(no subject)
This is the one story I really liked that came out of this holiday's furious writing, and though there are a few grammatical errors towards the end, I really liked how it turned out, and I hope anyone who reads it finds it entertaining given any time you spend doing so.
"Yet It Never Stops Speaking to Us, Lest We Burn."
She was a beautiful girl. She was the sort of girl who radiated beauty from within her and off of her very skin; she the was sort of girl who could make lesser men tremble and greater men go mad. She was not a sexual creature, or one who would have flaunted her beauty, and it could be said it may have been very difficult for her to. She was, as it is commonly said and applied to this sort of girl, modest. During her life, she never fully understood her possession of this certain grace, though the spirit-hag did, and could see, from when she dawned, who she would be.
On the night of her first awakening into the world, it was dark, thoroughly black and thick and more than it typically was so during the night-time. She awoke into this darkness, which pushed against her eyes with pressure like that which one experiences upon touching their nose to the bottom of a lake. The girl was not aware of her own existence until she began to breathe. She then experienced the sensation the conscious commonly call fright. When she began to breathe, and felt the expansion of her breast and shoulders, she coughed out the dust which had collected inside of her lungs and throat over the years. The horrible noise which was bursting from her throat and which also brought her to the awareness of her own mouth and tongue was very frightening, and she had difficulty breathing as she choked on the dust which had settled inside of her mouth, too, especially on her teeth. She began to scream.
She screamed in an inhuman, infantile fashion, with all the throes and wails of an infant, unacquainted and ignorant of how it was she should scream having just been brought to life. She was, however, not an infant. She was, at least physically, an adult woman, and any person who saw her would agree she was breathtakingly beautiful.
Writhing on the ground, she became aware of both a patch of white moonlight seeping slowly into the corner of her vision, to which she screamed (having never been visually stimulated before and also experiencing the blinding pain of opening her eyes for the first time), and a sharp tugging at her scalp which occurred when she attempted to move her head. Left, and right, and left she tugged in an attempt to look upon the light which bled from somewhere in the murk of the dark which surrounded her.
She paused, and was quiet. This pause became a cease of all and any action.
Her arms and legs, which she had just become aware of, were bound by something to the ground, as was her waist. It did not feel as though it was a strong binding, but the harder she pulled at the hair, the tighter her limbs were bound, until tiny strands of what held her down began to cut into her flesh.
These lacerations were painful to endure, but she felt pain in her lungs and her heart and everywhere else which was now active; the binds which bit her were no greater pain than the pain which enveloped her completely.
From beside her ear, the girl heard a voice, and the voice said to the girl: “It’s your hair, dearie. That’s what’s got you.” The voice was raspy and dry in texture and the girl decided to respond in the only fashion she knew: to scream.
“Oh, quiet!” gurgled the voice, “I dan’t bring you eyes-open so that you could wail and bemoan yourself.” And the girl shrieked, and the thing which was speaking pinched and caressed the girls face. ”You cannot even comprehend the tongue I speak, or any, but you will know, soon, too much than should ever have been known.”
The thing laughed, and the girl felt hands rest upon her face, lightly. She trembled involuntarily and stopped her screaming.
“I’ll be right back, girl. I’ve to go to the womb from whence the earth came, and fetch you something sweet.” said the voice, and then the girl saw the voice’s origin, a horrible, dark thing which swept over her. It displayed a wild, shifting face which at once looked old and young. The girl would have screamed but elected not to as it had begun to cause her throat much pain. She simply blinked.
And the face blinked back at her. It looked at her first with menace, and then surprised, because the girl was silent. Perhaps the thing was unused to such tolerance of its natural horror, because a worried looked crossed its strange, inhuman features, and it faded away.
The girl began to babble a bit. It amused her for a long while, and that was a longer while than you would think, and then she noticed that the moonlight beside her was beginning to fade. This alarmed her, and as she had no other means of communicating her displeasure, she began to scream, and then cry. Nothing happened to change the light’s dimming, and so she stopped. She felt an itch, and when she tried to move to dispel it, her binds bit deeper into her. She would have felt miserable, but did not know anything else and so simply tried to lay as still as possible until she grew tired of that, too, and proceeded to babble again.
This babbling trailed off into sleep, though it was shallow and painful because the hair on her head was strung taut outwards at every angle. It was so taut that if she let her head fall too far to one side the roots of her hair would be torn from her scalp. The moonlight faded away completely after a few hours, and each successive awakening was violent and painful, until her newborn mind became numb with so much pain, and each successive awakening was greeted with a sun which was rising to brighten the morning world.
