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.
Day 10: The thick boles were wide enough to allow easy passage.
The thick boles were wide enough to allow easy passage. It was a relief to be away from the rocky ruins. Not only because she was less easy to spot, but because winding through the rocky pathway had been difficult and often left bruises as she bumped into fallen stones.
Anya’s legs and arms felt bruised and battered. She wanted nothing more than to curl up to sleep as the sun rose slowly into the sky. She knew at this moment she didn’t have that luxury. She may have escaped the tower but she was still easy to find. All they had to do was locate the tunnel and then follow the natural exit as she had and she would be caught. The further from the ruins she was, the safer she would be.
Walking beneath the trees was a great deal easier on her body. The trees were widely spaced and their canopy overhead thick enough that little grew beneath their dense shade. There were little patches of mushrooms and although Anya was accustomed to foraging for mushrooms, both to extend the family’s pantry and to sell in the village market, these were not ones she could identify so she let them be.
The ground underfoot was cushioned with layers of leaf fall and felt soft and springy to her feet after so much time spent on bare rock. The wind began to blow through the corridors beneath the trees. It caused the limbs to sway over head and whisper as though the trees were talking to each other and pressed against her back as though helping to push her further away from the ruins.
Anya envied the trees their conversations as she could use someone to talk with. While she was used to spending time with her own council at the moment another’s thoughts would be helpful. Anya managed to get away from the tower and her captors, but she had no idea where to go from here. She wasn’t sure where she was in relation to her home or any of the few villages and even fewer cities she knew. The direction she was taking was designed to be the opposite direction from the direction her guard took. While she thought it minimized her chances of running into him when he was returning to the tower, it didn’t really help her much.
‘Not that I have a direction,’ she thought. Even if Anya knew where Tyrin lay in relation to where she was, Anya wasn’t sure she should or even could go back there. Her family took money to put her into service so she didn’t really belong there. ‘And it would be the first place someone would look for me,’ Anya said.
She may not have known why she was in the tower but someone went to a lot of trouble to put her there, she doubted they would like that expense wasted. Anya kept moving hoping that her plan of ‘get as far away from here as possible,’ might lead to some sort of plan.
‘Tyrin was located along some ruins,’ she reasoned. ‘In fact every village, town and city she knew of had some sort of ruins associated with them. These were bigger ruins than she ever knew existed, surely there would be some sort of city or town nearby. Anya wasn’t sure if her logic was correct as something about it seemed a little off, but she was tired, too tired to think very clearly. The wind had almost managed to dry her dress and the warmth of the wind took away some of the chill that filled her from her time underground. While the warmth was welcome it was also making her somewhat sleepy.
Anya looked for a place to spend the night. For a while she walked, with the world looking much the same in every direction. Then she saw the outline of something in the distance. As her plodding footsteps took her nearer, Anya realized it was a pile of stone, a tumbled down building. At first she thought she might have managed to walk in a giant circle and somehow end up back at the ruins, but as she approached she could see the building was isolated and that beyond it the forest continued.
Ten til Midnight 