Chapter 43: The writer.
POV: Cassandra Ryla
'-the boy lunged for his most treasured possession, the crystal ball did not wait for him, and so it fell down the cliff and into the grand sea.'
"Finally!" I yelled out loud; I had just finished writing my first story! Hopefully, people will be interested in the tales of a child relying too much on one thing.
But now that I was done with the story, I could sell it to people and make a fortune from them! Well, only if people actually liked the story, if they didn't... well I just lost a good bit of money.
I shook my head to get rid of the negative thoughts, and prepared myself to start the process of cleaning the whole room; Apparently, ink is quite hard to get out of some materials. But as I was about to do so, a strange light appeared at the seams of the trapdoor leading to the basement; There aren't any candles in there, right?
I hesitated for a moment before getting up from my rough wooden chair to make my way to the trapdoor; The light coming from it seemed much brighter than any lone candle could give off, but no smoke came through. Deciding to simply satisfy my curiosity, I opened it.
What I saw made me feel like I was crazy; After all, there usually wasn't a large hall in my basement. I took one look around myself before quickly climbing down the wooden ladder that led downwards into the strange room. It took me about a minute to reach the ground, after which the ladder retracted to keep me from going back up.
Then, all of a sudden, a rather strange voice spoke up. "H-Hi! W-Welcome to t-the castle! T-To understand y-your situation, p-please look a-at the leather n-notebook next to t-the pile o-of parchment."
The whole thing felt as if it was ripped straight out of a book, it felt surreal; Maybe I was dreaming right now? In any case, I followed the voice's advice and read the small notebook that had been indicated. It didn't contain much, but what it told made me so excited that I immediately flipped through the few parchments that were left here by what I could only assume to be another 'participant'; The notebook and parchments told me quite a lot about what was going on though.
The whole thing made me so happy! I had the chance to add to a story that had already been started, and the fact that I would be one of probably hundreds made it all even better! And so I left the hall to wander around the corridors, occasionally finding weird secret doors that required me to do absurd things to get through them. Who had thought of making someone do a backflip to open a door?
I went everywhere I could, getting ideas left and right and calling them out to the voice; A story built itself up from the one that the previous visitor had left for me, it would be one of friendship and alliances, one of betrayal and desperation, one of war. And to make the story believable, I made sure that little hints were sprinkled all throughout the place. I wrote notes on torn pieces of parchment and put them a bit everywhere, their content talking about the worry and fear of the supposed inhabitants of the castle. I also had found a tower at one point and decided it to be a place of betrayal, the place where one of the friends killed another.
I then called out to the voice to tell it the story I had made so that it could improve upon it and make the castle a bit more fitting for the story.
Once all of that was done, I went back to the hall I had arrived from. The ladder was planted solidly on the floor and wouldn't budge. I spoke out some short goodbyes before finally climbing out of the trapdoor which slammed shut. I simply needed to write down everything I had made right now! I simply h..ad ...to wr- I looked around the room in confusion, why did the ink look dry when it should have taken at least a few hours?
Yep, another chapter like this; Don't worry though, you guys will soon get another chapter with Antier! Discord: https://discord.gg/5eTED7PVYH