Every Day in May (grand prize winner) ✔

***WINNER of the "BREATHTAKING: A FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL WRITING COMPETITION!"

"You are a secret kept from the world, but not from me." So begins the peculiar message found slipped under a bedroom door on the morning of May first.

Theo is the heir to a powerful dictatorship. The number of people allowed to know he exists is few. He has spent his entire life walled up in the Tower, the looming stone monolith from which his father rules over the Land.

Merryn is the daughter of political prisoners. She's known who Theo is longer than he would think possible, and she is taking a great risk contacting him via handwritten notes in order to convince him he deserves more than the fate his father has designed for him.

She has one month to exchange daily messages with him, to answer his questions and open his eyes to the realities of a world he has never been allowed to see. A revolution is coming to the Land at the end of the month, and if Merryn's notes fail to get their point across, Theo may never live to see the sunrise on June first.

A/N: The following letters were originally published each day from May 1st-31st, 2014. As you will see,Theo is allowed to write down a question for Merryn each evening, but you, the reader, won't see these within the body of the story. It may or may not be obvious from Merryn's response what Theo is asking. Part of the fun is guessing what his questions might be, but if you really want to know what they are, a list of those questions is at the end of the story.

This story is a re-imagining of Rapunzel.

Now, without further ado-I believe a young heir is about to unfold a slip of paper found on the tile floor near his door... Let's see what it says!