The Girl in the Thorned Tower
Light came first to the top of the tower, the way it always did, spilling gold over the windowsill and across the floorboards long before it reached the forest below. Rapunzel woke to it the way she woke to everything—slowly, and alone. She lay still for a moment, listening to the small sounds of morning: wind combing through the treetops, a woodpecker somewhere testing its patience against bark, the faint creak of stone settling as though the tower itself were stretching after sleep.
She did not open her eyes right away. She liked this part best, the space between dreaming and waking, when the world outside still felt close enough to touch. In her dreams she had been walking—always walking, down roads she had never seen, past houses with smoke curling from their chimneys, through markets loud with voices and color. She could never remember the particulars once she woke, only the feeling: the ground beneath her feet instead of stone, the sense of *forward* instead of *up* and *down* and *round again*.
When she finally sat up, her hair rose with her like a tide pulling back from shore. Seventy feet of it, pooled across the floor in loops and coils, gleaming faintly even in the…
