i love this story and ur other story 2 . email me if ur doin another fic it roxx

YAY! ur starting to make stories for your charectorss! one down, six to go. lol! YAY! it was really good tho! keep it up! ^.^

I really liked this. You've made me see Hikitsu in a whole new light, and deepened my understanding of Hikitsu the man-one can't ask for more from a character study than that!

I'm also impressed with the amount of thought and care you put into writing this (as the details in the story and your author's note at the end of it reveal.) Clearly, you care about how your characters' pasts have affected their actions , which is the sign of a very good writer in the making.

You did an excellent job in writing the dialogue and in describing the interactions between Hikitsu and Sora...I could see their expressions and feel their emotions. I loved what Sora said about his eyepatch...and that he took it off because what she said. Lovely characterization, there. ^__^

And now...*slaps on beta reader's hat*

For whatever it's worth to you, I do have a couple of constructive criticisms. ^__^

~Be careful of homynyms- spellcheck won't catch it if you use words that sound the same but are spelled differently. For example 'let them stair' should be 'let them stare'.

~ Your prose is a bit choppy, due to the fact that your sentences are very short or actually sentence fragments. There were a couple spots where I thought that style really worked, most of the time I felt it made a extremely interesting story seem less so.

Example:

What you wrote:

Chen Entato, or Hikitsu, as most people called him these days, knew that. He was already as good as dead. He had set out alone on his way to the capital. At the time he had known where he was going. He had been well supplied and ready for the journey. But no longer. An unlucky turn of events had left him trapped in a snowstorm. He had been one of the lucky ones. He had survived. But at what cost.

Suggested edit:

Chen Entato, or Hikitsu, as most people called him these days, was aware of the danger but had still set out alone, on his way to the capital. At the time he had known where he was going, and was ready and well supplied for the journey.

That no longer held true. An unlucky turn of events had left him trapped in a snowstorm. He had been one of the lucky ones, though, he had survived- but at what cost? To go missing was a death sentence, and he knew it.

Does that make sense? If you have questions, please email me. If you would want, I'll even help you edit this fic. ^_^

*takes off beta reader's cap*

You should be very proud of this story-it's a thoughtful and very insightful look into a character that's not written about nearly enough for my liking. ^_^* I am very much interested in reading the 'The Genbu Story' after reading this fic, and plan to as soon as I can.

Keep up the good work!!

Best wishes and good thoughts,
KittyLynne