(Albion) Boot Camp Week One

So far, so good. I'm very satisfied with the challenge of melding a more nebulous and overarching concept - the Beast of Albion card - with a more specific and focused insertion - the random sentence - while giving a flavor of character, plot and setting ... all in about two hundred words. I may have to switch books before I finish my current read, but so far, Gallows Thief is holding up. I've found that I prefer to use the sentence as a lead-in rather than a lead-out, but as I expected, the ones where it's a lead-out run longer.

Not going to post examples as a general rule, but here's the one I did today just as an idea of how it turns out. The setting is the same world as Journal of the Dead:

CRANE: Sentry of the Inner World

In (Place), a funnel-shaped thoroughfare that narrowed as it ran from (Name) Street to (Name) Hill, the scaffold was being taken down.

Coran was irritated, not for the first time, that the only window in his quarters faced the scene of his of executions. The spirits of the deceased clamored inside his thoughts, their welcomes to the newcomer – some sarcastic, some sincere – pushing his equilibrium towards a strange mix of amicability and sourness. He closed his eyes, drawing in meditative breaths and focusing on his core, the part of his consciousness that had been born in this body … a thing which shrank every time his jailors forced him to pull the lever another time.

There had been a time he was consumed by guilt for the crime that had brought him here. Now, when every time he served as executioner, the victim’s mind jumped into his – he had paid enough. He had started to forget what he had done, and saw his crime only as one in the wave of others that haunted him.

Coran rubbed his temples. Carefully, he focused on the newest spirit, a sorcerer named Elhizath. Meimn, the magic of time and perception – two things he could have used, but the power had died with her.

*Why are you here?* she asked, voice cool as silk. When she had first leapt to him, she had screamed and flailed, an incoherent mass of thought. He was used to that.