There are pieces that are hard to crit. That can be a negative thing, or a very, very positive thing. This is the latter, I assure you. It's so finished! So pristine! The very bane of a critter's existence. Ah! What polish. You'll see some majorly nitpicky things, so take it with a mountain of salt. This is entirely postable in its current form, as I'm sure you know.
Some things tho:
A face, but bad; the outward layer saying ‘bird’ but the hypodermis screaming ‘man.’
1. this is a banger sentence. 2. thank you for putting punctuation on the inside of your qoutemarks.
Its face sports sickly neon yellow eyes and a matching beak. A row of sharp teeth line a mouth behind the beak, in various rotting shades of yellow and green.
This is so minor but you use 'yellow' and 'beak' twice between these sentences. Synonyms?
On it is a large magenta, feathery mass.
Tiny bit of clunk here. "Large, magenta, feathery mass" is what it should be, I think? But that doesn't quite look right either. When you have three non-switchable adj. in a row I think you need commas for all of them?? Not sure, my grammar lessons only went so far.
Across the room from Valz is a door, wooden.
Honestly I would just say "wooden door." here. Unless you wanted to add something after: 'a door, wooden and dilapidated' or something.
Eyes darting around like a chameleon’s.
I know that some of this is SoC-y but this fragment is a bit jarring.
is not an idiom, and idioms are reviled for their unpredictability.
Replace comma with a em dash?
but the more specific the desired result then the more specific one has to be in their phrasing.
Remove 'then,' replace with a comma: "desired result, the more specific"
Syntax, pragmatics, formal semantics, a wizard must be aware of all of these when working.
After semantics should be a colon, not a comma: "Syntax, pragmatics, formal semantics: a wizard"
Due to this, registered wizards are granted great psychotherapy options by the state.
I love your writing holy balls
Valz thought of only one word: ‘Back’.
Punctuation inside quotes
She lands in an undignified heap, covered in dirt and sweat.
You use "undignified heap" at the beginning to the bird-man too. If that's a callback, cool I guess. Otherwise it just seems weird to use the same phrase again
Man this is a wild ride. Genuinely incredible. Is this Mages of Rela stuff? Reminds me of it. Anyway, incredible work. There might be some things I missed. After awhile it sorta just washed over me and I went along with the crazed-zombie ride of it all. Played out like an indie animation-feature in my head. Great stuff.
It doesn't feel sluggish, and your pacing is pretty good! It feels its length a tiny, tiny bit in the middle section. But that's natural, and its probably not real. Reading it whilst critting obviously makes it take longer than if I were a normal reader. Prose is great, plot is… wild. And otherwise you've got my stamp!
—Oli
