Looking for feedback
I'm looking feedback on a story I am working on. Let me start by saying I would not even consider myself a amateur author in the slightest. I have two friends who work in the field who are giving me advice and comments on my work as I go through it. As it goes on I am re editing and revising much of the work and immensely enjoying the process. I mainly want feed back on the plot and story line so far as I prefer the feedback I am already getting on word choices, structure and pacing. Posting the first 3 chapters for now and if your interested by it and would like to read more of it as I finish more let me know. (Even these 3 chapters I'm not fully done with)
Chapter 1 — The Silent Rain
The rain had gone quiet.
I did not know why that frightened her. I did not know where I was, or how I had come to be lying in the mud beneath an overturned wagon, or why every part of my body ached as though I had been thrown from a great height. I did not even know my own name yet , but I knew the rain should have made sound.
It still fell. I could see it dimpling the puddles beside hmy face and sliding down the broken stones of the road. It ran from the rooftops in thin streams and gathered in the cracks between the cobbles, darkening the mud around her hands. But there was no patter, no splash, no whisper over wood and stone. Only silence.
Then something scraped across the street.
I opened my eyes.
A ruined road stretched ahead of me. Buildings leaned on either side, their windows dark, their doors hanging loose. The wagon beside me had half-collapsed into the mud, its broken wheel jutting toward the sky. When I tried to move, pain answered. It flared through my shoulder and ribs, sharp enough to stop my breath. My head throbbed, and when I pushed myself up, My palm slipped against a mossy wall, nearly sending her back into the mud.
Blood ran from my nose, thin and watery in the rain. I wiped it away and stared at my red fingers.
“What happened?” I whispered.
The words sounded too loud.
I searched inward for an answer and found nothing. No memory. No place I belonged to. No face I recognized. Only a hollow space where my past should have been.
Another scrape came from beyond the wagon.
I went still. Something stood at the far end of the street. At first, it looked like a person: thin, bent, sick perhaps. Then it shifted, and the shape of it became wrong. Its head hung at an unnatural angle. One arm dragged along the stones, its fingers twitching. Long black hair clung to its face, and its mouth opened and closed slowly, as though tasting the empty air.
I held my breath.
The figure stopped. Its head turned before the rest of its body, slow and uneven, as if something inside the neck had forgotten how bones were meant to move. Then its milky eyes fixed on the wagon. On the gap between the broken slats. On me.
I scrambled back. My boot slipped in the mud, and My shoulder struck the wagon hard enough to make the rotten frame groan. The creature lunged, and sound rushed back into the world all at once. Rain hammered the stones. Thunder rolled above the rooftops. The creature tore through the wagon’s broken side, jaws opening too wide, one hand reaching for my throat.
I threw myself aside. Its fingers struck the wood where my face had been, snapping through the slats. I hit the mud and rolled, but the creature fell across my legs before I could crawl away. The weight drove the air from my lungs.
I kicked. It barely moved. Its face lowered toward my own, black drool spilling from its mouth. The smell of rot filled my nose. I caught its wrist with both hands and pushed with everything I had, but it was stronger. Its fingers came closer, slow and certain. My arms shook. My heels dug through the mud, finding no purchase.
“No,” I gasped.
The creature did not care.
I twisted, searching blindly with one hand. My fingers closed around a broken length of wood from the wagon, and I drove it into the creature’s mouth just as its teeth snapped down. The wood cracked. I used that single breath to wrench one leg free and drive My knee up into its ribs. Something broke inside it, but the creature only jerked and clawed at my shoulder.
Pain burst white behind my eyes. I screamed, but the rain swallowed the sound.
The creature lunged as it snarled hungrily.
I tried to move, but my body had nothing left to give. my arms shook, my shoulder burned, and the mud beneath me offered no grip. The creature’s mouth opened above me; teeth slick with rain and black drool.
This was it.
I stopped fighting for one terrible heartbeat and only hoped it would be quick.
Then a warhammer slammed into the side of its head.
The creature was torn off me and sent skidding through the mud. I lay frozen, too shocked to breathe, watching as it twitched and tried to crawl back with half its face caved inward.
A man stepped between them.
He was broad-shouldered and worn down by years of surviving, with tired eyes, a short rain-dark beard, and a heavy cloak hanging over battered armor. In one hand he carried a shield. In the other, the warhammer that had saved my life.
“Stay down,” he said.
I did.
The creature threw itself at him. It hit his shield hard enough to drive him back a step, but the man held firm, boots grinding into the mud. He shoved forward, raised the hammer with high, and brought it down.
