But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:17
"See, this is what I hate about you vampires. Sex and death and love and pain... it's all the same damn thing to you."
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer
It wasn't the worst way to die: in the place of someone I loved, truly and absolutely. A noble death, even. I had never been a noble person - or even an extraordinary one - so maybe it counted for something, going out like this.
We all have our little hopes.
I stared into the hunters eyes like the trapped rat that I was, and he grinned pleasantly back at me. Killing me wouldn't bother him any. Most likely it wouldn't bother anyone. Except maybe one person...
I know I'd never have died this way if I hadn't come to this awful town. But I have no regrets. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, one can hardly grieve when that dream comes to an end.
The hunter smiled again, and sauntered slowly forwards to wake me.
OK, so here's my first bout with the dragon. While the preface is pretty short, there are a couple of things here I wanted to get right off the bat:
ReplyDeleteStephanie Meyer knew what she was doing with this preface, but she didn't understand how to do it. The hallmarks of good storytelling are there - opening with the imminent death scene, especially classy in a vampire novel even if it's pretty inherently obvious that she's not going to "die" die. She has a concept here for a friendly-faced killer that is grossly mishandled, but I can't exactly put any more description on it without knowing who this mystery man is, so I just cleaned up the language where I could.
What'sherface, our protagonist, needs a face. The opening riff should establish her as a character as much as it establishes anyone. Knowing what little I do about the series, I can surmise that this character has been a huge jackass all her life and is otherwise completely average in every way. Rather than try to reinvent her without knowing her plot, I figured I'd make her self-aware of this in a fairly tragic sense.
A lot of the necessary parts were there to make this work already. If that keeps being true I won't have to go back and write things from scratch. Otherwise, we might be taking another pass at this later.