Circumstances Leading to the Conclusion

[Visla Eraclaire]

Visla’s eyelids were heavy, not yet knowing the release of sleep even as the sun crept through the one small window in Elenore’s basement. A pair of sigils were painted on the floor in immaculate detail. Visla positioned herself outside of one and took a deep breath. Within the other, Leonard stood proudly smirking and consulting his tome a final time.

“Ready to be free?” he clucked.

Visla nodded assent and muttered a few Infernal words to herself before snapping her arm down as if she were going to tear the air itself. With a plume of smoke and fire, Aelva appeared centered perfectly in the glyph. She was disoriented for a moment and her eyes came to focus on Visla.

“Finally,” the succubus said indignantly before even glancing around the room. “I had wondered when you would be done with your sulk.”

She reached toward her summoner, but Visla lurched back with a speed uncharacteristic of the otherwise clumsy woman. As Aelva’s fingertips broke the perimeter of the spell circle they were stopped by a bolt of eldritch energy. The singe was felt in Visla’s hand as she took her place in Leonard’s shadow.

“Wretch!” the demon screamed, her face contorted with rage. Her hand began to swarm with sickly green balefire, but Visla plunged a dagger into her own hand. Blood poured from the Succubus’ claw and the flames dissipated. Visla winced with an overwhelming pain even as she drew the blade back from an unwounded hand.

“That should subside once she’s banished, my dear,” Leonard assured her. “Now, by your leave,” he began to chant the words of his spell in a language that dripped power from every syllable.

The sigils erupted with light, forming lucent bonds around the demon. Even as they ensnared her twisted form, the rage was gone from Aelva’s face. Her deep emerald eyes simply stared down at the gushing wound in her hand and across at Visla, hidden behind Leonard’s billowing robes.

“I’m sorry,” Visla whispered as she heard Leonard’s spell reach its climax.

[Visla Eraclaire]

A blood-curdling scream and a torrent of magical energy flooded the room. Arcs of violet lightning crackled across the ground between Leonard and the succubus. The bolts crept up their legs and snapped through the air toward eachother until they formed a snaking conduit from one heartless chest to another.

Visla drew the blade out from Leonard’s back and blood poured forth, covering her hands. She pushed the discarded caster to the floor and pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket, smudging its scrawled words with her stained hands. She spoke the spell aloud in a faltering voice even as the man’s gloved hands grasped feebly up toward her.

The tendrils of energy that coursed between him and the demon began to wrap themselves around him, caressing the river of blood that flowed from his savage wound. Soon the very essence of his being began to burn and vanish into the flow of arcane power, siphoning toward Aelva. The succubus stood still, basking in the stream until the wizard’s gloves and robes fell limp and empty on the floor. The spell’s lingering crackles subsided and the demon flew into a frenzy, rushing to the floor to tear the man’s remnants to shreds, cackling wildly.

“You were a fool to trust her,” she laughed gleefully. “Visla is—“

She looked up and found the warlock was gone.

Visla ran down the hill outside, her legs barely supporting her. She held her cane tucked under one arm and Leonard’s book beneath the other. Adrenaline alone powered her as she ran into the shadow of the woods. The thorns stuck in her legs and low branches cut her cheeks and yet she ran on until she could go no further.

She collapsed beneath an old oak, bleeding slightly from her wounds, a grim sign of her triumph. She was free and so too was Aelva. No magic bound them together. A slow death still awaited Visla, as it did all humans, but no longer was it paid as a tithe to the Abyss. The price for Aelva’s continued presence would be paid by the arrogant young alchemist’s soul, for whatever it was worth. The future was full of uncertainty, without direction or purpose. Freedom too was a struggle, but perhaps it was a struggle that could change Visla’s life in a way that war and strife could not.

Even as her eyes fell shut from exhaustion, Visla hoped the best for those she had left behind. Goodbye, farewell, amen.

[Nayeli]

Circumstances Leading to the Conclusion

• STORY (21) ~ As a whole, I very much enjoyed this thread. As I discuss below, your writing reminds me of the sort of American dark romanticism that emerged in the 19th century. People like Poe and Hawthorne who wrote stories involving the supernatural and human psychology and had this very poetic style. It’s one of my favorite genres, which is probably why I found your writing to be so compelling. I feel like this story is gothic, but not the sort of gothic that shops at Hot Topic and listens to Evanescence and moans about how misunderstood it is because its parents won't buy it a car, but the sort of gothic that listens to sigur rós and sips a chai latté in Prague and submits poetry about car crashes to a monthly magazine. (Sorry, I may have gotten a bit too into that metaphor and lost it somewhere, but I couldn’t help myself.) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: it was good! Not perfect, but a strong story, and I enjoyed it as much or more as any writing I’ve read on this site.
  
