Hello and welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors.  This week I’m sharing from a new work-in-progress. This story is a fairy tale mash-up along the lines of Gryffon Hall, set in the same world and infested with the same monsters, gremlins and shadowy goings-on, but with different main characters. I’m not going to mention the title yet, because I have this crazy idea that leaving the fairy tale it’s based on a mystery might be kind of fun, in an evil author sort of way. This snippet is the beginning of Chapter One.

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At the first sight of the red-tiled roof of Castle Rosenthal’s tallest tower, Prince Gabriel reined in his horse Tempest, and brought him to a halt.  The castle was still nearly half a day’s ride away, at the far end of a long valley, but because it perched on a lone hill, Gabriel could see it from the sunny top of the distant rise where he’d stopped. Today the north watchtower rose up alone out of a foggy soup that clung to the castle like ghostly tentacles. To reach it, he would have to ride into the fog blanketing the valley, and be enshrouded in its dank shadows.

Gabriel shivered. He hadn’t been home in almost three years, and now that his mother the Queen was dead, he had less desire than ever to visit. But his brother, now the king, had summoned him.

Gabriel peered into the fog, attempting to see what awaited him in that cold, shambling pile of ancient stones. Memories, some pleasant, mostly not, crept out of long buried places. Visions of his father, dead so long ago, and now his mother, came and went along with pangs of grief.

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Home Sweet Home

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Weekend Writing Warriors is a blog hop where writers from a wide variety of genres share from their work in excerpts of ten sentences or less.  Click the link to check out the other writers participating today.  It’s a great way to discover your next favorite book!