“Hold on,” he told them before investigating the ancient-looking, unbelievably tall tower whose base had finally been revealed as they crested a large hill; they had been able to see it for miles, a silhouette against the sun, but now it stood before them, soaring into the scarce clouds scattered throughout the sky. It was the first of a seemingly endless number. Their numbers filled the entire valley, standing like trees in an unspeakably old forest.
The explorer believed that he would be right back, that he could investigate the interior of the soaring, vine-clad skyscraper and return to the rest of his troupe within the hour. He had never been so wrong in his life.
Upon crossing the threshold of the old stone structure, the splintering wooden door had slammed shut behind him. An ominous click announced exactly what the young man did not want to hear: the door had locked itself. Like any self-respecting adventurer, he hauled on the door’s wrought-iron handle. When it was pried from the wood with the strength of his pulling, he then proceeded to charge the door with the intention of breaking it down. To his dismay, this also failed to succeed; the door was certainly stronger than it looked.
By this time, his troupe was pounding on the door with closed fists and shouting encouragement at their trapped compadre, but to no avail. Bruised and weary from his attack on the door, the disheartened prisoner instructed his company to wait no more than three days before continuing on without him; if he had not managed to escape by then, it was likely he never could. In that case, he would have to live out the rest of his days imprisoned in the tower. Then, with the farewells and encouragements of his fellows in his ears, the prisoner did the only thing he could do: climb the stairs opposite the door and ascend further into the tower.
The next three days were fraught with failed plans of escape. Well, not quite.
The adventurer found a pleasant, well-furnished circular chamber at the top of the stairs, complete with a table laden with food. These things he ignored, for he was not planning on staying long enough to need any of it. Instead he marched straight to the set of double doors to his left, which opened out onto a reasonably-sized balcony.
When the explorer looked over the balcony’s railing, he was astounded to see what appeared to be diminutive ants on the ground in place of his men. In fact, he was up so high that he was at eye-level with the clouds. How could this be? It had felt like it had taken mere minutes to climb the tower’s steps, but in reality he had ascended what seemed to be thousands of feet. He tried shouting to catch the attention of the little troupe on the ground, but the only creature that heard him was a small blue jay (it twittered in surprise at the suddenness of the call).
Dejected, the halted explorer cast about the room for something with which he could break down the door at the tower’s base. Mounted on the wall he spotted two crossed swords, the larger of which he took to complete his task. With a determined set to his jaw, he set off back down the stairs.
The going was longer on the way down, as if the stairs were reluctant to carry him out. Five minutes turned into ten, which elongated into thirty, which crawled increasing slowness towards one, two, and three hours. After the fourth hour of this endless descent, the exhausted adventurer paused.
Just for the heck of it, he turned and started back up the stairs. As soon as he rounded the corner, he found himself back in the circular chamber, which he knew to be at the top of the staircase. The futility of the past four hours crashed down on his shoulders and he sank into a sitting position against the doorpost.
A glance out the open balcony windows rewarded him with a chunk of the sky, a rich black color with a smattering of stars that sparkled as brilliantly as diamonds. The exhausted prisoner could smell the faint aroma of a campfire, wafted into the room by a cold breeze. It didn’t take much to imagine himself safe, laughing around such a fire—preferably over which some sort of meal was cooking—with his friends, bathing in the warmth of their companionship. The far-off hoot of an owl broke into his reminiscence, reminding him of where he truly was: imprisoned, isolated, and alone.
He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing the prisoner knew, it was daylight. The sun cast its rays through the balcony doors, and a young girl perched on the balcony’s railing. Wait, what?
The prisoner did a double-take, but the girl he thought he had seen was really only a blue jay. The small creature ruffled its feathers and twittered a little, its tiny black eyes fixed curiously on him. He smiled and whistled a short melody in return, ascribing the little girl’s appearance to his loneliness. After all, the girl had looked a bit like the daughter of one of his troupe’s men—but that was impossible. The girl had disappeared and was presumed dead years ago.
He stood, rubbing the stiffness out of his neck. Upon finding himself hungry, the prisoner wandered over to the table bearing food, which yesterday he had ignored altogether. He debated whether or not he should try the stairs again, instead of wasting his time—a meager two days, now—with food, but eventually the rumbling in his stomach won out.
On the table was an assortment of fruits and cheeses, accompanied by a couple loaves of bread and a plate of what looked and smelled like ham. Without giving much thought to the possibly of the food being tampered with in some way, the prisoner tucked in to the meal. His fierce desperation to escape had been replaced with an odd sort of calm—presumably brought about by the sweet music issuing from the blue jay’s beak.
