The fifteen minute novel writing experiment is a attempt to write a complete (and very rough) draft of a novel by writing for fifteen minutes each day. I have taken a timed writing from one of the daily prompts done in 2021, cleaned it up a little and used it as my jumping off point into a story. Each day I will take the last line of the story written the day before and use it as my sentence starter and write for fifteen minutes, growing the story as the year progresses.
Day 150: With the dust cleared her skirts did not stir up anything to make her sneeze and as there was no one with her, there was no urge to speak.
With the dust cleared her skirts did not stir up anything to make her sneeze and as there was no one with her, there was no urge to speak. Anya moved silently down the corridors. Each room looked as though it was simply waiting for someone’s arrival. Someone to light a fire in the grate and settle in with a book or a mug of tea. There were work spaces as well and they looked as though someone had just stepped out for a moment. Other rooms were cleared as she passed. Anya wondered if they were rooms where people gathered to talk, to discuss the things going on within the mountain or to train those who were still learning their abilities.
Those rooms were spacious, but they held little in them. Anya thought of the Orb. It too had a room all of it’s own. There were no books inside it, not shelving for them either. She paused at the entrance to one of these rooms. She stopped in the doorway and looked inside. There were skylights, holes punched through the mountain and concealed while still allowing light in. Anya wondered if magic was used to conceal the openings but had no one to ask. She stepped into the room and saw that the hopes leading upward were covered by a thick crystalline casing. It didn’t look like glass, more like some sort of rock crystal. It looked carved so that it was thin enough to allow light but still thick enough to be sturdy.
Anya walked further into the room. She frowned. Even if this space had once been designated for training, it made no sense to leave it as such when they locked down the mountain. She understood most of the rooms. They were filled with books and work spaces and were set up for use. Someone like her could work in secret. But large rooms like this with nothing in them seemed pointless.
‘Did they run out of things to conceal or did they just not get around to doing anything with the space and left it because it was already hidden?’ As the hiding of the spaces was done when an attack was either imminent or in motion she suspected it could have easily been forgotten or pushed aside for more immediate concerns.
She look in the space, looking at the floors and walls, wondering if there was scaring from long ago training mishaps or if this too had been healed by the magic setting things to rights. As she reached the center of the room there was an odd sort of humming. Anya paused in place. A light rose from the floor and she looked down. There was a circle of light laid out and she appeared to be standing in the center of it. Anya tried to turn thinking that standing in the center of a magical circle didn’t sound like the smartest of ideas. She found she was unable to move. The humming grew louder and the light flashed to blue. The humming changed pitch and then turned green.
Anya wondered if it was some sort of trap or weapon that whoever built this place put here in case the hidden passages were breached by someone they didn’t want in the spaces. The light around her shifted from green to white again and Anya found that within the circle she could move, she simply couldn’t leave it.
“Well greetings to you, young mistress,” Anya heard. She turned towards the sound of the voice.
Ten til Midnight 