Once there was a beautiful Tower that was trapped by a tall, sinister Princess.
The Tower was a lovely, bright, airy tower which loved nothing more than to be bedecked with flowers from the local fields. In happier times, its lower levels held carnivals for the local children, and its upper levels served as an observatory.
All this changed when a wicked Witch locked a Princess in the Tower.
The Princess would not be denied. She bustled into the top of the tower, pushing all the astronomical instruments out of the windows and off of parapets as she wept over her cruel fate: in a world where most peasants primarily at mush, other mush, and a third form of mush that didn’t taste as good, her roast partridge was frequently undercooked when the sweating chefs finally ran from the Castle grounds up the nine hundred eighty seven steps to where the Princess, for no particularly good reason, insisted on staying at the very top of the Tower, claiming it was good for her complexion.
Furthermore, many of the days of the year were somewhat rainy, and during the winter, it sometimes even snowed; a particular hardship for someone who could not stroll free through the woods and the fields, and was forced to spend her time in the 240,000 square foot condominium of the Great Tower.
The Tower tried to be patient.
Princesses do not tend to live more than, say, a hundred years; significantly less, if one can find an appropriate dragon.
Towers can last many centuries.
Perhaps if the Tower simply endured this Princess, someday she would shuffle off this mortal coil, accidentally defenestrate, and the Tower would be rid of her once, for all, and for good, bad, indifferent, and anything else available.
Perhaps the Tower had a Fairy Godkeep, some hitherto unknown architectural ancestor with magical ambitions, who might turn the Princess into a frog. Then all that would be necessary would be attracting a cat…
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.
