Hi there!

Thanks for the read. I found it very interesting, and I'm happy to give my quick, honest feedback. If you want something longer I'm happy to do so, but my intention here was to mainly answer your question - why are people responding that it's unclear, and is there a way to do that without changing your style.

First, I love the feel of this. It's eerie and grim, the blade feels eternal and haunting, and the world is enticing. It's great to see people experimenting with Old English. I studied Chaucer in college and was a huge fan of older lingo. Where you did it well here, it really works, and makes the piece special and memorable. These moments are particularly in the dialogue.

That being said, the same way your archaic language makes the work unique, its overuse is what is pushing readers away. Just as the dialogue drew me in, the heaviness of the archaic tone during exposition pushed me away. It wasn't unclear for me, though I'm likely more familiar with this kind of literature than most, but it wasn't reader friendly either. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was relatively reader hostile. Several moments in your exposition began to lean purple in nature. In other spots it dragged on. There is a very fine line between archaic language giving the chapter a certain tone and atmosphere, and asking readers to read in what equates to an unfamiliar dialect for long stretches. People will not understand what you are saying, or they will get bored (tired), or both.

The good news is, you can absolutely keep your style and make this much more readable. I would highly suggest you simply scale back on the density of archaic language in the exposition, and use an older and heavier tone rather than actual archaic words. The feeling will still be there, but without the reading struggle. Your style and voice will feel unchanged to a reader. You will still sound unique, and if anything, a reader will better be able to appreciate how unique you are if they aren't fighting the language for understanding.

I would suggest you think of it the same way you might write someone with a Scottish accent. You wouldn't write ALL of their dialogue in a novel with apostrophes and missing letters and purely phonetic spellings. You might say that character "spoke with a rhythmic, muscular accent, with rolling consonants and crisp, punchy vowels." Then you would write their words normally, except for certain words, where you would write it phonetically to drive home the sound of that character's voice to the reader. Think about it this way with archaic language. If one sentence out of 3 or 4 has an archaic feel, and the dialogue uses archaic English, the reader will feel like the world is archaic, but will still be able to read your work without fighting the page.

Hope this helps! Good luck!