Chapter 14: Safest Home
>>Aelin
I found myself back in the room where I had once stayed. The space was the same as I remembered—quiet, forgotten, tucked away in a corner of the castle no one will ever come to visit. I closed the heavy metal door behind me softly, the faint click echoing in the silence.
This room had been a strange sort of sanctuary for me once. Not because it was comforting—no, it was far from that—but because of the two things that had kept me mildly amused during those long, suffocating days.
The first was the small library next door. I had spent countless hours there, flipping through pages, losing myself in the words. I had read almost every book on the shelves, devouring them one by one. But the ones on the top most shelf had always remained out of reach.
I had no ladder here and the stool wasn’t high enough to help me grasp what was just beyond my fingers.
Right next to the library was my room and in that room is the second reason.
The window, its view both beautiful and haunting. From there, I could see the forest on the castle grounds, its dark green expanse stretching out endlessly. And in the forest there, rising above the trees was a lone tower, distant and isolated, standing apart from the rest of the castle.
I could only ever see the top part of the tower. The rest was swallowed by the dense canopy of the forest, hidden from view. Still, it had always intrigued me. On rare occasions, I had seen movement behind the tower’s old, cracked windows. A shadow here, a flicker there. But every time I had asked someone about it, their answer was always the same.
’The tower is abandoned.’
Now, as I stood in the center of the room, I let my gaze wander, taking it all in for what I knew would be the last time. The faint scent of parchment from the library lingered in the air, mingling with the faint chill of stone walls.
I walked over to the shelf that held the books I had already read, trailing my fingers along the spines. They were worn now, familiar in a way that nothing else in this castle had been.