For this week's wee bloodbath, you must center your story on either a meteoric ascent or a calamitous descent. This can be literal (scaling a mountain) or figurative (an unexpected development brings international fame & fortune overnight.) Conversely, a detailed account of falling from the summit of Everest or a massive collapse in company stocks in a few hours would work just fine.

This ascent/descent can (and probably should) be a/the focus of your submission, but doesn't have to encompass it. What's more important is the pace of the ascent/descent. No deliberate and measured scalings of said frozen peak or slow collapses into financial ruin. The rise or fall must objectively be very fast, either to your characters or the reader, though the event itself could be a paragraph or even a sentence, with everything else about the before/after etc.

Also, said rise/fall should be "externally evident", I guess would be the phrase? In other words, no emotional roller-coasters unless accompanied by a real one; the ascent/descent must be some event that would be somehow apparent to an onlooker.

Let's go with an 1800-word limit, as this number is aesthetically appealing to me for reasons undefined.