Alan Harnum <harnums@thekeep.org> wrote:
Here it is at last - after nearly two years, the final chapter.
The epilogue and author's notes will be out very soon, hopefully
by the weekend; I considered delaying the release of this
chapter until they were finished, but then decided that you've
all waited long enough already.
That would make us waiters under Earth then? :)
(Yes, I know *you've* heard that joke before, but the vast masses out
there haven't. :P)
Oh, gods, she thought. Oh, my dead kings, I do not wish to
hear this.
"And it wasn't her and I, it was you and me."
The inconsistency here is jarring (at least to a grammar weenie like
yours truly). Either I should be me (for standard, informal speech) or
me should be I (for the formal tone that he seems to be using here).
Unless you're trying to show that Ranma's personality is still somewhat
in flux, I'd really suggest picking one or the other.
"Of course I have to," he answered, even though she could
see no way he could not know she knew the answer before he spoke
it.
That last bit seems unnecessarily convoluted.
After taking a tight two-handed grip upon the still-visible
section of the staff, he began to churn the stone. At first, it
felt like trying to shift a mountain;
Actually, that kind of IS what he's doing.
He released the staff, and stepped back as it continued to
spin; whether with stored energy or of its own volition, he could
not say. He pictured the rippling blur spreading out, like rings
spreading across a pond, transforming, changing... until there
would be not stone, stone no longer, no, water...
Water.
"Why does it ALWAYS have to be WATER?!?"
"This deed is pleasing to my eye, servant," she said kindly.
"So Tang Jin shall live again, and be a light against the Dark.
Yes, Tang's not just for breakfast anymore.
Do you know why you must bathe here again? the Lady of
Change asked him, in a voice that sounded silent within his head.
He answered, silent in return, that he did not.
Figure it out, Ranma. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
I am gathering back the souls that died within the pools,
that they might at last find rest in dissolution. Some I have
brought to me already, even as I lay wounded; now, I must take
the rest. And there is no more for you to learn from her now.
Learn?
Through her, we tried to teach you to another way of seeing.
You learned it well enough; not as well as we might have hoped,
but it let you make the right choice when the time came; to reach
out with the hand of compassion, rather than the hand of
destruction.
Ah hah, right here's yer gnostic feminist propaganda. :)
As Ranma descended towards the top of one hill of sand, his
wind-aura scattered tiny dust devils about his feet. They died
and collapsed as he let the power shrink again. His bare feet,
still damp from his bathing, left muddy tracks upon the sand as
he descended the dune. The wind sobbed in his ears.
Over sandy dune and dip of sand he went searching for the
weeping's source. This finding was a harder one than that of
earlier; Tang Jin had lived on in twisted form, but Wurdsenlin
had seen the dying of forty centuries while it lay dead. And
there was no water to guide him here, as there would have been
anywhere else.
C'mon, even a desert has *some* water in it. BTW, most deserts aren't
sandy.
His mind mapped them; in minutes, he knew them as intimately
as he knew himself.
Which, considering that this is Ranma, might not be all that well....
At the centre, where the weeping was most distant and most
poignant, he stopped. Empty sands no more distinguishable from
any other place within the desert greeted him when he opened his
eyes. Had he been wrong?
"Lady, I implore thee."
o/~ Lady of Spain, I ado-o-ore you.... o/~
Upon his brazen throne, he waits, and no longer upon the
tower. His eyes, be they of hammered gold or molten fire, do not
see as the eyes of mortal beings do; at once, he is within this
chamber, and upon the tower as well. Born one, or become one, he
is a god; much power he holds within his hands.
"Much power?" Seems a little vague. How much power?
His own god is on the move. With glee, Baazel witnesses his
power. What hope have they?, he thinks. What hope have any?
? or , Pick one.
A second later, he landed on his feet in the small chamber
of dark rock veined with moon-coloured crystal. The Lady's lake
- really no more than large pond - glistened in the centre.
'than a large pond' (and is there any way to move that dash up to the
previous line? It looks bloody weird where it is.)
"You need not fear that fate," she said, as though reading
his thoughts. "I saw his heart's desire and gave him new office,
and with it a great role to play that is not yet played out. The
power was always in his blood; I merely wakened him to my
service." Here she paused for a moment, and regarded him with
dark-starred eyes. "Your part goes beyond service to any one of
us."
Insert your own hentai comment on that last line. It's just too easy.
Again she laughed, and this time it was a beautiful knife,
so sharp that its most delicate touch could wound. "I have never
been broken, nor bound, Lord of Waters. I do not need healing
>from you; you shall pay any debt to me in the end."
