58 Vhalar 722
Studying for exams was really stressful and Eternity needed something to take her mind off of it all. She pushed aside her ensorcelling notes and tossed the two stones she’d been polishing onto her bed. She pulled over a blank sheet of paper and tapped her quill onto it, leaving random black dots on the page. She wanted to try writing a story. Writing seemed like it would be creative and artsy, just the kind of thing that she liked to try. As she tried to think of a story her mind went blank.
“Why is this so hard,” she wondered as her tapping increased in frequency. “Well, what do you even want the story to be about?” she asked herself.
“I don’t know, anything really… how about something simple? Like some kids playing tug of war?” she tapped even faster until her wrist got tired then she set the quill down to massage her head. She thought the story idea was stupid but it was better than nothing. She planned on tossing whatever she wrote into the fire because she knew it was going to be garbage. Still, she needed to do something, anything to break from the ensorcelling monotony.
“Alright, let’s do this,” Eternity said with a sigh. She picked the quill back up and jotted down a paragraph. It was hardly what she’d expected. I was just a collection of statements about people digging a hole with no details. It also lacked a clear beginning and ending. “I can do better than this,” Eternity told herself. She crumpled up the paper and tossed it at the fire with one hand while pulling a fresh paper with her other hand. After what had to be an hour of writing, scratching parts out, and starting over, Eternity ended up with the following:
Once upon a time, there were two kids, Jussy and julia, who were best friends for many years… One day, they decided to play a game of tug of war... jussy and Julia took each end of a strange rope and began the game or something... They pulled with all their might, but neither could get the advantage. They tugged and tugged and tugged, but neither could budge the other (should this be longer?). Next (or should I say Finally?) Jussy got the upper hand and started to pull Julia towards him. She dug her heels into the ground, but he kept pulling, julia was about to give up when she got an idea.,! She shouted, “Hey jussy I challenge you to a game of tug of war right now.” jussy accepted her challenge and they started the game again. This time, they both tugged with all their strength and the rope moved back and forth between them. Back and forth they went, neither one giving up. Finally (what’s another word for finally?) after what seemed like hours, julia was able to take the rope from Jussy and won the tug of war challenge (is it a game? A match?). They both cheered and hugged in celebration. Jussy and Julia had a great time playing tug of war, and they learned that with a little bit of perseverance, anything can be achieved.
“This is terrible,” Eternity realized after reading the finalized version. Every time she read it, she spotted a new grammatical error or a note she didn’t mean to throw in there. She didn’t know how story writers managed to draw out a story or how they made them the least bit interesting. Alas, she never thought she would make a good story, it was just a distraction from her monotonous studies. She looked over at her ensorcelling stuff and thought she would be refreshed and ready to study after her break, but she was even more mentally drained now than she’d been before.
“Fek it,” she said with an angry sigh. She hadn’t the discipline to continue with that boring work any more today, she needed something interesting. “What to do, what to do,” she pondered for a few moments then an idea came to mind. She fetched her set of daggers and shuriken then headed into her back yard.
Eternity hardly ever used her weaponry. Having a lack of strength really hampered how willing she was to get better at physical activities. Someone with good strength could learn how to use a weapon and actually go do things with it. She thought that if one didn’t have good strength then there wasn’t any point in learning to use a weapon since they wouldn’t be able to actually cut anything. She walked circles in her back yard and examined the small bundle of throwable weaponry she owned and then walked to one edge of her property.
“Let’s make sure this is a safe thing to do first,” she said to herself. Her intention was to practice throwing weapons a bit but she didn’t want to hit someone else’s home. So she tested her strength. She chucked a rock as hard as she could and sure enough, it didn’t even make it to the other side of her property. That was more of a testament to how weak she was rather than how large her place was.
“Guess I’ll throw at the tree then,” she said. Eternity cocked her hand behind her head and took aim with one of her daggers. She closed an eye and stared right at the center of the tree trunk. Her chest rose and fell slowly, then quickly as anticipation built up within her. Then, when she couldn't take it anymore, she threw the dagger as hard as she could.
The dagger spun through the air but wobbled as it did so. It made three or four rotations in total before falling harmlessly to the ground. She'd missed the tree entirely by several meters. Eternity lost sight of the dagger as well in her tall grass that really ought to have been cut down, but she was lazy when it came to yardwork.
Finding the dagger was a lot more work than she'd anticipated. She knew the general direction but as she walked in that direction, she found nothing. Nothing but thick grass. She realized how hard it was to even see her own feet and felt relief when she finally kicked the handle of the weapon.
"Something's got to be done about this grass," she told herself. Then the idea of cutting it with her weapon popped into her mind. She grinned and dropped down to the ground. She swung the blade, but it wasn't exactly the right tool for the job. The blades of grass were merely pushed by the dagger because this one wasn't all that sharp to begin with and she didn't have enough force behind the swing. Eternity settled for grabbing a handful of grass in a bunch and sawing through the blades. This worked well, but it was time consuming and required her to focus to avoid cutting herself. Her idea of cutting her yard’s grass with a dagger were unrealistic to say the least.
Eternity realized that she ought to have gone to the proving grounds to practice because then she wouldn’t have to deal with the grass, or the off chance that she’d hit something she didn’t mean to… but she was feeling lazy. She squared off with her tree once more and threw the daggers one after another. Not one of them hit the tree and most of them veered off to the left side. She then switched to the shuriken. She’d never handled them before. She’d bought them because they looked cool but they were sharp devils that she never quite figured out how to carry with her without nicking herself. That’s why she left them at home.
She held one of the shuriken carefully up to her face and lined it up with the tree then threw it. To her surprise it cut through the air a lot more easily than the dagger. It made sense because shuriken were made for throwing. She’d seen people throw knives but her daggers didn’t look like those. She was too inexperienced with weaponry to know that some knives were specifically made to be thrown. She shrugged and threw the rest of her shuriken and one of them miraculously hit the tree, but she hadn’t thrown it hard enough to stick in the wood so it fell to the ground harmlessly.
Eternity’s arm already felt worn out. She’d thrown each weapon as hard as she could and she was sure that her shoulder was going to complain for hours. She had a bit of fun though, so she committed to doing it all again on another day. For now though, she had to go collect them all from the grass. She knew she couldn’t put it off either so she got right to work. When all was said and done, Eternity felt like she’d blown off enough steam to finally get back to polishing that rock for her ensorcelling class!
[Template credit to Pyrre]
) I liked this thread.