/lit/ - Literature

Rate this passage from a novella I'm writing (I'm 1/3 of the way through):


Gorond slammed shut the wooden door of his shack, causing piles of snow perched atop the roof to rain down on the ground. With strides long and rapid he traversed what used to be a meticulously tended garden, now a ruin of thorns and roots frozen by the icy tendrils of the inevitable winter.

Gorond's shack was five minutes away from the Hangman's Dock, a route which provided him with no sights other than decrepit old warehouses, fermented shark meat stalls and the dark tendrils of smoke rising from the refineries of the Kartkoff district to the east.

Gorond shoved his hands inside the pockets of his tightly buttoned wooly coat and walked the distance to the Ushala Dockyards, where he would find the Black Marrow, his whaling ship whose repairs were supposed to have finished by this morning. His boots clattered against the cold cobblestone pavement as he met the usual faces working the sagging docks. Sailors, longshoremen, hired swords and lowly merchants frequented the dockside, all hailing from different corners of the known world.

They all felt so familiar but so alien at the same time. A concentration of cultures and dialect that could only be matched by the metropolitan heart of Montevilla. "They no doubt came to Fjuthuul for the same reason I did. Greedy fools," he thought and spat at the ground. Gorond wondered how many families had been lured to the edge of the world at the prospect of profiting from the blooming silver dust and whaling industries, only to be left shackled and stranded, their soulless husks drained of any will to live and prosper.

There was once a time where Gorond praised the Gods each time he woke up on solid ground, ignited by the desire to reunite with his family. Nowadays, ten lonely years after he first step foot on the bleak shores of Fjuuthul, he prayed each night that the next morning would find him cold and lifeless.