And Now For Something Marginally Different

Sick of Iconine Iconine? Too bad; she's back in seven days, but until then, you might be relieved to know that I'll be running a similar, if not quite so library-themed, writing exercise on the blog. Voila!

Seven minutes in OpenOffice Paint. I'm an artisan.

Every day this week, while I recharge my Thousand-Name Town juices, I'm gonna be writing a one-off drabble (hundred word short story, for the initiated). They'll probably be random, non sequitur and not necessarily of particular quality but, for the sake of variety, I'm figger it's worth a shot.

To further mix it up (and to give myself a flotation device), I'm gonna add one condition to each day's drabble. It must include the "Word of the Day" featured on Dictionary.com, my preferred internet definitionary. Today's worth, for example, is "ingress".

ingress \ IN - gres \  , noun
1. the act of going in or entering
2. the right to enter
3. a means or place of entering; entryway
4. Astronomy; immersion

And thusly, I wrote this drabble:

The once trustworthy wood of Ran's naginata is made treacherous by sweaty palms. She maneuvers to stand between the child and the doorway, the shrine's single point of ingress, at once urging the boy to cease his mewling and praying to any attentive gods to grant her fighting skill to match thirty some men. These Purple Sparrow clansmen ransack each of the temple's rooms, door by door, and it's to be only a number of breaths until they find hers. As she counts each exhale, Ran wonders absently how much rice the boy's head might fetch from a grateful shogunate.

Come back tomorrow for another!