Continuing from last week:
Last time I wrote this, I was taking writing prompts from the Writing Excuses people and if I returned to a story I’d told, it had to be because something in the prompt and the past piece of the story sparked something for me. This time as I continued, it was because they asked us the following prompt:
Write a cliffhanger with actual suspense, not just a jump scare.
That is to say, don’t pull the cheap trick of “blah blah normal stuff ordinary scene then the door slammed open!!!”
“Next chapter: There was Uncle Melvin, telling them this stuff about the boat trip he had last week. Normal normal normal blah blah blah but then he said something that really shocked them! What? What shocked them? Tune in next week/chapter/etc!”
Instead, actually give information in the cliffhanger until it builds real suspense that you can rely on. Make the cliffhanger itself the surprise.
I remember really enjoying this segment in particular, finding just the right place to cut it for the right suspense. And passing up several places that could have worked but I wanted to ratchet the tension higher. So if you don’t mind, I’m about to hanger your cliffs.
(and hope it’s as fun/effective this time around)
Constance puttered with the Dragon over the upcoming days. She… forgot to send a message to the relevant authorities that she’d recovered a piece of enemy technology. She’d get around to it, of course she would. She wasn’t keeping it to herself, obviously, but couldn’t she just tinker with it for a few days by herself? Enjoy the discovery? See how the gears and cogs and pistons worked? See the new language of the Heijo Empire written in their intricate metal and decipher the way their mechanisms created new meanings for the verbs she already knew and opened up new metaphors? She’d tell them but later. She was busy right now.
Nor did she become less busy. The Dragon had suffered damage in the fall, of course, and some pretty extensive damage to the boiler before the fall- probably the cause of it. The baffling part, as she thought about it, was how the Dragon came to be there at all. There hadn’t been a battle the day before, she was sure. Otherwise the scavenging would have been richer and the damage to the city more extensive. Beyond that, a Dragon wasn’t particularly stealthy. It shared no shapes in common with the local air craft and unless it could get significantly higher than the craft she was accustomed to, she couldn’t imagine how it could expect to not be spotted. In Londinia, of all places.
On the other hand, Her Royal Highness’s spymasters could figure all of that out, later. When she handed the Dragon over to them. After she was done investigating it. And fixing it a little; after all, she needed to see it in working condition to understand how it worked. She had to improvise a new landing brace for it as well; her replacement wasn’t the beautiful scaled dragon legs of the other three – well, two were beautiful, one was still functional – but the stabilizing pistons of her copper-plated replacement already had improvements from previous works based on the function of the current legs.
It fell into a happy buzz of research, notes, tinkering, and fixing for a few days… then a week… then nearly a month. She still hadn’t sent the report. But she would today. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow evening at the latest for sure. Because she was fairly confident, at last, that the Dragon was functioning. The boiler had been replaced, the mechanisms winding through its wings and steamers and engines and even its weaponry seemed to be twitching with eagerness to live again, even though she hadn’t so much as warmed the coals. There was new glass in its face, so now it gazed at her every time she entered her basement workshop. She was buzzing with eagerness to try something, to fire it up and make the Dragon move.
Then her alarm went off.
That was the intruder alarm. But not the one she’d put at the gate. Not even one of the ones on the approaches or the one at the front door. This was the back door. The door only accessible via the alley that she’d walled and warded with all her tricks so only Tad should be able to get in and out.
And she’d left her parasols and knives upstairs. Even her hairpins. Today it was just tied out of her way simply since she’d planned on not leaving the house- or, come to think of it, the basement- at all. But there were wrenches aplenty in this workspace and other tools that could find a less metallic application of force. In fact, by the door was the crowbar she’d taken from that young man the day she’d found the dragon. Constance grabbed it up and went cautiously to the stairs.
She crept up, avoiding the creaking in the center of this one and the sides of these two and skipping this one entirely that was on a hinge. Then she was in the main hall. She stopped and listened. The house was dead silent until she heard something faint, like someone trying to walk quietly in the library. She slid her feet along the carpet down the hall until she reached the door.
Constance held her breath, reaching for the doorknob and trying not to picture some boggart of a burglar on the other side doing the same thing. Her hand with the crowbar raised, ready, and then she pushed the door open and stepped forward in one swift movement.
Her crowbar hit the floor.
The face looking back at her was from her past. From days when they played in the streets, rode horses in the meadows at the country manor, teased each other across the dinner table, when the sun shone through the clouds and the world was golden instead of gray, from when she’d been a girl and he’d been a young man and then everything had gone dark.
Her brother.
“Jeremy?” Constance asked, her voice choking on the word.
“Constance,” he said, blinking and holding his arms out to her. She ran to him, feeling as undignified as a school girl when the term was finally over and not caring in the slightest. She threw her arms around him.
“I thought you were dead,” she said, voice muffled in the collar of his shirt. “Where were you? Why didn’t you write? I missed you so much! Why…” she broke off.
“I’m here now,” Jeremy said, an arm around her waist and one reaching up to her shoulder. Then something cold prickled against her neck. Cold, hard, and sharp.
“I’ve come for my Dragon that you’ve got in your basement.”
Intellectual Property of Elizabeth Doman
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