Pitch Wars Entry #8 - THE SOVEREIGN PALACE (YA Magical Realism)

NAME: Kurt Hartwig

MENTOR: Michelle Painchaud

TITLE: THE SOVEREIGN PALACE 

GENRE: YA/Magical Realism/Literary

WORD COUNT: 85,000

PITCH:

Mina must travel to the heart of a cruelly magical world called the Weeping Monarchy to find escape before memories of the car crash that killed her best friend – and the growing scab on her side – destroy her from the inside out. 

FIRST 250:

“When are we going?” yells the Made Up Girl over the wind. She looks like me, almost exactly like me. Me from home, before I came here, however long ago that was. A year? She looks like me without the plastic porcupine quills. Short white spines don’t stick out of her body the way they do all over mine. The ones on my face I can barely see out of the corners of my eyes. They make me think of cat whiskers.

The air is thick with the musty, funky stench of mold, a reek of mildewed basements stuffed with old cardboard. Even without the rain there’s something miserable here in the Nearly Last Settlements.

No stars. No moon. The only lights are the meager fires of the hill and the houses below. The gray clouds glow a spotty, dull orange-brown with them. The sky looks sick. Everything here presses against the Made Up Girl’s words. The land doesn’t want us to leave. That’s not what people do here. What people do is give up.

It would help if I knew how to get to the Monarchs. How long before the scab on my side digs farther into my body. It doesn’t only spread across my skin. It burrows. I can feel it mining my insides. 

I want my yellow brick road.

My fingers rest on it, leather-tough and warm underneath my cold, wet shirt. I can’t think about it. I have to be strong for us both.

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