. Digged and busted through felt like twenty floors down, but felt somethin’ you know, like that feelin’ in th’ back your brain-box, tingly-like, the feeling that said somethin’s there to be found,” he said, checking around him as though enemies were hiding in the sand to hear all of his secrets.
“Like a cold freezer, got that deep. Found a drink, cases a’ shit that glowed. Had a thing from an earlier haul, told you what somethin’ does if it gets a taste. Big Medicine, it said, the kind stuff ‘a knock’s out plagues and unkinks crippled legs n’ shit.” He looked away, considering more aspects of that particular haul and what would be worthy of telling. “Looked at it, thought this was too big an’ like the bad bone-rattlin’s ah wise men to make some coin or scrip off a miracle, you know?”

“Unfucked a lot of lives, it did” he continued. “Givin’ it out, no-strings like, to the gimped an’ dyin’. If the next find takes me, I know I got somethin’ good out before I got got, like I did something, you know?”

“I know, and you did,” the woman chimed. She saw what those few words did for the boy, and chose not to add, thinking they would lessen the first batch.

“So what brought you here, miss.” He asked, trying to pass the time for what was going to be a long while to the nearest station. “I mean, you don’t look like yeh came to get in on a th’ high-risk-high-coin business I got myse-,”

“Stop the wagon,” she said, her eyes fixed to a spot in the desert where the boy saw nothing.

“Wait, what you mean sto-“

“Stop the fucking wagon,” the woman commanded, reaching for her weapon, preparing to jump from the carriage.

The boy remembered the scav tales, and reined in the beast, slowing its pace.

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Okay yeah, this has to be considerably into the future, though I am wondering how the person in question could read.... I have to kinda think about what I am reading to understand it, but that is dialects for you.
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Before the wagon stopped, the woman leapt from the metal lip of the cart, and began moving with her weapon in a ceremonial rigidity she was taught as a girl. It was a long bladed thing, an ornate mix of shovel, pick, and pendulum blade. Along its sides and lining its edges were arcane sigils, holy and metaphysical designs woven into the metal, glowing in such a way that it resembled strings that formed into a curved sliver of moonlight. For her, this was as much a symbol of her status that gave safe passage among certain circles as it was a weapon.

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I have no idea what this weapon looks like, it's described in a way my mind gives up.
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The scavenger could see something in the afterglow of the setting sun, something that the woman approached. It went against many tenets of survival in his trade, but the boy reined in the pack beast, and tried to follow the woman along her footsteps for fear of straying away into some ancient and forgotten trap.

The boy felt that the walk was going on forever, yet when he saw what caused her to leap from the wagon, he got out of his carriage out of respect.

The woman in black was kneeling before a corpse, or at least what remained of one. Desiccated and barely extant after an unknown time of scouring in the desert, she could see that pieces of the body were strewn about and placed in a ritualistic manner throughout the area.

The boy was standing there, trying to make sense of what the desert had been trying to erase.

“Esah,” the woman said out loud, not looking away from her ministrations to the remains.

“What,” the boy asked, dazed.

“My name. It’s Esah. You asked earlier, when we met on the road,” she said, gathering the parts of the body.

“That short for something,” he said, a distant look on his face.

“Yeah,” she said, rising and walking toward the boy.

“What?”

“Something longer.”

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"Ministrations" was a word that was so on the line, I had to look up what it meant because I couldn't tell if I remembered correctly. Despite this, I think the word works well.

So far I am liking the tension and how the conversations are working. Reviewing, even if poorly, is kinda work, and it makes this easier.
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Esah looked around, far out into the desert as a wind picked up, looking for any sign of where the killers went. The boy saw what was under the hood the woman wore as the wind hit, yet this gave no comfort. She wore a mask, a polished black face of stone, with two oval holes for eyes, and two holes underneath a sculpted and abstracted nose for breathing. The mask seemed more an idealization than a copy of any particular face. There were two broad streaks of white that ran down the face from the eyes, as though they were twin streams of tears.

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This is  a very good description of something interesting to read about. Already I am lead to believe there is a lot to this person, and letting it go on this long without telling me anything is interesting.

I wonder if the full name is biblical or something, maybe Persian.
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“Could it have been an animal, or some waste-busted folk that took to man-eating?”
Esah looked at the boy through her mask, “You hear of animals making shrines out of their kills? You hear of man-eaters being good enough with knives to make clean cuts and scrapings and not just chop the bones up to get to the marrow?”
“I’d heard ah’ folks doin’ man-hunting in places,” he said, dazed.

”No more’n stories I always figured.”

