Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Stone Wall, Part One

Where the south and east walls of Louest meet is a small bedroom, pressed right up against the cold stone.  The bedroom is small, in the back corner of an inn, at the end of a long stretch of houses built right up against the city wall.  The room was large enough, but only barely, to hold a mattress and all the possessions in the world belonging to X, the only child of the innkeepers.  Only he knew that if he crawled and wiggled his way between the wall and his mattress, right in the very corner, there was a nook--a small depression where the boulders making up the wall curved in.  And in that depression was a loose rock.  By working at it, he had found that it could be removed and behind it was a tunnel.  It was an apparently long-lost door to an apparently long-lost city secret.  Now it was his secret.

X was a happy, quiet boy, 10 years old, straw hair sticking up wherever it would.  His parents were always busy with the inn and that gave X lots of time to himself, which he usually spent reading in his room, far from the noise and bustle of one of the busier inns in that section of Louest.

If there was something unusual about X, it was his ability to get lost in a book for endless hours without any sense of the outside world.  His parents would on occasion come in to rouse him and get him going early in the morning, only to find him reading, sleeplessly, for the twelfth straight hour.  They would mildly chide him, but otherwise let him do as he wanted.

Upon awakening, X got up and exited through the small, unnoticeable door beneath the stairwell outside his bedroom, where no one would even suspect there to be a bedroom.  Due to the shape of the city wall, it looked like there was hardly room for a supply closet under the stairs.  X liked it that way--he felt safe, cozy, and tucked away.

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