Morning everyone. As you know I finished out the story line of the story I set myself for 2023’s fifteen minute novel and so I picked out another prompt I liked from the ones completed in order to work on it for the remainder of the year. No use letting several months go buy without writing as I have now built the daily habit. At the moment i am still working sans outline. I suspect this weekend will see an actual outline form but for now I am just taking the story as it comes. Which is oddly quite a lot of fun. I actually can’t wait to see how this starts to fill out. (I do knw that past a few days if I don’t have an outline I will ramble so I at least need a few points on the outline to keep me going in some sort of direction). But for now…
Day 2: If none of her home defenses were triggered I she could get what she needed and be gone in less than ten minutes.
If none of her home defenses were triggered I she could get what she needed and be gone in less than ten minutes. As she moved through the maze of buildings, Anna tried to concentrate on the present. If they knew to look for her in the archives then they knew she would eventually arrive and leave the building. She took no pains to hide her arrival, why would she? Anna thought she was clear of the hunt.
‘Which means they have to think I am still there.’ She thought of that red string. The enchantment worked a bit like litmus paper except that it tracked magic more than acid. There was always some sort of magic around, whether people knew it or not so most considered the original enchantment fairly useless. Unless she was in a controlled environment the string would almost invariable change colors within an hour. Anna tweaked things a bit and now her strings were attuned only to magic specifically aimed at her.
The problem was it was still generic in it’s warnings. She couldn’t tell if it was a small spell designed to latch on to her so that whoever placed it could track her to her home or if it was one of the nastier spells set to attack. She also didn’t know if whoever set it had a method of knowing when it was triggered. All of these things factored into the amount of time she had before someone realized that she was no longer in the archives.
Anna tried to hurry her steps feeling time running out as she weighed her options. ‘Best to plan for the worst,’ she thought.
It was the thought that kept her alive while she was running. It was in fact the same thought that sent her running after the funeral in the first place. ‘Present now,’ she reminded herself shelving thoughts of the past away. If she wished to remain uncaught, she could not dwell in reminiscences, not now.
Despite feeling the sands in her hourglass running out, Anna slowed her steps as she neared her apartment. She put warnings around the neighborhood in a blanket of the area so that she could tell from a distance what might have invaded her home. As she approached, she checked them. The outer perimeter was undisturbed and it gave her some hope. It was the most hidden and the furthest away. To reach her home the barrier would have been broken. There would have been no way to avoid it.
The sight of the unbroken barrier brought her comfort and caused her heart rate to race less. ‘Still not home free,’ she reminded herself. As she moved down the shade dappled sidewalk of the tree lined street, Anna realized she would be sad to leave this neighborhood. After she fled she lived many places, some for a few days others for longer. This was the longest and it started to feel like home.
Ten til Midnight 