Hi critters! I have something niche that I’m hoping to find more readers for. It’s a dark fairytale novella, Slavic-inspired but not a retelling. The prose is literary/poetic, descriptive, maybe slightly archaic, and not everyone’s cup of tea. 
I’m looking for bigger picture feedback: what you like, dislike, what’s confusing, and any notes on pacing, plot, or characters. I’d love feedback within a month. Please PM if interested. Thanks for looking!
————————— BLURB
Scorched by daylight, and cast out for her strangeness, Sedge’s only friend is Night himself. She can summon him to cast day in darkness, but calling Night disrupts nature’s rhythm: it destroys crops, incites sickness, and abets nocturnal predators. Everywhere she goes or hides, she’s found, hated, and hunted.
While fleeing her latest burned home, Sedge encounters an ördög, a spiritual beast of flame and darkness, who promises her refuge in its fortress. In exchange, Sedge must call Night so it can prey at will on nearby towns. Desperate to belong, Sedge agrees, and her trepidation is swiftly soothed by the ördög’s affection and the safety of its abode.
Her peace is shattered when a hunter accepts a bounty for the ördög. During the battle between the two predators, Sedge is captured by the hunter. He tells her of the horrific suffering the ördög inflicts, and she is stricken by guilt and despair. Sedge must either banish Night to aid the hunter, save the people who have always rejected her, and doom herself back to a life of exile. Or she could protect the only shelter she’s ever known, and save the one creature—however cruel and dark—who has ever shown her acceptance.
————————— EXCERPT (for sense of style)
Emboldened by the quiet, Sedge crawled from the knitted shadows of a boulder crevice, evicting herself from the dark. Instantly speared by sunbeams, she curled in pain, exposed skin steaming, veins growing blue and swollen. The torment that would summon her solace.
She licked cracking lips and inhaled air that burned like fire, but it wasn’t her voice that Night would hear. Her words forged a connection between their worlds, but he was listening for her heart, and a heart in distress was the loudest of all. Gathering her pain and yearning, heart pounding, Sedge weaved it into her words and called:
Her sacrifice reached him, her spirit bled just enough. Sudden midnight swept around her like a soothing balm. The agony of day sloughed away, and sunlight peeled off Sedge’s pale skin. The bruising dissolved, her distended veins eased, and she blinked rapidly, eyes drinking darkness. Pinpricks of light swirled in gloam.
“Hello, Night,” she whispered, wiping hot tears off her cheeks. She rolled onto her back on the moss and let the heat seep out of her, replaced by relief so cool and tender she could ignore hunger chewing at her stomach and thirst itching her throat.
Night's eager darkness simmered among the oak, threaded the rowan, and pooled around Sedge. An inky fog rippled like muscles around thin bones of white birch. Moonlit dew rolled on the skin of the dark, and fresh stars dusted the canopy.
Sedge's heart calmed. Night was her little island of safety. The summer days were long, the sun never fully set, and the nights were bouts of twilight in which she, like the stars, languished in a crepuscular mire. Night's full presence was intoxicating relief, but he was pulled by a natural course, and would eventually return to the firmament’s rhythm, drawn away from her. Sedge had never found peace among fellow humans, and fit best in these rebellious moments outside of the natural flow of things, eloping with Night during a confusion of rhythms. The world that rejected her disappeared from worry.
“Thank you, friend, drogi przyjaciel.” Sedge knew many languages, and all the names of Night, and had summoned him from countless nations as each one drove her out, calling her their word for the unwanted. Vještica, a witch. Nightcaller. The woman able to summon the underworld. Some named her changeling or cambion, offspring of beasts, daughter of a dragon. But her strange ability and nocturnal nature was a choice, not a pedigree. Subsisting under the cover of Night—her only friend—since childhood had turned her skin thin and sunless, her hair dark, eyes large, and senses acute. Her attempts to live normally never lasted long. People saw her as strange, and she was friend with spirits and a worker of dark miracles, so they categorized her with the wild. The secrecy and lies and anxiety weren’t worth trying to pass as a normal woman again among people—it was too obvious that she was different, now. As a child, it had been easier to get by, the sympathy easier to win.
Night condensed among the trees. The velvet folds of moon shadows twisted into a thick, vague shape, edges studded with the bunched glimmers of star and dew.
“I’m sorry to pull you from your course,” she said. “But I have nothing, again, and need your help.”
A handful of stars shot across the sky, bringing a smile to Sedge’s cracked lips. Night never spoke, but in the motions of moonlight and stars she felt his answers, as if he uttered in a world thinly veiled from hers.
