First Campaigner Challenge

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Here’s the challenge:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “The door swung open” These four words will be included in the word count.

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), use the same beginning words and end with the words: “the door swung shut.” (also included in the word count)

For those who want an even greater challenge, make your story 200 words EXACTLY!

I tried, but the story didn’t like being at 200 words. It didn’t like 34 words of fluff. So here’s my entry, at 166 words:

Frozen Roses
The door swung open. There they were. Limp red mittens drowning in water. I pulled the ice tray toward me. Twelve perfect cubes of frozen rose petals.

The Book had said this would cure love. Bespelled roses consumed by ice. No more waiting to be noticed, no more “accidental” run-ins, no more wasted daydreams. My feelings would die with the roses. I would be free of him.

I wasn’t free. I craved his hand on mine, running up my arm. Lazy Sundays with just the two of us. Nobody else, especially not a wife.

My body shook. What was I thinking? I couldn’t still be in love. I couldn’t. The roses were dead. I’d done everything perfectly.

No. Not perfectly.

One corner of one petal breached the surface. Breathing. Surviving. Tying me to him.

I yanked out the ice tray and ran the faucet. When the red was completely submerged, I returned the tray and stepped back. Cutting myself off. For good.

The door swung shut.

You can vote for my story by clicking here!

The Narrator: First 250 Words

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Prince Calder of Anwingda, expert swordsman and tactician extraordinaire, surveyed the dangers before him. Eleven enemy soldiers waited for his first move. Beyond them, a fair maiden with golden locks and rosy cheeks breathlessly awaited his timely rescue.

With a shout, Calder swung his sword at the closest one. The soldier blocked, and received a kick in the stomach for his troubles. Calder had already moved on, slashing and stabbing with all the ferocity of a chained dragon.

Calder turned. A sword swept toward his head. He ducked and sent his own sword into the man’s heart.

In short order, all the soldiers were dead. Calder knelt at the princess’ feet. “Oh beautiful maiden,” he said. “I have traveled far and wide to reach your side.”

“You are brave,” said the princess. She tapped a gauntleted hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for besting the evil soldiers.”

Calder gazed up into her ruddy face.

And burst out laughing.

One of the dead soldiers sat up. “That does it. Next time, I get to be the princess!”

“You’re too new,” protested the princess. “Only senior officers have the privilege.”

“But whoever heard of a princess with a beard?”

He guffawed, breaking the illusion. The princess was replaced with the captain of the First Regiment.

“I need you where you are, Gunnerson,” Calder told the soldier. “You’re the best swordsman in the regiment.”

He was mollified a bit. Others sat up, rubbing bruised limbs. “Do you still require our services, Your Highness?” asked the captain.

The Narrator: Prologue

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Author’s Note: This is actually sillier than the rest of the novel. I blame the original author, whose words appear in bold. The narrator’s words are in regular typeface.

Princess Arianna had spent her whole life in towers, and was therefore not much surprised to find herself living in yet another one. She had been born in a tower, the highest tower of her parents’ castle in the capital of Delmara. After the revolution a few years later, the king and his family moved to the country, and little Arianna claimed the only tower in the manor for her bedroom. When things settled down and the royal family moved back to Delmara, Arianna lived in the North Tower of the palace.

And now she was living in the clock tower of Faraday Castle.

It wasn’t so bad, she decided. She had books, and pretty furnishings. She had a window which overlooked the castle grounds and the surrounding forest. But the most interesting things about the clock tower was the clock. In place of numbers, there were strange symbols, and the hands moved at uneven speeds. Arianna liked to sit on her window seat and watch it tick away. She also liked to mark her own time on the clock.

Every day, before she was brought her breakfast of wiggly eggs, fattened ham, and slightly crunchy toast, Princess Arianna leaned as far as possible out of her window and carved a notch in the side of the clock frame. She was very proud of the clock on her clock tower, though she could never decide why that was.

She regarded her collection of notches thoughtfully. Today would be her 100th day anniversary of captivity. One more notch, and she would have been here for one hundred days, with no rescue in sight.

