For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 97: Each ring was on a circle and looked deliberately placed.
Each ring was on a circle and looked deliberately placed. Penelope stared at the rings. There was no mistaking the fall for anything natural. There were no clumps of rings. There was no ring fallen into the blank space between the circles. Each ring looked deliberately placed on a single circle.
“Well that’s…something,” she said. What exactly it was she couldn’t tell. The information she read had not covered this eventuality. She looked to the one glowing ring. It was placed on the circle marked for far sight.
She wasn’t certain if that was simply the circle available to the ring of if there was any significance. Hesitantly she reached out and picked the ring up. She half expected it would be warm. It was instead cool to the touch.
The ring was delicate, especially compared to the other rings in the collection. If she remembered correctly it was one of the items purchased in a bag of junk jewelry. It was a slime carved metal band with a trio of small stones in it. She thought the stones were glass but liked the soft blue white color of them. The ring fit her ring finger and as the chunkier ring she chose for that finger was a bit loose, she word the ring to hold the larger ring in place. It was barely noticeable under the shadow of the larger ring.
Penelope frowned and studied the ring as the glow started to fade. The stones looked once again like glass rather than stone. ‘But unless it is enchanted glass it shouldn’t glow.’
Penelope had seen enchanted glass. There was a sculptor with magic who made it his specialty. He had an exhibit about eight months prior and unable to resist Penelope stopped in for a tour. She meant to only assuage her curiosity since so many people were talking about the exhibit but she ended up staying three hours, only leaving because the gallery was closing. The docent smiled as her reaction was not unusual and she was far from the only one being shepherd-ed towards the door.
There had been an exhibition brochure with a small paragraph about glass being able to take on a magical glow, but it was temporary and needed to be reinfused every so often. The sculptures themselves were beautiful on their own, but the magic brought a soft glow that nearly brought them to life.
‘But it would have to be infused,’ she thought. She wondered if her small spell counted and temporarily infused the glass with her magic. Again it was another question she had no idea how to answer. ‘I suppose I could look up the artist and send him an e-mail.
It was something to think about.
The ring was the only item from the bag of jewelry she used. The junk shop she purchased things from had bags of costume jewelry and she bought several bags for a few dollars each sorting through for what she needed and putting the rest away to sort through later. The bag was in one of her suitcases. It wa placed there for lack of any other location and she saw it both when she packed to leave home and when she unpacked here.
She looked past the ring to the book.
Ten til Midnight 