Girl of Iron and Magic

10.

10.
PRESENT DAY

That night, in her dreams, Lotte searched for a tower.

She couldn't remember what she needed a tower for. Her whole life in Raidox, the sky had been chopped up by towers. There was never a need to search for them, they were all just there.

But this tower was different. It was old and solitary. It had only one room, at the very top and hundreds of spiralling worn steps to be climbed.

But no matter how much she ran that night, through fields of flowers and skies studded with diamond-like stars, her mind was a closed circuit and she couldn't find the way towards that place.

When she finally woke up, it was to the sound of weeping. She opened her eyes expecting a forest canopy, but all she saw was grey, empty sky.
She rose, expecting to see the tower covered in vines and lichen with those odd violet flowers and their bloody centre.

But before her was a dark pit. A spiralling staircase started at her feet and went down, down, down into the darkness. The stairs were of the same worn rock as those of the tower. The darkness they led into was absolute.

Out of the depths, she could hear someone weeping. It was the kind of breathy, silent sobs. The kind of crying she knew only too well, when she herself had tried to keep her grief hidden.

"Hello?" she called down, her voice getting swallowed up by the pit.
She didn't fear the dark—she was a creature of the night—but both parts of her, the elven half, and human half, despised the thought of going underground.

The weeping continued. She descended a few steps. "Hello?"
The person in the pit groaned and sniffed. "Lotte?" he said in a shaking voice.

It was the same voice from the tower, but why was it a pit now? "What's wrong?" She took another step down, then another, but she couldn't bring herself to venture deeper into the darkness.

"They killed her," he said, his voice a rocky rumble and the onslaught of sobs that followed shot through Lotte's own bones. She'd never experienced this kind of pain before, not in all her life. She couldn't stop her legs from moving down. The void before her opened up inside her heart like a rose of pure darkness.

"They killed her," he said. "They killed her." He repeated, over and over.

"Who?" Lotte asked. She had to know.

"Sia," he said, before succumbing again to a bout of sobs. "They killed Sia."

The name, of course, meant nothing to her, but because she was inside his mind, she felt a wave of intense connection, protectiveness and...loss.

"I'm sorry," she said, her own voice trembling. She began descending down the stairs now, in earnest. Determined to reach the bottom. "I'm here," she said. "I'm coming. I'm—"

"Lotte, no." It was his voice, but it was coming from somewhere behind her. She felt an odd pull, as if there was a string connected to the back of her hand and the length of her spine.

The inverted staircase popped out, walls rose around her. The pit had become a tower. Lotte was high up inside it, rushing up instead of down, and the change made her head spin and knees buckle.
"What..."

"You weren't supposed to go there," he said. She could feel something fragile on the edges of his voice. "That was...private."

Despite not physically being there, Lotte felt her face flush. She'd found her way to him, but she had clearly gone too far. "Are you... are you alright?"

"It happened a long time ago," he said.

"Does it still hurt?" She put her hand to her chest where the memory of that void had left a heaviness. She never wanted to feel something like that again.