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 92: Her scrying would be easier if she started from where she was physically and then expanded outward.
Her scrying would be easier if she started from where she was physically and then expanded outward. Kasca took her bowl to the entrance of the small cave and let the rain water fill it. The rainwater would help provide a clearer view as it was currently falling on a wide area. The water would be seen as part of a whole.
Bowl filled, Kasca settled herself in the back of the cave with her back pressed to stone and cast her scrying spell, leaning over the bowl to let the water take her sight.
She scouted the area around the cave first. She felt relief when she could see for herself that no one was sneaking up on her resting place. No one noticed her and no one objected to her presence.
There was no one.
She let her sight expand. The nearest village was abandoned. They did not put the parkers for death on the doors hear as they did in her home so she had no way to mark the diseases progression. It could have wiped out the village or caused survivors to flee. It also could have been abandoned so they would be further away from any potential contamination, the villagers leaving on their own in order to isolate themselves.
She couldn’t tell from what she could see. There were no pyres and no markers. ‘But I don’t think they burn their dead here,’ she recalled. She vaguely remembered someone mentioning the people of this kingdom buried their dead instead of committing them to flames.
‘So I might not see pyres,’ she thought.
With no people in the village it was both a relief and a concern. She was relieved that her arrival would go un noticed but worried as she wanted to find a community to join. Kasca decidd to waste no more time on the village and instead sent her sight further. She identified several more villages. Some were abandoned, mostly the smaller ones while others still had people. Those occupied were in the midst of contagion. She could see it in those she studied. Kasca wondered if she could create cures but all those she saw passed the point where the cure she carried would do any good.
In addition, there were warnings at the entrances to villages and on the palisades of the few walled settlements she saw. Travelers were not welcome. Many placed cages outside the town walls and Kasca could see that visitors were locked in and left. If she was inclined to be charitable she could have thought it was initially a quarantine measure to see if the visitor was contaminated before allowing them entry.
There were a lot of cages and those in them were long dead. Some looked as though they had been there over the winter. There certainly weren’t any new arrivals.
‘Certainly giving those towns a wide berth,’ she decided. While she was free of the contamination, she did not want to be put in a cage to starve.
Kasca let her sight extend past the towns and villages. There were a few cities although their population looked substantially less than she would have thought. There were buildings empty and large empty places in each of them.
Her home no longer had cities. The overlord limited the size of each settlement to help control the island. No village was allowed a large enough population to form a significant force. Anytime he thought the population was too great there would be a collection.
Ten til Midnight 