An Old Altmer's Tale Options

[Callidus Thorn]

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This post has been edited by Callidus Thorn: Nov 28 2013, 05:24 PM

[SubRosa]

An old Altmer. Wow, what does it take for an Altmer to be old? He's probably been around since before Tiber Septim's reign. Ahh, now I starting to suspect that he is recounting the tale in the 4th Era, of what happened to him in the 3rd.

You would not begrudge an old man his walking stick, would you?
Gandalf FTW!

“The Knights of the True Horn?”
The knights of the who horn? Speechify on Old Altmer! Let's hear this tale!

Ahh, so it is a 3rd Era tale after all. And apparently not the story of the speaker. Well, perhaps not. I suppose we shall see, won't we?


nits:
It was early evening, but it was already looking to be a good night, the tavern virtually {filled}, the patrons {filling} the air with the sounds of good cheer, and calls for more drink.
There are a couple of things here. First is that you have a repetition of filled/filling in the same sentence. It is always best to avoid any word repetitions. Thesaurus.com is your friend here. It is one of my search engines in Firefox. The other thing is that it is a run on sentence. The best way to tell if one is or not is to read it outloud. If you find yourself running out of breath and having to stop more than once, it is too long. I would suggest breaking it up into multiple sentences. For example:
It was early evening, but it was already looking to be a good night. The tavern was virtually filled, and the patrons suffused the air with the sounds of good cheer, and calls for more drink.


{“}The Altmer chuckled, a dry, hollow sound in the near silence that filled the tavern.
Looks like that sneaky Altmer slid in an opening quotation mark when you were not looking.


One question asked in many voices, and in many different ways, ran{d} across the room.
Never trust an elf. This time he sneaked in a 'd' at the end of 'ran'.


spread in a screen in {t}he hopes of preventing any from getting close enough to harm the Emperor
I am thinking you wanted a 't' to make a 'the' here.


opened his mouth to speak only to be interrupted by the {“prisoner”}.
It is not a hard and fast rule, but just as a suggestion, you might consider using single quotation marks around 'prisoner' rather than double quotation marks. The reason being you have a lot of dialogue around it, and it makes the word prisoner look like it was being spoken aloud.


“What? Anaril? Is that you?” The Altmer in the cell coughed violently before replying.
I found this to be confusing. I thought it was the Altmer in the cell saying it. When apparently he said the line above it. The same is true of a few other lines as well. It is usually best to put the speech tags in the same paragraph as its dependent dialogue. I would consider going back and editing those paragraphs, perhaps like so:

The Captain was not happy to find the cell occupied. “What's this prisoner doing here? This cell is supposed to be off-limits,” she grumbled.

The other Blade, a Redguard, opened his mouth to speak, "I..."

“Captain Renault! You must turn back!" the prisoner interrupted him. "The way is compromised! The enemy know the secret!”

“What? Anaril? Is that you?” the Captain wondered aloud.

The Altmer in the cell coughed violently before replying. “Yes. I managed to get close enough to discover their plans, at least in part, but I could not get away undetected. I rode my horse into the ground to get here, but I couldn't risk approaching you openly. They've been watching you all for days, I would never have gotten close. So I got myself arrested, and placed in this cell. I bribed a few people to commit some petty crimes and get arrested, filling the other cells, so they had to put me in here. It was the only way I could think of to make sure you got my warning. Turn back! This way is not safe, it is a trap!”


they herded us through {t}he streets

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 21 2013, 09:02 PM