Another week, another challenge. This time taking the first sentence from someone else and creating a story out of it. I ended up with Fred Yost’s “The first breath shattered her world, the second shattered her heart.” Thanks Fred, and if you do, by chance read this, I hope you enjoy it.
As always, comments are welcome and appreciated.
This week’s challenge: a subgenre mash-up. Lucky, lucky me ended up with Weird West (wich I have done before) and BDSM erotica (which I haven’t). The scale is more heavily weighed to the former than the latter, but then I had around 1500 words to work with and I went a bit over by about 100 words.
That said, there’s a bit more sex in this than you might otherwise expect from things I write and the violence does get fairly gory. Fair warning right? All that said, this could be the kind of thing I come back to.
This week’s challenge? To create a character. That’s it. Some total. Keeping it under 250 words.
So here you go:
Luísa de la Cruz is the only child of the famed swordsman Severo de la Cruz. Her mother, Adriana, was a minor noble. Their elopement created a fair amount of scandal, and mercenaries were dispatched to make Adriana a widow and return her to her home. By the time the mercenaries tracked the two down to a remote village, five years had passed, and little Luísa was five years old. Her father, outnumbered, managed to buy time for Adriana and Luísa to flee, but at the cost of his own life.
There weren’t many options for a young mother with no connections and a small child, but Adriana found a small village by the sea. She took up work as a seamstress, and Luísa took up with the children of sailors and merchants. She learned to fight early, the locals teaching her with fist and foot. The older men, bemused by the tomboy, taught her how to use a knife. Some of her father’s skill must have been with her, because she quickly surpassed her teachers.
Soon after Luísa turned sixteen, Adriana fell ill. On her deathbed, she informed Luísa of her birthright, and told her of the sword kept under the floorboards, the only inheritance from her father. Her teenage blood set aflame, Luísa swore to avenge her parents. The only problem? She doesn’t know where to start.
So this week is a bit different. The idea is to write just the first part of a story, and three different people will continue it in the following weeks. Here’s my offering, which I do so dearly hope someone picks up and carries on. It is a a bit shy of the 1,000 word recommended limit, but I think it still works well as an opening. I’ll be sure to keep this post updated if someone else decides to keep it going.
Dark Perceptions 