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 37: At first the words came slowly and Anya had to think about each one.
At first the words came slowly and Anya had to think about each one. By the time she reached the bottom of the page, the skill was coming back to her and she found it easier to follow the meaning of the words as they linked together to form sentences. The sentences linked to talk of an Empire that stretched back into the dim recesses of time.
The first section was an overview of the empire. It has somewhat fantastical beginnings that seemed to involve fighting an ancient sea creature to retrieve the moon after he swallowed it. Anya had to read that part a few times and was uncertain what sort of sea creature it was, why it swallowed the moon or who managed to retrieve it. The book talked of those things as if it was a story everyone knew and so the author could afford to skim over the details.
‘It wasn’t a story I was ever told,’ Anya thought.
Despite the battle for the moon somehow managing to found an empire, the empire grew fairly normally after that. They formed alliances and gradually their towns expanded. Sometimes there was peaceful expansion, other times there was war, but overall the empire kept growing. At some point there was a war and the author of the book claimed that ‘Magic deserted the empire.’
Anya frowned. The only magic she knew of involved colorful figures who participated in feast day fares. They did tricks with cards and sang silly songs to distract you from what their hands were doing as they twisted rope and made small objects disappear. She couldn’t see how such a thing was beneficial to an empire, let alone how it would fall without it.
After giving the highlights of the empire, the introduction then claimed it was going to share the true history of the empire and not just the myth every child knew and dispel preconceived notions. Anya frowned. As she had never heard of the Festian Empire before tonight she had no preconceived notions. She made it to the end of the introduction and yawned hugely. The author and his true history would have to wait. Tonight she had reached the end of her reading.
Anya put the book to the side and blew out the lamp, allowing the darkness to descend. She lay back in the bed, wriggling down into the warm comfort between the clean smelling sheets. She grew up with the river Fes and the ruins of the ancient town standing just outside her village. Most of the town she knew of had some sort of ancient ruins near them.
‘I suppose people just built new towns near the old ones.’
According to the map, the ruins near her home in Tyrin and the ruins that surrounded the tower were both part of the same empire. ‘So is the House of the Star,” Anya thought as sleep pulled her eyelids down. ‘Or the building that became the House of the star.’
The other woman told her that the Star’s house was moved to this place, which was abandoned long ago. On the map it was part of the Festian Empire too. Anya smiled, somehow making her feel connected to home once again. Thoughts of the tower caused the warm thoughts to fade. ‘Maybe tomorrow I’ll find out more about the Haverdown.’
Ten til Midnight 