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from the top of the flightarthur
IP: 89.240.115.174
Posted on August 23, 2012 at 10:44:08 PM by Dyna Bowmore




In the pinkish glow of twilight, Dyna Bowmore picked her way through the trees outside the castle’s walls with the comfort of one who has been doing this since childhood. Her improbably glittery shoes followed routes that an outsider would have thought to be random, but the absentminded glaze of her kohl-rimmed eyes showed that the knowledge of where she was going was ingrained within her. She reached the walls at a point where a thick slab of stone had been displaced, leaving a hole she could just squeeze through. The slightly damp, craggy, wall seemed to embrace her small pale figure for a moment, like a jewel on velvet, and then it enveloped her.

She paused within the walls, gazing up once more on her beloved castle. She had wondered if, on returning, it would seem smaller than it had in memory, but no, the walls still reached heights which baffled her sense of depth. She drew lipstick from a hidden pocket and applied it carefully, and then took a step out of the shadows of the wall. And yes, there he was.

‘Uncle’ Christoph had been, in her view, cursed since birth. His shriveled arm and scaly hand was only slightly worse than his inherent malevolence, and the injuries his grumpiness had brought upon himself only emphasized his stumpy irregularity. His scaly hand, on his one good arm, held a roughly hewn crutch, on which he swung towards her with monkey-like agility. He paused at a distance where his shortness would not be overly contrasted by her willowy figure, and glared at her through his matted beard. His dark eyes blinked rapidly and a rough, almost inhuman voice emanated from his overgrown moustache.

“Well. Back to spoil the barrel are you? Told you you'd return.”

He stumped closer towards her, into her personal space, and leered into her face, the smell of garbage rotting off him.

“The castle. It knew. It’s in your bones, heh.”

Dyna shuddered and drew away from the wet darkness of his graveyard mouth. Christoph was the invisible eyes and ears of the castle, his cavernous mind laid out in its spaces, mistaken for a servant since his childhood. His father was her father’s adopted son, and when Dyna had been abandoned by her parents, it had been to him that she had fled, thinking that in someone with a similar background she might find refuge. And, indeed, he had shown her the ropes of living behind the scenes, shown her the dark inner routes of the castle, his roughness kinder than her mother’s total ignorance. And it had been in rebellion against his gross appearance that she had first experimented with her own wardrobe, which had caused a small rift between them.

“Well, Christoph. No one gets through these walls without you seeing, do they. Nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing’s changed?! Idiot! You can no longer use the back passage of the west quarter, and some imbicile cut down the great root, so there is no bridge from the kitchens going north…”

She tuned out, gazing around her, ignoring his warnings about the changes in routes to stay invisible about the castle. Why should she bother being invisible? Who would notice a spare girl wandering around, anyway, and if they did, well she was only here until she could think of somewhere else she should be. That was all. Smiling benignly, she followed his hideous figure through a maze of dingy tunnels, vistas of stone reaching in each direction, up and down half-moldy ladders, her memory tightly reminding her where the snagging nails were, what to avoid. A closeness in her chest eased – this was, for all she disliked the idea, her home.

Christoph reached his low door. The room he had spent his life huddled away in was exactly his height – she remembered when she’d started being too tall for it. No wonder she walked so straight the rest of the time – being bent down to his height had been rather traumatic to her young mind. He opened it with a flourish, and swung his half-mauled legs through into his putrid lair.

“… but the tunnel under the right wing is, finally, clear. So. Here we are, you and me again, cozy again, eh?”

She paused in the doorway, and then took a step away.

“Well. It may just be a visit. I’m hungry, going to the kitchens.”

She quickly stepped away, ignoring his protests. She wanted to stretch back into the castle again, to find her favourite parts. To see if they’d fixed the stained glass, to get to her attic – her face glowed with joy at the thought of her attic. It had been filled with the treasures of her castle – the moth eaten furs, the cast away toys, strange carvings: it was her dusty eden. She threaded through the walls, easily stepping through the mouse droppings, sweeping away the cobwebs, occasionally pausing to gaze through a chink in the walls at the normal dweller’s world, grey eyes taking it all in in great relieved gulps.

She reached the roof and tiptoed along the leaden tip of it, the world around her seeming made entirely of stone and sky, fields of flagstones stretching to her horizons. And there, that little window she had once found, hidden in ivy, there, her attic. She reached the window and stretched one dainty foot through, hopping in with her customary spin. Oh, wonders, the echoing chapel of golden motes, her attic. In the shadows she stepped forward, into her world.


DYNA BOWMORE


there's a bell in my ears... there's a wide white roar...






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