Let There Be Light

The vampire’s laughter boomed through the crypt, beat down on the two Hunters. “Your faith means nothing here”, it said from a shadow darker than any shadow had ever been.

“You are wrong, beast”, Diana said through gritted teeth. The effort she expended to remain standing under the mental onslaught was considerable, but Diana stood firm.

Beside her, Sandoval grunted and dropped to a knee. The lantern clattered on the stone floor.

The abomination growled, a wet, hungry sound. “What words from your holy book hold sway over me? Speak them and die.”

“Four words, Count. I will speak only four. ‘Let there be light’.” Diana thumbed a switch and the Sunlight Lantern filled the chamber, burned the shadows.

The vampire screamed and was dust.

You’ll notice that I didn’t use “100-word” in the title of this post, even though this is my normal story for the weekly Phantom Sway writing prompt. Turns out this story this week needed a few more words. That’s okay. Sometimes a story needs a little extra space. When that happens, all you can do as an writer is let it take up the space it wants, and prune judiciously after the fact.

Self-imposed word limits make good boundaries, in my opinion, but they’re not built from stone. If you set out to write a 100-word story and, after several editing passes, you can’t cut that far and still have a complete and coherent story, revise your limit. In my case, I’ll jump up to 125 and see if I can get the story to fit that container. As it happens, it did, perfectly!

On another note, you might have read on my Facebook feed that I expected this story to be terrible. Well, it’s not and I’m as surprised by that as anyone. Today’s story is probably not in the top half of stories I’ve written, but it’s not bad at all. You can sink your teeth into it.

SWIDT? Heh.