“Stare into the crystal and meditate, Beatrice,” I tell you. You’re barely younger than I am, your eighteenth birthday about a week away. “We need to work on your concentration.”
You gaze into the crystal, your face blank, in a trance. Knowing you no longer sense my presence, I reach for the case and open it, taking out the hypodermic.
A very interesting choice to use ‘you’, and effective I think. This tiny scene has to work hard and conveys a lot of information in a very small space. It also brings in the fascinating fact that Dawn is still very young herself.
Unsurprisely, I’m not comforted by Wyndam-Pryce’s words.
Another typo.
He’s made his own decisions he’d rather not have had to make.
Here your language unfortunately moves from the deliberately formal into just being hard to read.
I can tell she is thinking, and that she’ll give me an answer as soon as she comes up with one.
Very nice, a perfect little piece of characterization that also contributes to the plot.
Her eyes fall on a picture of Quentin Travers
Now why ‘fall’? It implies Lydia thinks of Quentin only by chance, and that contradicts her later emotions. A different verb such as ‘fix’ might carry the theme better.
(Just as we still don’t know why Angel was brought back after Buffy killed him, I muse. And then I wonder—-where is Angel?) Travers had traveled to America to oversee Buffy’s Cruciamentum, and then again to review her performance before giving her the Council’s information about Glorificus. (Even years later, I shiver at the memory of the hellgod.) Giles and Buffy hated him with the deepest righteous anger.
I hate these asides in brackets. They distract but they add nothing to the story. If you want something for Dawn to think about while Lydia considers her answer I suggest this would be a perfect place to return to the idea of Dawn having been in danger during Buffy’s Cruciamentum. What emotions and memories does the whole idea of Cruciamentum evoke for Dawn? How is it playing into her present decision?
But Lydia has seen the other side of the man; had looked up to him as teacher and friend.
Nice idea.
Lydia puts her hand on the portrait’s frame, stares deeply into the painted eyes of her mentor’s simulacrum. “Let the men be blinded by love and by power,” she says. “We need to prepare for the future.”
A lovely contradiction of words and emotions as displayed through her actions.
“For the future,” I repeat, if somewhat tonelessly, then turn and walk towards my office. After all, a Watcher’s burden is never complete.
I have read and re-read that last sentence and yet I am still unsure what you are trying to say with it. I feel the message is important to you but I am just not following it. And most sadly the result of that last sentence is that it makes this the weakest ending for a section you have. I actually think the sentence before that completes and summarizes the story much better and the last one is superfluous. To close with Dawn going back into her office would be an ending as punchy as all the others that gives both a finality to the decision that will undoubtedly condemn girls to their death and encapsulates the woman she has become – office-bound, formal, taking on the rituals and traditions of the Watcher’s Council.
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continued...
Date: 2005-09-24 11:22 am (UTC)Another typo.
Here your language unfortunately moves from the deliberately formal into just being hard to read.
Very nice, a perfect little piece of characterization that also contributes to the plot.
Now why ‘fall’? It implies Lydia thinks of Quentin only by chance, and that contradicts her later emotions. A different verb such as ‘fix’ might carry the theme better.
I hate these asides in brackets. They distract but they add nothing to the story. If you want something for Dawn to think about while Lydia considers her answer I suggest this would be a perfect place to return to the idea of Dawn having been in danger during Buffy’s Cruciamentum. What emotions and memories does the whole idea of Cruciamentum evoke for Dawn? How is it playing into her present decision?
Nice idea.
A lovely contradiction of words and emotions as displayed through her actions.
I have read and re-read that last sentence and yet I am still unsure what you are trying to say with it. I feel the message is important to you but I am just not following it. And most sadly the result of that last sentence is that it makes this the weakest ending for a section you have. I actually think the sentence before that completes and summarizes the story much better and the last one is superfluous. To close with Dawn going back into her office would be an ending as punchy as all the others that gives both a finality to the decision that will undoubtedly condemn girls to their death and encapsulates the woman she has become – office-bound, formal, taking on the rituals and traditions of the Watcher’s Council.