Rapunzel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Rapunzel had wrapped her hair around the tower's secret for a hundred years before she learned what it was. Now the people who broke things to get what they wanted were digging at her walls. If they reached the sealed thing first, they would find the object that named her binder. She could not let that happen. She meant to learn who chained her here, and free herself. That answer sat beneath her own floor, and strangers wanted it. She stood at the balcony rail and looked down. Her tower rose above a crystal cavern, and the crystals below glowed blue through the arch. Hunters ringed the base. They swung picks at the stone. Collectors watched from the tree line, patient, waiting for the wall to break. A pick struck near the crystal arch. A crack ran up the stone. Rapunzel felt it in her scalp, because her hair lived inside that wall. The pain told her they were close to the burial ground her roots had grown through. Too close to the thing sealed below. She would not dig them out one by one. She would swallow the ground itself. Rapunzel gripped the rail and pushed her hair down through the tower. It poured out of every crack in living ropes. It found the soil, the old bones, the crystal seams. She fed her magic into it and grew. The earth heaved. Thorned vines burst up around the tower base. They wrapped the picks, the ropes, the men. A wall of briar climbed higher than the arch. The hunters shouted and cut, but the vines grew back faster than steel could sever them. In minutes a thicket sealed the whole base of the tower. No pick could reach the wall now. The collectors did not run. One of them raised a horn and blew three long notes into the trees. Rapunzel heard the call carry over the forest and knew it was a signal, not a retreat. Something answered from the far dark. Brush snapped. A shape pushed through the briar as if it were grass. It was a boar built of red brick and tangled thorn, taller than a horse, its tusks scraping the vines aside. Her wall meant nothing to it. It walked to the cracked stone and set its shoulder against the base of the tower. The wall groaned. A brick tusk gouged the crack wider. Blue crystal light spilled out through the gap. Below that light lay the sealed thing and the evidence inside it. Rapunzel pulled her hair back into her hands. The briar had stopped the men, but not this. Her wall was already broken. Whoever built that beast had sent it straight to the one place she was trying to hide. She stared down at the boar working her wall apart. She had bought herself no time at all. She had only learned that someone out there wanted her binder's name as badly as she did.