This was recommended to me by a chapter of a series from Ms. Blake. I love every second of this amazing story and paring! Thank you very much for taking the time to write this eloquent masterpiece.

Cheers,
N. King

This was one of the most lovely things I have ever read. I really enjoyed it.

Just finished reading this for what must be the fourth or fifth time, and it remains utterly gorgeous. The imagery is transporting - honestly one of my favourite fics of all time. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. (And I get such a nice little thrill every time from seeing one of the chapters dedicated to me - so thank you for that too!)

Possibly the most beautiful world-building I've ever read. Amazing job making this rare pair so natural and staying so true to the characters in such an AU.

i'm just on first chapter and the way you write it reminded me of Gossip Girl .love it

So Daphne learned how to be powerful and all only to be a slut of draco malfoy wow so much for being powerful and cunning isn't it? And so much for loving harry right? Pathetic piece of shit writing remove Harry's name it will not even get 100 favorite or follow

a very good and interesting tale!

This is written so much above the level of an average fanfiction, it's almost poetry. I am immensely grateful to find your story, as almost everything I've read this year was a complete garbage, but here it isthe fanfiction diamond, one of the few.

Very well done. The mysterious way you write your story matches the plot and the setting very well. However, I don't really understand your choices of names. Why is the girl named Daphne? Why is Draco's lover called Hermione? And doesn't he turn a little bit to fast towards the 'light' side and accepts a homeless girl as his wive? In my opinion, the characters don't really match their canon equivalent. Having said that, Harry and espacially Snape are very well characterised. Finally, the way Harry got to know Daphne through his childhood makes in the context of a fairytale a lot of sense and seems 'natural'.

That was so beautiful. I haven’t read anything like it ever before. Thank you, Author.

Stunning

O hthis promises a delightful read. Your writing style is lovely, the rhythm smooth and variedand very vividly descriptive. Loving it!

Beautiful: experiment and fresh and exciting. What a fun and intriguing first chapter!

You'd think that, with persistent claims about poetic prose, this might actually employ "poesy" to some degree to create a pound-shop version of it, but I guess not; however, lo and behold, after trudging through three chapters of slippery attempts at tedious prose, I haven't been able to locate this "phenomenon" called "Poetic Prose". I, honestly, am of the firm belief that fan-fiction-crowd's functional illiteracy super-exceeds my expectations, because this fiction attracted praise and censure for a "quality (poetic prose)" it doesn't even possess. No, it, quite literally, doesn’t. Fan-fiction crowd just adores over-using the terms, in self-parodical attempts to sound smarter than they are, don't they?

Between "the city wakes from its slumber" and "the glimmering reflection of water", your list of "clichés" doesn't really end there. Not only does most of the language not work, but it falters almost comically with the effects you've tried to create. Your intention lacks the skill to convey the effects you wanted. The tone's all over the place: one minute the lines try to sound profound, and the next they dance buck-naked with little shame by urinating on the same "profundity" they pretended to possess. (You might want to tone down on the jarring tonal-shifts as you lack the skill to handle the violent transitions.) Time and time again, we're introduced to the idea of "masks", and from that point, I thought it wise to start creating the "list" that might accompany it: she hides behind the mask and is generally miserable; she doesn't want to marry her betrothed, and hides behind the dreadful mask that threatens to fall off when she runs (this metaphor, once personified, wept somewhere in hysterics); a young man from the past appears in a mask to break her out of her tragic, tragic ordeals; fulfillment of childhood promises, etc. etc.

That's not how a leitmotif (you might want to look into this—trust me) should work. The least you could've done is create varied effects for the cliché you've abused more than Harry Potter's make-believe charms. Everything about this was centered on ballroom drama, but it scarcely expanded on the idea it stood on: Snape teaches her dancing, but one day, out of nowhere, he decides to teach her the way of the commoners; a street-rat makes Daphne's transition from a prissy-princess to a thief so easy, because, somehow, dancing and close-quarters-combat (this doesn't mean what you "think" it means) are one and the same. How? Lord knows.

Dancing is about creating harmony with the other whilst martial arts are about creating "disharmony" in the other individual's move-set. The reflex-action and speed and precision required for the latter aren't something a mere dancer can ever accomplish; and once your fiction reached this point (cherry on top with the "Mask of Zorro" scene with Harry, whom I saw coming in all his “Fabio Glory” from a mile away), it went beyond the notion of salvageable: I thought it was out and out Parody. Why? Because it follows a predictable pattern to the point where it just became silly. How to make Daphne a miserable? Kill her mum, and make her mum say that she needs to wear masks and shit. How to lay it on thick? Make someone she doesn't want to marry her suitor. How to add "girl-power" to the fiction because it's so trendy? Make sure to sell the idea that Dancing and Martial Arts are two sides of the same coin. Lord bless the wrinkled-slot inside the dark seam of this idea's hindquarters, because it makes no sense. Oh, and have Daphne and Harry snog in the room after a hilarious scuffle, because that's so fucking hot! Zorro! (Background Spanish music intensifies! Adios amigos! "Mua-ha-ha," he laughed sexily! He didn't have a mustache, did he?)

There's really nothing more to say here. Everything you've used to make this work just doesn't work. It's just there to pass the time (of Daphne's totes sad life, too) till she meets Harry for a cool Zorro-scene, because we can't have romance without prissy girls in ivory towers and swash-buckling thieves!

You might want to work on your language, too. That's not how semi-colons work, which you've unceremoniously ravaged with less sensibilities than Harry's fuck-boy charms (but without the added grease, of course, because "bae's" mus-kles are super-smooth, fam!), and that's not how colons work. Open a punctuation dictionary, for the love of God! If you want Style to carry your work, then work on it. I've got no fucking clue as to who in their right minds (Terms and Conditions apply for the illiterates of Fan-Fiction) would call this "poetic prose". It lacks the structural requirements to even be considered one: it lacks rhyme, rhythm, poesy, etc. This is barely prose, let alone a poetic one. I've noticed that anything that veers slightly right from the road of prose's left-over bones that have been left to wither away in the sun, it's, apparently, poetic.

This, honestly, was very disappointing, as beyond your "attempts" at Style, this didn't work on any level. "Here is a secret: the best dancers have an assassin's touch. Heart-piercing, feather-light." This is your best line, and even here you couldn't help yourself from botching the hyphens ...

Hello! I recently discovered the podcast you and Olivie Blake did last year, which has been an absolute delight and has led me down the rabbit hole to this incredible story. I cannot figure out how to make comments on the podcast website but I can here. Firstly, listening to the podcast makes me laugh and feel a strong sense of sisterhood and I'm pretty sure you're both actually soul-bonded to one of my best friends because you approach revenge in such similar ways. Secondly, this story! AHHH! I'm so glad I found it when it was complete, as having to wait for chapters would have been torture. This was beautifully written and all the word choices felt very precise, which is the best, and thank you so much for sharing it. Reading this felt like a stormy day and sitting in a wooden chair with sharp edges but also a nice cup of tea with honey in it, and any story that evokes such a specific feeling has done something very, very right. I look forward to reading everything else you have ever posted. If you become a published author, I will definitely buy your work.