When the spirit-hag returned, she could be seen clearly in the morning sun. The girl awoke, and regarded the thing with calm curiosity through her bleary eyes blurred with the tears that came when the hair tore, that which had so terrified her the night before but which now was physically there, apparent, and soaring toward her in a sky so blue as to appear to be nothing more than a flat and painted surface with its very own illumination.
We as observers can be sure the spirit-hag was a witch, in a somewhat classical sense of the word. Like all witches of times before (and this story took place very long ago) she was inadvertently evil, and not necessarily human, either. The spirit-hag appeared to be human, a human with purple and black rags wrapped ‘round her so thickly that one could hardly make out any features of her body; it appeared as if she were a thick, imposing column hunched over to peer curiously toward whatever it was so inclined to observe. Peeking through these veils and tatters was a head with round, nervous eyes and a nose-beak which was so large as to seem inhuman. Underneath this nose there was a pair of very thin, very small black lips, and only if one so choose to look for a pair of lips would one be able to see them. Her shoulders were broad, and her arms were long, and she let them always hang at her side so that you could never make out where body was and arm began through the rags. Only her little head and hands were exposed, which had caused her, in some eyes, to take on the appearance of a wiry, sinister vulture as the rags and cloth fluttered and ripped violently about her in the wind when she took flight through the afternoon sun.
The girl saw her return, zipping about the sky, through a large stone viewing-window. Around it the dust which had filled the girls lungs lay caked into strange, alien shapes. It was the only threshold the girl had ever perceived, and she did not understand its concept or depth, or what size it was, or what the concept of size was at all.
The girl had realized that her eyes were part of a body that could be viewed as it lay out before her and for the most part it responded to what she wanted it to do. It was pale, and almost blue-white because of the sky it reflected, and the girl saw the hair which bound her, and it was the same colour. For a moment she thought the sky and her were one, and that it was she the witch had been flying around upon, she who bound herself, and she who was everything but the stone room that barricaded her body from the rest of herself. Her new mind reeled at the thought of this, and she turned away from the electric and triumphant blue in the window with a hoarse yelp.
Said the spirit-hag, when she fluttered into the window, “Sit up,” and the hands of the witch moved in a series of strange flickers and gestures, though her arms never left her sides. To the untrained mind of the girl, this merely meant something to be terrified of (and she was terrified rightly so of this ghastly thing), but to you, reader, it could have looked like a vulture shuffling its wings.
The girls hair shook and slithered around her violently, and dust from the stone floor and wall around her escaped into the window in thick clouds, and the girl whimpered when the hair tore itself from her wounds which had begun to scab around the binds. It pulled and tugged at her in such a way that she was forced to stand up, which was a difficult thing to begin to learn right there on her second day of consciousness. However, if she fell down, or wavered, the locks bound her tighter, and when the witch lost patience with her she balled her hands into fists and the girl was pushed back against the wall opposite the window. It wrapped itself around her bare body, and lifted her chin up so that she could breathe and would not asphyxiate herself (as she did not know how to stand up yet). The girl screamed through all this, and the witch could not in spite of herself resist filling the girls mouth up with hair so that she would be quiet.
The witch-hag pulled out from within her rags an apple which was so red and full of the sort of magic that only the colour red can hold that even the witch herself could not take her eyes from it.
“A base magic. But the first. And the most potent, I think.” said the spirit-hag. “This apple is from Eden, or what was left of it when I just visited. You are lucky that old Gothel is so feared still in the dark corners of the earth, as the angel sentinels which guard that place do not cower in the face of many things.”
She examined the apple one more, in a careful, deliberate manner, and her lips curled back to show a set of perfect, tiny white teeth. Her quick eyes fluttered all over it. She pulled away from the vibrant red apple, and her breathing was fast, and her eyes went dead when they looked away. She held the apple before the girl’s eyes.
The girl was tired, as she had not slept at all, and was hungry, but did not know to eat. In fact, any other food would have not produced the effect the apple had: it was as if this fruit of wisdom gave the ignorant the knowledge and invitation to eat it merely by proximity. And so the girl ate the fruit from the knobby, eternal hands of Gothel the spirit-hag, and the shimmering blue hair which held her also turned the fruit about and forced the all of it down her throat.
“I am naked.” said the girl.
“I am cold, and I am scared.” said the girl.
“What,” and the girl paused here before saying, “is my name?”
