I’d appreciate some feedback on the first page(and a half) of my novel. Silk Road fantasy, student/mentor dynamic, character study. I'm specifically looking for thoughts on:
Proper Nouns: Am I pushing the proper nouns right to the edge or over? Related to this so that I have a gauge, your favorite author?
Fatigue and POV: I drop the father's name (Gedran) in the fourth paragraph. Should I restructure to avoid dropping his name to mitigate cognitive load with regard to proper noun fatigue? That is, until my mentor character (Tzeb) references him later? I realize I never really thought of my own father by his first name, so I'm wondering if using "Gedran" here breaks Telun's close POV, or if it works at signaling their cold relationship.
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The sun bore down, pinning Telun against the rock, the crevasse’s shadow thinning to a useless line. Better cover lay west along the ridge. Deeper cuts of shade, less exposed shelves to watch the eastern approach. Move, then. But reaching them required breaking cover, and Tzeb had hammered the lesson deep: the eye catches motion. Three months ago, scouts had watched the horizon for him. Now he crouched on hot stone, dreading a question.
What did you do wrong? The question worked at him the way grit works inside a boot. This was the longest he had survived the fox’s daily hunt. Somewhere in the fractured country around him, that Ashen mercenary waited for the rabbit to misjudge a silence. The question had been his father's verdict. But Tzeb had stolen it with a snort, expecting a man to answer better tomorrow. For that, Telun had let the alleys of Chandra close without him.
He tugged at his waterskin. The water came warm and leather-tainted and did nothing for the dust lining his throat. He pressed the stopper into the neck. Soon the caravan would appear. The first camels would break the heat haze and draw the rest after them.
His father had bought him this road to light a fire in him, naming the return—season and sum—at the gate, bangles clattering before the investment even cleared the yard. But Telun had planned to slip the column in the temple crowds, sell his silk, and the crest at his chest after it, and vanish into alleys no horse could reach. Instead, he had sealed the crest into his pack, intending to toss it at his father's feet. The silk was still in his pack. The crest was not. Fourteen days now, since he had gone to the seam where he'd hidden it and found the fraying mouth empty. Behind him lay the whole of the desert, no stretch of it more guilty than another. His father, still in his tent in the ordu’s prized inner ring, did not yet know. Ahead of him waited that reckoning, patient as everything else Gedran owned.
