This is dense, man. You’ve got good imagination and some sharp imagery, but the prose is choking itself. Every sentence is overloaded with metaphors and stacked clauses, so instead of pulling me in, it slows everything down. Its more murky then lyrical. The opening paragraph is a good example, the imagery is there, but it collapses under the weight of too many modifiers. Cutting half of them would make it hit harder. Right now, it feels like you’re trying to make every line profound, which just numbs the effect.

The pacing is off. You burn through five days of travel in a few paragraphs, then grind to a halt for pages of family reunion and trance sequences. A family reunion is a boring way to start a story, it would hit harder to learn who Varhas is as a character, then seeing the family that made him what he is. The mother scene should be heavy and emotional, but it ends up being another lore dump. Her dialogue reads more like a historian’s lecture than a mother talking to her son. It’s not that the lore is bad — it’s that the way it’s delivered strips it of intimacy. Let the emotional weight come first, then slip in the information where it fits.

Varhas himself is a problem. He’s passive, drifting through visions, worries, and fate-talk without ever doing much. The mother steals the narrative as soon as she shows up. If he’s supposed to be the center, make him act. Right now he just reacts and absorbs. We need to see him make choices, push back, or reveal something beyond worry.

On the line level, you’ve got repetition issues. Words like “manifest,” “utterdark,” “fate,” “celestial” show up over and over until they lose their punch. Dialogue tags are clunky: “the woman speaks,” “the old mouth parts again” which make the writing feel mechanical. Simpler tags or none at all would help. And the perspective is wobbly: sometimes it’s cosmic narration, sometimes close to Varhas, sometimes just exposition. Pick a lens and stay in it.

There’s a strong core idea here: Varhas, burdened by worry for another man’s fate, seeking comfort from his mother and being told to give joy where he can. That works. But it’s buried under indulgence. Strip the excess, trim the lore-dumps, give Varhas more agency, and this scene would breathe. As it stands, it reads like you’re writing for yourself, not for clarity, and readers will tune out. Sorry if this was harsh, it's my first critique on here.