“It would be good fun to deny you this,” said the spirit-hag. Gothel nodded to herself, and paced the room. She smiled at the girl from the corners of her mouth to her eyes, and turned to the giant stone window.
As she walked to the window-sil, it looked like either the witch or the dust had no physical influence, as one of them passed through the other. The dust around the window left no trace of her having disturbed it, but then, her feet were still visible from inside the filth.
She looked out over the edge of the window, and lurched forward as if she were going to take flight again, but instead raise a long, wiry arm that could have been a black, oily wing what with the rags which hung dead from it. They did not move in any breeze the girl could feel, as there was no breeze at all.
With a flick of her wrist, the rags twisted and tore and made whistling sounds with heir movement, and from somewhere on the ground below something came into the witches hands.
“However, the sins of your parents will be very evident in your name, and will cause you great pain in every facet of yourself when you see that which brought you here.” said the spirit-hag.
And she slowly brought her arm up, and dropped upon the ground a clump of fresh rampion.
Rapunzel screamed, because she heard her name and felt her name being pulsed and pushed through every part of her, felt the stones of the room around her weep, felt the clouds outside groan and mock her, felt the air whisper of the sins of her father, who stole rapunzel from Gothel’s garden for his then pregnant wife, and was forced to sacrifice his unborn daughter, to save their lives from the spirit-hag’s wrath.
Her eyes were like those of a horse rearing away in fear, and her hair began to change. Yes, thought Rapunzel, it was turning a blonde. Not a blonde like that of the witch, not a pale-white but a peculiar colour which became like gold in the sun. She felt it become soft, and it became her own, and she struggled, and broke free of it, and fell to the ground with tears.
Through everything still screamed, the world was calm. It took her away for a brief moment. The wind blew and furled underneath her nose, and it calmed her, bearing the message: “You are the product of greed, and you have been raised by jealousy of your beauty. Your golden hair is your curse. Your beauty is a greater curse. Your time lost is something which the witch conceived and is worse, perhaps, than any ancient binding she could have placed before you. I will bring the message of your awakening and imprisonment to all the things below, and soon you will be free.”
And the wind shuddered and was silent, when the witch said, “But I will care for you.” and with a twisted, crooked smile, said “And you will never have to be concerned with these things.”
Rapunzel was strung up like a crude puppet, limb by limb and in a slow, careful fashion, to the circular stone ceiling. She began to cry, because she saw the sky and the clouds and sun and wished to be out there, if nothing else falling through the blue which she wished she was but knew she could not be. She cursed that she had ever woken up from whatever nothing she had come from, but stopped herself. At least, she thought, if nothing else, there is that thought. And that is better than nothing at all.
The spirit-hag growled and groaned, and Rapunzel felt her hair move, slither, and grow out and down, down out of the window, into ladder or rope for the witch the climb down. Rapunzel did not know why she had to do so, when she could have just as easily flown away.
And the spirit-hag knew this, and looked into Rapunzels eyes with her own, and Rapunzel saw strange and evil things in those black eyes that moved and terrified her, and she also saw the contempt the witch held for her. And Rapunzel felt the weight of the hair which was ever flowing out of the window, and when the witch began to descend on it, climbing downward, she felt every little movement, hesistation, and breath that Gothel took, felt it in pain and in the roots of her hair, but some queer magic never let them tear out of her scalp and give her release from her suffering.
Dazedly, Rapunzel noticed it was black again out, and that the witch had left when the sun had turned orange and ochre.
Rapunzel’s days began when she was awoken with the pain of the witch ascending her hair, and ended when she left to meld with the night again. Indeed, Rapunzel saw that this room was refuge from the daytime, and that the witch seemed to become unsettled with some excitement when it was time once more to prey upon the world in the night-time. She would always bring Rapunzel food to eat, or draw it from the world below from out of the stone window, and gave her jewelry, but never clothing; the spirit-hag told her that she was ever a captor and something which belonged to Gothel, and that to give her clothing would be a thing which would take her from the witch.
Once, the spirit-hag allowed Rapunzel to see where it was that the spirit-hag descended to every night, and Rapunzel was curious to discover that she resided in a floating stone cylinder, or at least one which was lost in clouds and was too high to allow Rapunzel to see through them. Rapunzel never asked again about the subject, and even began to entertain the witch as she pleased, hoping that the wind that had spoken to her once would someday fulfill its promise.
And somewhere, in a kingdom far to the west of the tower, a prince gave audience to the wind, and it told him of a maiden with the mind of an infant who was in captivity of the spirit-hag Gothel, of legend. And the young man was taken aback by the winds concern for the girl, and its description of her spry beauty, and mounted a horse to ascend upon her golden lock.
