Day 288 Writing Short Stories

Drone

The quiet buzz of the bees drowned out the garden. She stood there on the ladder, wearing her bee suit, and pushing the small camera inside the bee nest hanging from the tree where she had situated it. She was to count the drones. The bees didn’t quite like her attempt, but the suit kept the worst stings away. The bees should understand what she was doing. They knew all about order, counting, and planning. She needed to know as much as they needed to sting her.

The normal hive had hundreds of drones, but this was her test hive, and she wanted to see if her alterations had affected the colony structure.

—

I’m not sure what I want to do with this prompt. All I knew about the word was that I didn’t want to use it in the modern sense and make it a machine. But I couldn’t find a story to tell from bees, either, the drone aspect of it. Male bees are quite boring.

End

She fell to the ground. The sword pierced her chest. The breath came in ragged gasps, and she watched as her opponent leaned over her. She could see it in their eyes that once the sword came out, she would be dead.

That morning hadn’t started with death. It had started like any other day at the museum. She had embedded the charms in the doors and windows, keeping unwanted intruders out while letting in the usual visitors, bringing in much-needed money for the museum. Later that day, she had taken in a new shipment of Highland finds. There had been one particular item that had made her all excited. She had been tracing its origin for the rest of the day, knowing that the stone carving had more power than the usual magical items that ended up in the museum to be guarded.

The stone had raw potential, unlike anything she had seen in a while. Whenever she touched it, it tingled against her skin as if it were begging her to release whatever was trapped inside the stone. The pull was strong, and she had to remind herself at every turn not to believe the lies the stone told her. It was what magic did. It played with your senses, making you serve its purpose, not the other way around.

It was her duty to keep the magical items away from the public and from causing catastrophes outside the museum walls. But not all agreed. There were those who did everything in their power to get their hands on the items for their perverted uses. Power was power, and there was nothing like it in the world. It made even an honest man a thief and a murderer.

She locked the museum doors behind the last visitors. She let the rest of the staff leave as she once again made her way to her work desk at the archives, where she worked with magical items. The stone was there under a glass dome. The carvings on the glass soothed the magic trying to get out. Yet the pull was there, and she couldn’t say no anymore.

She lifted the dome and set her bare fingers on the stones.

“Release,” she commanded.

A pulse surged from the stones to the doors and windows, shattering the wards she had put there. And before she knew, a shadow moved into the archives. She let go of the stone and rushed to the sword she kept on the shelf next to her desk. But it was too late. The shadow was there, and they had their own sword. They had her death written on their face. She tried to block the sword coming down on her, but they were too fast, too strong. They had dead eyes and waxen skin.

And she knew what the shadow was. It was a skinwalker. And she knew what the stone was. It would release unspeakable horrors into the world in the wrong hands, and she had just done that. She had pulled the creature here and let the stone begin its destiny. There was nothing she could do now. She lay there, gurgling blood as the sword was drawn out of her chest, as the skinwalker left with the stone, and the stone alone.

Sly

An honest man finds himself in a job environment where slyness and cattiness are the norm of interaction. I skipped this one.

The prompts are from the book A Year of Creative Writing Prompts.

The second prompt was fun. It was about starting a story with its ending. It forced me to look at plotting from a different perspective, and it would do me some good to do it more often. Plotting is one of my weaknesses. I too often let the story take me somewhere, and that often ends in disasters, forcing me to do countless iterations and heavy editing.

But now I have to hurry to work.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a wonderful day!