Once.
Then again.
The creature stopped moving.
Only then did I remember how to breathe.
The creature threw itself at him. He caught it on his shield, but the impact shoved him back. His jaw tightened as he pushed forward, forced the thing off balance, and brought the hammer down. The first blow made the creature twitch. The second broke its skull. Even then, the man did not lower his shield until the body stopped moving.
I stared at the corpse. Black blood ran between the stones, carried away by the rain. My stomach turned, but I did not look away. That thing had tried to kill me.
The man turned. He had tired eyes and a short beard darkened by rain. He looked worn down, but not careless. Nothing about him was careless.
“You picked a fine place to come,” he said.
“I didn’t pick it.”
“Aye. Figured as much.”
He crouched beside me and reached toward my shoulder. I flinched before I could stop myself. He paused, hand still in the air.
“Easy. I’m not here to hurt you.”
I wanted to believe him. That scared me almost as much as the creature had.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Nathan.”
The name meant nothing to me, but his voice was not cruel. He looked at my wound and grimaced.
“Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.”
“That usually means no.”
I tried anyway. My legs shook beneath me, but I forced myself upright before he could lift me. Pain tore through my shoulder, and a hiss slipped through my teeth. Nathan watched her for a moment.
“Stubborn.”
“I don’t know what else to be.”
Something in his expression shifted. Not pity. Something quieter than that.
“Your name?”
I searched the empty place inside myself. For a moment, there was nothing. Then a single word rose from the dark.
“Tera.”
Nathan nodded once. “Well, Tera, we need to move.”
“What? ” Tera asked.
“Ashfall.”
The word meant nothing to her. But the fear in his voice did. Above the rooftops, pale smoke gathered beneath the clouds.
It did not drift. It sank, slow and heavy, spilling between the buildings as if poured from an unseen wound in the sky. The rain passed through it without thinning it. The wind did not break it apart. Wherever it spread, the street seemed to lose sound, color, and breath.
Tera’s stomach turned. The ache in her shoulder sharpened, and a cold pressure settled behind her eyes. She did not know what the smoke was, but her body understood before her mind did.
This was not weather.
Nathan grabbed her arm.
“Shelter. Now.”
“What is that?”
“The Godsmoke.”
Tera looked back at the pale haze. It moved with awful patience, sliding down the street as though it knew exactly where to go.
“Ashfall means it’s coming down,” Nathan said. “Godsmoke is what it is. Questions later.”
She wanted answers. She wanted memory. She wanted the world to stop throwing terror at her long enough for one thought to make sense. She got none of those things, so she ran.
Nathan stayed beside her, shield raised, guiding her toward a nearby building. Her shoulder burned with every step. The Godsmoke crept lower, and as it did, the rain seemed farther away, muffled behind a wall she could not see.
Nathan kicked open a crooked door and shoved her inside. The room was small and stale. Boards covered the windows. Cloth had been stuffed into the gaps around the frame. He slammed the door and dragged a broken table against it.
“Seal the cracks,” he said.
Tera stared at him.
He pointed with the hammer. “Now.” pointing to to a narrow gap between the door and the floor.
The order cut through her panic. She grabbed a strip of cloth from the floor and pressed it into a gap between two boards. Her hands shook, but she kept working. Nathan checked the door, then the windows, then the lower wall where the boards had pulled loose.
Outside, the Godsmoke reached the building.
It was not fog. Tera knew that without being told. Fog did not gather at cracks like fingers feeling for a way in.
Nathan finished sealing the last gap and turned to her. “Sit.”
“I can stand.”
“You’re bleeding through your sleeve.”
She looked down. He was right. The pain came rushing back, and her knees weakened. She sank against the wall before she could fall. Nathan knelt in front of her and pulled a canteen from his belt.
“Drink.”
She hesitated.
“If I wanted you dead, I would’ve left you outside.”
That made enough sense. She drank. The water was cold and tasted faintly of leather. Nathan took the canteen back, then cut away enough of her sleeve to look at the wound.
“Thrall got you deep,” he said.
“Thrall?”
“That thing outside.”
“Was it a person?”
“Once.”
Tera looked toward the boarded window. Pale vapor moved beyond the cracks.
“Can they be saved?”
Nathan did not answer right away.
That was answer enough.
The question had come from some soft place in her, some stubborn hope that wanted the world to be less cruel than it looked. But she remembered the weight of the thrall on top of her, the teeth, the fingers reaching for her throat. If Nathan had not come, it would have killed her.