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These lines were humping again
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Esah stood in the breeze, looking back at the boy, the strips of white cloth about her fluttering as though she were some sun-blasted bird managing a body of unkempt feathers. She began to dig a hole with her weapon.

“I don’t think I ever asked you your name,” Esah asked as she worked.

“Vakker”, the boy said, his mind dazed and adrift and not wanting to be there.

“Vakker,” she said. “How much have you traveled, done and seen.”

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You forgot a , in the last line. Your description here is good and the word choice is understood, elegant.
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Vakker looked at Esah, realizing that she was actually taller than him by a fair amount as he saw her work, the hood she wore lined up with those white strips of cloth to give the illusion that she had a longer neck than what was normal.

“I’ve done a share, more’n most I suspect.” He said.

“I been to the Screaming Trees to the west, heard the Whispering Vaults cut huge into the mountains to the north, an’ th’ Clotted Marshes to the southeast.”

“Yet you’ve always had your share of sights here,” Esah said, pointing to the ground, “Such that you neglect what could be from out there,” now pointing to the sky.

Vakker looked at the woman, but now saw her as far stranger than when he began his trip with her.

“You ain’t just from some faraway side of the sand, ain’t you?”

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I just realized he doesn't have "are" in hid dialect at all.
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Esah stopped her digging for a moment. She put her hand on Vakker’s shoulder, and kept her other hand aloft, twirling her finger, feeling for something. While she did this, the bladed staff she held stood rigid in the sand beside her as she searched. A moment later, and Esah’s hand straightened out with an outstretched arm, her finger reaching towards a single spot in the reddening sky.
“It’s too cold for you to see, the star so dim it’s probably being out-staged by neighboring kin from here, but there is a sun where I point and my home is in a cycle around it.” Esah lifted her head, grasped her weapon and returned to her digging.

“So what’re you here for then,” Vakker asked, gazing upon either a madwoman or the real thing, neither of which being a prospect he found comforting.

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Oh...Before I started reading all of this, I thought she like fell through a portal into another dimension or something.
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Esah looked up from her work, through the eye-slits of her crying mask, and gazed at the boy, before touching the dried, bleached skull of the corpse with the end of her bladed staff.

“Her.”

“Her?” Vakker asked, looking at the corpse lying at their feet.

“Among other things,” she answered, “but yes, it begins with her.

Where I come from, tending to the dead is our way of life. We’d have skull-filled celebrations and ululating parades in the cities, living among flaming trees awash with lambent sap and Mycopoli that glowed in gentle patterns of greens and yellows. Yet beneath it all, our world was engineered to hold funerary rites, to provide ancient embalming techniques, to keep lit great fires and furnaces that exhaled charnel into the twilit void, and to purify vast and stilled pools of water meant to inter what fell to a certain depth.”
She retrieved an onyx cylinder from her robes, the length being her outstretched hand. She twisted one end, turned it upside down, twisted it back, and returned it right-side up.

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The paragraphs just above are aligned in such a way that the talking needs to be merged and separated from the actions.

Also I find it weird that the person she was looking for, was just almost randomly seen while travelling. No indications she was looking for landmarks because she had any idea where the body might be, or that she thought it was along the road somewhere.
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“We make liquor from the memories of those who’ve passed and those still living, drawing out humours from the mind to be fermented,” she said, handing the cylinder to Vakker.

The boy looked on, seeing and hearing words of things that he couldn’t imagine.

“That’s someone’s thinkage liqourified,” he asked, pointing to the flask.

Esah paused, tilting her head, parsing out the statement in her head.

“Yes,” she said.

“Hers, in her last moments of living,” nodding to the collection of bones.

Vakker looked at the woman, remembering the dread he felt of a certain scav custom that you don’t turn away what is given in the wastes. With a halting reach, he took the vial from Esah.

“I’ve set it up so only a small cap is poured,” she said.

“You need only a small drink, with greater amounts making the memories more concentrated, more severe.”
With that, Vakker tilted the end of the cylinder, and brought a burning and a pleasant warmth in his chest and mind unlike anything he felt before, then had to steady himself as a wave of nausea and confusion began to assault him. Vakker became limp and anxious at the same time, for he was reliving the thoughts of someone gripped in stark, raving terror.

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Well, that is a a clip-hanger if I've seen one.

Overall, reading is work, reviewing is work, but this isn't as bad or tricky as I thought it would be.

What I see here is actually quite good, and despite resembling a few dozen things, it appears, like a sandwich, to be it's own thing, rather then bread or meat, etc etc.

I don't see anything wrong with it, but I am curious why she is a "scav" and he isn't. Perhaps it takes decades to be considered one or you have to travel very far.