The Camel in the Needle's Eye

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 550 words, and the Grey Wolf's chapter started.

Not as I'd anticipated when I conceived this story, with big striding chords and my old hero-villain resurgent, finding her greatness in the right cause at last and in her people's direst need.  But low, halt, broken, clambering out of the pit of her stalking hell only with all the aid her well-meaning friends and unfriendly fellow-sufferer can give her; at such an ebb that her great inspiration is nearly splained and soothed away even by such men as are used to taking vehement, erratic old women equally and seriously.

Now, of course, I see it must be so, to rise in the true crescendo.  This was never going to be Great Kate battering down Giant Despair with potmetal swords.  This is her standing foursquare at last with the low and the halt and the broken, and bringing them together to Jericho walls.  And that is why, when her trumpet-voice rings again after such long silence down the Dales -

- hearts and walls of stone must tremble.

Crescendo. 

Slow abrading writing for me, this end: being Kate, through one long bloody thread of her.