Yeah, overall, I'd say this reads a lot smoother in the places where it needed to.
And of course, you know I'm looking forward to stuff coming up.
Glad you feel like the new version is smoother. I wanted to address the real concerns people had, but to try to do it with a scalpel wherever possible instead of a cleaver. So if that was successful, then I'm relieved.
Hope that the next parts come out nicely as well.
I forgot this wasn't in the archives yet.
Me, too.
Your revisions look good to me! There's just one place where Astria says she hasn't seen the fire diamond in 20 years, which I'm thinking is a mistake of some sort. That's the only error I noticed. Otherwise, it feels much more clear how the 'walkers fit into this plane and what the power dynamics at play are. Nice work!
I'll have to double-check the bit with the fire diamond. The twenty years part is intentional, because she hasn't actually seen the diamond itself since it was sealed away in the box. She handled it very recently, but she was handling the box it was in rather than the diamond itself. But the language here may just be too ambiguous.
Glad that the 'walker dynamics make a little more sense now. I kind of hesitated about being as explicit with Astria's feelings of envy as I wound up being, because I didn't love how un-subtle it became, and I usually think of her as being a little more guarded than that. But, in the end, it seemed like it just needed to be said, and it gave me a hook to hang a little bit of exposition on, hopefully without it seeming too much like a digression.
Thanks, again, to you both for the feedback, again.