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empty season

part three

“You’re Gonna Love It”

Alone, she sat at the edge of a cliff while the world burned down around her. Sacred, she’d felt as those she loved fell away into the sea. The metaphoric chains on her wrists were heavy to bear. Her mind was tired after all the fighting. The world was ending as she sat still, unable to stop it. But, hey, at least the view was great! She had a pain in her heart. She guessed that was what happened when you were dying. All out of fight, she sat back and let the flames consume her. The blood on her hands was her own. The beating of her heart had slowed to a crawl. The wound in her chest steadily dripped blood onto her torn jeans. Her dark hair matted and caked with dirt. What was once a pretty face, was not bogged down with exhaustion, grime and dried tears. A deep frown wrinkled her face in ways a twenty-something’s face shouldn’t be. Her once wide, innocent eyes were now empty and sunken. Her youthful skin was pale, greying and peeling. Blinking slowly, she looked out over the city she once loved that did nothing for her. A short while later, she laid her weary body down on the grassy cliff edge. Her head felt fuzzy and her nerves buzzed restlessly. As her heavy eyes fell closed one final time, her heart took it’s last slow, weak beat. Her breath left her in one final, finally peaceful, exhale. She watched herself float away from her body and felt peace for the first time in a while. A voice behind her reminded her where she was. Taking the man’s hand, she welcomed her future and smiled at her father, mother and brother in the distance. “So this is death,” she asked the long lost love of her life. “Yep. You’re gonna love it,” John beamed, kissing her temple. And they walked off into their peaceful forever as the flames engulfed her lifeless body, ending the world finally. 

~Fin. 

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empty seasons

part two

Prompt: Day 1:  "Smoke hung so thick in the library's rafters that she could read words in it."

Celtie climbed the bookshelves, knocking loose a few books in the process. She cringed as they thumped to the floor and echoed around the large room. If she could just get this one book off the very top shelf, she'd be free of her English teacher's hounding. The teen had been hunting for this one book for months. Her teacher told her that if she could find it, he'd sign off on it for her summer reading. That was back in January and it was two weeks from May as she climbed the shelves.

It would be just her luck that the librarian's gorgeous teaching assistant would be off today for personal matters. More than eye candy, the attractive college student was taller than old Mrs. Jacobson or her niece Ms. Ball and had twice the reach. It didn't help matters that Celtie was only 5'2" and the two librarians were a combined 3 inches taller than her. Jasper, or rather, Mr. Jasper on the other hand was over 6 foot tall and quite the college football player if Celtie's old brother's stories were of any consequence.

So without Mr. Jasper or Ms. Ball's height advantages, Celtie was left to fend for herself. And that wasn't much help to her now. She'd tried standing on a chair to reach but no chair in the entire building would have been tall enough for her to reach the top shelf. Add to that, the ever ticking clock until summer and, more important than that, the closing of the library. Left with no other choice, the brunette was forced to climb the shelves as carefully as she could.

Finally grasping onto the worn noble, Celtie was now faced with the difficulty of getting back down. The petite teen was worn out from her impromptu climb in the library and didn't see a reason to clamber back down so soon. So instead, she climbed a little higher until she was able to sit on top of the bookshelf line. Delicately, she sprawled herself along the line of shelving to catch her breath. Her eyes fluttered shut in the quiet dusty ceilings of the library. Silently she planned out her trip down the shelves but made no move to take it....

<+>

Several hours later, Celtie awoke to find herself in a smoky, darkened library. Panic washed over her as she took in her now unrecognizable surroundings. Confused and half-asleep, Celtie shot up, teetering on the edge of falling as she tried to make sense of the world around her. The novel in her grasp slipped ever so slightly, reminding her of her reason for even being in this now terrifying place in the first place. Unsure what to do, the brunette pulled herself to her feet, a challenge due to her distance from the ground and the wooden rafters above her head.

Carefully, she grabbed onto the lowest hanging beam and used the adrenaline coursing through her veins to heft herself up onto the beam and higher into the rafters. The smoke was thicker the higher she climbed but the awful sulfuric smell faded the higher she was. Once she'd reached the peak of the library's ceiling, she bolstered herself on the beam, feet wedged between the intersections of the two wooden posts. She waited for the air to clear but smoke hung so thick in the library's rafters that she could read words in it. Beyond that, the smell was shifting from rancid eggs to sweet lavender, vanilla and jasmine. Celtie found herself lured by the entracing scent as it wafted up through the thick, blackened smoke to her nose. Her heart kept wanting her to follow that beautiful scent right to its source but her good sense rooted her feet where they were.

After several minutes that felt to Celtie more like hours of wanting and waiting, the smoke began to dissipate, fading right before her stunned eyes. Terror and curiosity drifted over her like a thick veil. Once the smoke was completely gone and the sudden sound of footsteps across the tile entranceway faded out of existence right out the door, Celtie slowly worked her way down from the rafters and onto the upper balcony where she thanked any deity that had a hand in saving her life, before she rushed for the stairs.

