(As we near the midpoint of National Novel Writing Month, I thought it would be fun to share an edited excerpt from my 50k words written four years ago.
My experience with the novel-writing challenge was a little crazy. I procrastinated so terribly that I ended up writing the last half (25k words) in the last 5 days of the month, over the Thanksgiving weekend. Talk about intense!
To give a little background: this story took place on an island inhabited by dragons and other mythical creatures, as well as two neighboring cities — the City and the Valley — locked in a devastating centuries-long war. I had plotted the original story several years before and essentially rewrote it in first person for NaNo in 2015. The scene I’d like to share is part of the epilogue, in which I moved back into third person and used a secondary character’s point of view. Enjoy!)
Benjo walked down the street slowly, carefully. Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of destruction. The Valley hadn’t left a single corner of the City untouched. He wondered how they had managed to plant hundreds of explosives overnight without being noticed.
Bracing himself, Benjo entered the crumbling wall that surrounded the market and headed for his stand. Small fires still burned throughout the area. Now that the battle was over, warriors were pacing the City, looking for people buried beneath the rubble. As he neared the Entertainer’s stand, he heard a whistle. Several warriors scrambled over the rubble to help drag somebody out. The young woman they pulled from the rock was limp. Benjo couldn’t tell if she was still alive.
He turned his head away and brought his attention, instead, to the unrecognizable pile of wood and metal in front of him. A scorched piece of fabric waved in the breeze like a small flag of surrender.
It was all gone.
The puppets. The flags. The scarves and funny hats. The noisemakers. The Entertainer’s red cape, which Benjo had hung from a pole after he had died, as a memorial to him. There was nothing left, nothing but rubble.
Benjo fell to his knees. The books. He saw the hole in the ground, from which smoke billowed. They had been burned as well. They were his source of comfort, the secret rebellion he had held onto all those years.
Desperately, Benjo looked around for something, some item that had survived. There had to be something. He dug half-heartedly around in the rocks and twisted metal. He heard another whistle; another body had been found. Nobody paid him, Benjo, any mind.
He found something. It was covered in ash and barely recognizable, but he knew exactly what it was. One of his puppets — no, one of the Entertainer’s puppets. The Entertainer had made each puppet by hand. He had given them each a name. Benjo brushed the ash as best as he could from the fabric. This one was called Babble.
Benjo stood and put the puppet on his hand. He closed his eyes and could practically hear the Entertainer’s voice, high-pitched for Babble, acting out a show for the City children. Where is everyone?
Benjo sighed. “I don’t know, Babble.”
He took the stupid puppet with him and left the market. He knew that everyone was supposed to be in the arena, but he couldn’t stay in that place, where everyone sobbed in mourning. Instead, he roamed the streets, taking everything in. He didn’t want to forget, no matter how terrible it was. He couldn’t forget this day.
The explosives had been placed at random, it seemed. There were holes in the street, which Benjo had to zig-zag to avoid. He saw entire houses, collapsed. Right beside of a pile of debris sat a child’s shoe, burned and twisted. The warriors went from house to house and sifted through the remains. They pulled bodies out and lay them in rows on the street. This was why they didn’t want people roaming. Benjo had never seen so much death. He felt numb to it. There was no emotion left in him, it seemed. Nothing stirred inside him when he looked into the blank eyes of a body.
Above him circled dragons. Some were searching for signs of movement in the ruins on the ground, but others, he knew, were looking for the runaways. The rebel. He pushed the thought out of his mind.
A little further down the street, he was startled by motion in the doorway of a half-destroyed house. It was a little girl. Her blond hair was streaked with ash. Her blue eyes looked lost. He noticed her arm was bandaged and in a crude sling.
Something inside her had been destroyed in the attack. It made Benjo’s heart ache with sadness.
She stared at him for a while. Benjo approached her slowly, carefully stepping over jagged rock and sharp metal. She didn’t move, didn’t flinch. Finally Benjo reached her and held out the one thing he had left to give—the puppet. The Entertainer would have wanted him to give it to a child.
The girl took it, but didn’t react at all. Her arm dropped limply to her side, and she stared at the ground. Benjo swallowed. “Its name is Babble.” The girl sat down on her front step without a word. The puppet was still in her hand. Benjo left.
There were children all along the streets. Some were searching their own homes, as dangerous as it was. He heard their desperate, pleading shouts. Other children simply sat, like the first little girl he had encountered, lost and forlorn. They stared around at the wreckage.
“They’re going to need a lot of puppet shows to recover from this one,” Benjo whispered to himself.
It was more than that. The kids were the ones that cared so much about the City that they had disobeyed their elders and left the place of safety just to look around at the destruction. The children were the ones that would be affected the most by this attack. It was the youngest generation, Benjo realized, that would decide whether the City and Valley would ever make peace.
He passed the Clase’s home. Most of their house was demolished. He could see that it had been affected by two blasts. The warriors hadn’t reached this edge of the City yet. Benjo saw a body lying in the ruins; it was a boy about his own age. Benjo flinched at his own thought—at least it wasn’t Coral.
He broke into a sprint towards the sea.
It had become his refuge, that beach. He had met Coral there several times. He had distant memories of them lying on the sand, staring up at the stars.
Coral was the rebel.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected it to happen. She was a girl from the Real World who had never really liked what she’d found in the City. A people at war. Children forced into the army.
But he had thought she would learn to like it, or at least, tolerate it. And she had, sort of.
She hadn’t wanted to die.
He knew she had at least been in the battle for a while. She had followed her orders, even though she knew they were sending her to die for the City. What, then, had changed out on the battlefield?
Benjo wished he knew where she was now. He wished he could have said goodbye to her when he still had the chance. Now, he could only hope she’d found safety somewhere. Perhaps her dragon was with her.
If Coral was caught, they would both be executed. It was as simple as that.
Benjo knew she had a chance, though. The rebel just might make it.