  Continuity (6) ~ Heavily based in past threads and events, this is the sort of thread that would regularly receive low scores in Continuity. Your character sheet isn’t on the site anymore, but the summary of Visla’s history that you sent me was very helpful. Still, in order to receive a high score here, a thread really ought to stand alone. While enough information is given about Visla herself to explain the character, I can’t say the same thing about the NPCs. There were a number of points where I found myself confused as to character’s relationships or motivations. This problem started in the fourth post with her first conversation with Elenore, and progressed from there on out. I don’t think that Leonard’s identity was ever adequately explained.
  
  On a similar note, the technicalities of Visla’s relationship with Aleva were explained adequately, but their relationship never was. Why do they hate eachother? Who was Aleva in life? None of this is really explained.
  
  However, I’m not penalizing you heavily here because I don’t think it detracted much at all from the strength of the thread as a whole. Pages and pages of epic backstory rarely make a thread more compelling. While some more interwoven explanation of events prior (the circumstances leading to the circumstances leading to the conclusion, so to speak, har har) would have been helpful, I think this was fine. The characters were strong enough that they spoke for themselves, and the thread certainly stands on its own as a compelling story.
  
  Setting (8) ~ While your descriptions of settings aren’t thick, they are vivid. Sometimes I think that people confuse over-described settings with good settings. You perhaps could have given a bit more description in places—at times it did seem as though the action was taking place on a blank canvas—but for the most part this was good. It was by nature a mostly introspective thread, and you aren’t exactly delving into epic Lord-of-the-Rings-eque fantasy settings, so what you gave was adequate.
  
  This ties into your Technique score, but you do a really good job of using literary techniques and the like to describe setting. Sometimes writers are tempted to give long and precise but rather bland technical descriptions of setting (the room was twenty feet wide, and in this corner there was that, and in that corner there was the other thing) but I generally think that it’s more effective to create an atmosphere, immerse your characters in it, and allow the reader’s imagination to do the rest.
  
  

  As she pulled back the stiff tendrils of a dead bush they cracked like brittle bones. She pushed through the wall of arboreal corpses until she could see clearly what was at the center of the ring. Moonlight peeked through a break in the forest’s leafy ceiling, but was still so stifled that the figure within lit his work with an orb of blue flame that gave the tiny glen a spectral appearance.

  This is really, really good, and it might be this passage that brought your score in this area up so high. As I mention in other areas, your writing very strongly reminds me of some of the old romantic writers I’ve read—Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, that sort. It’s a very dark and atmospheric sort of writing, very emotional, and I think you capture that feel well.
  
  Pacing (7) ~ Most of this thread was paced well. I thought it moved quickly enough, and it effectively maintained my interest from start to finish. It was, as I already mentioned, largely an introspective and character-focused thread, so it wasn’t as though it brought me to heart-pounding suspense…but it wasn’t supposed to. It achieved your purpose effectively, and therefore you did well here.
  
  The only complaint I have in this area is the ending. It seemed that the last couple posts—the eleventh and twelfth, flew by far too fast. The tenth post and the conversation with Elenore there was wonderful, and I was looking forward to another full page of story, but it fell short. At the end it almost seemed as though you were rushing just to get it done, even leaving out necessary pieces of action, which is disappointing and not very effective. It’s good to build up to a climax and increase pacing towards the end, yes, but not to the extent where you seem rushed. So, while for the majority of the thread your pacing was great, the end was not, and that prevented this score from being a bit higher.
  
  
• CHARACTER (23) ~ Visla’s an interesting character, if fairly archetypal. I’m not sure if this was your intention, but she comes across very strongly as a Byronic hero. Again, similar to the protagonists of the dark romantic style writing, she’s dark (perhaps morally ambiguous) introspective, an exile. Hell, her sexuality is even ambiguous—another feature of the Byronic hero. It’s a compelling character type, if not altogether an original one. You write it out very well though, and she has enough depth of emotion and complexity to intrigue the reader.
  
  However, I would make the point that a bit more originality would be nice. While the Byronic hero is a more complex character archetype than the stereotypical badass or hero or villain or whatever, it is still an archetype. If you could deconstruct that or add your own flair to it, it certainly would be nice. Otherwise it almost comes across as you mimicking an old style, which isn’t a good thing for your reader to be thinking.
  
  You asked me over AIM to comment on whether I found Visla to be a believable female protagonist, and so I’ll do that here. To answer your question: it doesn’t matter. Just because she’s a woman, I see absolutely no reason that you should describe her any differently. If you tried to inject some sort of false femininity into your writing I think it would only come across as forced and stereotypical. She’s perfectly “believable” as a woman, as if that even means anything. If anything it make the story stronger because she’s female—typically this sort of protagonist is male, so it makes it more unique.
  
