This is a tiny demo scene from Create A World Clinic, but I think it’s fun. And I got it by interviewing a chicken puppet and a player piano, which made the process of getting the details for writing it entertaining.
Yes, that’s all worldbuilding.
And I got 1080 words today.
Black night, and the houses on Wickham Street huddled together, familiar and old, cold and shivering in their wooden bones. On the street, nothing moved, as if the bitter wind pouring down from the north had frozen the world.
Minutes ahead of the coming blizzard, a night rose bloomed, shooting into the air silent as a hunter, blazing red against low, scudding clouds, blood-bathing snow and houses and ice-slicked street in its hard light, glaring down in unblinking fury until sudden blackness claimed it.
Emmi Hanson, breathing air that froze her from the inside out, hurrying against the storm smell of imminent snowfall, skidded and slid down a sidewalk salt had only cleared in patches, her head full of worries and her stomach knotted with a fear she could not explain or describe. That long blast of red light had sent her pulse racing, but she’d already been terrified…which was why she’d come home.
Her house was three down, and she wished she could have parked closer. Something was wrong. Something she couldn’t see and couldn’t name was after her.
She picked up her pace, looking at the light pouring warm and golden from her family’s living room window. She should have told them she was coming. They should have known to look for her.
Hurrying, she didn’t see the black ice that threw her to the ground. One instant she was almost home—the next, lying stunned with her chin, lip and cheek cut, and the palms of her hands scraped raw and bloody, while the ruby eye in her gold ring glowed with the same mad light that had abandoned the sky.
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