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 31: The only travelers she saw worked for the Overlord.
The only travelers she saw worked for the Overlord. The thought sent a ball of cold dread into her belly. Dera was at the end of the route. The collectors would have stopped at every other village in the north before reaching her hometown. ‘If one of them was contaminated…’
Kasca let the thought go as she expanded her search. She used the bowl of water to look through the towns she knew well and the towns she passed through only occasionally. Her scrying showed that all were infected. The disease raced through and took a heavy toll. Some villages looked as abandoned as the ones she went through after passing the Overlord’s keep.
As Kasca followed the main roads and dipped into byways to look for those not infected, she saw the Overlords collectors’ wagons. They were abandoned by the side of the road.
‘Its not too far from the main inn near there,’ Kasca thought. Her sight went towards the Traveler’s Rest Inn. It was usually a hive of activity. Even with travel restricted it was where the locals came for a pint after work or to socialize. While the custom of traveler’s dwindled, the rooms let out only housing the Overseer’s collectors most years, it was always busy.
It was echoingly quiet. The sign of contagion was painted sloppily on the door as though someone painted it at speed, eager to be away. Kasca searched the familiar spaces. There was no one in the taproom. In the back of the inn, in the stable yard, she found freshly turned earth showing quick burials. The horses were left to rot in the stables where they died. Kasca noticed that there were dead flies around the bloated corpses.
Even the insects were not immune.
Kasca looked through the inn and while she found most rooms empty she found two beds occupied by corpses. No doubt they helped bury the others and were left with no one to bury them. It was a grim sight and Kasca was happy to leave it behind. She thought again of the Overlord’s collectors.
Kasca pulled her sight south. She let her sight move swiftly down roads that took her months to walk, reaching the Overlord’s central keep in only a moment. No one was traveling the roads and she saw many of the dead monsters of the patrol. At the Overlord’s keep she waited looking for the patrol. There was none. Not a single patrol moved.
She did find a mound of the dead creatures. They didn’t look as desiccated or decayed as the others and she wondered if that was the patrol she passed as she headed south. There was no way to know. She looked to the tower.
Much of what happened there was on an automated system. While the people returned to using candles and oil lanterns as any electrified systems were dismantled, The overlord kept generators and his halogen lights to illuminate the area. They were on a timer and no manual use was needed.
Kasca looked at the keep. She remembered when she was quite small, before her family fled north, there were times when those of her village were required to attend the Overlord. He assumed leadership, but his directives had not been as onerous as they became. It was near the beginning of his reign and his yoke was heavy, but did not bear the full weight of tyranny. One time, she visited the keep with her father when he and the others were called.
Ten til Midnight 