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 42: Her fingers traced the ruins of the town where she was kept.
Her fingers traced map to the ruins of the town where she was kept. It was labeled Haversdown. Anya looked around but there was no other name on top of it. Almost all of the other ancient city sites had a currently existing town built just at the very edge of the ruins.
Anya let her eyes scan the map. Whoever put the map together used black ink for the ancient cities and a slightly lighter blue ink to label the current ones. The nearest town to Haversdown in the north was a good two finger’s widths from Haversdown and had a different ancient town associated with it. It was in face the House of the Star. In the South it was a three finger’s width span. The east and West were even further. And all of the blue names had a black ancient city associated with them.
Anya shook her head. At the moment the point wasn’t to figure out why Haversdown didn’t have a new town spring up along its edge. The point was to try and figure out where the guard went and how soon he could be expected to notice she was gone.
When her path intersected the road, she chose a Northerly direction since her guard went south. Anya tracced her finger down the map.
‘Holden,’ Anya read the modern name. It meant nothing to her. Anya tapped the town. ‘If he was heading here then it would take a little over a week to reach the town and the same to return to Haversdown. Anya frowned as she let her finger trace back up to the site of the tower where she was kept. A glimmer of thought skittered through her mind.
It took her almost a week to get to the House of the Star. Along the way she rationed her food tightly, much more tightly than she would have in the tower. “And there is only five or six days of food left. “
She whispered the thought aloud and let it flutter around her room. As it did, Anya felt it solidify into hard fact. There were only three options. She listed them as she started at the map. ‘The guard miscounted or they wanted me to be hungry for a few days for some reason, or they never intended to come back for me.’
Anya remembered the guard meticulously counting out the packets of food. He worked from a tally sheet that she suspected someone else gave him. ‘So I doubt it was miscalculation, at least not on his part.’ Anya had no way of guessing if whoever gave her guard orders miscalculated, but she some how doubted it.
‘I suppose they could want me to go a few days without food so that I would be grateful for them returning,’ Anya thought. She frowned. ‘But then what?’ In her time in the tower no one asked her questions or tried to get any information from her. ‘Not that I have any information to give.’
Likewise they never tried to get her to do anything. She was simply in the tower waiting. “But starving me to death makes no sense either.”
Ten til Midnight 