Each Sunday, Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from writers in multiple genres and forms. Check out the full roster here.

***

I thought this would be a sweet voyage, a chance to have a bit of home life and do our bit for the Outposts. Maia and Tadr and Felip would have done the negotiation, Xen and Zoi provided technical backup, and I would have been the silent outrider and amused Arna when I was on board. Arna and I would have had a chance to spend some leisure time in each other’s company, which Maia thought would be good for both of us.

Arna was looking outward already from the traveling-circle into which she was born. This would have been a fine time to converse with her about apprenticeship, and think about what she really wanted. Some decisions she could begin to contemplate now; others, she could put off to the natural course of things. Plans made too far in advance are just a story we tell ourselves. You can only plan so far.

That story, what didn’t happen, the quiet and calm I savored in advance, are precisely what I miss.

***

Speaker is Taryn, diplomatic outrider for the Outposts, bomb squad engineer, jack-of-all trades. She appears in my 2013 NaNoWriMo project, Inside the Jump, as well as the untitled Romance with Rayguns.