I got this prompt off of Pinterest. I had to take the book that was closest to me, turn to page 45, then use the first five words on that page as the final words of a story, then write the last paragraph of that story. Obviously, I used more than five words at the end, but it wouldn't have made sense otherwise. The book I used was The Hobbit.
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The battlefield stretched onward, dark and stinking, the dirt cracked with dried blood and want of rain. Bodies lay in sprawled heaps across the earth, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, faces gray, eyes glaring like matte glass in the waxing light that glimmered down through the dust and clouds in faint, gray streaks. Flies had already begun to gather on the corpses of the fallen, the buzzing of their wings heavy in the air, the only sound for miles. In this wasteland of death, it was impossible to tell friend from foe—all were tangled and slumped together, mud and blood splattered across their banners and insignias until the desecrated forms blurred into a still fresco of life's end. In this field filled with the raw stench of death, the survivors walked, mournful, their faces appearing just as lifeless as those bodies around them. This pit of despair, this hellish scene, was their victory cry, this was their legacy, the reality of the slaughter that poets yet to be born would one day sing of. That mother screaming the name of a son who could not answer were the lyrics, the sobs of that warrior hugging the blood-stained head of his fallen friend to his chest was the tune, and the crack of branch thrown upon branch for the funeral pyre was the drumbeat.
This was their victory, the battle won, but as the sun began to climb, there was only silence; a lingering rot of bitterness and tears descending upon all.
This was their victory.
They did not sing or tell stories that day.
