10.
PRESENT DAY

That night, in her dreams, Lotte searched for a tower.

She couldn't remember what she needed a tower for. Her whole life in Raidox, the sky had been chopped up by towers. There was never a need to search for them, they were all just there.

But this tower was different. It was old and solitary. It had only one room, at the very top and hundreds of spiralling worn steps to be climbed.

But no matter how much she ran that night, through fields of flowers and skies studded with diamond-like stars, her mind was a closed circuit and she couldn't find the way towards that place.

When she finally woke up, it was to the sound of weeping. She opened her eyes expecting a forest canopy, but all she saw was grey, empty sky.
She rose, expecting to see the tower covered in vines and lichen with those odd violet flowers and their bloody centre.

But before her was a dark pit. A spiralling staircase started at her feet and went down, down, down into the darkness. The stairs were of the same worn rock as those of the tower. The darkness they led into was absolute.

Out of the depths, she could hear someone weeping. It was the kind of breathy, silent sobs. The kind of crying she knew only too well, when she herself had tried to keep her grief hidden.

"Hello?" she called down, her voice getting swallowed up by the pit.
She didn't fear the dark—she was a creature of the night—but both parts of her, the elven half, and human half, despised the thought of going underground.

The weeping continued. She descended a few steps. "Hello?"
The person in the pit groaned and sniffed. "Lotte?" he said in a shaking voice.

It was the same voice from the tower, but why was it a pit now? "What's wrong?" She took another step down, then another, but she couldn't bring herself to venture deeper into the darkness.

"They killed her," he said, his voice a rocky rumble and the onslaught of sobs that followed shot through Lotte's own bones. She'd never experienced this kind of pain before, not in all her life. She couldn't stop her legs from moving down. The void before her opened up inside her heart like a rose of pure darkness.

"They killed her," he said. "They killed her." He repeated, over and over.

"Who?" Lotte asked. She had to know.

"Sia," he said, before succumbing again to a bout of sobs. "They killed Sia."

The name, of course, meant nothing to her, but because she was inside his mind, she felt a wave of intense connection, protectiveness and...loss.

"I'm sorry," she said, her own voice trembling. She began descending down the stairs now, in earnest. Determined to reach the bottom. "I'm here," she said. "I'm coming. I'm—"

"Lotte, no." It was his voice, but it was coming from somewhere behind her. She felt an odd pull, as if there was a string connected to the back of her hand and the length of her spine.

The inverted staircase popped out, walls rose around her. The pit had become a tower. Lotte was high up inside it, rushing up instead of down, and the change made her head spin and knees buckle.
"What..."

"You weren't supposed to go there," he said. She could feel something fragile on the edges of his voice. "That was...private."

Despite not physically being there, Lotte felt her face flush. She'd found her way to him, but she had clearly gone too far. "Are you... are you alright?"

"It happened a long time ago," he said.

"Does it still hurt?" She put her hand to her chest where the memory of that void had left a heaviness. She never wanted to feel something like that again.

"It never stops to hurt," he whispered. "But...I don't want it to stop, either."

Lotte started climbing again. She didn't feel worried, not like last time. "Why not?"

"I don't want to forget, not even that. Forgetting is dangerous."

"Will you tell me about her?"

"Not today," he answered quickly, his voice weary.

Lotte nodded. Perhaps he had to visit his grief more keenly today because of her. She looked down below. She had quite a long way to go if she wanted to leave.

But if she left him as he was, she had a strong sense that his mind would plummet right back to that place.

"I want to see you," she said.

"Tonight?" He clearly didn't believe her.

"Now." She started climbing the steps three at a time.

He didn't say anything, but around her the tower became brighter and there was a lovely fragrance, like a fresh early spring freeze with a hint of thawing mountain snow and a dash of bloom.

"Why is this tower so tall?" Lotte said, panting.

A gold chain suddenly dangled before her face. "Here, grab onto this."

She stopped, taking the moment to catch her breath before grabbing ahold. The chain was thin, and it shone like no gold she had ever seen. It grew taut at her touch and suddenly she was whisked off her feet. It was the same sensation of the string on her spine, except this chain pulled her forward and not back. The air rushed in her ears, the tower became a blur. She went up, up.

Vaguely, she noticed herself passing through a circular opening, into a large round room before crashing into something soft and sparkling with a series of clangs resonating around her.

The chain scurried out of her palm as someone gently, but firmly, grabbed her arms and pushed her back.

She found herself face to face with a creature like no other. He wasn't quite what she was expecting. And she was a lot closer to him than she had ever anticipated being.

In fact, she was right in his lap.

He was not an elf, or a human, but it wasn't that he was completely different from both. His ears were roughly the same size and shape as her own, and his eyes—an impossible sapphire colour—were perfectly proportionate if you disregarded his outrageously long eyelashes. Even his skin, if you ignored the odd luminescence, was a cool brown not unlike many humans.

But his cheeks and forehead were studded with a neat pattern of what looked like sparkling rhinestones...or...scales? He had two small round horns protruding out of his scalp, white-grey at the button and black at the tip. His face was framed by the cascading locks of blue-ish-white hair that were so long they must've reached his waist.

