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 199: ‘Seeing where I might take shelter if I wasn’t going back to Tyrin,’ Anya realized.
‘Seeing where I might take shelter if I wasn’t going back to Tyrin,’ Anya realized. She recalled that the others thought it would be foolish to simply head back to Tyrin since that is where someone would automatically look.
‘So maybe he thinks I might not be that foolish either,’ Anya thought. She wasn’t certain if he thought she wasn’t that foolish, if the Matron advised something smarter or if he was just being thorough, but the path seemed to lead him to every possible place she could have stopped while still heading in a southerly direction.
Eventually the path she was taking caught up with the man himself. He was walking down the road. There was no one in sight. He was on the main road and there didn’t seem to be any side roads that could lead her anywhere but south. Anya remembered the road she traveled to get here. It seemed as though there was nothing but the straight road leading to the passage between the mountains.
‘There might be more stretches like that.’ She thought. She watched the man walk a while but learned nothing. She studied his face and thought she would easily be able to identify him if she ever saw him in person. There was little to gain from watching him walk. There was no one for him to talk to and he was not talking to himself. His eyes studied the road ahead and seemed to be peering into the trees as though looking for spots where someone had left the main road. It told her that he was observant and thorough but little else.
‘And I would have expected that if he was the man Lord Mathis sent,’ Anya thought. Lord Mathis didn’t seem the sort to hire an incompetent. ‘Especially for something as important as he seems to think tracking me down is.’
Anya shifted her thoughts away, leaving the man to walk and search. She shifted her thoughts to Lord Mathis and her sight was drawn back in the other direction, speeding north and leaving the empty woods and lonely road to descend into a busy city. Anya had an impression of far more people than she had ever seen all gathered in one city. They went to market they argued, they worked. Anya had a confused jumble before her sight took her past the castle and into a road heading into a different set of woods.
Her she followed two riders. Both seated on magnificent looking horses. Anya didn’t know much of anything about horses. She had seen the ones used to plow the fields but these were almost a completely different sort of creature. They were proud and glossy, their coats shining from a recent brushing. They were equipped with dyed leather accoutrements. One of the men riding was Lord Mathis. The other man Anya couldn’t identify.
Ten til Midnight 