Fictober 2022 | Day 8 | Deep Water Prompt #2615

Photo by Skull Kat on Unsplash

❝The thing in the tower is just as tall and thin, unknowable vigilant eyes keeping the war above at bay. The skies are strange colors these days.❞

I don’t like this country.

I don’t like their living buildings, which breathe and shift and watch the people scurry below them and upon them and within them like old, patient gods, disinclined to brush away the minor disturbances we cause them.

I don’t like the now-haunted skies, all murky greens and blues edged with sickly yellows and purples, like a bruise, where before they used to be dark and velvety, swept through with speckled opalescence.

I don’t like the distant war cries that wail like faint alarms, mournful and vengeful all at once, between the battling factions overhead.

But the thing in the tower—that I do not mind so much. It is bound, just as I am, and so I feel a kinship with it, though its chains are much larger and made of star-stuff, while mine are made of iron (also star stuff, but tempered). I appreciate that without the thing, the war would come crashing down upon all our heads, sweeping us away like a great and ruinous wave.
 
The thing watches—and the battalions know they are being watched, and so they keep their movements limited to the heavens. I like that too; so perhaps it is not that I like the thing in the tower, but that I am grateful to it.

I wonder if it is grateful to me at all, for the company I provide it, though it isn't willing company. The two of us are so very alone, here in this tower.

Fictober is a challenge where writers respond to a prompt a day for the whole of October.
This year's prompts are from Deep Water Prompts on tumblr.