[1505] Askia - Chapter 1 Part 1

Hi everyone! This is the first half of the first chapter of a fantasy novel I've written over the past year. This is my first attempt at creative writing, as my main academic training has been in music, so please don't hold back on literally anything--I know I'm green!

The novel is complete at about 120k words, so I'm looking for general critique of my writing before I start working on my second draft. General readability, setting, worldbuilding, all of that jazz--any thoughts you've got I want to hear them. Thanks for your time.

here's the text

And here are my critiques: (1)https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/10ked8l/comment/j605ewu/

(2)https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/10leuid/comment/j5zurma/

Edit: somehow I got the word count off by a little bit (1527, not 1505), not sure how I bungled that lol. Hope that's alright, it's still under the amount in my critiques.