I thought this was a really well-written chapter, especially the constant interplay between descriptions of light and darkness. With the book so focused on colors and light, I'd love to see more of that in earlier chapters, too.
Night in T’Telir was very different from her homeland. There, it had been possible to see so many stars overhead that it looked like a bucket of white sand had been sprayed into the air.
Here, there were street lamps. Beyond that, there were taverns, restaurants, and other houses of entertainment. The result was a city full of lights--a little like the stars themselves had come down to inspect grand T’Telir. At first, Vivenna had been surprised at how few stars she could see in the sky, and had attributed it to the lower altitude. However, she was beginning to suspect that it was the light.
That's beautifully written in itself, shows an enlarging of Vivenna's inner ability both to appreciate beauty and to deduce, and it's a nice example of a slightly more primitive level of cosmological understanding in action. (N.B., she's looking up at the street lamps, which to someone not used to them might look like "stars [that] have come down.")
(I do note that she's having these poetic thoughts while being a drab...I still don't know what if anything being a drab does to one's mental state, but I thought I'd point that out.)
Other thoughts/comments:
- The D'Denir statues have been mentioned often enough that it now feels like foreshadowing.
- Can you say anything about your writing process and these 3.0 chapters you've been posting recently? Oddly they seem to contain far more small errors than the past 1.0 and 2.0 chapters (missing words, "she" instead of "he," that kind of thing). Or is this just a sign of how busy you are with all the other projects you're working on? (Congratulations on the Alcatraz news: even if it is very preliminary it's still very cool!)
As far as nomenclature, the basic problem I have, as I mentioned above, is that there are too many different, unrelated names for things. Some terms like "Breath" and "Awakening" seem to relate to life; others like "Iridescent tones" relate to color and sound; "BioChroma" is really the only word that links them; and then there are others like "First Heightening" and "Commands" that don't fit into either.
I don't like "Iridescence" because that word has a specific connotation of shifting colors -- it just doesn't mean what you need it to mean. Nobody has much "Iridescence." (It also sounds too related to "Idris.") Ditto with "Prismatic."
Something like "Chrominance" might work although it is long and like "BioChroma" suffers from sounding very scientific. You could perhaps shorten it to just "chroma": "She grimaced, then did as told, sending her
chroma into her shirt with a basic, and non-active, Command."
You could also make BioChroma feel simpler and less technical -- and more foreign -- in the same way, by lowercasing it and putting it in italics: "He didn't have much
biochroma" or "He gave away his
biochroma."
In fact, I don't know if you've already considered this and rejected it, but what about replacing "Breath" with something else? It seems to be the word that least accurately or poetically conveys what it in fact is and does. You can give away your Breath and still breathe and live; you can Awaken something with Breath and it does not breathe or live. The word may cause more conceptual confusion than it is worth.
This is also a perfect place to invent a word, I should add, since the concept isn't something that exists in our language. Of course, I'm still trying to figure out what exactly it is, so can't be of much help for another 10 chapters...
MattD