Nathan wrapped her shoulder with practiced hands. “Listen to me. If a thrall reaches for you, you put it down. You don’t wait to see if there’s something left inside. You kill it, or it kills you.”
The words were ugly. They also felt true.
“All right,” Tera said.
Nathan studied her, perhaps expecting an argument.
The room settled around them. Rain fell outside, uneven and constant. The Godsmoke dulled the light through the boards until everything looked pale. Tera’s eyelids grew heavy, and she fought them open.
Nathan noticed. “Sleep if you can.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Aye. Most don’t.”
That was not comforting. Still, her body had reached its limit. Will could drag her through pain, but it could not keep her upright forever. She tried to stay awake, failed, and slipped into darkness.
It was not empty.
She stood barefoot on a cold surface she could not see. Mist curled around her ankles. There was no city, no rain, no Nathan. Only a mirror rising from the blackness, tall and silent, its frame marked with symbols that shifted when she tried to read them.
Tera stepped closer despite the pressure in her chest.
Her reflection looked back. Pale face. Crimson hair. Emerald eyes. Then the reflection smiled.
Tera had not.
The emerald eyes turned black. Red pinpricks burned in their depths. Darkness spread beneath the reflection’s skin. Its jaw stretched, teeth forcing their way through the gums in crooked rows. Its face lengthened into something wolfish and rotten, and black feathers tore from its shoulders.
Tera tried to step back. Her body would not move.
The thing in the mirror pressed one clawed hand against the glass. The surface bent outward like wet skin, and when its mouth opened, the voice that came out did not belong to any human throat.
“The Beast of Desire will devour.”
Tera tried to scream, but no sound came.
“The flame will choke on its own ash.”
The mirror cracked.
“Desire will wear your face.”
The red eyes burned brighter.
“And you will open the door.”
The glass split.
Tera woke choking. Nathan’s hand covered her mouth before the sound could escape.
“Quiet,” he whispered. “The Godsmoke is still down.”
Tera stared at him, shaking. He slowly lowered his hand.
“Nightmare?”
She looked toward the boarded window. Pale vapor slid past the cracks, patient and silent. Rain tapped softly against the roof, then picked up again in random bursts.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Nathan handed her the canteen. “Get used to those.”
Tera drank with trembling hands. Outside, the rain kept falling, and somewhere deep inside her mind, something smiled.
Chapter 2 — Toward the Wall
The rain was still falling when the Godsmoke lifted.
It did not clear all at once. It thinned slowly from the cracks in the boarded window, drawing back from the shelter like a pale hand retreating from a flame. The hush went with it. First came the faint patter of rain against the roof, then the drip from broken gutters outside, then the distant sound of water running through the street.
Tera sat against the wall, one hand pressed to the bandage on her shoulder, and listened as the city remembered how to make noise.
Nathan waited longer than she expected.
He stood near the door with his shield raised and his warhammer held low, watching the gaps in the boards as though he expected the Godsmoke to change its mind. Only after several minutes did he move. He leaned close to the door, listened, then pressed two fingers to the cloth stuffed along the frame. When nothing seeped through, he let out a slow breath.
“All right,” he said. “We move.”
Tera pushed herself up before he could offer help. Her shoulder burned under the bandage, and her legs still felt weak, but she managed to stand without falling. That felt like a victory, even if it was a pathetic one.
Nathan noticed anyway. He seemed to notice everything.
“You should rest longer,” he said.
“Are we safe here?”
“No.”
“Then I’m rested enough.”
He gave her a look that might have been approval if it had belonged to a less tired man. “Stubborn,” he muttered.
“You said that already.”
“I expect I’ll say it again.”
He moved the broken table away from the door and opened it just enough to look outside. Rain blew in at an angle, cold and fine. Tera caught a glimpse of the street beyond: gray stones, leaning walls, puddles trembling under the rain. The thrall’s body lay where Nathan had killed it, but it looked smaller now. Less terrifying as a corpse.
That bothered her.
Nathan stepped out first. Tera followed, keeping close to the wall as he had told her. The city smelled of wet stone and rot. Rain ran down every surface, sometimes soft, sometimes hard, never fully stopping. It made the world feel alive in the worst way, as though the whole place was sweating out a fever.
Tera glanced at the dead thrall.
“Should we do something about the body?”
Nathan did not slow. “No need. The Godsmoke will take it eventually, and if it doesnt some other entity will devour it.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Stop looking for comfort here.”
She looked away from the body and followed him.
