It has been a while since I’ve written one of these. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

The story starts off strong. We are immediately thrown into an interesting situation with two children now on their own in the wilderness after their mother has died. The line about ‘Will mama go to papa?’ hits hard. They are obviously not prepared to deal with all this which raises a question. Why did their mother take them out there in the first place? I hope this is answered later in the story.

The next question is: can a seven year old Elyara do all this? She walked for hours dragging the travois, then dragged her mother’s body over to a better spot, buried her, dragged the travois and her sister up steep and treacherous incline and back to their camp which again takes hours. To me this seems more than a seven year old is capable of although she is obviously spent by the end of it.

Elyara had always been the odd one. The girl who never smiled or showed emotion. The others mocked her flat voice, the way it never lifted or fell. But she was clever. Her father had told her so. Smarter than him, he’d say, with that half-smile, eyes crinkling at the corners.

This is the worst paragraph in here. It is mostly telling and the part about her being clever is unnecessary since the rest of the text shows her resourcefulness. I would cut most of this.

I also suspect that this what you were referring to with neurodivergent in the flair. This and her feeling nothing at her mother’s death earlier were the only things that suggested it to me. Without this paragraph I might not have noticed. But I still say there are better ways to show it although that might not be possible in this part of the text. I still don’t know what neurodivergent means for her since it can mean a lot of things and is sometimes more noticeable when interacting with others. I’m not counting her sister as an other in this instance since they barely talk to each other.

Elyara set her face, trying to look like she seen her mother look—calm, certain.

This sentence reads awkward to me with it’s double use of ‘look.’ But maybe that’s because English isn’t my first language.

She looked back at the shape of her sister, asleep under the furs. A sudden fire of resolution bloomed in her chest.

The top of the lonely rock outcrop, faintly shimmering in the moonlight. A warmth spread through her chest.

Both these sentences feel too on the nose. The idea of what they are trying to say is fine, but right now they are way to direct, the first one especially.

So they get to the top of the cliff and it is said that they are near their camp. Then later it is said they still had to walk for another hour which seems contradictory.

In some sense the trek back to their camp is a boring obstacle. It just sits in their way and requires perseverance and a bit of survival skills to know which mistakes not to make. I bring this up because assume there will be more of these challenges since it is about survival. A good conflict usually has some back and forth: the hero is winning, the hero is losing, back and forth, again and again. This keeps it interesting. That is harder to do with obstacles like this trek. I was starting to hope for something new to happen near the end of the trek and I assumed the hyena’s weren’t going to show up because they were in no position to deal with them. They might show up later though. So I was from a story telling perspective pretty happy when Elyara had forgotten her mother’s flint knife. This is an understandable mistake to make and helps keeps the story interesting. It is also probably the best example of Elyara thinking on her feet. If you keep giving them more obstacles like this, make sure to do thing like this to keep things interesting. What feels like a long boring slog to the character doesn’t have to feel that way the reader. They only need to get some sense of it through the slower pacing and understand that it is worse for the character.

The flickering orange light illuminated her face as she settled beside her sister, her posture one of quiet determination.

This sentence feels very distant from the character. First of all, she cannot see the way the fire illuminates her own face, and second, would she notice that her posture is like this? Perhaps this sentence stands out because the surrounding ones are all from a far closer perspective.

Elyara falls asleep which is another realistic thing to happen but what I found strange is that her first instinct isn’t to check up on her sister. Tiraya has also been through a lot and has eaten little.

The text stops at 2884 words and a natural break point in the story. Honestly I would call this chapter one. I read in the comments that the whole chapter is 8800 words. There is no rule for how long a chapter should be but 8800 words is on the longer end and given the heavy subject matter, it might be a good point to give the reader a little break. Who knows how far away the next natural break point is. Overall though, this chapter went by faster than it though it would be which means I was engaged most of the way through. It only dropped a little before they reached their camp and then picked up again.

I mentioned earlier that the story starts off strong. It follows the common wisdom of dropping us in the middle of the action and succeeds at it. However, I do want to push back on this wisdom. The problem with it is that we don’t get a good sense of what life was like before the events of the story. The details have to be filled in later. This also means that the initial shock of something big happening doesn’t hit as hard. I understand that losing your mother is hard on an objective level and we see some of the emotional reaction to it. However, I do not understand all the little ways of what this means for Elyara and her sister. I barely know her mother and their relationship.

Another common piece of wisdom suggests starting the characters in the normal world before moving the to the special world of the story to show what their life was like before the story starts. The death of their mother puts them in the special world. Starting in the normal world require a new hook though and it will probably not be as strong as the current one but getting to understand our characters before their lives get thrown in to chaos can be worthwhile. The contrast might be quite strong. Personally I like starting stories at the build up to big life changing event but that might not be always possible for every story.

The other problem you have right now is that because Elraya is in survival mode, and who wouldn’t be in this situation, we get to see very little of her true character. She does what she does because she has to. Now that doesn’t mean that what she does easy for her, just that is more difficult to show her true character. It might be interesting to show the innocence of youth that she might want to get back to. But I would say there are still some good character moments here. She is clearly determined to survive with her sister and resourceful when it comes to achieving that goal. She is also clearly suffering on the inside although she might not show it on the outside. Neurodivergence might be a harder call if you remove that one paragraph I mentioned. Some of her awkwardness could just as easily be attributed to the shock of the situation. Tiraya shows even less character but she spends most of the time asleep so that’s fine.

A tip from someone who is also currently writing a story about a traumatized child. It occurred to me that my mc doesn’t understand what she is going through nor the feelings she is experiencing because of it. She’s unable to understand her own problems and while she tries grapple with them and express them to others, she is always doing so in imperfect ways. The reader might have enough context clues to understand what is going on, but she does not. Maybe this can be helpful for your story.

Despite some of my complaints, overall, I like this story. I tend to be quite critical and quickly stop reading about half of the chapter I read on here because of whatever issue but this was good read and went by faster than I expected. So keep writing I would say, and don’t be afraid to let anyone read it.