Like every other day, but with a certain air of ceremony, she leaned out of the window. She imagined her fingers stretching out like taffy, and her small penknife brushed the side of the clock. When she had carved the one hundredth notch, the small door across the room flung open. Mrs. Stockard entered and placed the breakfast tray on the table with a generous amount of wiggling from the eggs.

“Your Highness!” cried the easily unnerved maid.

Princess Arianna leaped down immediately, hoping she wasn’t too late to avoid Mrs. Stockard’s seeing her collection of notches. She was, however, too late to avoid Mrs. Stockard’s fluttering and cluttering about heights and royal necks.

“Why, my cousin Eric, he was stable master to the Duke of Yore. His Grace took a jump too high for him and broke his neck, poor soul.”

“What happened to the horse?” asked Arianna. She sprinkled expensive cinnamon on her toast.

“Horses?” spluttered the maid as she bustled around the room, leaving a tidy mess in her wake. “What have horses to do with his bad jump?”

“But you said – Mrs. Stockard?”

“Yes, dear?”

“What’s this?” The princess gracefully pointed out the letter nestled between the milk jug and the vase holding a peach blossom and sprig of holly.

“That’s for you, dear. Now my niece Laura, she was seamstress for the Countess of Clytch and…”

Princess Arianna frowned. This was not according to plan; she never received any letters. Nobody knew where she was. Unless…

Composing herself, Arianna slid the letter out from its nest and unfolded it. With every subsequent line her face paled significantly.

“It’s from him.” She washed down her cinnamon toast with the iced milk. “I’m to make myself presentable and be in the Phoenix Hall in a quarter of an hour.” Subconsciously, she glanced at the recently notched clock outside her window.

“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Stockard, who was in the midst of retelling the death of the Queen of Shelton by a rabid moose. “You haven’t even chosen an outfit yet!”

With a snap, Mrs. Stockard bustled on a whole new level, stuffing Arianna into itchy lace underthings and untangling wretched curly knots, and had the princess out of her tower door in twelve minutes flat.

“Now His Lordship is very particular,” Mrs. Stockard instructed as they tunneled deeper into the dungeons of Faraday Castle.” And he has a thing about manners. You mustn’t stare, you mustn’t cough, and you certainly mustn’t mention – “

A young man, barely twenty by the look of him, and very well kept and gentlemanly if Arianna was any judge, appeared around the corner. He waited patiently, hands neatly folded behind him. Mrs. Stockard jumped, and placed a protective arm around Princess Arianna’s shoulders.

“Thank you, Mrs. Stockard.”

Arianna felt the woman bristle at the friendly tone. “If you will excuse us, we are late to see the master.” She tried to push past him, keeping herself between the man and Arianna. He stopped her.

“Your services are no longer needed,” the man informed her.

She stopped. “Who are you, sir?” she asked bravely, but the girl’s body trembled from the force of the maid’s upset.

He bowed. “I am Mr. Pennington, His Lordship’s new assistant.” He smiled at Princess Arianna, but she could only glare back at this man who was preventing her duty as a guest, a day she had been anticipating for the past one hundred days: the chance to visit her captor.

Mr. Pennington seemed unimpressed by her little show of hostility. “You are free to return to your duties, Mrs. Stockard,” he said to the flustered maid.

“I’ll take it from here.”

Kailani, Part 2

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And we’re back with part 2 of my short story, Kailani of the Single Bell.

Don’t forget to enter the survey for a chance to win Incarceron. I have graciously given you all one more week so that Abigail doesn’t win by default! (I mean come on, what kind of contest is that?)

Her trips to Kwasi for food, water, and supplies produced less and less. There simply weren’t any more useful goods in the wreckage. And with winter on the rise, food in the woods was scarce. There were the crows, but even if she was capable of bringing them down, she wouldn’t dare try. She started giving all of her rations and most of the water to Nookcha, but she couldn’t go much longer without food.

The only improvement in the situation was her leg. She wouldn’t be carrying Nookcha down the mountain soon, but the pain was tolerable. She took comfort in the echoing ching of her anklet as it dogged her every step.

