Right. First chapter observations: It's hard to tell from just chapter one, but I think I like the premise. Some old, sociopathic wizard living secluded in an underground realm trying to keep the bothersome ponies away like one would gnats.

There are a few typos and grammatical errors, but that's typical for a story without a swarm of editors. There aren't enough to actually effect the reading experience, so they don't really matter much.

My main criticism lies with your sentence structure, and by extension your descriptions. I am seeing a lot of commas. Perhaps entirely too many, and that is coming from someone quite fond of commas. These long chains are mostly prevalent when you endeavor to detail the setting or objects. In general, I would recommend breaking these up into two or three complex sentences, however certain cases might warrant a complete reexamination of how you describe them. It can often be tempting to list off a number of descriptors in an effort to convey the same mental images you have to the readers, but I've generally found that being overly specific actually accomplishes less in that regard. Instead of just linking multiple physical attributes, try to think of more emotionally charged words or concepts to evoke the feeling of the place in the reader. Their minds can do the rest, typically. Through this method, you can often narrow down the specific details to just the ones directly relevant to the story. Sometimes, some things are better left ambiguous, where as other times you'll find yourself replacing a single sentence that contained a list of details with multiple wordy sentences that focus instead on the atmosphere.

A final suggestion, and I don't mean this to sound condescending in any way, is to really make use of a thesaurus. As I said about find more emotionally charged words, it can be amazing how switching a word with a more elaborate synonym can completely change the spirit of the sentence. I'm not suggesting unduely complicated or technical words, just lesser used ones to spice up the variety or add a different context.

I will say that despite my above criticisms, I found the way you handled the characters and their descriptions rather good! You spared details about them until it was relevant. The batpony got a much more in depth examination because the human was indeed critically examining her. In contrast, the pony only saw details of the human immediately significant to her: tall, scary, robed, pale, ect. You also represented their personalities by show, not tell, and that is always a good thing.

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I have been rethinking the sentence structure quite a bit and rewritten as I went along, so far in my literary experiment here is getting the knack for cutting back on things. I do not own a thesaurus anymore just from all the moving around over the years but I have just sat here and stewed over better words to use. Your observation is dead on by the way, I will be taking a break from writing more chapters for a bit because where I left off is a good breaking point. With any luck as I keep experimenting things will improve and hopefully my repertoire will grow as I keep going, it has been a long time since I have actually used larger words.

Thank you for the review! It is indeed helpful!

If you have problems getting a thesaurus, you can just type "yourword def".
Some of the results are from online thesauri and you can get alternatives.

Well if you were going for 'Dark', mission accomplished. Somewhat hooking, I will admit.

Now, I noticed that the perspective changed several times and there were some parts where the characters' thoughts were displayed. You want to have a method to define when the perspective changes or it will lead to confusion on the part of the readers. For the internal thoughts, try italicizing them. (That is the method I use) One other thing, why did she refer to her food as 'iron rations'?

Also, if you wanted the reader to hate the robed character, you have done so with great aplomb.