My Father Locked Me In A Tower For Being ‘Broken’ — Then A Stranger Bought The Estate
Part 1
Magic was supposed to smell like ozone and burning sugar.
Mine smelled like wet dirt.
When the High Council realized I couldn’t light a candle, they didn’t execute me.
They did something much worse.
They locked the heavy iron door and forgot I existed.
A cell is not measured in feet or yards, but in paces.
It was fourteen paces from the heavy oak door to the narrow slit of the window.
Twelve paces from the rusted washbasin to the straw-stuffed mattress.
My name was Megan.
Four years ago, I had a surname, a silk wardrobe, and a future.
Then came the Awakening Ceremony at the Academy.
The instructors placed the obsidian sphere in my palms.
Everyone waited for the explosive surge of elemental power that justified my family’s aristocratic status.
Nothing happened.
The sphere remained cold, dead glass.
My father’s face drained of blood before flushing with a rage so absolute it hardened into stone.
A child of Craig could not be a null.
A null was a peasant.
Worse, I wasn’t truly a null, just deformed.
When they tested me further in the dark cellars of the Academy, they found my magic.
It was a miserable, parasitic thing.
I couldn’t create energy.
I could only move it.
If I concentrated hard enough, I could draw the ambient heat from a warm stone and pull it into my fingers.
The ability was invisible, quiet, and completely useless for war.
So, I died.
Officially, the eldest daughter succumbed to a sudden strain of river fever.
A closed-casket funeral was held while I was dragged in the dead of night to the abandoned northern watchtower.
They shoved me inside and locked away the family shame.
Isolation does not drive you mad in a sudden break.
It erodes you like water dripping on sandstone.
During the first year, I screamed until my throat tore and tasted of copper.
I threw my body against the iron-banded door until my shoulders bruised black and yellow.
By the third year, I had stopped speaking altogether.
The only human contact I had was the thick fingers of the deaf-mute servant who pushed a wooden tray through the rusted slot twice a day.
Breakfast was stale bread and a tin cup of water.
Dinner was thin root stew.
To survive the winters, I had to use the broken magic they had condemned me for.
The northern tower was a wind tunnel.
Frost would bloom on the interior stones thick as moss.
I would sit in the center of the room and press my bare hands against the floorboards.
Casting my mind out, I felt for the faint residual heat of the earth far below.
Slowly, agonizingly, I would pull that heat up.
It wasn’t a fire.
The air around me would drop to freezing, moisture turning to ice crystals, while my own body maintained a desperate warmth.
The effort left me exhausted, hollowed out, and aching in every joint.
Today was Tuesday, marked by the servant giving me the crust end of the bread loaf.
I sat by the window slit, tracing the rough edge of a loosened stone with my thumb.
My fingernails were chipped and packed with grime.
My hair hung in matted, lifeless ropes down my back.
At twenty-two years old, I looked like a feral dog.
Down in the courtyard, four stories below, I heard the faint crunch of gravel.
I pressed my cheek against the rough stone of the window slit.
A column of riders flooded the narrow view of the southern gate.
They wore dark leather and chain mail, flying no banners at all.
At the head of the column rode a man on a massive roan gelding.
He looked dense, as though gravity pulled at him harder than the rest of the world.
My father walked out of the main hall to meet him.
Instead of puffing up his chest, Craig bowed.
A cold spike of dread drove itself into my stomach.
Change is never a good thing in a cage.
The sounds began three hours later.
Usually, the tower stairwell echoed only with the scuttling of rats.
Now, it filled with the heavy, rhythmic thud of multiple boots.
I retreated to the far corner of the room.
Pressing my back against the damp stone, I pulled my rough woolen blanket tight.
I grabbed the rusted tin cup from my breakfast tray.
It was a pathetic weapon, but the weight of it anchored me.
Voices bled through the thick oak.
A low baritone, rough like dragging a stone across a grate, demanded entry.
My father’s voice answered, tight with a panic I had never heard before.
Craig claimed the structure was an unsound storage silo, sealed for decades.
The baritone interrupted with flat, unyielding authority.
He had bought the estate, and he intended to inspect his property.
My father protested that the key was lost.
A sharp metallic scrape echoed through the stone, followed by a breathless gasp.
The stranger announced he owned the stones, the timber, and the rust on the hinges.
A massive impact resonated through the wood.
Ancient dust fell from the ceiling.
The upper iron hinge groaned.
Wood splintered.
The massive oak door, the absolute boundary of my universe for four years, began to buckle inward.
Panic seized my chest.
I tried to pull heat from the floor, but my heart beat too fast.
My panicked magic flared wildly, sucking the heat from the air.
Frost instantly crept up the walls in jagged spiderwebs.
The lock mechanism tore free from the stone jamb.
The door tilted violently and collapsed inward with a deafening crash.
Silence rushed into the room, heavy and ringing.
Through the settling haze, a figure stepped into the doorway.
He carried the exhaustion of a man who had ridden for weeks.
His face was a map of hard miles, complete with a crooked nose and graying temples.
He held a heavy crowbar in one hand, resting the iron tip on the floor.
His eyes scanned the frost-covered walls, the rusted washbasin, the miserable straw pallet.
Then, his eyes found me.
He didn’t draw a sword or shout commands, he just stared at the feral, freezing girl they had tried to erase, and I braced myself for the killing blow.
