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 40: If anyone in any of the districts had the resources to create an antidote it would have been the Overlord.
If anyone in any of the districts had the resources to create an antidote it would have been the Overlord. That was the part that struck her. He stripped resources from the entire island, every corner. While they rationed their supplies to get through the lean months, he could have elaborate feasts and even allow excess food to spoil.
‘He has excess food,’ Kasca thought bitterly. Even in the good years when things weren’t so tight there was just enough to go around. There was never excess. Every scrap of what they had was used. Nothing went to waste because even in a good year they couldn’t afford the waste.
The Overlord was under no such constraints. He had every resource in abundance. ‘Yet he didn’t have a cure.’
Kasca finished her bread and felt a little less hollow. She also felt the need for movement. She stood and walked to the door, flinging it open, for a moment forgetting the weather. Bitter winds whipped inside carrying them the damp cold that settled into bones and heralded a storm. Looking to the sky, Kasca could see it darkening by the second as heavy clouds were blown in. In haling she smelled the scent of smoke as well as the smell of snow. She closed the door, shivering.
‘No walking,’ she decided. Kasca couldn’t keep still, her thoughts spinning. She paced through the cabin like a caged thing as the wind moaned around the palisade. ‘The Overlord either didn’t have time to create an antidote or didn’t have time to use it,’ she thought as she paced. ‘Or he made one and it wasn’t effective.’
She didn’t know which. ‘I also don’t know where the disease came from.’
She paced, but now the speed was less frenetic, less caged animal and more thoughtful. Options began to flick through her mind slowly. She chose one, focused on it and then let it slide to study another. Gradually the need to move faded as her thoughts shifted from panic into planning. Still she couldn’t keep entirely still. She looked to the wool she spun from the store kept in the cottage. She took a length of the yarn she created and took it and her knitting needles back to the fire to start a project. She settled in and the rhythmic clicking of the needles comforted her as she began to plan.
“As I see it,” she said as though someone were sitting in front of the fire with her. “Where the disease came from is important. If the Overlord created it and it got loose, the details of his creation may still be in his keep.”
Kasca knitted a few stitches as she thought about it. She knew she could send her sight to the keep. She searched it earlier looking for answers. “But I didn’t search it all.”
She saw the Overlord had a laboratory adjacent to the lair of the beasts, but had not been willing to spend time there. ‘I found no dead there and I was looking for people more than anything.’
“So I go back and spend time in the laboratory,” she didn’t know if she would be able to look through a book if he took notes in it, but if there were notes on his work top or pinned to the wall, they could provide answers. “It would be a start,” Kasca said.
Ten til Midnight 