Nookcha’s sores cleared in a few days, but his fever worsened. If he wasn’t asleep, he was delirious. Kailani tried everything she could remember from Master Dorje’s teachings, but not matter what she did he slipped further and further into the Otherworld.

He had just managed to settle into a semblance of sleep after her latest, thinnest version of broth. Kailani huddled on the game path, embracing the protection offered by the large boulders. She still needed to make another trip for water before nightfall, but she didn’t want to stand anymore.

“It is hard to see a good warrior broken.”

Kailani’s head snapped up before she could stop herself. A moon-hazed blur of a man stood on the path. He held a bow loosely in his hand and was watching Nookcha turn uneasily in his sleep. His body was covered in line-thin scars, and his sparse relaxed-elder cloth contrasted sharply with the winter chill. If she turned her head slightly, the man disappeared.

He was one of the hunter spirits who stalked the game path.

“Do you know Nookcha?” she asked the spirit, afraid to speak too loud and break the connection.

She thought he hid his surprise at being addressed by a young living girl. “He is a distant nephew,” he hunter replied. “You are caring for him?”

Kailani nodded slowly.

“You are brave, but it is not enough,” he told her. “I can feel his spirit approaching the Otherworld. You do not have much time.”

“I know,” she admitted, crumbling against the stone. “But I can do nothing more by myself.”

The hunter smiled and clasped her shoulder.

“Then you must ask for help.”

*~*~*

The hunter spirit gave her instructions. He only knew how to begin a shaman’s journey; he did not know what came after. At that point she would have to rely on herself.

On the third night of her fast, she wrapped Nookcha in fresh blankets and hot rocks. She set food and water near enough for him to reach comfortably, if he had the strength to reach at all. She wavered to her feet.

“Hana,” he murmured.

Kailani waited, but he said no more. With a quick prayer, she walked into the forest, her bells chinging softly.

The moon cast enough light for her to slowly make her way deep into the forest. She absorbed the night around her. She was not afraid of attack, from animals or humans.

When her leg began to give out, Kailani sat at the base of a tree and leaned against its reassuring trunk. All she could do now was wait. Her mind drifted half-formed and unthought. Sleep tugged at her like a mountain wind, but every time she pushed it back. It would not do to sleep so close to the Otherworld.

Her eyelids fluttered.

“You are far from home, little one.”

A man stood in front of her. He was taller than any mortal, his hands were like claws, and his head was in the shape of a crow. He watched her silently, but she noticed that his eyes hinted at mockery.

This was the god of trickery and death.

This was Two Crow.

“I have traveled far to speak with you, great one.” The ritual words came shakily, as if from another’s life. “Please, sit, that you may rest from your own journey.” She tried to collect the half-remembered fragments of her lessons; the next part of the ritual demanded that the god decline, and remain standing.

Two Crow inspected her with one bright eye and hacked out a laugh. “Yes, I believe I shall,” he said. He folded himself until he was sitting before her. “Journeys do tend to tire one.”

Kailani cursed her luck. Her first meeting with a god and it had to be the trickster, who had already abandoned ritual. She knew the stories, and she was not experienced enough to come away unscathed. Two Crow had tricked the Chokta’s first chief, the bravest and smartest of the People, into giving up the immortality of the Chokta, then imprisoned the chief himself in the depths of the Otherworld. She could not hope to have better luck than the first chief.

Two Crow turned his head to watch her with the other eye. “So, Kailani of the Single Bell, you have come seeking my help to cure your dying friend.”

“Yes. Can you help?”

“Of course!” he declared. Two Crow reached into a small bag which had not been there a moment ago and withdrew a set of vivid-colored bells. “These bells can heal any wound or cure any disease. They will help your friend.”

Kailani was entranced by the dancing red anklet and the drumming blue bracelet. The chanting green bells glowed with power, and she knew these bells could save Nookcha.

But she was waiting for the trick.

“Why give these powerful bells to me?” she asked. “What do you gain by this?”

