The Tower

Once upon a time, there lived a king and queen whose lives were as close to a fairy tale as lives can get. The moon shone silvery in the moon each night, and lit their way through the royal gardens as they pondered the many mysteries of the universe. They were a wise couple, but far too jolly and so they never got very far with their ponderings, and life ticked along pretty much as it had before. It was perhaps because of this, that their people were a happy bunch - though this may also have had something to do with a special floral tea brewed up by an old woman every new moon.
One autumn, the queen’s belly began to grow, and by spring she had given birth to a baby girl. The king and queen were deliriously happy, and suddenly all of their time was spent feeding, bathing, rocking, watching, soothing and playing with their cherished daughter.
At first, the people too were overjoyed, but as time went on they became annoyed that the king and queen paid no attention to them. Carnivals were canceled, feasts were postponed, and the land fell into disrepair, as the king and queen gave less and less thought to their people, and more and more to the princess.
One dark night, the people gathered together and hatched a terrible plot. The very next day, they began building a monument to the princess - a tower which would be completed on the child’s sixth birthday. The king and queen were delighted at this sudden shift in the attitude of the people. They poured all available funds into the project, the tower grew and grew. Far beyond anyone’s reckoning, the tower soon reached the clouds and by the eve of the princesses’ sixth birthday, it had climbed almost to the heavens.
Then the terrible thing happened. At 8 o’clock, the king and queen rushed to wake the princess, but she did not lie sleeping in her small oak bed. Nor was she our playing with the dogs in the courtyard. Nor was she hiding beneath the giant kitchen table snatching crumbs as breakfast was prepared. In fact, she had quite vanished.
The grief of the king and queen cannot be imagined. The wind ceased to blow, the flowers lost their petals and withered away. The door to the tower was sealed with a heavy iron lock. It didn’t take long for the people to realize that they were now worse off than ever, but not one of them dare reveal what they had done, to the king and queen.

High up in the tower, in rooms lined with ancient tapestries, lived the princess. By the time she had reached her seventh year, she could remember little of the land which stretched out far below the thick carpet of clouds outside her window. Her only clues that there was more to life than met her hungry eyes, were a row of books, and the plates of food which appeared daily at her door. She had long since given up trying to solve the riddles of this strange life.
Each day, from the first creeping moments of sunrise, to the last drops of sunset, she huddled over the pages of one of the twenty-seven books in her library. Hours spent in pilgrimage and battle, courting and conquering, often left her too exhausted to crawl across the room to her bed. On some nights, it was too much effort to close her eyes, and she slept like a statue, forever about to turn to the next page.
A life spent reading and re-reading the same twenty-seven books might have slowly nudged the princess into insanity, but she was sustained by the nightly explosion of starts lifting her spirit high into the atmosphere, with barely enough time to drop to a reasonable level by morning.
Then one day, for the first time in a long time, something different happened. The princess awoke to find something lying beside the customary plate of steaming food. It was a book. Her twenty-eighth book. The princesses’ heart slowed to an unperceivable rate as the color gradually drained from her gaping face, her long neck, her sinewy limbs - until all the blood in her body was collected in her toes, which finally sprung into action and propelled her towards the book. It was large and heavy with pages thin as petals and tiny words spun like a web across the page. The princess dove headlong into the first story, a journey to far off lands overflowing with jewel thieves. At night time she rose, and lay down to sleep in a bed which had grown too small. She dreamt she was walking through a market in a long lost city. The cries of vendors echoed through the night in foreign tongues. The Princess filled her nostrils with the sweet, heady smells of spices billowing about her head like sails. When she awoke, she found that her pillows were laden with fruit. Mangos, kiwis, apricots, peaches - so plump and juicy they threatened to burst at any second and plant their seeds and stone sin the tower walls. When the princess bit into a particularly pleasing mango, the juices ran down her chin in rivers, and the first insects the princess had seen in years swarmed through the window and devoured the rest of the fruit.
The princess turned to the book, and began reading the second story - an epic history of a great queen, whose telling took all of four days and four nights before the princess fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, the tower rung with the low, watery notes of the great queen’s voice. Until the sun perched at it’s highest point in the sky and the sounds evaporated, the princess followed the sighs and laughter and demands and murmurs around her small, dark rooms.
The next story, of battles waged in icy mountain peaks, filled her dreams with searing winds, and she woke to find a blanket of snow into which all sound and motion disappeared. By nighttime the snow had melted into a slowly draining pool, upon which the princess rowed through the moonlight on her bedside table.
The days and nights went on in this fashion, until the sun rose on the morning after the last story, a tale of true love. The air was filled with the scent of roses, which grew in abundance from the floor and twisted around the legs of tables and chairs. The princess could smell freshly baked breads waiting by the door, but she did not stop to eat. She could not see the book anywhere. For three hours she searched frantically. In every nook, in every cranny her fingers twitched, her unblinking eyes hunted and mauled and scoured. Finally she stood still. Her arms and legs were smeared crimson from the sharp thorns of the roses. Her long hair was tangled with briars and browning petals. When she walked slowly to her bed and lay down to sleep, she did not dream.
The sun swooned in the sky, and the moon rose like a looking-glass. The scarlet blooms began to fade, and the princess lay silently in hollow sleep.
With another princess, perhaps this would have been the end. But this wasn’t another princess. This was this princess, and this princess woke up the very next day with a rather clever plan. After a good breakfast, she returned to bed and pulled the covers over her head. “Once upon a time,” she began, and she didn’t stop until the stars were twinkling with all their might and it was undoubtedly time to fall asleep.
When the princess woke, she dare not open her eyes. The air smelled of morning, of every other morning. She waited until she could bare it no longer, and then she turned her head and looked at the floor. Lying by the side of her bed, were coils and coils of thick, brown rope.
The princess ate her final breakfast in the tower, then she tied one end of the rope to her sturdy, if rather small - bed. The other end, she threw out of the window, and watched it disappear through the clouds. With a head-full of knights and damsels and dragons and happy endings, the princess climbed out through the window, and begun the long decent down her beautiful, long rope.