What POV are you aiming for? If you don't know, I highly recommend Characters and Viewpoint by OSC (sorry if I already said so, I suggest it to everyone because it helped me so much).

I found it a bit hard to picture the scene. Is the "he" in your first sentence the same person as the old man? Is he alone in the cell since the 50 bodies have gone?

As to POV - who is telling the story? Are these the old man's thoughts (wich I understand to be close 3rd person) or a narrators? If it is a narrator that can read the thoughts of any character, and tell information the characters wouldn't necessary know, then it is omniscient POV.

quote:

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Actually I seem to recall extrinsic has a very detailed post on this somewhere. Maybe you could search for it?

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You'll have to be a wee bit more specific. extrinsic has made many very detailed posts on a great variety of topics.

With regards to Lou's thirteen, I also find it difficult to properly critique this because we are jumping into the story some time after the beginning. The point of a first thirteen is to grab a reader off the start, when they're fresh. A second chapter, when people have been brought into the world a bit already, has a different goal.

In isolation, this isn't too bad, but it definitely needs some tightening up. What do powerful magics sound like? What's with the 50 people? Why are they mentioned in one sentence but seem to be gone down the corridor in the next? Why is the old man both described as mad, crazy, insane, but also canny enough to remember when the augry told his future (I assume that's what happened)? How can he be horribly mangled but also vigorously fit

Keep writing - chapter 2 is probably a long way from finishing this story.

“Again in the cooling quiet darkness he waited. As still and quiet as the stone walls of the cell.“
But we are just meeting this guy for the first time. Who is he? "Again" doesn’t work up front, since we have no background on him yet. The second sentence is not a complete sentence, which in my limited experience is usually reserved for dialogue and thoughts. You used "quiet" 2x.
I’d suggest: The old man waited in the quiet darkness, as still as the stone walls of the cell.

“The old man [He] sat alone, a dungeon wretch of the worst kind. Foul and forlorn he sat in his squalor; horribly mangled and twisted of mind, yet vigorously fit for one of his age.”
You tell us 2x that he sat. This could be tightened up to be clearer. How is he “mangled and twisted of mind”? What is a “dungeon wretch”? (Both statements are evocative, yet unclear.)

“The holding cells are always warm for a while after the beginning of Redemption Arena, fifty bodies will do that. The sweat and tears, the wailing and ravings all dwindled down the stone passage. Then silence resumed; only rarely punctuated by the rumbling of distant thundering applause and powerful magics.”

Don’t switch tense (were/are; past/present). Now you can say that the holding cells are cooling (instead of still warm). But the timing doesn’t fit; is it still quiet, or can he hear everyone leaving? Is it cooling that quickly? If you want to use that second sentence about dwindling sounds, it needs to come before the quiet stillness at the start.
First everyone leaves, then it is quiet with occasional noise from the arena, and the air cools.

At this point I want to know, why did everyone else go while he stayed behind? Just lucky? Did he hide?

“Obsessively he consulted the …” This sounds a bit too clear-minded for his mangled mental state.

This is a potentially powerful scene. Be specific, get the sequence in order, and it will be stronger. (And being me, I have to add I would prefer to experience it from the old man’s perspective rather than the narrator’s. You are almost there anyway.)

P.S. Wolfe_boy, Lou has finished writing his first draft. (Wahoo!)