The Ring Bearer ongoing The Ring Bearer AUTHOR: RawChicken
LEAD: OT12
GENRE; SETTING: advernture, angst, romance, mamaverse; supernatural/fantasy
CHAPTERS: 52, as of 19/11/2015
READER INFORMATION: None  

It had started out as a dream, just a simple dream that wasn't supposed to make sense. That changed quickly when the world was turned upside down, and I found these rings. Rings that held beauty, rings that were so elegant that they didn't seem like human-made creations; rings that could either save our universe...

Or break it.

thoughts PLOT: I've been subscribed to this one for I don't even know how long. I think I found it not long after it started up, but I never got around to reading it until I was really ill last week. And it was worth it. It definitely deserves more attention than it currently has.

In a futuristic world under attack by aliens, where everybody can be drafted into the city's militia to protect it and some people also have magical powers, Yun Seung is plagued by mysterious dreams of a ring in a box, in a cave with an immobile stream of water, and a voice crying out for her to help. When her hometown is attacked, she sets out to find the ring, only to discover that it's one of a dozen and each ring contains an enslaved mage with magical powers. Yun Seung promises to free them from their slavery in return for their good will and friendship, and then they discover that the odds are vastly stacked against them in the form of two evil sorceresses who want Yun Seung dead and the ring mages back under their control.

I love stories with exciting opening chapters. We get thrown straight into the action here – the main character has a weird dream she doesn't understand, and then when she wakes up, the city is promptly under attack. She isn't that competent, but she knows it's her duty to fight. Her sudden desire to go after the ring in the middle of the fight did feel a little out of place and probably could have done with more introduction other than just the dream, because it didn't seem to follow along from being attacked. I really enjoyed the use of the dream sequences, too – it's quite hard to use them as foreshadowing, especially when the character finds herself doing things that she did in the dreams in the knowledge that they were going to lead to other things which anybody would naturally balk from, but for it to make sense for her to carry through with what she's seen herself doing in the dreams, so I was impressed by that.

The pacing of the story is fast – possibly even a little too fast at the beginning, and it's odd, because that's sort of coupled with a "loose" plot – there is drive and direction, but to begin with it can be hard to see where it's coming from (like Yun Seung's abrupt fixation with the ring in chapter one). However, the quest to find the other ring mages (EXO) is pretty fun, and each of them are placed differently and have different challenges when it comes to finding and liberating them. There are