Hello! *waves*
Since your fic is short so far and I should get into a habit of reviewing more often, I will … review? XD Bear in mind that I haven’t fully read the reviews you’re already received, so apologies if I repeat something.
Okay then! This is a prologue, so it’s allowed to be short, but there’s a difference between having a story or chapter short for good reasons and it being short just because there’s not really enough in it. Right now, your prologue is short because you’ve only given us the bare-bones of what’s happening. A lot of the time, a story is carried by the characters: what makes the story interesting is what happens to the characters and how they react—or what they do and the consequences of it. Now, I realise this prologue is meant to present backstory, so how the prologue is written depends on what you intend to do with the rest of the story.
Without meaning to ask for details: if your story is going to be about the people of the town and their lives as ghosts, then you might want to introduce one or two of the characters directly in the prologue so we already have someone to empathise with—we don’t even need to know their names (in fact, it might be more interesting and tense if we didn’t!); you just need to focus on them a little. If your story is going to be about the ones that survived, then it’s a similar situation; if, on the other hand, the story focuses on the men who did it, we should get to see more about their motives and personality, instead of just their actions. Finally, if you’re planning to focus on the town itself and other people coming through it and discovering that it
is a ghost town, then I think you’re going in the right direction in terms of being detached from any human character, but the town itself could be a kind of ‘character’ in itself.
But, depending on which route you’re going to take will change the content of the prologue. If you’re going with one of the first routes, then you really should choose a character and focus on them, because that will introduce them to us, and seeing their death (or escape from it) will make us want to know more. Right now, the only characters you’ve introduced us to with any detail are the men who burned down the town. I had thought perhaps they would be the focus of the story somehow and come back to the town later, but then they get offed by being cursed, with the implication that we won’t see any more of them—or not much more. In fact, the villains are a bit odd because we don’t even get to see why they did what they did—it seemed very random.
The more important a thing is, the more detail it should have—even if you’re deliberately holding the detail back to keep the reader mystified, if you focus on something, it indicates that it’s important somehow. For instance, do we really need to see them start the fire, or would it be better if we weren’t sure how it started and it was just implied it was the two strangers? By focusing so much on the villains and the actual act of the burning, you’re implying they’re important, so you either need to make sure that they actually are, or not focus on them as much and focus on someone (or something) else instead.
By choosing one or two specific people to focus on, you’ll then have more to write about (depending on how you choose to write it): their perception of the town they live in; their day-to-day activities; their perspective of when the strangers came to town; their perspective as the town is burned (including their fear/pain/sorrow). Thinking about all of that would help lead up to the rest of the story, especially if you're focusing on the characters, and will also help you with the pacing, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Something else I wanted to bring up was the portrayal of the town itself. It does sound so very idyllic, but maybe too much so; it just sounds like everything is perfect and nothing bad ever happens. This might be what you’re intending to portray, but you should probably acknowledge that although sometimes people might argue, they always make it up afterwards: after all, being able to forgive one another is a nice ideal, and it implies that yes, they do have their problems but can get past them, which makes the town seem a little less unrealistic.
There’s also the fact that they all turn out and welcome the strangers; it just seems a little over the top right now, possibly because you haven’t really given an indication of the town’s size. A small, friendly town I could imagine doing this, especially if they’re out of the way and don’t get many visitors, but we need to know this. As it stands, you’ve sort of presented the story as a fairy-tale, so I’m not as opposed to the idea of an idyllic little town as I might otherwise be.
(As a side note: the
only thing they all ate for the feast was roast chicken and potatoes? No vegetables? No sauces? No drinks or desserts?
)
While I’m on the subject of the town, I’d just like to talk about the setting. Okay, so we have this nice, idyllic little town; that’s part of the setting. But where is it? In a forest, yes, but what kind of forest? A valley? Near a river? Is it out of the way, so not many people come there? What era is it from—five hundred years before the ‘present day’, or one hundred, or only a decade or so? Which region is it in? The name doesn’t sound like it fits within the Pokémon world at all (though I kind of like it on its own terms). You haven’t really mentioned pokémon at all yet, so I’m wondering a little if it is a pokémon story; for instance, surely there are some water pokémon around which could have helped put out the fire, even if they couldn’t put it out entirely?
