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 78: Towards the end of the day she found a spell designed to hide her from anyone intending to scry for her.
Towards the end of the day she found a spell designed to hide her from anyone intending to scry for her. Kasca memorized it and made a note of it’s location so she could go back the following day and reread it , further committing it to memory.
The days began to slip past in a routine wave. For a while it looked like none of the passages were ever going to be clear, that the floodwaters would remain high forever. Gradually she did start to see them go down. Each day she added to her score of spells as she looked through the books in the library. Kasca felt as though she was arming herself for an unknown future.
When she left the mines, she would be on her own. Completely. There was no home to go back to, no one who knew her and no where she belonged. She would need to carve out her own space, her own place. She just didn’t know where that would be.
The only people who knew she existed were in the sanctuary and they wanted to kill her. ‘Hardly an endorsement.’
While most of her days were spent studying, Kasca watched Jascon and his search for her. ‘Not just for me,’ Kasca thought. In addition to wanting to know where she went, Jascon was desperate to know how things stood beyond the sanctuary. He wanted to see how far the disease spread. Despite Kasca telling him that she was searching for a cure, he believed the Overlord gave her the cure and sent her to the Sanctuary as part of some sort of master plan.
‘He seems to have convinced himself of it,’ Kasac thought as she watched Jascon plot and scheme. Some days she saw and heard nothing of use to her. Other times there were long tirades born of frustration. The picture Kasca managed to piece together was that he believed the Overlord found a cure, helped his people and deliberately infected the sanctuary, then sending Kasca in with the cure to discover what other secrets they held.
At least that was the story he told himself. He was still telling the others the cure came to him in a vision, while convincing them she was a spy. The problem was that he was as blind as everyone else. He could not scry much beyond the shore and the person who taught her to use talismans was gone. Kasca watched Jascon try to use talismans and fail utterly. Scrying was simply not a skill where he excelled.
He somehow seemed to forget that he was the one who ordered the disease sent out and sent people to investigate its spread. That Kasca learned when listening to the grumblings of his underlings. Jascon now wanted others to return to the mainland and scout around to see the effects. No one knew if the cure was permanent and no one wanted to be reinfected.
There were no volunteers and so Jascon held a vote. Kasca found it interesting to watch him choose those to send and slowly convince those who followed him that a vote needed to be taken and to vote for his chosen. He was good and despite the grumbles, those he chose for the task were sent out to investigate.
Ten til Midnight 