Morning all and welcome to the Fifteen Minute Novel. Here I take the start of a story idea and work on it for fifteen minutes a day. I started with an old writing prompt that interested me, cleaned it up a bit to fit the basic outline of the story I want to write and then set aside fifteen minutes each week day to see it grow. Each morning’s writing starts with the last sentence of the day before. And so now we have the story of Kasca…
Day 9: Kasca swallowed hard and retreated from the form, slinking back into the shadows.
Kasca swallowed hard and retreated from the form, slinking back into the shadows. She moved quickly not wanting to be caught near the dead beast. That the beasts could die was not news. She heard tales of them falling in battle and even seen one killed in an avalanche once, the heavy stones crushing it. She studied the fresh corpse where it protruded from the rocks to see if more could be learned about the beasts.
She learned they were created by magic, the spells twisting something that might once have been natural into an unnatural form, possibly blending multiple creatures together. How it was done was beyond her, but it had been pleasing to know they could be killed.
‘But could be killed and left to rot in the middle of the road are two separate things,’ she thought.
Even the creature she saw claimed by the avalanche was recovered by the rest of the patrol. They dug the creature out and took it back with them to wherever they went when not on patrol. She knew that some claimed this meant the creatures had finer feelings, that they mourned their dead. She saw one of the creatures retrieving the dead gnawing on what looked like the beast’s leg as it helped carry the remains away, so she had her doubts as to their sensitivities.
‘The road is patrolled routinely,’ She thought. ‘Or it was.’
The beast would have been found quickly. There was no reason for it to remain abandoned to rot. More questions rose in her mind, especially as she saw no obvious means of death. ‘An avalanche is one thing,’ Kasca thought. ‘But if the villagers are killing the patrol somehow…’
Kasca shook her head and continued on. She didn’t have long to travel before she spotted another mound in the road. This one was larger and when she drew close, Kasca found there were three of the patrolling monsters lying dead on the ground. There were no more visible signs of what killed them than there were on the first, and Kasca did not feel like getting close enough for a search. The flesh was stinking and rotted and she contented herself with looking for protruding arrows at a distance.
‘None that I can see,’ she thought. ‘And why wouldn’t they be claimed by their fellows?’
Kasca continued on.
The road remained clear, but the death of the beasts troubled her. She looked ahead as the road curved towards the village. It left the woods and entered open fields around the village proper. All the farms that fed the village were located on the other side. The road came out of the woods and town the grassy slopes to the town. On the other side it branched out into lush farmland before reaching the river Gatoleon.
At the edge of the woods Kasca stopped. The village was not large, but it had a wall around it with a gate. It wasn’t stone-built like some of the larger ones, making do with a fire-hardened wooden palisade but it was a defended village with a watchtower and a guard.
Ten til Midnight 