I’m looking for bigger picture feedback: what you like, dislike, what’s confusing, and any notes on pacing, plot, or characters. I’d love feedback within a month. Please PM if interested. Thanks for looking!
————————— BLURB
Scorched by daylight, and cast out for her strangeness, Sedge’s only friend is Night himself. She can summon him to cast day in darkness, but calling Night disrupts nature’s rhythm: it destroys crops, incites sickness, and abets nocturnal predators. Everywhere she goes or hides, she’s found, hated, and hunted.
While fleeing her latest burned home, Sedge encounters an ördög, a spiritual beast of flame and darkness, who promises her refuge in its fortress. In exchange, Sedge must call Night so it can prey at will on nearby towns. Desperate to belong, Sedge agrees, and her trepidation is swiftly soothed by the ördög’s affection and the safety of its abode.
Her peace is shattered when a hunter accepts a bounty for the ördög. During the battle between the two predators, Sedge is captured by the hunter. He tells her of the horrific suffering the ördög inflicts, and she is stricken by guilt and despair. Sedge must either banish Night to aid the hunter, save the people who have always rejected her, and doom herself back to a life of exile. Or she could protect the only shelter she’s ever known, and save the one creature—however cruel and dark—who has ever shown her acceptance.
————————— EXCERPT (for sense of style)
Emboldened by the quiet, Sedge crawled from the knitted shadows of a boulder crevice, evicting herself from the dark. Instantly speared by sunbeams, she curled in pain, exposed skin steaming, veins growing blue and swollen. The torment that would summon her solace.
She licked cracking lips and inhaled air that burned like fire, but it wasn’t her voice that Night would hear. Her words forged a connection between their worlds, but he was listening for her heart, and a heart in distress was the loudest of all. Gathering her pain and yearning, heart pounding, Sedge weaved it into her words and called:
“Noc. Drogi noc. Gather, Night. I need you.”
Her sacrifice reached him, her spirit bled just enough. Sudden midnight swept around her like a soothing balm. The agony of day sloughed away, and sunlight peeled off Sedge’s pale skin. The bruising dissolved, her distended veins eased, and she blinked rapidly, eyes drinking darkness. Pinpricks of light swirled in gloam.
“Hello, Night,” she whispered, wiping hot tears off her cheeks. She rolled onto her back on the moss and let the heat seep out of her, replaced by relief so cool and tender she could ignore hunger chewing at her stomach and thirst itching her throat.
Night's eager darkness simmered among the oak, threaded the rowan, and pooled around Sedge. An inky fog rippled like muscles around thin bones of white birch. Moonlit dew rolled on the skin of the dark, and fresh stars dusted the canopy.
Sedge's heart calmed. Night was her little island of safety. The summer days were long, the sun never fully set, and the nights were bouts of twilight in which she, like the stars, languished in a crepuscular mire. Night's full presence was intoxicating relief, but he was pulled by a natural course, and would eventually return to the firmament’s rhythm, drawn away from her. Sedge had never found peace among fellow humans, and fit best in these rebellious moments outside of the natural flow of things, eloping with Night during a confusion of rhythms. The world that rejected her disappeared from worry.
“Thank you, friend, drogi przyjaciel.” Sedge knew many languages, and all the names of Night, and had summoned him from countless nations as each one drove her out, calling her their word for the unwanted. Vještica, a witch. Nightcaller. The woman able to summon the underworld. Some named her changeling or cambion, offspring of beasts, daughter of a dragon. But her strange ability and nocturnal nature was a choice, not a pedigree. Subsisting under the cover of Night—her only friend—since childhood had turned her skin thin and sunless, her hair dark, eyes large, and senses acute. Her attempts to live normally never lasted long. People saw her as strange, and she was friend with spirits and a worker of dark miracles, so they categorized her with the wild. The secrecy and lies and anxiety weren’t worth trying to pass as a normal woman again among people—it was too obvious that she was different, now. As a child, it had been easier to get by, the sympathy easier to win.
Night condensed among the trees. The velvet folds of moon shadows twisted into a thick, vague shape, edges studded with the bunched glimmers of star and dew.
“I’m sorry to pull you from your course,” she said. “But I have nothing, again, and need your help.”
A handful of stars shot across the sky, bringing a smile to Sedge’s cracked lips. Night never spoke, but in the motions of moonlight and stars she felt his answers, as if he uttered in a world thinly veiled from hers.
