The Tower
In the southern peaks of the Atlas Mountains, beneath the bright blue sky and in the chilly breeze of the great Atlantic, once stood a tower of no acclaim. Inside a man had hidden a treasure of true and dear value, the name of his firstborn son. He buried this name deep in the bricks and mortar, far beneath the woven carpet and the cold earthen floors. The tower stood for many years, monumental and yet humble, constructed in solitude yet standing equal to the surrounding palms and hills. The man did not build the tower, and did not ask from it more than the name stored deep underneath. For some time, the man was the only one who knew the tower.
Years had passed, and one day the son came to the tower to find the name his beloved father had left for him. The shrubs had grown full, the palms weighed heavy with their sprawling fronds, and he found the tower had begun to crumble, just a few rocks from the top had collapsed inwards. Standing inside the square hall, no more than an arm’s-length in each direction he looked to the sky. Over the walls of the tower, the sun shone far above, casting a dark shadow onto the warm stucco surface. The man felt a sense of unease, as if something was not right with the light from above. In a moment, the feeling passed, and he had left without his name.
The sun had risen and set on the tower over four thousand times more now, and the man had found a woman who cared for him, fought for him, and was his partner in life and eventually, in death. She was a gentle woman, a gatherer who travelled in the tall hills and the lower mountains, searching for berries, flowers, and sometimes the kinds of stones that shone in the light. The tower found her one day, when she was gathering firewood for a cold evening as she wanted to keep her feet warm. She had been growing colder at night in recent months, and so she searched further and further for firewood. When she stumbled across the tower, she did not pay it the same mind her husband had. The woman gathered branches from around the tower, cleaned the vines off the walls, and collected the fallen bricks inside. As the wife set the bricks down besides the shrubs, she noticed that they were not made from the earth. They were something else, which scared her. “This is not a place for us who walk on two feet,” she said aloud in a daze. For minutes, she stood there terrified, before coming to her senses and leaving.
Four thousand more times the sun rose and set, and now the son had grown old, and he had visited the tower once more, on a winter night when the sun was hidden by snow, which hung in the sky. His wife had fallen ill, full of their second child, and the man was scared that she would not live through the frost. The tower met the man halfway this time, a dark shadow which emerged from the icy night, and the son was grateful for this. He rested in the refuge of the tower, where he peered beneath the woven carpet. A ladder was hidden there, covered by a wooden latched door and the firstborn son descended and discovered his name in that place. The next day the storm had passed, and the tower was gone. The son went back to his wife and child, renewed by the knowledge of his name.
Four more winters such as these passed, each colder and more vicious than the last, and in the higher peaks the snow no longer melted in the warmer months. The son’s eldest had grown now to the same size as his father, though less firm and strong, and had heard his father’s stories of the tower that stood in the valley, and sometimes on the mountains. On one warm winter morning, when the snow that covered the ground had melted, but the dirt was cold with ice, the eldest left to find the tower. He traveled through the mountain where his father had seen the tower that fateful night, but it did not stand in that place again. He continued further, into the low valley that his mother had found the tower in, but it did not stand in that place either. The man left, to return home, with a kind of sadness in his heart that he had never felt before, and no matter what, it would not leave him.
The eldest lived with this sadness, until one day his father fell ill with the darkest kind of sickness. The eldest went out again to find the tower, knowing not what else he could do. He traveled for days, searching all the places that he knew the tower could be, and even the ones he knew it could not. He crossed rocky mountain passes, walked through the green and orange valleys, and even went to the far coast where the waves sang gentle songs on the shore. The eldest went until the skin began to fall off his feet and when he knew he could walk no further, he found the tower. It stood beyond where the waves broke white, a small door beckoning just above the darkest of the cerulean tides. A jagged ring of rocks guarded the base, and the eldest felt a quiet terror.
The eldest began to wade into the lighter blue waters, his sight fixed on the tower on the horizon. His feet held him true through the shallower waters, but as the lighter waters turned to deeper tides, his head began to bob under the waves, and so he picked up his feet and swam. The eldest had not swam before, and his arms and legs moved uncertainly as the waves crashed into the man. His muscles ached, and as he clawed onto the jagged rocks, the grandson felt his strength leaving him through his wet skin. Only with the luck of the tides would he return to shore. His raw feet bleeding on the rocks, the son entered the tower.
The tower was a quiet place, the crashing of the waves and the chirping of the sea birds could not be heard within it’s cold stone walls. The tower was decorated with tapestries and candles, hanging from small hooks on the stucco, and there was a kind of sacred solemnity in their arrangement, as if they had been placed in the same spot for years and years. The man looked to the sky far above, bright blue shades lighter than the sea, and sighed. He moved the carpet beneath his feet, opened the trapdoor, and began to descend.
