15 Minute Warm Up

Hey all! Hoping to get this next short story on here by tonight or tomorrow morning! In the meantime, here's a short warm up I did this morning. I was looking to practice a little introspection and some sentence structure variation. I think I ended up just creating a new plot line...which is honestly how most of my warm ups go.

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Walking into a riptide. That’s what this new land feels like. That’s what reaching her senses deep into the soil makes her remember, makes her think, makes her feel.

There’s no panic. People tend to imagine riptides as vicious, monstrous things that reach out to grab the legs of children and drag them out to sea. But riptides are more like liminal spaces, she’s found. There’s a brief, crystal clear moment where the body recognizes that something has changes, some significant factor in the environment that it does not know.

Then, as the riptide does as it will, the body panics and the mind follows.

She’s not quite panicking, breathing long and even breaths over the short grass that grows on the shore. She’s at that precarious moment between sensory recognition and reaction, trapped there as she carefully extends her awareness further and further, waiting for something to carry her away.

Nothing but a soft, constant hum greets her probe. The wind rolls along the ground, pulling her tangled, brown hair from her face and coaxing a chill into her wet clothes. She can smell something floral, a species of fauna she doesn’t know, and the musk of the earth after rain. Behind her, the waves lap at the sure, a pale imitation of how they threw her onto the coast during the storm the night before.

She climbs carefully to her feet, entire body aching from her rough passage from the sea. She can feel bruises pushing up through her thin skin, cuts and lacerations barely scabbing along the side of her face, down her legs, the soles of her bare feet. Her clothing is holding together though parts are more threadbare than she remembers in the face of the cold.

I’m alive. She holds fast to that thought, letting it anchor her in the absence of familiar earth beneath her. She keeps her eyes closed as she adjusts to all her new pains, hands clenched at her side. I’m alive.

That’s more than they’ll expect her to be.

Her job now is to keep herself that way until the right people realize she never made it to the castle or until she can figure out how to get back home herself. She has a little experience in living off the gird, but this is a new land. New weather patterns, new predators, new food sources.

She will have to be very smart, very careful, and very, very lucky.