Happy Friday, everyone! It’s just before the Autumn Equinox in my corner of the world, and pumpkin spice everything has taken over. I’m thoroughly enjoying seeing all of the Autumn decor. The pumpkins and straw bales add an air of festivity, and we have officially reached the Fall Festival season!
All of that beautiful creativity being spread around the festivals inspired me to practice some writing with a randomized writing prompt. This isn’t something I typically do before a writing session so let’s just see where it takes us!
The writing prompt comes from Service Scape Writing Prompt Generator and the genre, character types, and tropes were randomly selected using a “picker wheel”.
Genre: Paranormal & Fantasy Romance
Characters: Human & Vampire
Tropes: grumpy/sunshine
Writing Prompt #952
Growing up, there was a knock on the door every year at midnight on your birthday. With everyone sound asleep, you would always go and check who’s there, only to be met with nothing. On your 20th birthday, the knock happens as usual, but this time someone is standing in front of you. It is the handsome man from your nightmare last night—a person who wielded powerful magic and saved you from a dark being during your dream. You hope that your dream was not a premonition.
*Copyright © 2024 by This Book Beauty. All rights reserved.
I stood there, like a rabbit, frozen with fear in the middle of a clearing as a wolf approached. The man didn’t move to come in out of the freezing rain that pounded down on the black duster jacket he wore. He just stood outside the door. Was he even breathing? I raised my wide eyes to his face and an irrational part of me noted that he seemed ageless, timeless. The rational part of me was beginning to panic.
My mind couldn’t grasp which question I wanted answered more, who he was, or how he was alive, real, outside of my dreamscape.
I started, even as I wondered why I was more worried about how he was here and not who he was.
With a gentleness that didn’t seem to fit his broad shoulders and big hands, he moved me aside, just far enough out of the doorway that he could slip silently passed me into the tiny kitchen. The cottage seemed even smaller in his overwhelming presence.
Rain dripped off his coat and onto the laminate floor; a puddle was rapidly forming but I couldn’t bring myself to care, not as he lifted a large curved piece of gleaming steel. I wasn’t a history student. I didn’t know what in the devil that sword was called but I’d seen it in a few different pirate movies, and I remembered, they were always deadly.
I stepped back, even as his eyes lifted to mine and he stilled. The only noise was the sound of the quiet raindrops falling to the floor.
“Malia,” he sighed deeply, somehow making my name sound like a prayer and an annoyance at the same time, “I’ve been searching for you.”
He reached for my arm but I flinched away. He may have saved me in my dreams, the terrors that had plagued me for over six months as I neared my twentieth birthday, but that didn’t mean I trusted him.
“Who are you? How are you even here? You aren’t real, you’re just part of a dream.”
My voice sounded gravelly from lack of sleep, or maybe I’d been screaming in my dreams again. Seeing as this tall stranger had saved me from a darkness that devoured everything it came into contact with, a cloud of violence and fear that had been moments away from dragging me into it when he slashed through the intangible evil with that sword of his.
“We don’t have much time Malia,” an urgency entered his deep voice, it spoke directly to my thundering heart and begged me to move, somewhere, anywhere but where I stood.
Lightening struck nearby, the crack and boom shook the house and finally broke me loose from the fear that had held me in place this entire time. I scrambled for my tennis shoes, sans socks, and in my favorite pair of long purple pajama pants. Was I really going to run into the rainy night with some stranger because he said so?
Still, even if he hadn’t saved me last night in my dreams, even if he didn’t have that slightly curved sword in hand, the blade wreathed in dancing flames, the same ones that had speared into the darkness that hunted my subconscious, I would have followed him.
“We need to go,” he growled, honestly growled and his teeth glinted in the lightning flashes. I slipped my hand, dainty and ladylike compared to the callouses that marred his palms, and let him lead me into the pouring night. We raced from shadow to shadow, my shoes slipping in the sucking mud. We had barely reached the forest’s edge when the hair on my neck stood on end. I turned, frantically flinging the reddish-brown hair from my vision, desperately wanting one more glance at the home I had scrimped and saved to purchase. The gently illuminated windows beckoned me back, singing of home and safety and security. Then, the night lit up as the windows shattered, spraying glass far and wide. The lightning strike broke apart the boards, tossing them across the clearing as no more than deadly splinters. I stifled a scream and let the man pull me along faster, his cursing low and vicious beneath his breath. We plunged into the dark forest and I prayed he knew where he was going. I prayed he wasn’t just as bad as the thing that hunted me in my dreams.
“I won’t hurt you,” his voice was low, unthreatening, or at least I assumed that’s what he was aiming for with the quiet tone and gentle words, “I could never hurt you, Malia. But we have to get away from here. I promise I’ll explain everything.”
So, I let him pull me along, tree branches whipping at my face and drawing thin lines of blood from my cheeks. The tree line finally broke and I beheld his escape plan with disbelief. There, moored far off the shore, a murky shape in the still waters, was a pirate ship. An honest to goodness, pirate ship.
Behind us, the forest came to life, not with wildlife, but with something else. Something that screeched through the woods, unnatural, unyielding, and hungry.
The man glanced back, frustration marred his handsome face. He lunged toward the cliff, dragging me with him.
“3 . . . 2. . .,” we jumped. Right over the edge and plunged toward the frigid, merciless sea.
Short Story Updates will be moving to Wednesday and a new section should follow weekly. Let’s see where our MMC and FMC go!
Happy Reading!