  Dialogue (8) ~ Excellent. This is one an author’s most effective tools of characterization, and you use it to its fullest extent. The brief conversation with Elenore in the tenth post was one of my favorite parts of the thread. There were a few lines that I particularly liked—Visla’s comment about the difference between asking for advice and asking for help, Elenore’s speaking about her father. Your characters speech is very witty and poetic, which…is mostly good. In some places it gets a bit unbelievable. The dialogue in the climactic scene was cliché, and Leonard’s arrogance came off a bit too strongly, perhaps. However, as a whole, I really liked the dialogue in this thread. You used it as an effective tool to characterize the people in your story, which is exactly what I’m looking for in his category, and so you got a good score.
  
  Action (7) ~ There wasn’t an awful lot of action in this thread, which to some extent made it difficult to judge, but what action you did have was good enough. The climactic scene was decent in the way it was described and played out, and although it wasn’t my favorite part of the thread due to pacing reasons, the action was good. I found it poetically fitting that Visla stabbed Leonard in the back, just due to the connotations of “backstabber” seeming to fit her character and the action itself. In general your characters actions were believable to their personalities.
  
  This is minor, but one thing I noticed in the final scene was the bit about “tendrils of energy” and conduits and whatnot. Basically most of the description in first and third paragraphs of the twelfth post was…sort of underwhelming. That’s just a bit of a typical way to describe magic and its effects, and it just didn’t have the cleverness or wit that a lot of your descriptions have about them. It just seemed too standard. But, again, it was only a little piece of one post and not all that important, I apologize for the nitpicking.
  
  Persona (8) ~ I don’t have an awful lot to say here, because a lot of what I talked about in regards to the Character category as a whole pertains to this. So see the section where I discuss Visla’s similarities to the Byronic hero. I think you’re very strong in this category, though. Her emotions and inner turmoil are portrayed effectively and in an interesting fashion. While your characters don’t always act in a believable fashion, that only contributes to the romantic sort of dark atmosphere that your writing has. The only complaint that I have is that at times Visla becomes too melodramatic and then comes across as just being whiny and irritating, rather than brooding and mysterious. There’s a very thin line between those two, and keep a close eye to make sure you don’t cross it.
  
  The other suggestion I have is, as I talk about above, to add a bit more originality to her character concept. While she is an effective character, there’s little in her personality that I haven’t read in a number of other books and stories. It’s good, but it’s not new. I think there’s a lot of potential for you to actually write something of a deconstruction of the Byronic/romantic archetype and style, which would be interesting and I’d certainly love to read it.
  
  
• WRITING STYLE (23) ~ Your writing style is very good. Again, it isn’t exactly unique—but the authors you remind me the most of are very good ones (Poe especially) so I’m not going to complain.
  
  Mechanics (6) ~ You’re strong in terms of technique and skill, but it seems that you slack off when it comes to the mundane details of mechanics. There were a number of basic typos and spelling mistakes, as well as grammatical errors and places where it looked like sentences had been partially removed or editing hadn’t quite been finished. I shouldn’t have to tell a veteran member this, but you’ve got to edit your posts more carefully. There weren’t enough careless errors to really detract from the thread, but there were enough for it to be a bit disappointing. I’m not going to lecture you on mechanics because I’m certain that you’re capable of it and know what to do. Just…pay closer attention.
  
  Technique (9) ~ I have very little complaints to make here. Your writing style is very effective and I like it a lot. It’s not at all typical of the technique I see from a lot of people writing on Althanas, or on roleplaying sites in general, but it’s certainly good. I don’t think there’s a lot of improving for you to do here. It’s interesting in that, while your writing is sparse and concise, your language also has sort of a flowery feel to it that I like. Your metaphors are great, and I felt very much drawn into your writing. Excellent work. This is really what pulls the thread through from being something of a clichéd and typical story to being a strong work that stands on its own.
  
  Clarity (8) ~ For the most part great. There were a few places where action wasn’t as clearly described as I would have liked—again, see the last two posts, and Visla’s first conversation with Elenore—but as a whole I haven’t got much to say here. Your language is for the most part clear and not overly thick. Good job.
  
  
• WILD CARD (8) ~ This is one of my favorite threads that I’ve read on the site, and I’m giving you the highest score I’ve handed out thus far as a judge. You’re on the verge of going from a really great writer to being a truly excellent writer, and I think just a little bit more effort and care could push your stories over the top. I definitely look forward to hopefully having a chance to read more stuff of yours in the future!

Total Score: 75

Visla Eraclaire gains 3400 EXP and 180 GP!
Visla Eraclaire moves up to level seven! Congratulations!

[Letho]

EXP/GP added!