Saturday Short: One's Own Medicine

Saturday, June 6, 2020 at 3:15pm

Last week, I announced that I would use my short story time to write The Five Kingdoms of Daniel Worthy. However, that project now consists of three complete novella-length drafts, so using my short story time for it seems disingenuous.

I decided to go back to an old method of using Wikipedia’s “random entry” feature to help generate a story idea. I haven’t utilized this in a while, and it hasn’t always worked out for me, but this time it did. The entry I landed on was that of Guilielmus Peregrinus, a twelfth century monk who healed a count, predicted his own death, and supposedly “smelled sweet” upon his deathbed. He was made a patron of recovery.

The short story I’ve derived from this is titled “One’s Own Medicine.” Most of the story is told from the perspective of one Gillem Perigan, a monk and apothecary of Qelem Abbey.

For the setting, I’ve decided to reuse the locales of my 2016 short story “We Were Here First.” The protagonist of that story was from the Kingdom of Jeia, which was about to find itself at war with Kingdom of Calens. In between these two were the Kingdoms of Reiar and Yvenia. The incident described in “We Were Here First” is an element this new story, but the action takes place in a different kingdom entirely, that of Wellesper.

Fifty years after the incident in “We Were Here First,” Calens and Jeia are still at each other’s throats, but it is believed that the Lord Wellesper is the only one capable of brokering peace. Of course, a plague hits just as Gillem and his entourage arrive, and when the king falls ill, it is up to him to save the day, and he might just, with a little extraterrestrial help. But, as I established in “We Were Here First,” Gillem’s world is unprotected from extraterrestrial intruders, and both malevolent and beneficent alien forces may be present in Wellesper.

This one is definitely turning out well. I’ve got about 1,000 words so far, and I definitely feel I can finish this one within short story range (less than 7,500 words). I’ll report back when it’s done.

So far, definite inclusions in my next anthology are: