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 49: While that was true, Kasca realized she was scared of what she might find if she looked.
While that was true, Kasca realized she was scared of what she might find if she looked. In the Overlord’s keep there were only the remains of the dead. They were dead long enough that there was a distance to the deaths. It had been hard to look in on her home town and see the disease rampaging, but much of that was familiarity. While it was still infecting her friends and neighbors, the diseases work was almost complete.
At the Sanctuary, the epidemic was much more recent. They were just beginning to struggle. Kasca hoped that they were able to contain it. Wanted to believe they could contain it. She did not want to watch those containment efforts fail. She did not want to watch the hopelessness and desperation grow.
‘And there is the possibility I might be able to find out more from the laboratory that could help them,’ Kasca thought. She felt there was still cowardice on her part, but it was cowardice for a reason at least.
‘I’ll study what I can and when I have something to tell them, if they haven’t contacted me I will contact them.’
Kasca didn’t know the spell to create the message ball but she knew she could then use the paper from the library books to slip into the Sanctuary, learning the spell and sending the message once she had useful information.
“Knowing the Overlord is dead is good information, but not helpful at the moment.”
Kasca settled herself on the matter. She would learn what she could before contacting the others in the Sanctuary.
Decision made, her days fell into a rhythm. She woke and made her morning ablutions. She ate and spent the day studying the Overlord’s notes. She then returned her sight to the cottage when her energy started to faded and thought through what she learned often making notes on her own.
Tamping down her own emptions was difficult as she read the notes from the Overlord’s own hands. Not only was he using spies in every town and village as a means to control the population, but he used them as test subjects. When the disease arrived, he sequestered himself. The contagion rampaged through the beasts of the patrol taking down their already reduced numbers.
The disease hit them hard and fast and nothing he or those who worked for him could do anything to stop it. The disease almost seemed to target the beasts.
The Overlord did not create it, but assumed someone else had specifically to target the creatures. The initial study was designed not only to watch the progression of the disease but to make certain it could not jump to the new creatures, that his upcoming creations were immune to it.
‘He wasn’t even trying to save the creatures, just build better ones,’ Kasca thought as she sat by the fire reviewing what she learned. She had no love of the beasts. They had killed many of her friends and she occasionally had nightmares still featuring them. Still there was something sad about the callous way their creator was willing to study and discard them.
‘Humans didn’t fare much better,’ Kasca thought.
The overlord never figured out how to design his new creatures to be immune to the disease because it jumped from creature to human. His staff was infected. The overlord shielded himself. The contagion took his personal staff out quickly, too quickly for him to study the changes the disease made when shifting from beast to man.
‘So he purposefully infected his collectors,’ Kasca thought. There was a mix of anger and resignation in her when she learned of his plan.
Ten til Midnight 