An Eclectic Writing Class - Prompt Writing

Prompt: "She Opened Her Eyes"

{1st 25 minutes}

"How long is it going to take?" Vincent asked, handing over the [ingredient].

The necromancer took it and set it on the table beside the body.

Vincent did his best not to stare at her. Considering her wounds, she was remarkably well-preserved.

"Maybe an hour." The short man turned his back to Vincent and started rummaging through his apothecary cupboard. There were things in there Vincent didn't want to see—animal parts certainly, and maybe human too.

"You're welcome to stay here, or come back when I'm done," he said as he added a vial of something that looked like bile to a clay pot.

"I'll stay." He couldn't let her wake up alone. All the horrible things that had happened to her right before the end—he wanted her to see a familiar face when she woke up. His face.

"Suit yourself," the necromancer said, "Just don't go breaking my concentration or I might put the wrong soul back into her body."

Vincent shuddered and walked to the corner with a straight-backed wooden chair.  He sat.

The necromancer added the final ingredients to his potion and stirred with the never-before-used golden spoon Vincent had stolen from [person name]. If that had been the hardest item to get, gathering the tools and ingredients the necromancer needed to bring Scarlet back would have taken him three months, tops. But there were a number of items in that clay pot that were a good deal more difficult to find: [ingredients list with mini-stories of how/where he got them. Make sure to reveal stuff about the setting.] So it had taken Vincent nearly three years to collect them all—three years!

When she died, he thought he loved her as a mentor, a friend—but now he was sure that he was in love with her.

It would have been absurd before, with him fifteen and her twenty-two, but now he was eighteen, and she hadn't aged a day in the necromancer's crypt.

{Add beats more of the necromancer doing stuff to this scene later.}

The hardest part had been affording to keep her there. Illegally preserving her body had been expensive. If the necromancer hadn't given him a discount for all of the tools he stole for him, Vincent wouldn't have been able to keep her frozen {alt term? Something magical?}.

He'd even had to get a real job in addition to all of the theft for the necromancer since he couldn't risk getting caught selling stolen goods. Not when Scarlet's life was on the line too.

{At this point, my timer went off, and I realized I still hadn't made it to the prompt phrase. So I reset my timer and kept going. The rest of this took me another 13 minutes.}

He had lived with tons of roommates, moving whenever they asked too many questions. It wasn't hard in [city name]. Tons of people from the country came there to try to find a better life, usually to find they'd sold their family farm for less than a year's rent of a decent house in the city.

Street rats like him climbing the social ladder were much rarer, but Scarlet had taught him the art of seeming like someone else, like someone worthy of respect, of a well-paying job in the emperor's bureaucracy. Not bad for a kid who hated the old bastard.

Hated was an understatement, actually. Loathed with all of his being would be more accurate. When Scarlet woke up, Vincent planned to help her get their revenge on that son-of-a-bitch for murdering her—or having his guards murder her—same difference. Rich people always paid others to do their dirty work, everything from murder and theft to slaughtering animals.

The necromancer stood by Scarlet, a blank expression on his face as he chanted incantations in a dark tongue long forgotten.

Vincent stood as quietly as he could, but didn't take a step on the creaky wooden floor, not daring to disturb the necromancer, lest his warning come to pass.

His eyes widened. A bright light floated down through the ceiling and hovered over her body. He held his breath.

Slowly, as the necromancer chanted louder and louder, the light inched toward Scarlet's forehead, and finally disappeared inside. Then she opened her eyes.

***

You can find the blog post that accompanies this prompt by clicking the external link below.