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 73: At first she was puzzled, but then she remembered her tumble into the secret room.
At first she was puzzled, but then she remembered her tumble into the secret room. Anya stretched experimentally and found that the sorest parts of her body were the ones that connected with the floor first.
She shifted a little in the bed and while things were sore there were no sharp pains so she figured the stiffness would fade with time and movement.
‘Speaking of movement,’ Anya thought as she slowly made her way out of bed. She looked at her dress. Even though the morning light was thin and weak, she could see that her dress was covered with dust.
‘I expect a lot of it came from the floor when I landed.’ Although she closed her eyes when she fell, Anya suspected that a large cloud arose when she hit the floor. Anya moved to the wash stand and slipped off her night dress. She used some of the water to remove the last of the smudges from her skin/. She wet her hands and ran them through her hair. The water got rid of any linger dust trapped there and once she finished clearing up the dress, she would run the thin side of her come through her hair to catch anything that remained.
‘And hopefully it will dry before I go down to breakfast,’ she thought. ‘Or whatever they are calling the beverage.’
As Anya turned her tamp face cloth and her attention to the dress and removing the evidence of her adventure from the cloth, Anya wandered what was in the drink. It was filling and tasty, but it wasn’t like any drink she had been given before.
‘The lady spoke of entering the stillness of the mind to ask questions,’ Anya recalled. She wondered if the drink had something to do with that. ‘The way some of the drunks at the tavern are more suggestible to ideas when they have emptied a few cups.’
Anya knew this more from stories than experience. Mostly those were cautionary tales told to the boys before they were sent off into their apprentice ships. For most of them it would be the first time they ever had money of their own to spend and the warning and accompanying stories were considered a wise precaution. Anya had sampled a few alcoholic drinks during feast days and she knew the tang of it and how it made her feel inside. This drink had none of those hallmarks.
‘And it might just be magic that lets her doo that,’ Anya thought. A day prior she would have laughed off the notion but today, after having seen several scenes form distant places and times played out in the bowl, the notion didn’t seem nearly as silly.
She continued to get the dust streaks off of her clothing and when she thought it was as clean as she could get it, Anya began to dress for the day. As she did she thought about the scenes that the pool showed to her. She found her thoughts drifting more towards the ones she saw with Lord Mathis than the ones with her family. Those thoughts were tender still and not ones she wanted to focus on right away. Her thoughts circled around the shadowy vision of Lord Mathis where he posed and postured before a crowd that wasn’t there and had complements spewed out by an official in his own voice as he lifted an impossible looking crown onto his own head. It was different from the other visions.
‘It could be that the magic the lady loosed was fading,” Anya thought.
Ten til Midnight 