Two Crow chuckled. “And so the pebble questions the flight of the bird. There are things at stake here that you cannot comprehend, little mortal. Has it occurred to you that I might want your friend to survive? That he may be the key to restoring my children to their former glory?” He twitched the bells with his claws and they chinged in a cascade.

Kailani frowned. “You are Two Crow. You live to trick others. But I will not be fooled.”

“And so you shan’t,” he agreed with a laugh. “Trust me little one, the trick I play today is much larger than taking one shaman’s life. You are safe from me.” He unfolded himself until he was standing and offered the bells again.

Kailani did not see that she had much choice. She needed to get back to Nookcha before it was too late, and the god had promised her safety. She nodded.

“Good girl.”

She reached out a hand for the bright bells, but he snatched them out of reach.

“A moment. I need your bells in return.”

She stiffened. There was a trick after all.

“Stop glaring. It is impossible for a shaman to have more than one set of bells at the same time. You will not be able to return to your world with them.” Two Crow shrugged his shoulder blades. “What can I say? My brothers were not the cleverest creatures when they created the laws of the worlds.”

She was out of time.

Kailani unclasped her anklet, listening to its ching for the last time. These bells had managed to stay with her until the end, and now they were helping to save Nookcha. She could not ask for a better end for them than that.

She used the tree she had been leaning against to pull herself up. Two Crow began handing her the colorful bells, the yellow, the white, the blue. Her heart raced at the touch. She could feel the power ringing through them. How would she be able to control such powerful objects?

Her fingers jerked, and the red bells slipped from her grasp. They chinged flatly as they struck the forest floor. With a sharp crack, they snapped together into a small red rock. Kailani stared at one of the pieces from the children’s game in the village. How…?

Kailani threw the other bells on the ground. Sharp cracks thundered among the trees, and she was left surrounded by a scattering of bright rocks. “Stones!” she cried bitterly. “A pile of useless stones.”

She turned on Two Crow, tears searing her eyes. “You lied to me!” she shouted. “You said I was safe from your tricks! You said you wanted to help Nookcha!”

“I am surprised you believed me,” he admitted with a dangerous tilt of his crow head. “You were so skeptical for a little girl.”

“I need to save Nookcha!” she screamed.

“And I will not help you,” he said in a tone that sounded like he wanted to snap her neck. She stopped crying.

He began to fade. “I will allow you to return home. But know this Kailani of the Single Bell: at our next meeting, I will not be so generous. I can only hope we meet again very soon.” Two Crow disappeared, his laughter slowly falling away.

When the last echo had faded, Kailani re-clasped her bells around her ankle, gathered up the rocks, and bolted for camp. If she noticed the crows following her in the trees, or heard a hint of laughter on the wind, she kept it to herself.

*~*~*

Kailani never slowed until she reached the large boulders of the camp. She sank to her knees and instantly looked for Nookcha. He had dislodged the now-cold blankets and rocks, and was staring blindly at the highest branches of the pines.

Thinking it fitting, and with nothing else to use, she placed the red rock on his left eyelid and the yellow rock on his right.

She suspected he had passed on while she talked with Two Crow, maybe even before she had asked him for help. Perhaps it had happened when she had taken the fake bells.

She half-carried Nookcha to his village, built him a small pyre, and lit it. She sang the final prayers to guide his spirit to the Otherworld. Her voice quavered, hollow without the deeper voices of the men.

At the edge of her vision, an outline of Nookcha was welcomed by the community. The girl with the dog flung her arms around him. Kailani blinked and they were gone, but she imagined Nookcha turning back, hand raised.

The next village was ten nights away and probably needed help recovering from the warriors’ raids. With a single sigh, Kailani shouldered the remains of her supplies and limped down the mountain path, her shaman bells chinging faintly.

The crows dove at her, insulted her. She let the crows think they were driving her out of their territory. They needed something new to laugh about.

Kailani, Part 1

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We’re going to try something different today, thanks to one of the responses on the survey! (I don’t have that many, so I’m extending the deadline to next Wednesday.)