Lotte had time to take all this in, and then some, because they both somehow lost the ability to move. His eyes wouldn't leave her face, his chest rose and fell as if he had been the one running up stairs.

Suddenly he smiled with a brightness that was almost blinding, and the bottom fell out of Lotte's stomach.

"You're here," he said, breathless. "You're really, truly here."

She scrambled away, feeling giddy and dizzy. From an entirely aesthetic perspective, if he were artwork, he would be a masterpiece. He was so beautiful that it hurt her heart to look at him and at the same time, she wanted to see more.

Also, she wanted to draw him so badly her fingers began to itch.
He was staring at her oddly. Wide-eyed and attentive. As if...as if she were the moon who had fallen right out of the sky into his tower room.
As if he wanted to draw her.

"Well, not really, truly," she said, feeling as if her voice was coming from a very long distance. "Only metaphysically. Does this place actually exist outside your mind?"

He made a very tiny, jerking nod with his head and immediately stiffened.

But Lotte understood. He...whoever he was, whatever he was, he was cursed.

He smiled again so widely his eyes crinkled at the corners and his gemstone-like scales caught the light reflecting back their numerous colours. "You have no idea how long I've wanted to meet you."

She felt very bashful at this declaration and tore her eyes off him. "Wh—why?" There were countless windows in the circular room. She chose to look out them.

"I've...Well, you see, I posses a special ability. I can hear magic."

There was a large bed in the far end of the room, a mess of whicker baskets and burlap sacks near the larger windows on her right. "Hear magic?" Lotte asked as she continued to survey the room.

"Sometimes it's disturbing," he said. "And other times, it's like music more beautiful than I could explain."

There was a big round table with a mess of plates and books on it. More books lay in piles behind where he sat.

She finally had nowhere else to look but at him.

"Nothing I heard was as beautiful as your magic, Lotte," he said.

A shock ran through her. He was just as mesmerising upon second inspection.

"I feel...strange," she said.

He jumped to his feet with a precise yet feather-like movement, grabbing her hands. His fingers were long, palms narrow, nails black and pointed. She only noticed now, he had wings. "Come back tomorrow?" he pleaded. "You're about to—"

Lotte's eyes snapped open.

"Wake up, sleepyhead," Maloru said.

She sat up, feeling dizzy, hand going right to her heart.

"Oooo...Did you have a naughty dream or something?"

Her cheeks were hot. She didn't much like blushing. It was the combination of her red and gold blood, the red gave a faint pink to her cheeks and the gold made it literally glow.

"N—n—no," Lotte said, taking a deep breath to calm her racing heart.

"Uh huh. Stutter makes it real." Maloru wagged his finger in her face while clicking his tongue before getting to his feet.

Lotte didn't have the faintest clue what was going on, or if her dream could be considered naughty or not. She had a lot on her mind, a long journey ahead, a dangerous kingdom to reach.

But what she wanted...

She wanted to see him again.

***

10 YEARS BEFORE THE WAR

The wealthy man, Henri, found Lotte again a week after buying her first drawings. With only a small portion of the money he had given her, she bought the most expensive box of watercolours she could find, as well as brushes and a little tin she could use for paint water. She still drew on a small scale, but the sense of ease she had felt with the pencil sketches increased tenfold in a world of colour.

"Amazing," he said, speaking from over her shoulder, making her start. She spun around, cowering away from him.

He raised his hands in a gesture of peace. "I didn't mean to startle you."

She looked at him without moving a muscle.

He crouched down so he was at eye level with her. It looked like he was trying to seem unthreatening, but Lotte liked him a lot less without his companion.

"Do you have any more of those drawing you sold me last time?" he asked.

Lotte's eyes flicked to the messenger bag she had recently bought. It had a wooden box in it where she now stored her completed drawings, just in case she'd decide to sell some.

But at that moment, she had more money than she needed. She spilled out the water and began to gather her brushes.

"No need to be alarmed," Henri said with a laugh. "I just wanted to buy a few more."

But she remembered the calculating look he had given her before parting the first time. She shoved all her things into the bag and gathered it to her chest, taking a step back from him.

"Alright, little one," he said, speaking in a coaxing voice as if she were some animal. "Peace."

She turned on her heel and ran.

It was useless, though. He found her again a few days later. Lotte thought that, like Loureen, Henri had a gang that was on constant lookout for her. Otherwise, in a city as large as Raidox, he'd never be able to locate her.

She began collecting her things the moment she saw him. But he just smiled, placed a basket at her feet and walked away.

The basket contained a freshly baked meat pie, a few red apples, a wedge of cheese, a small chocolate cake and a box of oil pastels in sixty-four colours.

Even at the age of seven, Lotte thought she knew her strengths and weaknesses quite well. She could run fast, she could see in the dark, she could function on nothing but a can of sardines and a head full of daydreams.

And there was nothing in this world that made her heart race more than dozens of different colours laid neatly in a box ready to be used.