The prisoner had never known a blue jay’s call to be quite so melodious, but he was certainly enjoying the concert it was putting on. He tossed it a few bread crumbs for its performance before finishing his meal and standing. As the little bird gobbled up its snack, the prisoner moved to and looked over the balcony rail.
His troupe, small as ever, had made camp at the foot of the tower. The fire he had smelled last night was a tiny pinprick of light over which the men were preparing their breakfast. He felt no need to shout for their attention again, though he did consider writing a note to them. But for fear of a scrap of paper being snatched away by the wind or anything heavier he might tie a note to striking one of them, he decided against it.
Re-applying himself to the problem at hand, the trapped explorer began to pace the room. Every so often he would pause to toss an object down the stairs, counting just how many bounces it took to thunk against the solid oak of the door at its base. No doubt his troupe was thinking all sorts of things about the commotion, but the adventurer had a plan to devise.
As he discovered, larger objects took the longest to reach the bottom, while the smallest—a grape from the table—took no time at all. There was an enchantment on those stairs, and it prevented anything bigger than a breadbox from taking the short way down; something large, like a man, could bounce down those stairs for centuries and never see so much as a sliver of the door at the bottom. Judging from the time it took for him to ascend the stairs, the rule worked just as well in reverse: big things ascended quicker, and small things ascended slower.
To test a theory that occurred to him halfway through his initial data-gathering process, he found a spool of twine in a bedside drawer and tied it around a thimble, which was also found in the drawer. As he tossed the thimble through the stairway’s door, he made sure to hold onto the other end of the spool. Just as he had hypothesized, the bottom floor appeared as if it was a mere two steps down; the twine, being so thin and connecting the top and bottom floors, held the stairs in this short state much like a door-jam.
“Yes!” enthused the adventurer, and the blue jay chirped in congratulations (it, after being fed, had stuck around like his personal mascot). “Now,” he announced to his audience of one, “for the tricky part.”
The explorer gave the twine a yank—it was nearly pulled from his own hands in turn. He scrambled to cut the twine as the spool ran out in his hands. As he had suspected, such a tiny object would take forever to return—but what he hadn’t foreseen was the fact that, as the stairs stretched to follow their rule, they would need more and more twine to connect the thimble to the top floor.
Before the adventurer was able to cut the twine, the spool was tugged from his hands and into the limbo of the stairwell. He stared at the portal for a moment, then, when he had determined that it wouldn’t come back, shrugged at the blue jay. “Well, you can’t win ‘em all. We’ll just have to try again with something else.
As the adrenaline of a plan well-executed—for the most part—drained from him, the adventurer looked out the balcony doors, only to realize that the sun was setting. He grabbed a small apple from the table and stood out in the chill evening air, clothes tugged at lightly by the cool breeze.
The little blue jay flew over to perch beside the adventurer, taking the opportunity to look out into the great gold- and orange- and blue-colored expanse it called home. The young man sighed, and the bird seemed to mimic him. His eyes, however, soon strayed to his troupe.
Snippets of a sad tune played on a fiddle floated skywards; the adventurer had to strain his ears to hear the mournful notes. A somber frown spread across his lips as he realized that he had only one more day to escape, for the very next evening his troupe would depart—reluctantly, he knew, but they would depart all the same. A steely resolve cropped up in the stalwart adventurer, and he vowed to escape by any means necessary. He pushed himself away from the balcony railing, plonked the core of his apple on the table, and set determinedly to work.
The next morning found him snoring on the chamber’s four-poster bed, which he had stripped of any and all cloth. Beside him a great length of makeshift rope was heaped messily. He had worked through the night to fashion this rope—a backup plan in case the stairs outwitted his simple trick.
He had, half-jokingly, told the little bird to wake him in an hour—it was five hours later that the blue jay managed to shake the explorer from his slumber by dropping yesterday’s apple core on his head.
The adventurer awoke, slowly at first, but then with a jolt as he remembered where he was. He glanced at the sun—it was nearly midday—and proceeded to tie a length of string onto the apple core his small friend had fetched him. This he tossed town the stairwell, which magically shrank to a span of four steps. The other end of the string he tied around the closest bedpost.
A sudden, resolve-shattering doubt flooded into the adventurer’s heart and filled him with a fierce dread; he paused in his tracks. What if he couldn’t make it? What if the tower’s magic counteracted his own simple trick? Would he even be able to break down the door if he did make it?
The blue jay alit on the table beside him. It flapped its wings twice and gave a little hop, staring straight at him. It chittered an encouragement and tilted its head, waiting for its new friend to make his move.
A smile spread over the adventurer’s face and he nodded once. “Thanks, little buddy,” he said. “For everything.”
Sword in hand, the adventurer took a deep breath to calm his nerves. Then, with a running start, he leapt down the stairwell.