Reminder: Fill out the survey here to enter for a free copy of Incarceron.

Below is the first part of my short story, Kailani of the Single Bell. Yes, the title did inspire the blog’s name. I’ll post more of the story throughout the week!

The crows were laughing, hacking as the black snow clogged their throats. They were the obsidian remains of the mountain air, looming over the untouched pines and the girl struggling up the path.

The bells on her ankle chinged faintly with each uneven step. She had lost the rest outside her memory. Her coat was too big, taken from a man who no longer needed it. Her woolen skirt, once bright red with dancing, was smeared and heavy.

There was a pause in the crows’ jokes as they watched the girl enter the village. Some of the wooden beams still smoldered, sheltering young fires from the dark snow drifting overhead. The girl ignored the wreckage in the streets. She could not help those who had already entered the Otherworld.

When she turned toward the well, the crows shouted insults at her. Didn’t she know the water was polluted? Who was this strange human, this little girl who did not understand the way of the worlds?

She bowed to the well and whispered words the crows could not hear over their own laughter. She drew out a full bucket of water and poured it into her own. With a sigh – the only emotion she had shown to the crows – she picked up her bucket and chinged her uneven path away from the village. The crows cackled at the sight of her limping through the black snow, hauling a too-heavy bucket of water.

When she could no longer hear the crows’ heckling, Kailani allowed herself a grim smile.

At a far enough distance to respect the village’s spirits of the dead, Kailani lurched onto a game path. She concentrated on her feet; she had no desire to see the spirits of hunters who still stalked this trail. A small outcrop of boulders, the remnants of a distant people, leaned beyond the game path. It was a safe place, from mortals and crows alike. Kailani took a last deep breath, and limped around the far side of the boulders.

A young man, maybe seven years older than her, lay near the fire under the largest scrap of wool she had managed to find. He was sleeping. He was dying.

Kailani set the bucket down under the sparse overhang of rock and slowly knelt. She rubbed her bad leg. Before she could remember the rest of that day, she sent a prayer of good health for her companion to the Otherworld. Maybe Master Dorje would intercept it and –

“Who is Dorje?” The young man began coughing.

Kailani blinked. There was a sickening moment of hesitation where she wondered when she had spoken out loud. Then she was scooping well-water with a half-burnt bowl to help the man to drink.

He leaned out of reach. “W-where did you g-get that?” he asked between weakening coughs.

“It does not matter.” She raised the bowl again, but he turned his head away.

“It is from Kwasi,” he said. “I will not drink it. It has been polluted.”

Kailani’s master would have dumped the water on his head to bring him to his senses, but she had no water to spare. “Water is water. The well in the village is the only water I have been able to find. We need water. Drink.”

“I am unworthy.”

She wilted. “That does not mean you deserve to die,” she said quietly. He refused to look at her. “Nookcha, please. You must drink. You are drying out.” His lips were cracked with fever and had begun to bleed.

“I am unworthy,” Nookcha repeated to the ground.

She watched him for a few moments. She knew they were both Chokta, both of the People, but they were so different. She refused to accept that he would not even try to fight for his own life. The warriors of her village always accepted her help, but this one…The Chokta had lost their homes again and both of them had lost friends and family to these never-ending wars. Why, then, was he treating her as if she could not understand?

She walked her protective circles around the camp. Her dwindling supply of powdered herbs clung to her fingers like children at a mid-winter festival. She hurriedly dusted them off to complete the circle. She added several sticks to the fire and settled against one of the protective stones. She could rest before returning to salvage what she could from the village. The spirits would understand that she and Nookcha needed to survive. She did not need angry spirits punishing her for using death-tainted water. They had to understand.

But for the first time in three days, she felt that the crows were justified in laughing at her.

*~*~*

The next day, Kailani foraged the remains of Kwasi. The enemy warriors had been sloppy; not everything had burned. She found mostly whole clothes, stores of food, and tools. She even managed to find, protected beneath a collapsed roof, a children’s game of bright rocks. She left them untouched, but the crows who had settled in the village snatched them up in their jaws and took them away.

