50,000

Teachers will tell their schoolchildren. Mothers will tell their wards.

They will tell of they days of the Earth Before. That once the greenlands spread past the lake - they spread farther than just the will of Freya.

Once the children of Freya lived away from her sight and still had her love. And then came the great wolf, Fenri. Fenri promised the great men of old power and insight - but Fenri was a trickster. Once he got all the great men of Earth Before in the same room - he devoured them whole. And so the wolf Fenri unleashed his ravenous hunger on the world. He devoured all the nations whole. He ate all the animals and the plants that he could see. He ate buildings. That was not enough for him. His hunger continued. He then ate the clouds in the skies. That was not enough for him. He ate the stars and the sun and the moon.

And so the world plunged into darkness. Fenri looked for us - the children of Freya. Her most beloved. Freya, however, would not allow harm to her loved ones. She approached the wolf as it wandered the world for its last meal.

"Great wolf," she said, "surely you must be full from your meal. Your belly is fat. You should sleep before devouring the last - this world itself."

"I cannot sleep," Fenri replied, "I am restless knowing that food still exists. I shall eat the last - this world itself - and then I shall sleep."

"If I sang for you, great Fenri, could you then sleep?"

Fenri thought of this and decided that a song would be grand. And so Freya sang. And in her song was weaved in the grandiose dream of her song. Freya could not decieve the wolf - for it is not in her nature to decieve. Freya is love. And so she sang a song of such love the Fenri curled where he stood and fell asleep.

And so Freya's song gives Fenri such a dream that no wolf would ever want to awake. She has given him such a dream that Fenri may yet forget about this place and about us - the beloved fo Freya.

Thus is why the world outside Freya's Reach is cold and dark and evil. Because Fenri the Wolf ate all that was warm, light and good. And when we sleep, Freya grants up on us the same boon she granted her greatest foe. A dream of love and of the world that Fenri the Wolf devoured long ago.

Love Freya. Freya loves you.

OK - that's not the ending. It's the beginning. I thought I had hit 50K yesterday, but Google Doc's word counter was off by a few thousand. Even now, it's reporting over a thousand off from NaNo's official word count.

Technically, this was a successful NaNo - but it was a lot different than the other one I did. My first novel, Greenscape, resulted in something moderately novel-shaped. Sunset result in about five first drafts all mashed into each other. Rather than try and string specific plot elements into a cohesive narrative, I worried more about the actual themes and motifs of the story - beause even those shifted.

The above quote doesn't even really make sense with 3/4 of what's written in the story - but it might be closer to how the novel feels correct than what is in there right now.

That probably doesn't add up - but I'll have a more complete post-op later.

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