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 219: Still Anya reached for her cloak, wrapped it tight around herself and slipped into the corridors.
Still Anya reached for her cloak, wrapped it tight around herself and slipped into the corridors. Where to go wasn’t as much of a problem as she thought. There were miles and miles of hidden passageways to walk. As long as she was quiet, she would be fine. She was wrapped up against the cold. She just needed not to be heard.
Anya didn’t really pick her passage. She walked along the corridors, taking turns that felt right to her. It was what she did when she needed to walk in Tyrin. It always worked out for her. She would find a hidden mushroom or strawberry patch no one else kne about and come home with an unexpectedly full basket. She would come upon some of the more rarely growing medicinal herbs the healers would trade for eagerly. Her wanderings always benefitted everyone else so no one had ever complained of them.
This time, Anya didn’t know what she would find, just that she needed to walk. Her need for caution faded slightly as she realized her feet were taking her towards the less occupied spaces. These contained not only the empty spaces of the hidden sections, but were surrounded by empty rooms no longer occupied by the House of the Star, if they ever had been. Those rooms, Anya knew contained no magical books or hidden objects, they were regular rooms like she had before she went into the hidden spaces.
Anya passed the last section she visited and found her feet carrying her deeper into the mountain. Last time she looked, dust coated the contents. Now all the dust was cleared away and she could see the splendor that once was. The floor had a detailed wooden inlay and the ceiling was painted with a mural. She looked up and saw intricately painted figures on the ceiling. There was some sort of story involved with them, but Anya didn’t know what it was. She tilted her head back down and continued walking.
As beautiful as the empty spaces were, she was relieved to reach something a bit more humble in scale. She entered a corridor and found a set of stairs. The stairs led her to a smaller atrium, no less opulent, but less echoingly huge. There were two doors that branched off of it.
Anya decided to investigate the left first. She opened the door and found one of the indoor garden spaces. It looked clean and ready for use. If Anya had the elements needed for the setup of the space she could have easily put it into production. While interesting, Anya found the desire to stay in the space leave her, her feet still wanted to walk. She left the space and decided to investigate the other door. She opened it and entered into a large chamber that was set up much as the post season chamber the Matron assigned her had been. There was a well-appointed sitting room with bookshelves.
Anya took a look at them and realized they held mostly books on growing things, many of them specifically dealing with growing things in the adjacent chamber.
‘Which I suppose makes sense,’ Anya thought. She left the front sitting room and found a bedroom with an adjacent bathing chamber. Like the other one, it had a set up for heating water. Anya found herself longing to use it. The others may laugh at how those from Dovish bathed, but it was a part of anya and she deeply missed it.
Surprisingly there were also windows in the chamber. They let light into the rooms without the use of lanterns. Anya found a door between the windows and before opening it peered through the glass to see what was on the other side.
Ten til Midnight 