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It starts with an explosion, and then as the room slowly stops spinning and comes into focus, it is to reveal to us piece by piece this musty Hades into which the protagonist has fallen as a momentary and desperate shelter. The description serves to draw us further and further down into a place of dark and dreary gloom, of collected dust and abandoned time, of shredded curtains and cobwebs; the walls and windows and dust become recurring characters after being mentioned only twice in three paragraphs.I closed my eyes and reached desperately for cover as the cacophonous roars from outside shook the poorly constructed walls of the room, threatening to bring the unbearable pain from the outside world into my small haven.
The room around me seemed to be spinning; the windows vibrating with ominous force and barely allowing a pale, opalescent shaft of light to enter and penetrate through the dark and dreary gloom. Dust had collected along every surface, giving the place the appearance of having been abandoned for some time; an assumption confirmed by the shredded, dismal appearance of the curtains, the cobwebs which hung flimsily all around, and the presence of a shattered mirror sprawled on the splintering wooden floor.
Another roar. This one more violent and deafening than the last; my ears rang painfully as the windows exploded in a crystalline shower of glistening gems. The dust in the room whipped up with surprising force, and the walls began to crack in defiant protest against the merciless beating they received.
Aside from the beautiful demonization of the enemy soldiers (a difficult thing to do), the entire setting sets itself so perfectly in line with all that we've seen before that, even as it introduces for the first time the setting of an "umbra", we already know the image we're seeing; we know that the only partially metaphorical forest is made up of the same smogs of black and grey as the dust in the abandoned room, while the enemy soldiers prowling through are deeper shades of black, with only their eyes stained a crimson red of soldiers' blood and perhaps a white fang gleaming. Of course, the individual images may vary between readers, but for almost every reader, the effect is that we already 'know' what this scene looks like because we already 'know' what the world it is set in looks like. That is excellent description, and it allows the author a huge degree of freedom.The enemy soldiers were everywhere. They seemed not like men, but like beastly demons, prowling in the umbra, their eyes shining with a carnal bloodlust; their teeth, like monstrous canines, hungry for the dying flesh of their enemies. I was completely surrounded.
Internal world.I hadn't been ready for it.
External world.The earth shook in blazing anguish.
with the next blast the windows burst and that internal space is violated as the wind from outside rushes in and "the dust in the room whipped up with surprising force". With each step there is less separating the protagonist's internal and external worlds, and when the enemy soldiers burst fully into this space at last, the narrator is entirely "caught up in [his] own fusion of grief and delirium" such that he can't even fully distinguish the two anymore. The soldiers don't seem entirely real; only the cherry-red armband shines out through the "dark and musky Hades". The rest proceeds almost like a dream caught somewhere between the two worlds: a blast of physical pain; a state of soporific reflection; and then nothingness. This slow collision of two perspectives is really what gives the story movement.I closed my eyes and reached desperately for cover as the cacophonous roars from outside shook the poorly constructed walls of the room, threatening to bring the unbearable pain from the outside world into my small haven.
I closed my eyes and began thinking of home; I thought of my mother, who had always nurtured my wounds, both mental and physical, my father, who had never been a man of words, but had cried in solitude when I had received the draft notice, and my sister, with whom I’d always pick fights with, but whom I loved dearly.
Where you inserted the first semicolon you should have used a colon. This is because semicolons are used to separate different clauses that are still related, whereas here you were introducing the narrators thoughts. I then replaced some of the commas with semicolons because they are used to separate different but similar ideas. This is an enumeration of thoughts, so it's fine to use commas sometimes, but with lengthy thoughts that also incorporate commas it's best to distinctly separate them. (Using semicolons in enumerations doesn't always work, by the way. It's strange, but semicolons can only be used in enumerations if there are three things or more.) I also put the two withs in red because one is redundant, so whichever one you think doesn't fit in as well with the sentence should be removed. This is probably just an oversight.I closed my eyes and began thinking of home: I thought of my mother, who had always nurtured my wounds, both mental and physical; my father, who had never been a man of words, but had cried in solitude when I had received the draft notice; and my sister, with whom I’d always pick fights with, but whom I loved dearly.
There should be a period in place of the comma.My chest convulsed and my mouth filled with blood, the pain was...
Soldiers should be pluralised.I didn’t hear the soldier’s voices...
The word but is a coordinator, and as such it shouldn't be used to start a sentence. It would be fine to just take that out and start the sentence with the word now. If you're looking to keep it as a part of the narrator's thought process then I suggest joining this bit together with the previous sentence. You also start this sentence in the present tense and the verb that follows, "realized", is in the past tense where it shouldn't be.But now I realized I had set up illusory barriers, hopeful mirages, in order to detach myself from the world.