He could feel the tower’s magic, real and tangible, as if it was a living entity. It howled in his ears and tried to stretch the stairwell’s expanse—as a result, he felt the powerful force in his very bones. But as quickly as it had come, the feeling was gone and he was sprawled on the ground floor.
The adventurer stood, a shout of elation rising in his throat. When he heard nothing but the chirping of crickets, it died instantly. The voices of his men were absent, though they should be loud and clear—shouldn’t they?
The tower hadn’t been able to stop the explorer’s clever plan, but it had managed to steal two things from him: his sword and his time. The sword, which he had been clutching in his fist, was meant to cut down the door. Now it was nowhere to be seen; the weapon was probably stuck in limbo with the thimble and the spool of twine. But now the explorer had no way of breaking down the door. And the time, it seemed, had been sped up—hours into the night, perhaps. The troupe had already departed, so it appeared that the tower’s magic had been able to hold the adventurer on the stairwell long enough for them to pack up and leave—quite reluctantly and with much delay, as it happened. The poor, unfortunate adventurer realized all of this at once and couldn’t stop the flow of tears that wet his cheeks, for his brilliant plan hadn’t served its purpose and his chances of being reunited with his troupe seemed lost.
It was only a minute or so, however, until he remembered his backup plan. It was a last-ditch effort, but it would have to do.
The adventurer sped up the stairs—the tower, gloating, helped him greatly—and snatched up the makeshift rope coiled by the bed. He had torn up the sheets and drapes on and around the four-poster bed, tying them together to fashion this escape route, which was sketchy at best. However, the adventurer had lost the ability to care. The troupe was his family, and if he couldn’t be with them, then there was no point in living.
The blue jay twittered warnings in his ear, but the adventurer had made up his mind. He tied one end of the rope around the balcony railing and tossed the rest over the side. Gone was the calm of the second day or the resolve of earlier today; left was only desperation, and the fear that it was already too late to be reunited with his loved ones.
Hand-over-hand he lowered himself, and when his arms grew weary he wrapped his legs around the rope and slid, taking care not to be safe, but to always be on the descent. Even so, it was not long before he ran out of rope.
There he was, dangling against the side of the tower, swinging like a pendulum in the wind. Still he had such a long way to go, almost as if he had never gone anywhere; it was the tower’s magic affecting him once again. With no way down and no strength left to pull himself back up, he took a long look at the moon—full and shining bright, casting its light on his misery. Then he uncurled his cramping fingers and let go of the rope.
The blue jay was at his side in an instant, falling like a stone, and then it was gone. In its place was the young girl he had seen upon waking yesterday morning—the one who had reminded him of his friend’s lost daughter.
“Spread your wings!” she shouted over the wind, which grabbed and tore at their clothes as they fell for what seemed like forever. Her voice was shrill, but not out of fear. She said it again, an order this time: “Spread your wings!”
The adventurer, had he not just fought—and lost to—the magic of an ancient stone tower, would have had a hard time believing that the girl wasn’t part of some pre-death hallucination. Shoot, he still didn’t quite want to admit to her existence. How could she be real?
“Your arms!” the girl shouted, pointing to his own. “Stretch them out, like this!” She demonstrated and was gone. The blue jay had reappeared in her place, nose-diving towards the ground beside him, which was rushing at them steadily.
What the heck? thought the adventurer, giving a mental shrug. It isn’t like I’m gonna live through this anyways.
So he spread his arms, marveling at the fact that they rapidly morphed into a raven’s wings. He could feel his newfound feathers catching the wind and slowing his descent, so he let them. An instinct he didn’t know he had kicked in, and within minutes he was flying like a pro, the blue jay by his side.
Though his eyes were not suited for the night, he quickly picked out a familiar cluster of people trekking over the hills and out of the valley below them; their torches flickered and bobbed along the trail, illuminating their position quite nicely. Instantly he dove to meet them, the blue jay hot on his tail.
Upon reaching the ground, the little bird snapped its wings shut, growing into the young girl from before; the raven followed suit, becoming the adventurer once more. Just then, the old and familiar cluster of people appeared around the corner, and the adventurer ran to meet them. Shouts of surprise and joy issued from the mouths of the men and they welcomed their brother with open arms.
The young girl hung back shyly, only coming forward when the explorer beckoned to her. She blushed timidly, eyes passing over the jolly bunch—until her eyes rested on someone she thought she’d never see again.
“Daddy!” she cried, leaping into the man’s arms. Tears of reunited love streamed down their cheeks, intermingling as the father kissed his daughter’s forehead. The entire troupe broke out in cheers.
The hills were merry that night, lit by a blazing bonfire celebration. Laughter and songs persisted until dawn as the troupe thanked their lucky stars and taunted the evil that had kept two too many souls apart from the families with which they belonged.
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