GILDED AND GOLDEN TOWER

Ever since Ashen could remember, his life had been a cage. It was gilded and golden and extravagant, but it was always a cage.

The most important rule was that he was never allowed to leave their castle boundaries, and those were marked by a fence with guards everywhere. Of course, they included things like the pool and the gardens, and for the longest time, he didn't think there was anything strange at all about any of it.

That quickly changed when Ashen turned old enough to understand things like movies and books, and he realized that characters depicted were never as isolated as he was, but even so, Ashen never fought these strange laws.

He had the dreams, and those were things that made him never want to fight.

They started shortly after he brought up his desires to go to school, real school, with his mother, the queen.

She stared down at him with a fond kind of dread and sorrow in her eyes, the same look that she generally got when she looked at him. And she sighed. "I'm sorry, Ashen, but you can't. You stay in your classes here at the castle. But what if I offered you something in return for it?"

"What kind of something?" He grinned up at her, easily distracted. His mother had all kinds of strange trinkets around the castle.

"What about magic?" Her eyes twinkled, and Ashen's grin widened.

"Magic is kids' stuff, Mother. There's no such thing."

"Oh, is that a fact? What if I proved you wrong?" She stood, still smiling at him, and he was enchanted. The queen's quarters was a wild, sprawling place, and it had all kinds of mystical books that drew Ashen's fantasies.

He watched eagerly while she got down a bowl and chalice. She drew a symbol on her desk with a strange chalk and placed the bowl on top of it.

Ashen couldn't hear what his mother said under her breath, but she whispered as she poured water out of the chalice into the bowl. She held her hands on top of it, still whispering.

For a while, nothing happened, but then, while he watched, the water turned to dirt in the bowl, and he squealed when a beautiful dark dahlia grew there. "Elves adore mother nature," she finally said, touching his nose.

It worked. She had his attention. She showed him her other quarters, the ones with all of her strange artifacts, and Ashen was instantly drawn to a specific glass case.

He didn't know what it was about that case, except that it called to him, as if many voices swirled inside of it. Ashen wandered over to it and stared into the case, feeling as if those voices were speaking with him.

It was as if they knew him, as if he belonged to them somehow.

"Ash!"

He turned, broken from a reverie, and his mother was staring at him with a kind of terror. While he watched, she seemed to calm herself. "There are many dangerous types of magic. Anything in one of these cases is locked and sealed. I don't care how curious you are. You are never to touch these types, understood? If you do somehow open one and trespass, I will bar you out of these rooms for a long time. You have to be good, Ash."

He nodded, but his mind was on that terrible case. "Yes, mother. Show me more."

That was the night the dreams started.

Ashen dreamed of a goddess, a beautiful goddess, and she seemed a bit surprised to see him. Which struck Ashen as odd. She was trespassing in his dream, right? Why should she be surprised? But then, as he watched, her brows smoothed, and she smiled. "Hello, little one."

This had to be one of those storybook saviors. If he was the princess locked in a tower, then there would be a prince charming who would slay the dragon. But there was an unnatural twist to it. He was a prince locked in a tower. Wouldn't it be fair to say that this was the princess charming who would slay the dragon?

His fantasies of her started that night, and he had an instant obsession for the goddess in his dreams.

She had curves flowing in a mesmerizing figure-eight. Her waist, slim and taut, accentuated the fullness of her hips and the swell of her breasts, and her hair was almost as black as night and fell in long waves.

What was more, she was built like a temptress would be. She was lithe, like a reed by a calm stream. He didn't know why, but he instantly trusted that goddess. As soon as he saw her, some magic took hold of him. "Are you here to claim me?"

She chuckled. "I doubt that very much. Why do you need saving?"

Ashen hesitated. The answer would make him sound very spoiled because he knew that his life was charmed. And yet... he wanted to speak the truth.

He frowned because his thoughts were these broken things. "I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me. I hear these voices, and I'm so confused, and I can't go anywhere to find any answers."

"Ah." Then she made a grimace, and her voice was strange. "For Christ's sake, Isadora, I heard you the first time."

She rubbed her temple and then focused back on Ashen, smiling gently. "You're not crazy, little one. You are merely torn at the moment. Let's see. How to explain best... You're different, little one, and that's true. You need to hide these differences from others because they will think you crazy, though I can attest that isn't the case. Do you know about butterflies?"

Ashen crossed his arms and glared at her. "Everyone knows about butterflies."

She grinned. "Fair enough. So, let's liken your life to a butterfly's. You're in the cocoon, and it's disorienting. You were given away, and everything in you is changing to acclimate to the life that awaits you."

"I don't understand." Ashen retorted. She was making everything sound much more complicated, more terrifying.

"It's nothing to be scared of." Her eyes turned concerned with his agitation, and a soft purring sound escaped the goddess' mouth.

Strangely, it was soothing for him to hear. "There we go. There's nothing to fear. It's going to be confusing, but it will all make sense in the end, I promise."

Those words calmed Ashen even more because somehow he trusted that goddess. Everything in him trusted her, even if he could have never said why. Ashen nodded. "Okay. Okay, I'll be good."

She smiled in approval, and he warmed to it. "Don't tell anyone about these dreams or the voices, alright?"

Again, Ashen nodded, knowing her words to be true. He had to keep his secrets.

But after that, he started to sneak into the artifact room so he could sit in front of that special black case with its strange books and even stranger pentagrams.

They whispered to him, and it made him feel closer to that goddess from his dreams. Ashen's shoulder started to itch as he sat in front of that case night after night, until one morning, he looked in his mirror and blinked.

There was a mark on the back of his shoulder, a strange mark. It formed a star of a sort and looked almost like a scar. His mother's paranoia turned even more pronounced when she discovered it, and since then, he heard his parents arguing every night.

Thalia told Galahad he was crazy, begged him to let Ashen have some freedoms, but all of these arguments were met with no give on his part.

King Galahad kept Ashen in his tower, and he stayed quiet, kept his secrets to himself. Ashen settled for the company of the goddess in his dreams on those delightful nights when she appeared to him, and he kept his head down.

Ashen was allowed to order anything at all he wished, allowed to go for walks and swims as he pleased. He studied everything given to him and all the magics he was allowed access to in the royal library.

Ashen had nothing but time to learn these things, and he used it all to his heart's content. He didn't know why he was drawn to some topics and not others, but he never forgot what his dream goddess told him.

Ashen had been given to something and he didn't know what, but he was changing and growing to fit whatever end waited for him.

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