Finally, the last point about the plot, is the fact that almost
no one woke up in time to save themselves. I just took another look and you imply that the travelers actually circle the town with oil so that it’s surrounded, but depending on how the wind is blowing one side of the fire will just eat up all the forest. And since the fire is started in the forest itself, it’s unlikely that no one would wake up in time to sound the alarm. People would die, but not the whole town. If, on the other hand, the travelers chose certain places
inside the town to set on fire, all at once—or nearly so—then most of the town would be on fire and burning before the townspeople have much chance to wake up and react, and the death toll would be far higher. Also, unless the town really is small, chances are that
someone is awake somewhere.
Okay, on to pacing. Pacing is basically about how fast or slow your story moves. Right now, your story moves very fast, mostly because you haven’t given us much detail of certain events; you’ve just summarised it. For instance, you say that the fire woke everyone up, and then you say that some people survived, but most people didn’t. But what happened? Expand on the situation; how did the people who lived escape from the fire? How did the ones who died turn to ghosts? How long did it take before they did? Exactly how did they curse the travelers, and how did they find them? If you think about expanding on these things (keeping in mind that you might want to deliberately keep some things a mystery, but that requires a certain way of not revealing those parts), you’ll find your story moves more slowly and feels less rushed.
(‘Nuther side note: why is it important that we know the exact number of people who survived? Unless that’s important somehow, it would be best if you just generalised—‘a few people’ or ‘a handful of people’ would be fine.)
Something most reviewers bring up is description, but I didn’t want to touch on it very much because you
do seem to have chosen a ‘fairy-tale’ tone for the prologue, and those are often written with a special kind of summarising form, in which actual, detailed description isn’t as important. Firstly, I wanted to mention that some of (what I assume to be) your edited-in description seems very similar to the examples lugia*master wrote for you: I’d suggest you make sure you don’t do that. Take what he wrote as an example of
how you can expand on things, yes, but don’t take the actual words and form and use them yourself; depending on how far you go with it, it could lead to plagiarism, which is illegal.
Secondly, description is related to pacing because by making sure you describe things (and, as always, the most important things should be described the most), your story will be less rushed. So, again; describe what happens while the fire is spreading, and how the people escaped, and what happened when the ghosts cursed the travelers. You don’t need to go into a whole lot of detail considering this
is fairy-tale-esque, but even just something like this would be beneficial (my apologies for borrowing the beginning of one of your paragraphs):
The fire reached the town, burning its way through the dark streets. The heat made the townspeople shift uncomfortably in their sleep until finally, one by one, they awoke. Some woke up too late, and the fire had already taken over their houses until there was no escape; others heard the screams of the ones burning and rushed to their windows only to see the red glow over the town. Some managed to escape by throwing themselves in the river that ran beside the town—others were far enough away from the fire that they simply ran.
But, in the end, only a handful were left.
I don’t know how to accurate those details are compared to your mental image of the town, but you should get the idea; considering the tone you’ve set you don’t need to go into a
lot of detail, just enough that we know what happened at each point in time.
Finally, the technical nitpicks, which will probably change if you do a rewrite, but I’ll go through for future reference.
Aletrallinai-A Ghost Town
Very nitpicky, but good for future reference: I know you wanted a dash there, but that’s a hyphen pretending to be a dash. To make a real dash, all you need to do is put a space after a word, then a hyphen, then another space and type another word, and when you press the spacebar after the second word your writing program (or, well, Microsoft Word, at least) will turn it automatically into a dash.
Alternatively, since the forum doesn’t have an auto-format feature which means dashes are a no-go, I just go with two hyphens in a row without any spaces between them or the words. In Word that’ll make one extra-long dash; on-forum, I feel it’s good to just indicate something other than just your usual hyphen.
Also, the title as a whole is very big—too big, even. You shouldn’t need it to be so big, and it’s distracting, so you should probably make is smaller.