"Yet It Never Stops Speaking to Us, Lest We Burn."
She was a beautiful girl. She was the sort of girl who radiated beauty from within her and off of her very skin; she the was sort of girl who could make lesser men tremble and greater men go mad. She was not a sexual creature, or one who would have flaunted her beauty, and it could be said it may have been very difficult for her to. She was, as it is commonly said and applied to this sort of girl, modest. During her life, she never fully understood her possession of this certain grace, though the spirit-hag did, and could see, from when she dawned, who she would be.
On the night of her first awakening into the world, it was dark, thoroughly black and thick and more than it typically was so during the night-time. She awoke into this darkness, which pushed against her eyes with pressure like that which one experiences upon touching their nose to the bottom of a lake. The girl was not aware of her own existence until she began to breathe. She then experienced the sensation the conscious commonly call fright. When she began to breathe, and felt the expansion of her breast and shoulders, she coughed out the dust which had collected inside of her lungs and throat over the years. The horrible noise which was bursting from her throat and which also brought her to the awareness of her own mouth and tongue was very frightening, and she had difficulty breathing as she choked on the dust which had settled inside of her mouth, too, especially on her teeth. She began to scream.
She screamed in an inhuman, infantile fashion, with all the throes and wails of an infant, unacquainted and ignorant of how it was she should scream having just been brought to life. She was, however, not an infant. She was, at least physically, an adult woman, and any person who saw her would agree she was breathtakingly beautiful.
Writhing on the ground, she became aware of both a patch of white moonlight seeping slowly into the corner of her vision, to which she screamed (having never been visually stimulated before and also experiencing the blinding pain of opening her eyes for the first time), and a sharp tugging at her scalp which occurred when she attempted to move her head. Left, and right, and left she tugged in an attempt to look upon the light which bled from somewhere in the murk of the dark which surrounded her.
She paused, and was quiet. This pause became a cease of all and any action.
Her arms and legs, which she had just become aware of, were bound by something to the ground, as was her waist. It did not feel as though it was a strong binding, but the harder she pulled at the hair, the tighter her limbs were bound, until tiny strands of what held her down began to cut into her flesh.
These lacerations were painful to endure, but she felt pain in her lungs and her heart and everywhere else which was now active; the binds which bit her were no greater pain than the pain which enveloped her completely.
From beside her ear, the girl heard a voice, and the voice said to the girl: “It’s your hair, dearie. That’s what’s got you.” The voice was raspy and dry in texture and the girl decided to respond in the only fashion she knew: to scream.
“Oh, quiet!” gurgled the voice, “I dan’t bring you eyes-open so that you could wail and bemoan yourself.” And the girl shrieked, and the thing which was speaking pinched and caressed the girls face. ”You cannot even comprehend the tongue I speak, or any, but you will know, soon, too much than should ever have been known.”
The thing laughed, and the girl felt hands rest upon her face, lightly. She trembled involuntarily and stopped her screaming.
“I’ll be right back, girl. I’ve to go to the womb from whence the earth came, and fetch you something sweet.” said the voice, and then the girl saw the voice’s origin, a horrible, dark thing which swept over her. It displayed a wild, shifting face which at once looked old and young. The girl would have screamed but elected not to as it had begun to cause her throat much pain. She simply blinked.
And the face blinked back at her. It looked at her first with menace, and then surprised, because the girl was silent. Perhaps the thing was unused to such tolerance of its natural horror, because a worried looked crossed its strange, inhuman features, and it faded away.
The girl began to babble a bit. It amused her for a long while, and that was a longer while than you would think, and then she noticed that the moonlight beside her was beginning to fade. This alarmed her, and as she had no other means of communicating her displeasure, she began to scream, and then cry. Nothing happened to change the light’s dimming, and so she stopped. She felt an itch, and when she tried to move to dispel it, her binds bit deeper into her. She would have felt miserable, but did not know anything else and so simply tried to lay as still as possible until she grew tired of that, too, and proceeded to babble again.
This babbling trailed off into sleep, though it was shallow and painful because the hair on her head was strung taut outwards at every angle. It was so taut that if she let her head fall too far to one side the roots of her hair would be torn from her scalp. The moonlight faded away completely after a few hours, and each successive awakening was violent and painful, until her newborn mind became numb with so much pain, and each successive awakening was greeted with a sun which was rising to brighten the morning world.
