Gloriousmonsters - Blog Posts

curious about Jarnu and the house 👀

"Jarnu and the house" (working title: Holmwood: A Study of Scarlett) is one of the stories my partner and I are working on together, set in our fantasy world of Ashvatyr. It's a bit of a story within a story. While reading Sherlock Holmes, Francis and I decided the characters in our universe needed their own detective stories to be fans of. Jarnu is a fantasy version of John Watson, and the snippet below shows him unsuccessfully looking for lodgings.

There were twenty-two houses on Cherryhill Lane, twenty-one of which satisfied nearly all of Jarnu's lodging requests.

Numbers 1 through 21 were well-situated and spacious, with square gardens and brightly painted doors. Number 4 was smaller than the rest of course, the paint on 12 was cracked, and 15 sported violet glowing hedges from an overuse of pruning spells. Even so, he could have accepted their deficiencies. 

Jarnu looked down at the paper in his hand, a red circle carefully drawn around "Number Twenty-Two" in the advertisement section. He tapped his walking stick on the ground and trained his eyes on the building in question. A tight budget meant tight compromises when picking a rental but he felt, as any gentleman would agree, there were certain things which could not be borne. 

Number 22 Cherryhill was as well situated as the others he supposed, and spacious. More spacious in fact, as it stretched above the roofs of the other houses, above even the old oak tree by Number 20, and disappeared somewhere in the clouds. It could have been an illusion. Jarnu shielded his eyes from the sun, unable to make out a roof. If so, he personally would've added some illusory flowers to the cracked grey stone, and kept off the red painted  "BEWARE".