On the ground floor, she hurried to her bag and laptop. Packing everything away as quickly and efficiently as she could, Celtie held tight to the book she'd been hunting for. With no one left to help her check it out, she made her way to the exit. That was when she heard the sound of expensive shoes on the old tiled floors. Shocked and more than a little shaken from her previous experience, Celtie ducked behind a line of shelves and held her breath.

The footsteps grew closer and before she knew what was happening, Mr. Jasper walked over to Mrs. Jacobson's desk and started pawing around her things. Knick knacks, pictures of her grandchildren, artworks made by her children when they were still that, stuffed animals that students had gifted her over the years, and every single one of her papers. There wasn't a thing in or on the kind old woman's desk that he hadn' put his hands on. And Celtie just could not figure out why.

Perhaps he was one of those Strangling the adults of Hillford were always talking about. The question was: what kind of Strangling was Mr. Jasper? Was he a werewolf? A vampire? A witch? Or one of those rotten demon things that her father was always warning against? She figured this would probably be how she found out. Not that she was particularly thrilled about it. In fact, Celtie would rather run while he was distracted than find out what he was.

That's when she smelled it again, that entrancing lavender-y scent she'd been so drawn to before. Then terror struck her. Was this how she'd die? In a library? With some sort of Strangling? He was probably out for blood. Or childrens' hearts to put on his mantelpiece. The horrors knew no bounds and Celtie was scarce to learn just what he might do with her if she were caught. So she slithered, as much as her textbook laden backpack would let her, between the shelves so that she was closer to the exit. There she froze for a moment, watching the Strangling closely for any sign that he might have seen movement. When he didn't stop his searching of Mrs. Jacobson's desk, Celtie shimmied her way into an old, empty cabinet right next to the door. There she waited for the Strangling's next step.

When Mr. Jasper finally relinquished his search of Mrs. Jacobson's desk, he drifted over to a large cauldron of smoke that the teenager hadn't noticed before. He stirred the smoke several times before he reached into his nearby bag. From it he pulled a mason jar and it's lids. He carefully scooped the thick, smoking concoction from the pot and into the jar. The jar full and the concoction bubbling slowly in it's new container, Jasper held the jar over the cauldron and sealed the lids tight to the glass. Once sealed, he waved a hand over the pot and the smoke was gone in an instant. With a snap of his fingers, the cauldron was gone too. Mr. Jasper stuffed the mason jar in his bag and trotted off toward the exit.

The sound of the doors clicking shut was Celite's cue to get the hell out of there. She was going to have to tell her father about this and perhaps he might give her some advice. Carefully sneaking through the halls, Celtie made her way out of the library and out into the chilly night. Gripping her book tight to her chest, she hurried on her way home. Upon arriving there, she told her father all about the witch at the library and the potion he was likely brewing there after hours. He gave her some tips to help ward him off and suggested that she never return to that library ever again. The night had been so wild that Celtie forgot all about the library book she's all but stolen. As she was tucking into bed that night the book caught her attention from its place on her desk. She was smart enough to know that Mr. Ryan would know it was a library book if she kept the tags on it. So, she silently peeled off all the stickers and carefully removed the card holder from the cover page without damaging the paper. Once she was finished, she vowed never to tell anyone about her theft of the worn copy of Oliver Twist.

Fin.

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empty seasons

a collection of prompts not affiliated with any fandoms found on the internet to help the author better their writing and style. constructive criticism is welcome but outright hate is not.

maturity set for language and dark situations.

Part One

prompt reference sheet

Day 1: An impulse buy leading to intergalactic warfare.

Day 2: "Smoke hung so thick in the library's rafters that she could read words in it."

Day 3: The language of flowers, pajamas, a secret passageway.

Day 4: "His wife was having tea with the King and he didn't even know about it."

Day 5: The story of how your parents met, transposed into the Victorian era.

Day 6: A balloon, a ball, balustrades.

Day 7: A language class for aliens.

Day 8: "She liked to fit people into the world like puzzle pieces."

Day 9: Someone goes to extreme lengths to return something he/she borrowed.

Day 10: An explorer with MPD (multi-personality disorder), a widow, a house in the woods.

Day 11: "Winter was the only season we could be together."

Day 12: A story entitled "The Fate of the Telegraph Operator".

Day 13: Someone's life takes on new meaning after they discover an unusual tree.

Day 14: A sailor returning home finds his wife knows every detail of his life while he was away.

Day 15: A plague, a piece of chalk, viridian (a shade of green).

Day 16: "There were 48,000 gods in their mythology and not one..."

Day 17: A substance which generates ideas, a spy, 1 minute.

Day 18: "The floor tasted like..."

Day 19: A light-tent, an actress, 2 worlds.

Day 20: A story about someone who is obsessed with marmalade.

Day 21: Steampunk sleeping beauty.

Day 22: An unfinished work of art, a mycologist, a sense of foreboding.

Day 23: "Please shut the..."

Day 24: Mind controlling wallpaper creates happy ending.

Day 25: Lancelot, flannel, aeronautics.

Day 26: Invent a creation myth involving string and feathers.

Day 27: Story sandwich.

Day 28: "The color of her blood was the least of my worries."

Day 29: A single lily, a cliff, 3 hours.

Day 30: Write a story that begins and ends with a bicycle.

**Note: prompts likely won't be written in the order listed here.