I built this tower with the room at the top for her. I set her down in that room with only one window to look through where she could see a world out beyond the tower. I created a door for her to learn how to open.
Beyond the door were twisting corridors, long involved staircases and rooms beyond rooms that would – eventually – allow her out into the world beyond the tower. In some of those rooms, I’d hidden clothes she could use to dress herself, food to feed herself, tools she could use and maps she could follow to lead her out through that final door into this waiting world.
Out beyond the tower, I’d made a whole world for her to search through. A landscape for her to find the paths, tracks and roads that led her away from the tower and deeper into this maze of a world.
I knew she would – eventually - find her way through this world, follow the cunning paths I had made for her with their many wrong turnings and twists, dead ends and false trails. I knew that she would not give up until; she knew she’d escaped from that tower and all her imprisonment implied.
She thought she was escaping, running to be free. She thought she was fleeing the tower and whatever nameless being had incarcerated her there. What she did not know was that I’d contrived this whole world, so that in running away from me she would be running to me.
Then, one day – at the end of the last twisting road – I would be waiting there to save her.
[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]
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