From time to time she would catch a glimpse at the corner of her eye of imposing figures. The crows urged her to greet her friends. She wasn’t fooled, and never turned to look for these Chokta. She could only mutter a prayer of apology for invading their resting ground and continue searching the charred remains.

When Kailani returned to the camp around midday, Nookcha’s body was covered in sores. She ground up a poultice, improvising some of the rarer ingredients, and dabbed it on the brown spots. She prayed to the spirits. She heated rocks and wrapped them in with more blanket-scraps to sweat his fever out. But there was little else she could do besides try to make him drink the well-water. It grew shamefully easier as he grew too weak to protest.

“No,” he always mumbled. “I am unworthy.”

Nookcha’s fever worsened, and by nightfall he slipped into restless dreams. He would thrash, and Kailani kept rewrapping him with newly hot stones. Whenever he called out, she was torn between soothing him and limping as fast as possible down the mountain. No apprentice could handle such healing work alone. Then, ashamed of herself, Kailani would rush over in a clatter of chings and a dripping cloth to cool his forehead.

He awoke near fake dawn, with the sky the color of a dead hearthfire.

“Where is Hana?” he croaked.

Kailani seized the opportunity and tipped a few drops of water down his throat. “She wants you to drink,” she told him. She dipped the bowl in the bucket of well-water. “Ha – Hana says this will make you better.”

Still Nookcha tried to lean away. His fever-bright eyes struggled to face hers. “Where is she? Please. I want to see her.”

Her chest tightened in panic. Master Dorje had not yet taught her to mediate between the two worlds.

He grabbed her arm with all of his remaining strength. “Where is she?”

“In the Otherworld. I am sorry.” She closed her eyes out of respect for his pain, which was all too visible on his face.

He leaned back in defeat. “She was my sister.”

Kailani remembered one of the older girls she had seen from the corner of her eye, the one who had clutched a dog to her side and watched her with pestled eyes. She wondered if this had been Hana.

“I could not…I was sick when they attacked. I was too weak to help, but I could hear – my sister was calling for me. She was close. I-I made it outside, but she…she…” Kailani could not see him, but his trembling echoed through her arm. “I failed her. I should have been stronger, I should have helped…I should have…”

“It is not your fault,” she reminded him. “Hana knows, and wants you to live. After all, the gods have – ”

“How?” he demanded, gripping her arm tighter. “How is Hana’s death not my fault? Explain to me, shaman, how a person with no family can dare tell me what to feel right now.”

A half-memory flitted by, and she was being led away from her mother and father to the sound of flutes and drums and dances declaring her parents to be ordinary members of the village to her. She no longer knew if this was a memory from the truth or her imagination. She had never asked anyone.

“I have no connection to this world save my master and my bells,” she said. “But my master has entered the Otherworld so yes. I know how it feels to lose someone.”

Nookcha watched her. “Your leg. Spear?”

“Club.”

“Do you still smell the smoke?”

She nodded.

“It tastes bitter.”

His grip faltered. Gently, Kailani unhooked his fingers from her arm. When she raised the bowl to his lips again, he drank.

She settled down on her too-thin bedroll, past welcoming sleep. From across the fire she heard Nookcha ask wearily, “Do you hear the crows laughing?” He slept.

  • Welcome

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    Hi, I'm Jenn, new grad student and old YA fantasy writer. I've long dreamed of being a novelist, and I bet you have too. I hope you find my blog helpful, inspiring, and maybe just a little bit fun. (But not too much fun. Writing is serious business, you know.)

    You can follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or email me at:
    jennifer.a.johnson7 at gmail dot com

  • Official Progress


    4/21 segments

    A narrator hijacks a cliche fantasy story, much to the chagrin of its characters.

    Status: Second revision



    1,639/70,000 words
    A young noblewoman with strange powers must choose: her king or her soul.

    Status: First draft



    1,087/70,000 words
    When a girl's heart is stolen, she's plunged into a world of magic and shadows - but can she get her heart back before she loses it completely?

    Status: First draft





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    Jennifer Johnson © 2010