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 72: It was all well and good to plan ways for leaving but without a destination it seemed pointless.
It was all well and good to plan ways for leaving but without a destination it seemed pointless. Kasca leaned back against the wall and thought about it. She could still travel home. Everyone was gone but her home was there. True she had room right in the spare room of Garant’s house rather than a place of her own, but it was home.
She thought about the space. Garant was particular about the space and routinely inspected her room as though he expected her to do untoward things to the space. As all potions were brewed in hidden locations and not in the space where she lived, there was nothing remotely untoward about the space.
While she never caught him at it, Kasca was certain he went through her things when she wasn’t there. Things occasionally felt shifted about and sometimes small things went missing. She told herself they were just misplaced, but it happened often enough that she promised she would find another space to live once she returned from this trip.
It was something she thought about for a while but kept getting delayed in moving forward with. She remembered telling herself that she definitely would move regardless of when she returned. It was one of the reasons most of the things she cared about were in her pack now. She suspected when she returned, she would find a more thorough search of her room would have been made and many more items gone.
She had nothing to use as proof with the magistrates, nothing definitive, just her hunches. She knew if she did return to find things missing, Garant would have a ready excuse to make certain he couldn’t be blamed.
‘It helps that his brother and brother in law are both on the city council,’ Kasca thought. She blinked. ‘Helped.’ She corrected using the past tense. There was no city council anymore, no Garent to rummage through her things and look at her suspiciously. It was all gone.
Kasca felt a lump rising in her throat. All of it was gone. She wiped tears away.
‘Crying for Garent,’ she thought. ‘Stupid.’
Still the tears came, the grief swamped her. Deva hadn’t been perfect but it was home and now it was gone. In the mining cave on the edge of the central district, Kasca let herself grieve it’s loss.
Time passed. Her tears dried. Her face felt dry, puffy and itchy, desiccated from the loss of her tears. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t yet ready to eat, but she was thirsty. She drank her fill and rested. She kept her thoughts empty for a short while.
Finally she set the waterskin down and allowed her thoughts to turn back to planning. When she left Deva she packed all that mattered to her. There was no reason to go back.
She thought about the disease spreading off the island, brought by the fleeing Overlord. When she looked at the city, she could see that while affected there were still people about. She didn’t know what the conditions were now as it had been several weeks since she last looked.
‘If there were people then they could use the cure,’ she thought.
Kasca thought of the cure. She knew it worked as she saw it used on the others in the Sanctuary.
Ten til Midnight 