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 14: The sign for death and illness was painted on the one occasionally occupied building.
The sign for death and illness was painted on the one occasionally occupied building. Kasca didn’t bother investigating. She maintained her concealment charm and made her way to the river. She found a small boat that she could operate herself and untied it from the pier. She leaped in as she pushed it into the current and when the current caught the boat, taking her further south, she added a concealment on it as well. Safe inside the boat and shielded from view Kasca thought about the signs she saw and tried to build a time line.
The patrol at Laran was far more desiccated than the creatures she saw on the road before Neva. She didn’t know how their desiccation rate compared to other creatures, but figured each of them would desiccate much the same was as others of their kind.
‘Which means those by the river died first and those on the road could have been sent to find the missing patrol.’ Did that mean the disease spread from the river inland? Kasca didn’t know but it seemed likely. She didn’t know what sort of disease it was.
‘But it is too hard to fight the current to have come up from the south.’ Those that travelled this river only came down from the north. When their business was complete, they used a tributary with a much less powerful current to return North as it was much easier to navigate. It was one of the reasons Laran never grew to be a great port town. It was on the way to one of the tributaries but not close enough for people to stop and refresh themselves before going on. They would stop and unload but it was a short stay with traders quickly pushing on to Golston, the port town located near the tributary many would take back to the north.
‘Or at least they used to,’ she thought. Several of the tributaries had been deliberately diverted by the Overlord’s earth moving machines to prevent independent trade. All goods came to him and were then redistributed to where he believed they ought to go. If an area had not reached their quota of production, he could deny them additional goods. It was designed to encourage them to work harder the following year.
Instead, it promoted widespread starvation and hoarding of the few available resources. It was one of the reasons villages like hers were no longer sending the touched as runners. Each season the Overlords quotas became even more unreasonable. Reaching them was almost impossible. With one of the touched in town they could hide enough so that even though they were hungry, the village would not starve completely. It also helped ensure that one person did not hoard. The Touched helped ensure what little there was ended up being doled out fairly.
‘In some places,’ she thought. It wasn’t a perfect system and there were always those who were willing to put their own interests ahead of others. Kasca set the thought to the side, returning to the spread of the contagion.
Ten til Midnight 