Title: A Path of Swords by Aravis-Brightspell
Series: Rhyshannon Chronicles (book one)
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity
Category: Fantasy
Mature: N (blood, death, loss of a loved one, medical depictions, mild profanity, murder, violence)
LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Ongoing
Special note (judging): I had five books from this category, and the other judges (HavvySnow, silksutra, _p1nk_tr4sh_) had six, five, and five books, respectively.
Score: 96/100 (1st place)

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*****

Rubric:
- Title: 5
- Book cover: 5
- Description (blurb): 5
- Plot & storytelling: 15
- Character development: 10
- Writing style: 10
- Grammar: 10
- Originality & creativity: 10
- Emotional impact: 10
- Pacing & structure: 5
- Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5
- Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10
Total: 100

*****

Total: 96/100

Title: 5/5
I'm always down for a good fantasy novel, and throwing in a series with the word "chronicle" is a surefire way to hook me. Add in some sword action, and it would take a lot to deter me from reading. My only complaint is against Wattpad, not you. I wish there was some way to list the series name and the book name separately in the title, so both fit on the screen. And for some reason, I'm incapable of writing "swords" in this title when I type it out, and I have to go back and add the extra "s" to make it plural every time. But that's clearly a "me" problem. 😅

Cover: 5/5
Yes. Absolutely. This looks like a cover I'd see in Barnes & Noble when browsing the fantasy section. Series name, book name, your name—without the annoying "by" I see listed on so many covers—and a dark, moody image with a hooded figure, waves crashing, abnormally colored lightning streaking across the water, a rocky outcropping and a foreboding castle—this is candy for my li'l fantasy-lovin' soul.

Blurb: 4/5
Overall, great blurb, but a couple grammar things and one suggestion. First, the "would" in the first sentence feels off with the tense. This is written in present tense, and obviously, things happen in the past even when you're writing in present tense, but it feels better to me to change this to "will." Second, I'd remove the comma after "nightmare" in the second sentence. And third and final, I'd cut the comma and "himself" in the third sentence. It feels like the flow is better that way. But, yes, you're still dangling the proverbial carrot in front of my face, and I'd be hard pressed not to read this book, so obviously, you have done your job of hooking me quite well.

Plot & storytelling: 15/15
From the very beginning, this plot sucked me in and wouldn't let go. I've never read anything like it. Three worlds, time variations, multiple species and corrupted species, unique languages, complex magic and deep mythology—this has everything. Absolutely everything. And it's all told in a very engaging, driving way, dropping crumbs of information to the reader as the story progresses, filling in the blanks with more detail as necessary and without bulky info dumps. This is a superb story, and I can't wait for you to finish it.

Character development: 10/10
I hesitate to call Jared the main character. He's the central character, the single point this entire story revolves around, but his perspective is only one of many used throughout the narrative. His character development follows an incredibly unique progression, tying the fifteen-year-old boy in the beginning chapters to memories from years past to ancient knowledge to an eighteen-year-old intricately bound to an entity thousands of years old, giving his thoughts a strange paradox as they relate the present to another person's memories from ages long lost to time. Add into all that his innate magical abilities, which paint his entire worldview in multiple layers of energy, pain, and beauty, and it's no wonder his personality changes and unfolds in such a drastic manner from the beginning to the end of published material. The frightened boy, simultaneously helpless and powerful beyond reckoning, becomes an angry young man, scarred beyond healing and searching for answers.

And that's just him.

Then we have Arlan the Druid, Marsh and Calidar the mandrakes, Jared's grandparents in memory, the humans in Cair Llewellyn, the Myrdraath, the Soulless, Mergenthal, Da'artemis—how am I doing? Yes, I did read this entire book in the span of a few hours, but I didn't go back to look up any of those names, and I didn't have any of them written down. They're that memorable, that distinct, that unique, developed as needed, simple as needed. Your use of dialect for Marsh and the humans at the inn is stellar, and even the multiple people groups not yet represented by named characters have hidden stories and meaning to them.

Writing style: 9/10
Your writing style is superb, and the only area where I can really deduct points here is with dialogue, and that's only because of the complexity of this story. Usually, I just have to worry about spoken dialogue, thoughts, and maybe dreams or a written passage, and it's easy enough to come up with a consistent way to distinguish between all of those. You have...a lot of variations on dialogue here. Spoken dialogue (in English and your created languages). Thoughts. Dreams. Medical charts and other written passages. Foreign words. Translations of foreign words. A Master, who I assume is Laareth. Telepathic or thought communication. And let's not forget additional emphasis.

It's a lot to keep straight.

So, these are the styles I noticed you using, and there are some inconsistencies that would be good to nail down for reader comprehension:
- Double quotation marks - spoken dialogue
- Single quotation marks - thoughts, spoken dialogue
- Italics - dreams, medical charts, foreign words, emphasis
- Single quotation marks and italics - thoughts, spoken dialogue
- Parentheses - translations
- All caps - the Master in English, not done in italicized foreign words
- Colons - telepathic communication
- Bold and italics - one incidence of the boy shouting

As you can see, there's a lot of overlap with spoken dialogue and thoughts, and that's an important detail that needs clarification. I occasionally found myself wondering if something was spoken out loud, or if it was just something the speaker thought to themself.

