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 207: The maid stepped back and closed the door leaving Perov to wait.
The maid stepped back and closed the door leaving Perov to wait. He did so as though he had all of the time in the world, and Anya suspected he did. She suspected he wouldn’t want to return to Lord Mathis admitting failure.
‘I doubt Lord Mathis is very understanding,’ she thought. Considering he was willing to lock her in a tower to either manifest magic or die, she doubted his reaction to failure in his underlings was lenient.
‘I wonder what happened to the guards who lost me,’ Anya thought. The orb pulled her sight away from Perov and spun her to a glad in the woods. Anya frowned as she looked around but then she saw it. Half buried by old leaves and mostly rotted away was what was left of the corpse of her former jailer.
Anya looked away. Apparently Lord Mathis didn’t deal well with failure. As she turned away Anya saw the sight of a roof line. She edged closer, more to get away from the guard’s corpse than out of any interest in the house. As she came closer she saw that it was the same house where she saw Lord Mathis sitting and receiving reports of her escape. A thought flickered across her mind.
“Can you show me the Fairweather Estate,’ she asked the orb. Her vision blurred as she sped away from the house and back towards Rulash.
‘I guess that’s not the Fairweather Estate then,’ Anya thought. The world moved in a blur around her and Anya tried not to concentrate on anything lest she become dizzy and ill. ‘I’ll just look and then get back to Perov,’ she told herself. She hadn’t actually meant to leave and hoped she could get back before he was admitted into the house.
Her curiosity was too great for her to stop the orb before she saw the estate though. The world slowed and Anya found herself looking an old estate house. It was fully as large as any manor house she had ever seen but it had seen better days. It was also built along different lines. While most manor houses were built as large square or rectangle blocks rising several stories, this one had different levels. Some parts of it were one story tall while others had second story rooms. It made the roof line look strangely jagged. In addition, while the house itself was built as a large square, the center had been carved out to form a central courtyard. What she thought might have once been a garden was overgrown and tangled. It any pathways remained they were swallowed up but the plants.
In the center of the courtyard rose a large tree. Anya frowned unable to name the type of tree. It wasn’t one she knew of from Dovish and it hadn’t come up in her study of flora and fauna. The house looked abandoned and the land surrounding it likewise looked wild and abandoned.
‘Why would lord Mathis want this?’ Anya wondered.
Ten til Midnight 