There were no big tall skyscrapers, just lovely detached bungalow's.
That should be ‘bungalows’, because it’s just a plural; you only use an apostrophe when you’re implying that someone/thing owns something.
However one day, two travelers came to the town.
‘However’ should always have a comma after it.
short black hair with stubble around his face and a short mustache.
‘moustache’.
the travelers were sinister, at night, when everyone was asleep,
This comma should be either a semi-colon (which looks like this: ; ), or a period. Think of commas as representing a pause in a sentence, like a pause to breathe—you need to do it with any long sentence, but sometimes, you need a bigger pause. Now think of a sentence as representing a single idea or thought. The idea ‘the travelers were sinister’ is very different to the idea of what they did ‘at night, when everyone was asleep’. That means that you need a bigger pause to show that they are so different. That’s what semi-colons are for; they show that, even though there’s a big pause there, the two parts of the sentence are still related.
The exact details of the rule are more complicated, but that’s the gist of it; I wouldn’t recommend using a semi-colon unless you’re really sure you know what you’re doing, though.
The trees were all old and were on the edge of falling down.
Although this is technically one way of doing it, you don’t need to repeat the word ‘were’, because you’re still referring to the trees; repeating words is boring, so you want to avoid it if you can.
The travelers scrabbled to the oldest Rowan tree
Just a note on word-use, really; you might want something other than ‘scrabbled’. The word ‘scrabble’ indicates a quick, desperate movement, which doesn’t really suit the travelers’ actions (unless they’re worried about getting caught, but even then something like ‘quickly’ or ‘hastily’ would be better).
Then they lit the match and a glowing flame exploded that could be seen from the other side of the wood and the fire followed the trail and the travelers ran to the next town.
There are a number of things wrong with this sentence. Firstly, like the other sentence, you’re combining two different ideas: the fact that they lit a match (and the description of the match) and the movement of the fire. They need to be separated into different sentences, possibly also with a sentence between them to say that the travelers actually did light the oil on fire, instead of just jumping from ‘they lit a match’ to ‘the fire spread’.
Making it two sentences should also solve the problem of repeating the word ‘and’ too many times; remember, repetition, unless done in a certain way, is boring, so you want to avoid it.
Secondly, the part of the sentence that’s bolded is a little … odd. Since the part ‘that could be seen from the other side of the wood’ relates directly to the flame itself and not the exploding, it needs to come before the word ‘exploded’. Also, ‘explode’ is a verb, so it needs to be qualified by something like ‘exploded into life’—in other words, it needs to be
doing something.
Finally, the fact that ‘the travelers ran to the next town’ implies they got there before the first town was destroyed, which has the problem of distance: no one could run to the next town that quickly. I get the feeling you mean something like ‘the travelers ran
toward the next town’, however, which makes a lot more sense.
Tomorrow was the Aletrallinai sun festivile
Should be ‘festival’.
it burned it's way through the dark streets
That should be ‘its’. Think of it like this: ‘it’s’, with the apostrophe, is a shorter form of the phrase ‘it is’. Anytime you have an ‘its’ of any kind in the sentence but aren’t sure whether it should have an apostrophe or not, say the sentence again but make the ‘its’ ‘it is’; if the sentence sounds wrong and doesn’t make sense, then it shouldn’t have the apostrophe.
Only 12 people survived that night, the rest turned to ghosts.
Although the rule varies depending on author and style, usually numbers up to ninety-nine should be spelled out, and 100 and above can be in numeric form.
Secondly, the comma after ‘night’ should be either a semi-colon or a period.
The crime would not go unpunished, the ghosts gathered round the travelers as they slept and doomed there spirits to roam in the mines of Aletrallinai
Again, that should be a semi-colon or a period.
Secondly, that ‘there’ should be ‘their’; ‘their’ is the possessive form of ‘they’. All that means is that when you’re talking about something that more than one person ‘owns’, you use ‘their’, like with ‘their spirits’.
And that’s it. I think the prologue itself has a lot of potential to be very tense and suspenseful, and I have to admit I’m wondering what you’ll do with the rest of the story. ^^ Good luck.