When the spirit-hag returned, she could be seen clearly in the morning sun. The girl awoke, and regarded the thing with calm curiosity through her bleary eyes blurred with the tears that came when the hair tore, that which had so terrified her the night before but which now was physically there, apparent, and soaring toward her in a sky so blue as to appear to be nothing more than a flat and painted surface with its very own illumination.
We as observers can be sure the spirit-hag was a witch, in a somewhat classical sense of the word. Like all witches of times before (and this story took place very long ago) she was inadvertently evil, and not necessarily human, either. The spirit-hag appeared to be human, a human with purple and black rags wrapped ‘round her so thickly that one could hardly make out any features of her body; it appeared as if she were a thick, imposing column hunched over to peer curiously toward whatever it was so inclined to observe. Peeking through these veils and tatters was a head with round, nervous eyes and a nose-beak which was so large as to seem inhuman. Underneath this nose there was a pair of very thin, very small black lips, and only if one so choose to look for a pair of lips would one be able to see them. Her shoulders were broad, and her arms were long, and she let them always hang at her side so that you could never make out where body was and arm began through the rags. Only her little head and hands were exposed, which had caused her, in some eyes, to take on the appearance of a wiry, sinister vulture as the rags and cloth fluttered and ripped violently about her in the wind when she took flight through the afternoon sun.
The girl saw her return, zipping about the sky, through a large stone viewing-window. Around it the dust which had filled the girls lungs lay caked into strange, alien shapes. It was the only threshold the girl had ever perceived, and she did not understand its concept or depth, or what size it was, or what the concept of size was at all.
The girl had realized that her eyes were part of a body that could be viewed as it lay out before her and for the most part it responded to what she wanted it to do. It was pale, and almost blue-white because of the sky it reflected, and the girl saw the hair which bound her, and it was the same colour. For a moment she thought the sky and her were one, and that it was she the witch had been flying around upon, she who bound herself, and she who was everything but the stone room that barricaded her body from the rest of herself. Her new mind reeled at the thought of this, and she turned away from the electric and triumphant blue in the window with a hoarse yelp.
Said the spirit-hag, when she fluttered into the window, “Sit up,” and the hands of the witch moved in a series of strange flickers and gestures, though her arms never left her sides. To the untrained mind of the girl, this merely meant something to be terrified of (and she was terrified rightly so of this ghastly thing), but to you, reader, it could have looked like a vulture shuffling its wings.
The girls hair shook and slithered around her violently, and dust from the stone floor and wall around her escaped into the window in thick clouds, and the girl whimpered when the hair tore itself from her wounds which had begun to scab around the binds. It pulled and tugged at her in such a way that she was forced to stand up, which was a difficult thing to begin to learn right there on her second day of consciousness. However, if she fell down, or wavered, the locks bound her tighter, and when the witch lost patience with her she balled her hands into fists and the girl was pushed back against the wall opposite the window. It wrapped itself around her bare body, and lifted her chin up so that she could breathe and would not asphyxiate herself (as she did not know how to stand up yet). The girl screamed through all this, and the witch could not in spite of herself resist filling the girls mouth up with hair so that she would be quiet.
The witch-hag pulled out from within her rags an apple which was so red and full of the sort of magic that only the colour red can hold that even the witch herself could not take her eyes from it.
“A base magic. But the first. And the most potent, I think.” said the spirit-hag. “This apple is from Eden, or what was left of it when I just visited. You are lucky that old Gothel is so feared still in the dark corners of the earth, as the angel sentinels which guard that place do not cower in the face of many things.”
She examined the apple one more, in a careful, deliberate manner, and her lips curled back to show a set of perfect, tiny white teeth. Her quick eyes fluttered all over it. She pulled away from the vibrant red apple, and her breathing was fast, and her eyes went dead when they looked away. She held the apple before the girl’s eyes.
The girl was tired, as she had not slept at all, and was hungry, but did not know to eat. In fact, any other food would have not produced the effect the apple had: it was as if this fruit of wisdom gave the ignorant the knowledge and invitation to eat it merely by proximity. And so the girl ate the fruit from the knobby, eternal hands of Gothel the spirit-hag, and the shimmering blue hair which held her also turned the fruit about and forced the all of it down her throat.
“I am naked.” said the girl.
“I am cold, and I am scared.” said the girl.
“What,” and the girl paused here before saying, “is my name?”
“It would be good fun to deny you this,” said the spirit-hag. Gothel nodded to herself, and paced the room. She smiled at the girl from the corners of her mouth to her eyes, and turned to the giant stone window.
