The Coming of Cesh-Corran

Fantasy microfiction

Since this microfiction piece is a couple thousand words shorter than my usual post, I’ll include a short discussion at the end about why and where I wrote this and what my process was for cutting the story down to 100 words. Feel free to read through to the end or just stick with the microfiction, whichever is your preference!

Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash

Scraping flays the Dome. Light bleeds where our tiny sky will burst and Cesh-Corran will enter.

I turn to my gossamer-winged acolytes, the dozen Fae who have not fled deeper into our subterranean home.

I breathe. One breath of a handful more.

I announce. “I, the Herald, speak – think not of your temporal life, but of what you will gain. Cesh-Corran comes in glory.”

Silence.

Then shattering like glass.

The sky falls.

Screams surround me; I turn to Cesh-Corran.

Roaring, grinding.

Searing light.

Faces inside a ship – ears without tines, bodies without flight. Creatures unseen for millenia.

Not Cesh-Corran.

Humans.

---

I’ve participated in the NYC Midnight fiction competitions for several years now, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of fitting a certain genre/character/emotion/what-have-you into a tight word count on a strict deadline. I’m an incorrigible procrastinator, so having a hard and fast deadline is extremely helpful for me. There’s also a very active forum in which participants can post their submissions after the deadline to give and receive feedback from other writers.

The above story was written for the 100-word microfiction challenge. These were my prompts:

Genre: Fairy tale/fantasy

Action: Making an announcement

Word: Gain

I had twenty-four hours to craft a 100-word microfiction that met the criteria. And during that twenty-four hour period I was scheduled to drive three hours north to visit my sister and see a play. [We went to see the musical Bright Star - highly recommend. It’s about a woman who is searching for her son, who was taken from her as a baby, and it has an amazing, folksy bluegrass soundtrack. At the time I saw it, I had a one-year-old baby boy, and I sobbed the whole way through the second act. Given the plot of the play, I should have seen that coming. Also, Steve Martin wrote the script (what??).]

I came up with a wild idea for the fantasy story during the drive to my sister’s, and then somewhere in the midst of the driving and unpacking and hugging and hanging out, I asked my family to give me thirty minutes.

In half an hour, I sat down on the floor with my laptop on the Airbnb coffee table and threw roughly 300 words on the page. I then mercilessly went through the document again and again until I had slashed out two thirds of the words and re-styled the remaining 100.

It’s a big task to fit a fantasy story into 100 words, and it’s a skill that I want to keep honing - that practice of finding the most effective, perfect word that can condense a whole sentence into just a few short, hard-hitting letters.

So the takeaways from this post are that you should go see Bright Star right now, or, failing that, you should go look up the synopsis and listen to the soundtrack or try to find a bootlegged version online.

…Also, microfiction is a fantastic way to sharpen your wordsmithing skills. I find that it encourages me to break out of my go-to phrases to get to the heart of what I’m really trying to say or evoke. Sometimes the cherry-picking of words comes easily, and sometimes editing and finding the perfect phrasing to keep the story under the word count is like pulling teeth. But even on the occasions that my story feels a little too squeezed, the practice of weighing each word, its meaning and sound and connotation, is one of the most helpful tools in my writing toolkit.

Question for the comments: Have you ever written microfiction, whether for a competition or just for fun? What was the most memorable or challenging part of the experience for you?

Thanks for sticking through to the end! If you enjoyed this piece, please like or comment to keep the discussion going (and maybe give me a little dopamine hit).

I’ll be back next week with more short fiction!