LotR fic: Ransom (11/12)
Title: Ransom
Chapter Title: Be All My Sins Remembered
Word Count: 5,800
Rating: T
Summary: As the son of a poor family in Harad, Hakim thought he knew what to expect out of life. But, when a stranger stumbles onto his land after escaping the Mountains of Shadow, he and his family see their lives upended.
Previous Chapters:
Chapter One: Old ( Read more... )
Chapter Title: Be All My Sins Remembered
Word Count: 5,800
Rating: T
Summary: As the son of a poor family in Harad, Hakim thought he knew what to expect out of life. But, when a stranger stumbles onto his land after escaping the Mountains of Shadow, he and his family see their lives upended.
Previous Chapters:
Chapter One: Old ( Read more... )
I know I said that the last chapter was probably my favorite but then I re-read this one and now I think it might be my favorite. It's a toss-up. There's just so much wonderful angst in both. What's terrific about this chapter, of course, is that the angst is slowly resolving as you reveal the aftermath of the story. It's heartbreaking what happened to Azzam, and what Aragorn revealed about his role in burning the fleet at Umbar. That's especially one of those searing, wince-inducing moments in the story, and one that took some courage on your part to include. So many think Aragorn is Perfect, never making any mistakes, but war is war... it's messy, and confusing, and there are always unintended consequences. It's in Aragorn's reaction to what happened that the strength of his character will be revealed, and you've shown the deep scar... the sin, as you call it in the chapter title... that will no doubt be a lifelong reminder to Aragorn of the price of war and the need to work to avoid it.
Now for the epilogue! I'll be sorry that the story is coming to an end, but I have a feeling you've some more tales up your sleeve that will be just as compelling. :)
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Your reviews might be my favorite, though. I'm so glad you appreciated the resolution in this chapter. You're right that the part about Umbar was difficult to write, so I'm glad it was effective in context--that it paid off, so to speak.
Now that I have a whole eleven days between exams, I might even make some progress on my eleventy-one other WIPs!
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Bwa ha ha! You may have. Kinda like metal stress fatigue... you keep bending it, it's gonna snap! *g*
Your reviews might be my favorite, though.
Aw, well... my reviews here are sort of a continuation of my beta for you. All part of the service, ma'am.
Ooh, 11 whole days! And eleventy-one WIPs... *does math*... um, that means you'll work on 10.0909091 a day! *braces myself for onslaught of stories to beta*
I actually got a story posted to my LJ, a birthday fic for Lily Baggins (which means: Aragorn's battered and bashed again, poor guy). Now I'm trying to wrestle SoA into submission so I can get it posted there. I have the worst time with getting the formatting right on that site--seems like no matter how I post it, whether as an HTML doc or a text doc, it comes up with funky coding errors that translate into oddball all-caps paragraphs or centered text, or sometimes even rearranging the text entirely. *sigh* I've frustrated myself to the point this morning that I'm giving up until tomorrow, when I can come at it fresh.
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*happily trots off to read your h/c fic*
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Yep, I have to copy/paste, but only from Word docs, and even then I have to be careful what characters I use for section separators. And I can't use Firefox but have to use IE, which I absolutely despise. Adding to the oddness yesterday, someone emailed me telling me that they saw the story summary on my author page but there wasn't a chapter listed. Well, yes, there wasn't a chapter listed because I hadn't actually published the chapter. Why the story summary showed up on my author page (it didn't show up on the main page), I've no clue, but by evening, the summary was gone! This morning I uploaded it all and it worked fine, though, so who knows. I think it's just that SoA is a very old site and it's getting a little crankier with each new generation of web browsers. :(
Anyways, it's up now, and tweaked a little more from the LJ version but essentially the same. Just fixed a few continuity issues. Hope you enjoy it!
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