A beta-reader, if you please!

Fandom: NBC Hannibal-- specifically, "NBC Hannibal, but make it 330 BC." A historical AU with recognizable elements from the show that also strays pretty far afield.

Characters/Pairings: Hannibal/Will (Okay, technically Hannibal/Wel-- I had to do slightly rename him to give him a non-Anglo-Saxon background :P) Also contains a fair bit of Alexander the Great stuff, although I tried to keep it to a minimum because there's only room for so many characters who single-handedly breathe all the air in a room in one story. Ptolemy, Thais and Bagoas (not entirely canon-compliant with Mary Renault's version, but an obvious influence) have minor roles. Other Hannibal characters appear in more or less recognizable formats.

Rating & Warnings: I generally post my stories on AO3 with the "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" warning. This story I would describe as canon-typical everything for both NBC Hannibal and an ancient military milieu. Violence and cannibalism obviously play a more graphic role, and there are mentions of rape, slavery and underage sex in several contexts. There is explicit sex between the two main (male) characters.

Estimated Fic Length: ~130,000 words. I am currently nearing the end at 115k, and expect there to be three more chapters hopefully finished within a month or so.

Notes: I don't usually use a beta for my fanfiction, because my attitude is "my fic is for my own pleasure and what's important is that I like it." However, this is my first story of this length and complexity, I'm going to spend some time polishing it anyway, and there are some things that would be clearer to a second set of eyes. So if there is someone who likes the sounds of this and would actively want to spend some time with it, I would be looking for:

- Primarily, someone to check over general comprehensibility. Naturally my goal w/r/t historical setting is to provide enough detail to set the tone of time and place, without over-explaining but also always providing enough information that the text at least provides a suggestion of what to google if you want to know more. It's hard to evaluate that on my own. So feedback along the lines of "this paragraph feels like a lecture" or "I have no idea what this is supposed to mean" would be valuable.

- Someone to catch little threads of loose plot, character or theme; although the general arc has been set from the beginning, a lot of details changed during the writing, so I'm afraid there might be foreshadowing that ends up leading to nowhere, or a reference to something that happened earlier that didn't actually happen quite that way. I suspect this would be easier for someone else to notice than it would be for me.

- SPAG, awkward sentences, etc., though I'm planning on posting serially and reading over each chapter as it goes up so I'm not too worried about that.

- I don't necessarily need someone with knowledge of the historical setting, but if there's someone whose expertise is in that direction, I'd also be very happy just for your feedback on place/time/culture/language portrayals. (Specific history stuff: Hannibal is (duh) Carthaginian, and ended up in Alexander's army after the siege of Tyre; Wel is short for Weldjebauend, my best attempt at a Will-sounding name that is adjacent to some records of ancient Egyptian names, and he's coming from the oracle of Ammon-Re at Siwah. So although knowledge of ancient Greece is great and Greek sources obviously have to inform a lot of the story, neither of the main characters are Greek.)

- What I'm not looking for: suggestions about any major structural changes. I'm going to suddenly get very busy in September and I don't have the time or the inclination to make major changes.

As I said, I don't usually have a beta for my fic and I'm not 100% attached to having this one betaed, either-- it really depends on the person. If this sounds interesting, let me know how long you think you would need-- not having done this before, I am unsure how long it usually would take someone to get through a story of this length!