Birthday Bash Blogfest!

J.C Martin's awesome blog is officially one year old.  To celebrate, she is hosting a blogfest.  Here are the rules as posted on her blog.

Write a story (or a personal account) that begins with the phrase:
“A lot can happen in a year…”

The catch? It must be a drabble, i.e. exactly 100 words long, no more, no less. The starter phrase will not be included in your word count.

Some guidelines:

• Proper nouns (names, etc.) count as just one word, e.g. ‘New Mexico’ is one word
• Hyphenated phrases count as one word, e.g. ‘self-defence’ is one word
• I shall be lax with conjunctions: you may count them as one word! 

I'm not sure when I was supposed to post this, but it seemed like a good idea to do it on the actual blog birthday.  So here is my entry:

“A lot can happen in a year…”
Those were the words my mother had uttered when I told her I wanted to train with the Knights.
“We’ve been fine for ten, mother.”
My father died when I was little.  My sister and I were all that my mother had left.  We often worried that bandits would attack our homestead.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to fight them off.  But if I trained with the Knights, I could protect my family and my land.
I returned home, after a year, armed with the skill to fight off bandits, but I had only cinders and rubble to defend.

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