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Posted on April 24, 2011 at 05:15:04 AM by Dyna Bowmore
 Dyna shivered as she slid through the gates of the castle, her grey eyes large as they tried to look all the way up the still walls. The stones were so blank. She toddled along, her mother’s dark cloak of a dress loose around her, not much older than a baby, hardly steady on her feet. Her hands were held a little away from her body, keeping her balance, like someone learning ice skating. Her mother had dumped her at the gates, leaving a large gold locket, so heavy it felt like it would strangle her, around her neck and the knowledge that other children had found homes here in her ear. Her mother did not like children. She liked old people who would soon be burnt up. She liked decaying things. She didn’t mind childbirth, the disgusting aspects and vivacity of it all appealed to her… but now that the thing was no longer helpless, it was time for it to go. She knew she was going to meet two important boys here. Two boys living feet away from each other, not knowing of the other. And now that ignorance made sense. It was so big here. Just crossing the first courtyard to get to a door, to be less vulnerable to this outside world of chills, was like crossing a moor. She was afraid as she imagined the mountains of stone like honeycomb before her, or like a sponge, a sponge for people. She reached the inner wall and reached up on tiptoe to take hold of the heavy door handle, cold like a dead snake in her hands, and twisted it upwards slowly, snorting a little with the effort. She leant on the small section of the door which was cut into the larger arc of wood, her whole body raised on tiptoe to lean its entire weight on it. With a squeak it started to fall inwards, and she stepped into the castle, eyes wide. She stood quietly out of the door’s way, hands quietly clasped before her, until it slammed behind her, and, surprised, she scuttled to the closest staircase and ran up it, feeling rather like a mouse being watched by a hawk. The hood of her dress fell off her small head, revealing long, dark ginger hair which glinted gold in the light of the solitary torch bracketed against one dark wall. The darkness of the corridors scared her more, and none of her foreknowledge told her what to do, what to expect. There were cobwebs in the corners of the corridors, and dust at the halls’ edges, which rose in tiny clouds at each step. Everything is shadowed, shapes vague and heapish, obscured. The castle makes dulled noises, sounds like rusted metal squealing and rotted wood bending, heavy footsteps flabbing around the crumbling stairways. There were smells of batch-cooked food, huge amounts of steamed vegetables, or overcooked meat, which drifted unpleasantly along the damper parts. Huge ponderous pillars clawed at the larger spaces. Dyna stepped through all of this with a sense of purposelessness and fear. It wasn’t until she reached a tiny staircase which branched off of a wider spiralling eternity of stairs that she started to feel calmer. As she climbed into the winding darkness, she felt a sensation like that a diver feels when he enters his world of wavering light, pearls, tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born into a new form of existence the diver plunges away from the awkwardness of the land and into oneness with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean’s shifting sands, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. It was a sense of reaching home. Dyna ran her right hand along the walls as they became panelled with wood, the stairs also turning to floorboards, honey light, and she became aware of her nearness to the edges of the castle as windows appeared high above her, shedding pinpoints of fuzzy golden light into the stairwell, and, as she rose higher, the thin beams threaded the warm brooding dusk, filled with slowly moving motes like an firmament of stars revolving. One beam caught her dark gown and made her glow gold, and it was out of this brightness that she came into the airy, junk filled attic that she would claim as hers. She stood at the stairhead almost another being. Over her head vague rafters loomed, the lofty room reaching towards them with fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from a grand piano at the point of collapse to the painted head of a broken toy lion, with avenues reaching through it. It was a space to crawl into the recesses of, to create caverns in. Dyna had never seen so many things. The improvised belongings of her babyhood could be forgotten amongst the hills of instruments, furniture, boxes, toys and flags, relics of every kind, kites, pictures, armour. It was a few days later that Dyna was walking down one of the galleries of the darker depths of the castle and heard the low murmur of a boy’s voice. She’d changed into an elaborate gown she’d found amongst the warm fantasia of mountains, a silver and pink threaded shimmer which enveloped her body with the kind of gentle peace her mind could not provide. With a half smile, she ran towards the sound, and, rosy cheeked and out of breath, stumbled painfully over a threshold and crashed to the floor, arms outstretched. DYNA BOWMORE
i could never understand the wind at all was like a ball of love
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