Nov 27, 2025
I feel like this start is a little clumsy. I can appreciate not giving the game away too early, but it would really help if you grounded Kaoru a little more. Intriguing as his actions might be, they are never framed with any amount of reflection, nor do we get any preliminary character traits out of him. The narration is forward-only, meaning that all we have to glean who Kaoru is are his hitherto underexplained motives, the one instance of him wooing someone? (The sequence was not too clearly written.), and the singular moment where he says that he'd never been a patient man.
At the same time, whilst I can appreciate the atmosphere you were going for, I think the prose takes me out of it. You describe things very technically: 'A sound like...', 'A voice like...' and the grammatical rigour you maintain through scenes with varying vibes makes them read quite similarly. I don't really get any sense of dread or anxiety from Kaoru when the 'owner' appears. The words tell me he's scared, but the sentences don't help.