Aphelion

Very pretty descriptive prose, and I liked the way the characters were portrayed. Too many adverbs in the attributes, though.

Insufficient surprise; the good guys are gonna win, of course. Yeah, they take a little damage, but that's expected, too. Everybody's names told what side they were on, a little too blatantly.

I'm waiting for the dog to show up with his list of tropes.

You know, these Good vs Evil stories are really rather boring for most audiences, because you always know how they're going to end: The Good Guys win. Always. The reason the Good Guys always win is that if the Bad Guys won, the readers would be so pissed that they'd go look up the author and strike him repeatedly with blunt objects (starting, hopefully, with the author's keyboard), and the authors instinctively know this.

This particular story was made even more boring by revealing that, no matter WHAT happens to them, the Good Guys CAN'T EVEN DIE (permanently, anyway). The consequences of a fight have to mean something. Once I know that some character is, by their nature, invulnerable to risk, I quit caring about them.

More than that, though, if the Bad Guys won, they are SO EVIL, that, like the ones in this story, they would kill every living thing on the planet, and then go on from here to destroy, oh, maybe the Galaxy, or perhaps the WHOLE UNIVERSE.

That would leave the author with a serious lack of subject matter to write about.