Writing 101, Day Five: Be Brief

You stumble upon a random letter on the path. You read it. It affects you deeply, and you wish it could be returned to the person to which it’s addressed. Write a story about this encounter.

Today’s twist: Approach this post in as few words as possible.

None of us will ever know the whole story in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards that each seem perfect.

— From 100 Word Story‘s About page

Very funny, WordPress.  Book One alone is 180,000 words long.  Be brief?  I could jest about princes in various states of undress, but I suppose I should remain civil. 

In Book Two, just as Zarrek is getting close to Eledrynne, Starshine writes to him.  The girl whom he had tried to get close to but who refused to defy her father in order to court him, whom he had given up on and decided to get away from.  She wrote to him, and he refused to read the letter… tore it up into hundreds of tiny pieces and threw it into the wind and snow like so many paper snowflakes.  If I had been wandering outside that night– although who would, in all that snow?– a few of the paper shreds might have caught on my cloak.  Supposing I had been able to gather any meaning from those tiny pieces, would warning Zarrek make any difference?  The events that followed that letter had little to do with the letter itself; that was just information, and not the kind that would have changed the emotions and relationships that were going on at the time.  Had he read that letter, he still could not have changed Starshine’s mind.