Countdown Story

There are as many ways to write stories as there are authors. I'm
colating these from the various books in which I have them so that I
can put them into a file here for us to remind ourselves just how free
we really are to write anything, anyway we want.

One common way for authors to work out their stories is to "start at
the end and work backwards." The idea being that if one knows how the
story ends, then one might knows where it's going...lalala.

So, I propose a story told in ten little scenes, but we take turns
writing the story in backwards sequence... I'll start with the end, scene ten, and
the person after me writes the scene just before the end, scene 9, which explains how things got to be that way, then
before that, scene 8 etc.

No limits...write more than a few sentences, and less than several pages...hows that for a guideline?

They came down from the mountain beaten and bruised. Jack was dead, and they'd have to get used to life without him from now on. Indeed, everythign was different now, they'd have to get used to a whole lot of things.

"We're never leaving the valley again," M'Duai said solemnly, shifting the bag on her back.

Blackwind said nothing and simply watched the setting sun chase shadows across the valley, making everything glow like the fires at home --- a home that was even now coming into view.

They both quickened their pace.



The end.





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[note to next author...remember, write the scene that happened before this scene. This was the closing scene, after the huge climax.

Questions to consider, but that don't have to be answered...who are these three? How or Why did Jack die? are these two characters men or women? where does all this take place?

Can this be screwed up? HELL NO! Is it for fun? Hell yes. Peace ]

Jack clung to the sacred emerald Jaguar head and backed away from the advancing bird warriors. His eyes were wide and staring, and his lips were pulled into a snarling grin. Even from the ledge at the top of the cavern, M'Dai could see flecks of spittle glittered around Jack's mouth and spraying when he shrieked and roared in that high, screechy voice of the Jaguar god.

He was surrounded, nowhere to go but into the pit from which the Jaguar head had first arisen.

"It's mine, it spoke to ME! It made ME the king! YOUR KING!" he screamed.

Blackwind pulled M'dai closer. "It's not Jack. Our Jack is dead. Don't watch." M'Dai buried his head in Blackwind's shoulder, but Blackwind could not tear her eyes away.

The attack was sudden and silent.

The first blow lifted Jack off his feet, and the second knocked him back over the edge of the pit, where he stayed suspended in mid-air. Not because the Jaguar god's necromancy gave him powers of flight, M'Dai realized, but because the vengeful bird warriors wouldn't let him fall. They swarmed him, a blurred maelstrom of feathers and talons and hooked beaks that buffeted him and pulled at him, lifted him...

and tore at him.

They kept his body dancing in the air long after his screams had slipped to wet mewling, then silence, long after the emerald idol had slipped from his broken fingers and tumbled into the darkness of the pit...long after anything M'Dai thought sane would still be attacking. She remembered that the bird warriors of the jhee-Chuh'aii hunted, caught, and ate their prey while airborn, and she tore her eyes from the grisly sight. Jack's body would never fall, not in one piece.

She pressed herself into Blackwind, felt his sobs become hers, and hid in their joined anguish until exaustion and shock mercifully let her fall into her own black pit of unonsciousness.

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She awoke to light, still embracing Blackwind. Blue sky through the firs on the mountain side said it was midday. How exactly the jhee-Chuh'aii had brought them from the cavern under the mountain to here, whether by magic or muscle, wasn't as important to M'Dai as their having done it at all. The people of the air were beautiful, but alien. To have sought them out was more than foolish. It should have been suicide. If they ever returned uninvited, it would be.

In the distance she heard a bird cry...she shook Blackwind awake. Time to get going.