The street widened ahead, opening into a crossing where four roads met beneath the remains of a broken arch. Tera could see more of the city from there. Rooftops sagged. Walls leaned inward. Somewhere far ahead, beyond the gray maze of streets and ruined buildings, something massive rose through the rain.
A wall.
Not a house wall or a courtyard wall. This one climbed high enough to vanish into the low clouds, dark and broken but still standing. Towers jutted from it at uneven intervals. Even from far away, it looked old enough to have watched the city die.
Tera stopped before she realized it.
Nathan followed her gaze. “That’s where we’re going.”
“The wall?”
“Aye.”
“What’s past it?”
“If we’re lucky, another district. If we’re very lucky, a way out.”
“And if we’re not?”
Nathan adjusted the strap of his shield. “Then we’ll find out when we get there.”
Tera stared at the distant wall. It should have made her feel better, having a direction. Instead, it made the city feel larger. There was so much dead stone between here and there. So many windows. So many places for things to wait.
“Why not leave before now?” she asked.
Nathan’s face tightened. “Because the wall isn’t a gate. It’s a barrier. Most ways through are sealed, collapsed, or crawling with things worse than thralls. Getting there is hard. Getting through is harder.”
“But you still think we can?”
“I think staying here kills us slower.”
It was not hope, exactly, but it was something close enough to follow.
They moved west.
Nathan kept to side streets when he could. He avoided open roads, stepped around broken glass, and stopped often to listen. Tera learned quickly that he did not fear only what he could see. He watched the rain, the windows, the drain holes, the mouths of alleys. He watched the silence most of all.
Her shoulder throbbed with every step. She tried to hide it and failed.
“Hold your arm closer to your side,” Nathan said without looking back. “You’re pulling the wound open.”
Tera obeyed. “You were a healer before?”
“No.”
“You wrap bandages like one.”
“I’ve wrapped enough of my own.”
That ended the conversation for a while.
They passed a row of narrow homes whose doors had been scratched from the outside. Deep gouges marked the wood, some old, some fresh enough that rain still washed pale splinters into the street. Tera slowed when she saw a child’s shoe lying near one threshold.
Nathan did not.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
Tera looked at the shoe again. It was small. Mud had filled the inside.
“There might be someone in there.”
“There might be six dead things waiting behind the door.”
“There might be someone alive.”
Nathan finally turned. Rain ran down his face, cutting paths through the dirt there. “There might,” he said. “And if we had food, medicine, a safe shelter, and three more people watching the street, maybe we’d check. We don’t.”
Tera wanted to argue. The words rose in her throat, hot and useless. He was right, and she hated that he was right. Some part of her wanted the world to be simple. A cry meant someone needed help. A door meant shelter. A person could be saved if you were brave enough to try.
But the thrall had been a person once.
She looked away from the shoe.
Nathan’s voice softened, just a little. “Hope is good, lass. It keeps people moving. Just don’t let it make decisions for you.”
Tera swallowed. “Then what should?”
“Not dying.”
It was a cruel answer. It was also easy to remember.
They continued.
The rain picked up as they entered a street lined with old shops. The signs had mostly rotted away, but a few still hung from rusted hooks: bread, cloth, tools. Ordinary things. Tera found that worse than the ruins themselves. Someone had once stood here choosing flour, arguing over prices, laughing under awnings while rain fell around them.
Now the only movement came from water and shadows.
A low sound reached them from ahead.
Nathan stopped so abruptly that Tera nearly walked into him. He lifted his shield and motioned her back with the hammer.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He did not answer.
At the far end of the street, a thrall knelt in the rain with its back to them. Its shoulders jerked as it bent over something on the ground. Tera heard a wet tearing sound and understood.
Her stomach twisted.
Nathan guided her toward a side passage. “Quiet.”
They almost made it.
Tera’s boot struck a loose piece of slate hidden beneath the water. It skittered across the stones, loud enough to cut through the rain.
The thrall stopped feeding.
Nathan cursed under his breath.
The creature rose slowly. It was taller than the first one, with one side of its body swollen under the skin. Its head turned too far around before its shoulders followed. When it saw them, its jaw split open and a sound scraped out, raw and hungry.
“Run?” Tera asked.
“Too late.”
The thrall charged.
Nathan met it first. His shield slammed into its chest, but the creature’s weight drove him back. Tera saw his boots slide on the wet stone. He shoved hard, hammering at its shoulder, but the blow glanced off bone that had grown wrong beneath the flesh.
“Move!”