Notes for ‘A Ghost from the Past’
Four days, That was the mercenary's latest guess, give or take a day. (2) the transition from internal thought to narration, then back to internal thought reads a bit strange. There’s also the part where you capitalized ‘that’ in the middle of the sentence. I don’t think I can make a suggestion here that wouldn’t drastically change your intent, so I’ll leave that to you.
It was unfortunate, though, that a prison diet wasn't very conductive to good digestive regularity (2) conducive
Too much protien, the warrior thought passively, not enough fiber... (2) protein
maddening; enough (2) a colon or an en dash would work better here, as the former introduces an explanation while the latter acts as an emphatic afterthought.
Charles was resplendid in his full dress uniform (2) A rather strange portmanteau of ‘resplendent’ and ‘splendid’, which leads me to believe it’s actually not meant to be one.
His eyes locked on to Amelia's, Charles would have sworn he saw (3) it would need a coordinating conjunction like ‘and’ in between.
rebels as quickly as possibly (3) possible
"See that you do." Amelia replied. (3) dialogue is separated from an interpolated clause by a comma, question mark or exclamation point, but not a period.
a small table not unlike one would find (5) “a small table not unlike one you would find” or, to stick to your style, “a small table not unlike what one would find”
"Let's not be coy with one another, Mr. Barton." Amelia was saying. (5) Same as ["See that you do." Amelia replied]
"I'd prefer if you called me Teric." Was the veteran's simple response. (5) same as above
pushing that cleavage of her's forward in a way any man would be hard pressed to ignore. (5) hers
"There is a dining room, you know - downstairs, right of the main entrance." Teric quipped as he approached the table. (6) Same as ["See that you do." Amelia replied]. In this case, you can see a comma is required since without it, it seems like the line of dialogue and the fact that he quipped are unrelated, wholly distinct things. This happens quite often later on, so I’ll stop mentioning them in the notes.
My name is Amelia Hawthorn, I am the serving Steward of this fief by grace of the Church of Ethereal Sway (6) a semi-colon or that comma followed by coordinating conjunction like ‘and’ would fit better than a simple comma here.
was the portend of bad things (6) I wasn’t sure if the verb portend could be used as a noun, and after checking it doesn’t seem like it can. Then I just realized you were going for ‘portent’, which is a noun and does in fact mean some sort of omen or augury.
follow orders without qualm or conscious (7) I know ‘conscious’ can be used as a noun, but it usually stands in for ‘consciousness’ rather than ‘conscience’, the latter being what I think you meant.
had adopted a grazing approach to her meal; as opposed to Teric's feeding frenzy (8) You use a lot of semi-colons for this kind of pause, but they’re not really supposed to be used for this purpose. They are stronger pauses than commas, true, but they’re used to replace coordinating conjunctions and periods, not commas. To emphasize the comparison, you could either use a comma or a dash.
To be honest it all felt rather staged, almost made up, as if none of this was really happening. It was a plot so convoluted, so fantastic in scope, that Teric half expected to find himself a part of some theatrical production. Only storytellers came up with this kind of political intrigue - it was never so complicated in real life. (8) Hanging the lampshade, I see. I’ll reflect on whether it was effective or attracted too much attention to the contrived intrigue when I’m done reading!
In the end Amelia Hawthorn has turned out to be just another pretty face (10) had
the eyes of his assembled guests narrowing darkly they moved to approach the black-clad old man who'd dare stumble into their meeting. (11) narrowing darkly as they moved