Down the Tower: A Rapunzel Retelling

Chapter 1: Trapped

I HAVE LIVED IN THE PALACE OF DREAMS FOR SO LONG, the veil between reality and dreams has become almost wholly shredded apart.

Here, time stumbles and somersaults and drifts....

The walls bleed scarlet. Whispers caress my mind. They watch me, seeing, stalking, waiting.

I know my sanity dances precariously on the edge of a blade these days.

One breath

is all it will take for me to shatter into

a million little

bits

and

pieces

But that never particularly concerned me.

Madness passes the time 

                 much more efficiently than the

sIleNce

eVer

dId.

When my madness sleeps, I sing to keep the silence away. When singing is not enough, and the silence oozes into my head—

cold and clammy and paralyzing—

I scream to keep it at bay.

But, surely, the fact that I recognize my insanity must mean that I am still sane.

Or perhaps I've already fallen off the edge...

still believing that I haven't.

I have no use for sanity when there was no one else to be sane with me anyways.

My feet dangle in open evening air. The sloping roof tiles press against my back, leaching the warmth—if there was any warmth at all—from my skin.

I shiver. It's cold here—too cold, even though the temperature has never fluctuated a single degree my entire life.

Of course it hasn't. Because it is paradise here.

I'm not quite sure how I got here—only that I've always been here, that I need to be here. It's better, safer this way.

Or at least that's what Mother told me.

My earliest memory trails back years ago to the day I'd opened my eyes and found myself in the highest tower of the sprawling palace, stretching tens of thousands of square feet.

All to myself.

Inside my shaking fist had been a note with barely legible writing that read

Gothelia Square.

Be There.

Mother had burned it when I'd showed it to her, and the little pyre had been nothing next to the heat of her fury. Now the nonsensical words are carved in my mind instead of a piece of paper.

I miss her. It's hard not to, when she is one of the only two people I've ever spoken to throughout my existence. And the other person is me, of course.

She comes and goes. Comes not often enough, goes far too often.

I exhale.

An icy cloud escapes my lips, along with