Join in my daily writing prompt! I don’t promise to respond to them all myself, but will try my best! Here is my response to the latest prompt.
He had an hour to get home. If he didn’t make it …
Not pausing from his headlong flight through the dark and icy city streets, Jake scrabbled in his pocket for the hundredth time. Still there. The key, its golden chain coiled around it. He gulped a misty breath, and ran on.
Had the ice queen missed the key yet? From where it hung from her jewel-studded girdle? Surely she must have. Her fury, and her vengeance, would be terrible. Jake had seen her fury already, directed at him. His shoulders ached from where they had been frozen for hours. But how could he grant her wish to take her through the portal into his own world?
The key alone was not enough, it seemed. Not even for powerful ice queens. It needed a mortal to carry it. And Jake was her mortal, found wandering – bemused, hungry – in the city not two nights ago. Even in that short time, Jake had discovered that ice queen ways let loose on earth would be more awful than anything the world had seen, above all the dire happenings in its sordid history.
A noise behind him made Jake glance over his shoulder. No white soldiers in sight. Not yet. He glanced at the sky through the narrow opening above the tall, black, windowless buildings. Less than an hour until sunrise. He ran, the stitch in his side an agony he had to bear.
He had to make the portal by sunrise, use the key and pass through. The dwarf – the queen’s reluctant guard – had whispered it in Jake’s ear as Jake lay prostrate at the queen’s feet. And once the key was out of this realm, earth would be safe. But if he failed, he would be bound to this frozen place forever.
Another noise. This time Jake saw soldiers, on white horses, the clatter of hooves on the slick streets silencing his thudding heart. He ran, slipping, stumbling … and wishing he’d never shut himself in that damn old wardrobe in Granny’s attic.
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