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The Prophesy Tower. Chapter 51. Write a Novel Challenge.

The Prophesy Tower Title Page Image showing a tuinnel and a single pin prick of light

by Praneeth JoseAugust 9, 2020

What followed was the sort of large dramatic pause you would find in a theatre. But this was not a theatre. This was reality. Hard, bitter and terrifying reality.

Silence hammered itself throughout the dungeon, deafening in its intensity.

In her confusion, Isla’s head blanked out. She couldn’t make sense of the impossible situation she found herself in – and her consciousness crashed in on itself. As she reeled from the shock, wisps of faint memories long obscured by the ravages of her life and simple age, forced themselves on her, inking themselves in a myriad of colours on the blank canvass of her mind, filling it with images. Even here, there was to be no peace. No escape. No blacking out the horror.

She remembers living far away in a place filled with happiness – her childhood home. This was the place that Isla had lived for the majority of her youth. Around her is a large room, elaborately gilded with gold and silver. A large chandelier hangs from the towering ceiling. Looking down, she sees herself wearing an elaborate dress cut from rich silk hues of emerald green and adorned with gold embroidery and pretty ruffles, lending it a soft but sophisticated appearance. Behind here, she hears an old woman following in her footsteps, hurrying her long, and referring to herself as the nanny.

Isla sees herself as a child making her way across way across the room. Flanked on either side of the room there are large, imposing knights in fully gilded armour, their eyes seeming to follow her as she effortlessly glides across it.

The room leads to the Great Hall and, as she enters, she finds herself struck by the sparkles thrown off by a million rubies and emeralds layered on its walls in swirling patterns that draw her eyes away from the crowd of wealthy men drinking champagne that seem to have been waiting for her.

As she enters it seems the gaze of everyone in the room is on her, or rather her studded necklace.

Suddenly, everyone turns as the huge doors again opened. Isla finds herself stepping backwards, with those around her, to the sides of the hall, creating a path for a large gentleman walking through the grand entrance towards her. As he walks towards her, those around him bow.

He was wearing an embellished suit and a crown covered with diamonds and a large ruby in its centre. In his right hand, he carries an incongruously plain ebony staff, but one topped by a carved handle on which she could see astonishingly beautiful engravings of birds and flowers.

Standing before Isla, he offers her his left hand and she feels herself reaching out to him and holding his hand so tightly it hurts, as if anything less will see the beautiful world around her vanish as quickly as it had appeared.

Isla sees them both walking towards the throne where they sit besides each other smiling and laughing.

“Father…”

In the dungeon, Isla and Neina lean against the walls of their cells, seemingly waiting for the other to start speaking and to break the interminable silence. It seems that words are pointless in the face of such depths of despair – and neither speaks.

Instead Isla sobs as the truth of her real identity and her real home crush her in abject sorrow of a world once forgotten and now lost.

Neina is unable to comfort her, their cells divided by bars rusted with time and the vain impressions of futile and scuppered attempts by long dead prisoners to escape. So she calls out, not expecting a response, “We have to get out of here and find out about my parents; if they are alive or not.”

“But before that…” Isla fires back, “we need to stop the queen from completing the prophecy.”

It all seems to so pointless to Neina, but at least Isla seems to have not given up hope. Fearing the answer, Neina pleads: “… and how are we going to get out of here?”

“That’s easy, just follow my lead.”

In hushed tones, Neina reels from the plans that Isla whispers across the cavernous space between them. She is tired, but hope forces her awake as they lay in wait for night to fall and the moon reach the furthest corner of the barred window of her cell. It was then that she knew that twilight fell and the stout man would arrive with their meagre rations of of what bore a very far fetched relationship to ochre porridge.

As he does so, Neina follows Isla’s instructions, starting to scream for help. “Please help, Mister. She’s not moving. I’ve been trying to wake her up, but she doesn’t respond, no matter how many times I call her name.”

Hearing this, the man’s alarm is evident in his rush to open the locks of Isla’s cell. His haste betrays his fear of the consequences if something happens to them under his watch.

As he pulls across the bar to Isla’s cell and squats down to check on her apparently unconscious body, Isla’s hands dart out, grabbing the bowl of gruel and smashing it down on his head with all the force she could muster.

It was too late for him to call for help. He fell on his face, knocked out of his senses, dead to the world.

Isla pushes her way out of the cramped, tiny cell, making her way to Isla’s cell, freeing her with the key she has taken from the stout man’s belt.