[Report This]Date: December 30 2025 5:47 PM Title: Fog of War
Nice to see one of the all-time greatest writers returning to the size space.
I know this is your first piece in a while, but I thought it was excellent. I read this with a fairly critical lens and the only mistakes I found were negligible at worst and subjective at best; not so much "errors" as "this sentence might benefit from a comma" or "these clauses could be rearranged." I think I spotted one missing article in a speech tag for the helmsman. That's the degree of triviality we're talking about here. Such things are seldom noteworthy and ultimately inevitable without the assistance of professional editors, so "kudos" on an excellent work.
With the superficial nitpicking out of the way, I must commend you on your descriptive language and dialogue. Having not read your stories in a while (and reading far too many inferior works in the interim), I was awaiting the inevitable disruption of my immersion by one of the many "millenialisms" that plague modern writing, only to be relieved when I reached the end having never encountered any. I find that it's tricky for writers to construct dialogue from bygone eras, especially in esoteric contexts, but I found yours to be both convincing and effective while simultaneously avoiding the temptation of embellishment. Having the giantess herself have no spoken dialogue (discounting Perez's hearsay) was also an excellent choice.
Your descriptive language was very economical. Your imagery gave me a good sense of the scene and never left me feeling bored. Your diction was rich and period-appropriate as well. "Impish" is a word that I don't encounter nearly enough nowadays, to the point that I found it distracting when I saw it appear in your story twice (in hindsight, the story might benefit from one of these being replaced by a suitable synonym, such as "devilish," but this comment was intended as a personal anecdote from a reader rather than a criticism). Smut really isn't the kind of thing I read, but this story was an enjoyable experience (no innuendo intended).
Overall, this piece felt like more of a "scene" than a story for me and I would love to see you employ your skills for a lengthier work with more plot, but this marks an excellent return to form regardless. My review was thorough and nitpicky because I believe all reviews should be constructive and even the best of us can improve, but this is indubitably one of the best short stories in the genre. Exceptional work.