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 65: Slowly, she managed to pull her boat further away from the marshlands and the flooded plains.
Slowly, she managed to pull her boat further away from the marshlands and the flooded plains. By midday, the land was less waterlogged. She could see where the floodwaters stopped. She still kept to the water rather than going ashore as she knew the travel was quicker.
‘Besides there is a passage,’ she thought. There was a small waterway she could take to move her inland once more. She was certain she could paddle through and get herself closer to territory she found familiar. This particular section of the island was not heavily populated. The people resisted the Overlord more fiercely and were destroyed because of it. She remembered the tales of slaughter. Entire villages were raised.
Anyone who was left alive was resettled elsewhere. The land was allowed to lie fallow. Eventually the Overlord had outposts created. These small outposts housed those he transferred there to work. They were prisoners, criminals chosen from various other districts, none of whom had any ties to the area. Overseers were put in place to watch them and ensure they did the farming and mining the Overlord wanted them to do. It was less a settlement and more of a working prison.
From the notes she read, Kasca knew that the settlements here were his first test areas for watching how the disease spread. He felt that with his men controlling so much they would be easier to control. She also knew that the settlements were consumed by the disease. He lost contact and sent people to check. The settlements were as destroyed as the villages that ame before them. There had been no survivors.
Kasca had no desire to witness the destruction having already seen her share of abandoned villages and towns. There was nothing for her in this land and moving though quickly was her best option. She found the small estuary a few hours before sunset and found it was easily navicable for her small boat. It wasn’t large enough for heavy river traffic and from the map she knew it didn’t go near any of the settlements.
She moved down it’s course until the world started to darken. Then she tied up for the night, ate her ration and checked in on the Sanctuary. Nothing changed there and she left them to their evening as she settled down for another night in the boat.
She was up again with the dawn and she continued northwards. While the small river did not go near the settlements the Overlord placed on the land it did go past some of the older settlements. The destruction was done long enough ago that there were merely small sections of walls and the hints of what might have been village centers remaining. Time had blunted the destruction and she could not tell the difference between what the Overlord destroyed and what time weathered.
Ten til Midnight 