nah, doing a story would've been way harder than a poem. poems give you a lot of structure to fall back on, and they let you be less direct in your imagery. if I'd gotten the Castle like I wanted originally I could've easily done a story, but with Door? that was entirely a poem prompt.

Thanks for the feedback Keeper! I agree with what you say really, but my attitude is that I won't ever get better at writing unless I do more writing and get more feedback, so I'm glad it wasn't horrendous as that seems to be an alright place to work from.

From my perspective, I was never that great at English (I do Physics, c'mon.), so it's kind of hard to be interested in writing but also be not great at it technically... ^^

Anyway, congrats Ruwin and thanks again Keeper

Well I hope the commentary was helpful! And I hope you participate again

I think I might rewrite the story, or at least some of it (and get some other people to help edit), thank u!!!

EDIT: the stuff @ the end was supposed to be people summoning random stuff

Oh man. Second place! In a field with such luminaries! I am honored, truly honored.

@Keeper's commentary:

In retrospect, all-caps is basically never correct.

Endings are definitely the thing I need to work on most; every time I write a story, it's going fine until I run out of steam; then I'm just like, "welp, guess the story ends here" and bring it to a close as fast as I can. It's one of the reasons I have trouble writing long pieces.

Color-wise, I definitely imagined Helga as blue-green; I think those are appropriate colors for a witch, as blue-green tends to be a little further outside the realm of the familiar, and is also one of the pairs most interested in knowledge. She's definitely influenced by the Discworld witches in terms of personality, as well as some of Diana Wynne Jones' characters; she does good, but it doesn't quite come naturally to her. I think when she was younger she was probably a bit crueller as well, and I wonder what it was that changed her. She definitely knows how to lay a mean curse on you, even if she won't let herself do it.

The thing I didn't manage to figure out is what plane the story happens on. I considered Innistrad, but the only reason to set it on Innistrad is that it's a familiar plane, and besides, there's no connection between witches and blue magic there. The one thing I know about the plane is that it's a plane where small, everyday magics are fairly common, but anything beyond that is firmly in the realm of myth. And, of course, that at some point -- several generations before our story takes place -- someone decided witches were a menace, and decided to breed dogs/wolves to hunt them down...

A big thanks to everyone who wrote a story for us to enjoy, and to Keeper for running this game!