Ah another year, another writing experiment. This year I am sticking with The Fifteen Minute Novel writing and trying to implement some of the lessons I picked up in 2021. I liked the experiment and I learned a lot from the first pass through. Oddly, a lot of it was about how my own mind worked, Which isn’t entirely a bad thing. And so we kick off 2022 with a new Fifteen Minute Novel. As before…
The fifteen minute novel writing experiment is a attempt to write a complete (and very rough) draft of a novel by writing for fifteen minutes each day. I have taken a timed writing from one of the daily prompts done in 2021, cleaned it up a little and used it as my jumping off point into a story. Each day I will take the last line of the story written the day before and use it as my sentence starter and write for fifteen minutes, growing the story as the year progresses. I’ve marked this year’s as 2022 so it can be separated out from last year’s writings but I will still use the Day 1, Day 2 type numbering if you are following along.
And now without further ado…
Day 1: It was her only means of escape.
It was her only means of escape. It wouldn’t have been her first option. In fact if she had any other option, she would have taken it. This option seemed tailor made to play on all of her deepest fears. It was dark, it was in an enclosed space underground It was filled with water waist deep and impossible to see through and she could only guess that it let out somewhere at the end of the tunnel.
It was her only means out of this place. She searched for weeks looking for another option, one she was a little more confident in pulling off. There were none. Now she knew if she wanted to escape, it would be through the tunnels. Decision made, she bided her time until the optimal moment.
Her jailer, even though he preferred a friendlier term, like host, was confident that there was no way out for Anya. He was being called away. He told her so himself and brought in stockpiles of food so she would not starve in his absence. The stocks weren’t much. But they would keep her from starvation if she rationed them well.
“Just think how happy you will be to see me return,” he said with a smile Anya suspected he thought was friendly. “Think of what a feast we will have then.”
She waited until he left that morning after double checking all of the locks. The thought that he would leave one unlatched had been a fleeting hope but not one Anya put much faith in. The locks had remained firmly bolted since her arrival. Even the guard’s checking of them was just out of habit.
The day was newly broken when she saw the back of him. She waited until he was out of sight. Then Anya took stock of the items in her possession. While the stocks weren’t much, she could fit them all in the pack she planned to take with her.
Anya kept a piece of embroidery slowly growing so that he thought that was the task she set herself to occupy her mind during her imprisonment. He was encouraging in her efforts and told her the work would help the time pass more quickly. It was as though he expected her to be released at some set point. When she tried to get him to say more, he grew silent and did not speak to her for three weeks.
When taking up the embroidery, Anya admitted that she was slow in her work, thus explaining how glacial her progress and he seemed to buy it. When his eyes weren’t on her, Anya worked on repairing the bag with materials I found in one of the forgotten store rooms of her prison.
There were piles of moldy and half-forgotten garments, but there were also items like sail cloth. Buried under a pile of rope she found an old rucksack that was in desperate need of repair. There was a huge hole in the side as though someone shot a bolt from a crossbow straight through it. There were darker stains on the cloth that Anya didn’t want to think about. At the moment, she couldn’t afford to be picky and simply tried not to touch the stained sections of cloth any more than she had to. She used the sailcloth to repair the rucksack and after her Host disappeared, she fitted the largess of his supplies into the bag.
Anya was nervous, but more worried about being caught trying to escape than trying for the tunnel at this point. So she waited until dark to try her luck. As the tunnel was underground, Anya didn’t think that the darkness would be an issue. It would be dark above, just as it was below. All it did was hide the fact that she was no longer in the tower.
She wanted to wait until full dark, but her nerves only held until dusk. The sky was painted crimson when Anya decided it was late enough to go. She lit her lanterns so that anyone set to watch me would think she was still in the tower occupying herself before going to sleep. She adjusted the wicks so that the lamps would burn until the hour when she usually retired for the night. It would only be the following night when they weren’t relit that something would look amiss if anyone was watching.
Anya hoped to be far away when that happened. Lamps lit, she descended into the tunnels. Anya suspected that once, they carried sewage and other waste away from the tower, but it had been decades since the tower saw active use and so the smell was relatively clean. It was earthy and damp, but not horrendous. She eased the rusty gate out of the way and then pulled it shut behind her. Anya took care in breaking through the bars as I worked the gate loose and made certain the gap she created was well below the waterline. Anya had no illusions about the avenue of her escape remaining a mystery for long, but she hoped to leave a little confusion behind as it seemed only fair.
Ten til Midnight 