"But Lady..."
"But, Lady..."
"Hush." And she spoke as though to a child. "Speak not to
me of debts, Lord of Waters, but instead let me do you one final
service, before you go to face him."
"Service? I ask nothing more of you, Lady; I came only to
do service for you."
Boy, the service sector's really booming!
His hand of metal flexes; strong before, strong enough that
he was cast out, but he had aid then.
Switching "he" between Ranma and ol' Baz is confusing, but I dunno what
could be done about it.
Burn him forever.
"Burn," he says, out loud, relishing the sound of it.
Burn everything forever.
Au contraire. After a certain amount of time, you see, the oxygen would
be used up, and....
monstrous shadows all around him. Beneath silver archways
adorned with skittering runes he walked, across floors of
glistening gold. The castle was a beautiful nightmare; a
childish fancy twisted into something mostrous. No sense of
scale pervaded it; some rooms could have been ballrooms for
giants, and others prisons for dwarves. Marble and jade and
dwarfs (I think)
Ranma tried to think of something, anything, to say. But
then he remembered Shangai, and they robbed him of any words.
Didn't remember how to spell it, though, I guess. :)
There's an old woman locked in a cell of stone.
Why the present tense for this line?
Combat meant to end in the death of one combatant is a hard
thing to describe, even for the one who experiences it. To give
adequate voice to the sensation - the sense of walking a line as
thin as a razor, with death on either side - makes it seem
almost balletic in nature. It is not; there is nothing so formal
about it, it is mere mad hell of pain and fear, and death avoided
by the breadth of hairs.
In the end, the resort is to simile and metaphor - and yet
there is a point where those too break down. "They came together
like two bulls" - but analogies fall apart in the end, and there
can only be the cold and clinical summation.
I think you cut-and-pasted from "Invisible I" by mistake here, Alan. :)
For a few short moments, Baazel became the harried one,
seemingly surprised by the renewed vehemence of his foe. But it
did not last; Ranma had become too weak, and he was still too
strong. He pressed back; he screamed his hate. The Lord of
Waters nearly wept to hear it, for in it was the promised death
of all he loved.
Again, the use of pronouns is pretty confusing here.
It was not his death that he feared, though, but the
consequences of it. More cities destroyed, more lives lost, and
the world brought to sway beneath Baazel's cruel heel. Most of
all, he feared for those whom he loved. Not for himself, this
power; he saw that with perfect clarity now. For Akane, Ryoga,
his mother, Kima, Shampoo, Cologne. Hell, even for Tarou; no,
especially for Tarou, for the seed born in darkness that still
strives towards the light. For Samofere, Rouge, Mousse, Nabiki,
his father.
NABIKI: Ranma, you idiot! I'm not your father!
RANMA: Yeah, whatever. All right, this is for everyone *except* Nabiki.
Ya happy now?
Baazel's eye of fire was already growing dim as Ranma knelt
down beside him, and his eye of gold had lost its sinister
lustre. He seemed smaller than he had before, his elaborate
armour diminishing his own size rather than enchancing it.
Wounded and dying though he was, his eyes - both golden and fiery
- moved to focus upon his slayer.
"You could have been so much more than this," Ranma said
sadly.
"Like a hotel manager in Torquay!"
Baazel somehow summoned up enough breath and life to scream.
"NO! No, lord, master, no, no, not like this, not like this
I don't want--"
"Not the clown suit!"
Could Baazel, he wondered, have escaped becoming Ravager and
World-Hater, any more than he could have escaped becoming Lord of
Suggest "any more than Ranma Saotome could" (Bloody pronouns....)
Queerly shaped, too, in a teardrop wedge as ancient-seeming
as a glacial drumlin.
Is there any other kind?
He did know that he'd failed, though. He'd gone away, left
her without a protector. It didn't matter that he had no idea
that he had had no idea
Oh god, it was _looking_ at him, those hill-big eyes with
Suggest 'gods' or at least 'God' (otherwise the proper response is
"Which one?") Also should prolly be a comma after Oh.
END OF CHAPTER 40
Hokay, I can't really comment on the mythological aspects of this, being
but an ignerr'nt scientist/computer geek type. :) The writing was as
good as WUE gets, which is to say as good as fanfiction gets, with the
series' trademark vivid descriptive work and consistent style and tone.
The pacing, however, seemed a bit strange to me; the thing with the
Oldest One came and went in a very short space whereas it seemed to me
like it (being a major climax) should've been a longer party of the
story.
Looking forward to that epilogue... and the sequel! :-)
Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics.html