I always wanted to do an Escaflowne fic.
Well, okay, maybe not always, having not always seen the
series, but for many months now, at any rate.... ^_^

There aren't enough of them, that's for sure...

   If he was able to, Folken would cry, but a side effect of what
Dornkirk did to him rendered tears impossible.

This would read better shifted back a step further in tense:
    If he had been able to, Folken would have cried; but a side-effect
    of what Dornkirk had done to him rendered tears impossible.

   Afterwards, walking through the battlefield-- a small town near
Zaibach's borders and now a ruined hulk, Folken was still in the same
contemplative mood, walking slowly down the street with his cloak drawn
tight, keeping the aftermath of the battle at bay.

The dash in the first line needs a corresponding second dash after
"ruined hulk".

   The was a child, on the street; a child standing there outside an
hollowed out burning wreck of a house. A child standing there with a
blank, uncomprehending look covering his young face, not more than four
or five the boy could be, and watching Folken with a strange intensity.
The emptiness of the child's face was (thankfully) marred by a constant
stream of tears the child seemed not to notice, until, as if on its own
volition, the boy's right arm came up and wiped the tears, smearing
them towards his ears.

There was a
a hollowed-out

The second sentence in this paragraph is extremely clumsy.  The phrase
"not more that four or five the boy could be" doesn't belohg there; it would
be better shifted out into a separate sentence ("He could not have been
more than four or five.").

   When Folken returned to the Zaibach capital, the first thing he did
was go to a tattoo parlour. There were a variety of images on the
walls, samples of what could be done, some simple, some complex, some
beautiful and some not, some elegant and some pornographic. An empty
chair sat in the middle of the room, which was the most well-lit part
of the establishment.

The comma after "on the walls" would be better as a colon.

   That was how Folken got the first two of his tattoos to remind
himself of what they were fighting for: purple for the colour of
royalty, the majesty of the dream, and tears wiped away in
determination to see it through.

A fine self-delusion.  Oh, it might have been a majestic dream, if
doomed from the start (the ends can _never_ justify the means);
but what he saw shocked him and moved him, and now he's trying to
rewrite the event to give himself a measure of justification...

   Another war. There was always another war. Now that they had
committed themselves totally to their plan to rid the world of war and
usher in a Golden Age, where all desires and all fortunes would come
true all they did was war.

Needs another comma after "would come true".
And:  Life's full of little ironies, isn't it...?  :)

   "Why, may I ask, do you want this one?"

   "So I don't forget what we have lost trying to achieve our goal."

   A single tear, shed for the price their vision was incurring.

And so, perhaps he's finally understood after all.


A nice vignette, offering some insight into how Folken could bear to
do what he did.  Bravo.

Cheers,
Angus

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Angus MacSpon                                                Allen Gainsford
http://shell.ihug.co.nz/~macspon/          http://shell.ihug.co.nz/~macspon/