As she walked to the window-sil, it looked like either the witch or the dust had no physical influence, as one of them passed through the other. The dust around the window left no trace of her having disturbed it, but then, her feet were still visible from inside the filth.
She looked out over the edge of the window, and lurched forward as if she were going to take flight again, but instead raise a long, wiry arm that could have been a black, oily wing what with the rags which hung dead from it. They did not move in any breeze the girl could feel, as there was no breeze at all.
With a flick of her wrist, the rags twisted and tore and made whistling sounds with heir movement, and from somewhere on the ground below something came into the witches hands.
“However, the sins of your parents will be very evident in your name, and will cause you great pain in every facet of yourself when you see that which brought you here.” said the spirit-hag.
And she slowly brought her arm up, and dropped upon the ground a clump of fresh rampion.
Rapunzel screamed, because she heard her name and felt her name being pulsed and pushed through every part of her, felt the stones of the room around her weep, felt the clouds outside groan and mock her, felt the air whisper of the sins of her father, who stole rapunzel from Gothel’s garden for his then pregnant wife, and was forced to sacrifice his unborn daughter, to save their lives from the spirit-hag’s wrath.
Her eyes were like those of a horse rearing away in fear, and her hair began to change. Yes, thought Rapunzel, it was turning a blonde. Not a blonde like that of the witch, not a pale-white but a peculiar colour which became like gold in the sun. She felt it become soft, and it became her own, and she struggled, and broke free of it, and fell to the ground with tears.
Through everything still screamed, the world was calm. It took her away for a brief moment. The wind blew and furled underneath her nose, and it calmed her, bearing the message: “You are the product of greed, and you have been raised by jealousy of your beauty. Your golden hair is your curse. Your beauty is a greater curse. Your time lost is something which the witch conceived and is worse, perhaps, than any ancient binding she could have placed before you. I will bring the message of your awakening and imprisonment to all the things below, and soon you will be free.”
And the wind shuddered and was silent, when the witch said, “But I will care for you.” and with a twisted, crooked smile, said “And you will never have to be concerned with these things.”
Rapunzel was strung up like a crude puppet, limb by limb and in a slow, careful fashion, to the circular stone ceiling. She began to cry, because she saw the sky and the clouds and sun and wished to be out there, if nothing else falling through the blue which she wished she was but knew she could not be. She cursed that she had ever woken up from whatever nothing she had come from, but stopped herself. At least, she thought, if nothing else, there is that thought. And that is better than nothing at all.
The spirit-hag growled and groaned, and Rapunzel felt her hair move, slither, and grow out and down, down out of the window, into ladder or rope for the witch the climb down. Rapunzel did not know why she had to do so, when she could have just as easily flown away.
And the spirit-hag knew this, and looked into Rapunzels eyes with her own, and Rapunzel saw strange and evil things in those black eyes that moved and terrified her, and she also saw the contempt the witch held for her. And Rapunzel felt the weight of the hair which was ever flowing out of the window, and when the witch began to descend on it, climbing downward, she felt every little movement, hesistation, and breath that Gothel took, felt it in pain and in the roots of her hair, but some queer magic never let them tear out of her scalp and give her release from her suffering.
Dazedly, Rapunzel noticed it was black again out, and that the witch had left when the sun had turned orange and ochre.
Rapunzel’s days began when she was awoken with the pain of the witch ascending her hair, and ended when she left to meld with the night again. Indeed, Rapunzel saw that this room was refuge from the daytime, and that the witch seemed to become unsettled with some excitement when it was time once more to prey upon the world in the night-time. She would always bring Rapunzel food to eat, or draw it from the world below from out of the stone window, and gave her jewelry, but never clothing; the spirit-hag told her that she was ever a captor and something which belonged to Gothel, and that to give her clothing would be a thing which would take her from the witch.
Once, the spirit-hag allowed Rapunzel to see where it was that the spirit-hag descended to every night, and Rapunzel was curious to discover that she resided in a floating stone cylinder, or at least one which was lost in clouds and was too high to allow Rapunzel to see through them. Rapunzel never asked again about the subject, and even began to entertain the witch as she pleased, hoping that the wind that had spoken to her once would someday fulfill its promise.
And somewhere, in a kingdom far to the west of the tower, a prince gave audience to the wind, and it told him of a maiden with the mind of an infant who was in captivity of the spirit-hag Gothel, of legend. And the young man was taken aback by the winds concern for the girl, and its description of her spry beauty, and mounted a horse to ascend upon her golden lock.