The fifteen minute novel writing experiment is an 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 198: Pretending that if they weren’t here, the men weren’t a threat wasn’t a good idea.
Pretending that if they weren’t here, the men weren’t a threat wasn’t a good idea. “and trusting the statue in my dreams to find safe passage isn’t the greatest idea either,’ Anya decided. Deran had faith in both the moon and the Star and the Matron clearly took what the Star told her in the dreams she had to heart, but Anya suspected there would be gaps.
‘The statue didn’t know about the possible temporary nature of the assistance for one thing,’ Anya recalled.
She nodded, stood up and put the book down. Having decided that she needed to look, Anya thought she might as well get started. She banked the fire and suspecting that she might need to take longer in order to get her bearings, she took the blanket to stand on and tossed her outter cloak over her shoulders.
‘No use being colder than I have to be,’ she decided.
Anya slipped from her quarters and made her way down the corridor to the rom with the orb. It was a different time than her usualvisits and Anya found the changes in noise to be interesting. Normally she moved through the corridors when the rooms on the other side had emptied and everyone was gathered in the dining hall for their morning breakfast.
Then the passage was silent and the sound of her breath seemed loud. Now there were small sounds of movement, a sign that life was being lived on the other side of the walls. Anya heard the scrape of shoe leather on stone. The clearing of throats and theoccasional cough. There was muted laughter and the distant rumblings of conversations being held beyond the range of her hearing.
It made her feel sad that she was not a part of any of it, but it also served as a caution. It was a reminder that there were people moving about throughout the house and that if she could hear their noises then they could hear hers. She lightened her steps a little deliberately lifting each foot and setting it down so there would be no scraping sounds from her feet or sounds of her steps. She didn’t think anything on her garments made any noise, but Anya pulled her cloak close so that it wouldn’t brush against anything.
The passage from her quarters and to the room with the orb in it seemed to take twice as long as usual and by the time she arrived Anya felt jumpy and worn. She took a moment to regroup in the room with the orb, knowing that it was insulated from any of the House’s inhabitants. She sniffed loudly and shook her limbs. Nothing jingled of jangled and she allowed herself a moment to relax before placing the folded blanket on the floor in front of the orb.
Anya stepped on the blanket making sure her feet were in stable positions. Satisfied she would neither tilt nor slide, Anya pulled one hand under the warmth of her cloak and placed the other on the warm, pulsating orb.
Her vision doubled and Anya closed her eyes. ‘I need to see Lord Mathis man, the one searching for me,’ Anya thought trying to project her thoughts to the orb.
Her sight was whisked out of the house and down through the winding roads leading south. The passage was swift and smooth but not straight. While she didn’t get much detail, she thought she was being led on the pathway the man took when leaving. She saw the different small villages he passed and realized the path he took led him to each of these villages before continuing south.
‘Seeing where I might take shelter if I wasn’t going back to Tyrin,’ Anya realized.
Ten til Midnight 