Also, when the Master speaks in his foreign tongue, his words are not capitalized, and I think they should be for consistency. If it's important enough to distinguish his dialogue with all caps in English, it's important enough to do it in his native tongue, too.

The parentheses are a necessary evil, I think. I wish there were another way to handle translations in the narrative, but you're not translating single words. You're translating entire sentences. Simply adding an asterisk and telling the reader to reference the bottom of the chapter for translations wouldn't work here.

Additional emphasis is really tricky here, because you can't just use italics. That's already being used for something else. And, since you have so many styles of communication, you really need to pick and choose what truly warrants additional emphasis, because things get pretty busy, and you don't want to clutter the story up and confuse the reader with overuse of emphasis when they're already working to keep communication straight.

This is the system I propose, so the reader always knows what a text style means:
- Double quotation marks - spoken dialogue
- Single quotation marks - thoughts
- Italics - dreams, written passages, foreign words (using whatever punctuation is appropriate for the dialogue type)
- Parentheses - translations
- All caps - the Master (English and otherwise)
- Colons - telepathic/thought communication
- Bold - reserve for rare emphasis of extremely important content

Also, I was just editing this feedback before submitting it, and I realized there's no category in my rubric for descriptions. Which is crying shame, because you would blow that out of the water. I love the fanart included at the end of a handful of chapters (props to Sunnyrizz for being amazing), but what makes it even better is that I was envisioning that before I saw the picture. Your use of descriptive language is just fantastic, and that adds so much life and depth to an already vivid story.

Grammar: 8/10
If I weren't such a detail-oriented person, I wouldn't have caught most of the grammar and punctuation errors in the text. They're so rare and so minor that it's easy to overlook them, and I attribute most, if not all, of them to misses during proofreading. So, I'll list the things I've seen, but I don't really think you need my help here.

First, consistency with dialogue tags. The first letter of a dialogue tag should be lowercase if it's not a complete sentence without the dialogue, and you should use a comma instead of a period in these cases.

This may be an optical illusion courtesy of italics, but it sometimes looks like there's a space between the opening punctuation for dialogue and the first word of dialogue, so just double check that. No spaces. And there are a couple of places where the same speaker's dialogue is split into two different paragraphs without a really good reason or a significant action or transition to warrant that, so just keep all of a speaker's dialogue together to reduce confusion.

Quotes within quotes (so, someone quoting something within spoken dialogue) should be set apart with single quotation marks: "Is that your idea of a 'fun' time?"

There was one spot where you used parentheses where you could have used commas to offset the phrase, and in light of the complicated dialogue/communication situation, you should really avoid using parentheses for anything other than translations.

There were a handful or wrong prepositions here or there: "considering how frantic we were on you a couple of days ago" (on/about)

And you have a tendency to overuse commas, which I notice, because I do, too, and my editing software is always catching me out on that. There are one or two run-on sentences that could be fixed by just swapping a comma for a semicolon. Also, you use em dashes fairly often (—), and I'll let you in on a trick I learned to insert the solid icon instead of multiple hyphens in a row with those annoying tiny spaces between them: Alt + 0151. It seems to work pretty consistently in most applications for me (edit: now Wattpad sometimes turns that em dashes into a single hyphes, which is annoying). Oh, and there's one sentence where you missed the paired em dash and put a comma instead: "The druid had forgotten about the strength of mandrakes—twice that of a strong human, until Marsh commented that the child weighed almost next to nothing."

An occasional word swap would probably be a good idea: "but the boy couldn't for the life of him know of anyone" (know/think)

Rare singular/plural disagreements: "Its bat wings, now cupped to control its descent, had almost resumed its usual luster" (their usual luster)

An extra word or missing word here or there, some occasional awkward phrasing (first paragraph of chapter six is a good example of this), occasional slips into present tense, and a random double-space in chapter 12 rounds it all out.

Originality & creativity: 10/10
Did I mention the three worlds? Earth, Ervon, and the Shadow Realm? And all the species? Humans, elfs, dwarves, ogiers, mandrakes, Myrdraaths, Soulless, etc.? And all the magic used in different ways by Druids, Seers, Healers, Adepts, and the Conclave? What about the time-space continuum that seems to be in constant flux? Oh, and that mythology about the Rhyshannon prophecy and the Key that can unlock or destroy Laareth. Let's also not forget the language creation and descriptions that are verbal paintings.

Emotional impact: 10/10
It would be easy for an author writing a story with this level of complexity to do so in a cold, detached tone, too focused on setting forth the facts and logic while allowing character development and emotions to stagnate, but you don't do that. The emotions are tied as intricately with each character and especially their relationship to magic as Jared ends up tied to Mergenthaal. The way you describe the Myrdraath's assault on his mind at the beginning of the story is downright painful on a deeply physical and emotional level, and the numbness, emptiness, and frustration that follows is believable and relatable (although I can't say I've ever endured a violent shredding of my mind and memories). And you continue that level of emotional exploration throughout the story. To read this is to feel it.

Pacing & structure: 5/5
So, a lot going on here, and it would be really easy for it to drag by spending too much time on the details or rush by spending too much time on the action. You've struck the perfect balance here. I never felt like it was going so fast I was going to miss something important, and I never felt like tapping my foot, wondering when something would finally happen.

Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5/5
Free points. Yay! 🙂

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10/10
If you haven't noticed by now, I really like this story, and I need you to continue it. Please?