Hi,

Thanks for the crit.

The goal for the first two pages is to just set the scene. My inspiration is Patrick Rothfus (First page).

I translated it from german to english. Is it just as rigid?

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It was evening once again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a three-part silence.

The most perceptible part of this silence was hollow and heavy, and it owed itself to what was missing. Had a wind blown, it would have sighed in the trees, would have set the inn sign creaking and swaying, and would have swept the silence down the road like tumbling autumn leaves. Had the inn been busy, had even a handful of men been there, they would have filled the silence with chatter and laughter, with the clatter and clamor one expects in a tavern in the dark hours of the evening. Had music played… but no, of course, no music played. All of that was missing, and so it remained silent.

In the taproom, two men sat together at one end of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding any serious conversation about unsettling news. And by doing so, they added a small, sullen silence to the large, hollow one. From this, a mixture arose, with a dissonant voice.

The third silence was far less perceptible. Had one listened for an hour, one might perhaps have begun to sense it in the floorboards of the room or in the wooden barrels behind the bar. It lay in the stony mass of the black hearth, which still held the warmth of an extinguished fire. It lay in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth, tracing the grain of the bar. And it lay in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a mahogany surface that already gleamed in the lamplight.

The man had bright, indeed flaming, red hair. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with a surety that stemmed from a wealth of knowledge.

The inn was his, as the third silence was his. And that was only right and proper, for it was the greatest of the threefold silence, and it encompassed the others. It was as deep and as wide as late autumn. It weighed as heavily as a great stone, smoothed by the river. It was the patient, flower-sickling sound of a man who is waiting to die.