#<- Sorta ig? Anways reblog this post

[jonahmagnus]

In world where there are two types of tower-dwellers, a Princess is locked in a tower.

There are two types of tower-people: A Princess, put there to remain pure until marriage or until rescued, and a Wizard, put there by choice to study and learn in isolation. Princesses are defined by their beautiful long hair, and Wizards are defined by their beards and impressive 'stache.

There is a Princess, and she lives in a tower. She was put there recently by her mother and father, to keep her pure and untouched until they can secure the marriage to another kingdom and a prince shes doesn't love. She has long, almost brown sandy-blonde hair, pale green eyes and a slim, tender build. She is not the fairest in the land, but she is tall and pretty. If compared to a rose, she would be the humble yet graceful willow tree, slender and long. She has wanted to be a wizard since a young age, but there is no way for a princess to become a wizard. Princesses are delicate girls to be protected and sold off until their either dead or Queens or have found True Love, unsuited to the life of experimentation and study of a wizard. That is what her mother tells her, in a quiet scolding that is far more forceful and cruel then it has any right to be. And the princess, terrified, believes her.

She used to run the castle halls, stick in hand, robe fashioned out of a delicate silk bedsheet, shouting fake spells at birds while her servants chased her. But as she grew older, her restraints became tighter, and more and more often, she was confined in her room to embroider in solitude with barely the comfort of a window or a maid. The life she is forced into makes her hang her head low, makes her hands be paper-soft, and demands her hair be long and beautiful and perfect like all other princesses. The world she longed to be a part of was a world of study and experimentation, and as the kingdoms princess and tool, she could not even dare to hint at her desires into adulthood. She could become a witch, she knew, flee the castle barefoot and sink into the loving embrace of the swamp. But witches don’t live in towers, and they make potions instead of spells, and they don’t grow the flowing whimsical beards that wizards do.

But that does not mean she has to be bored in her tower. Fascinated by magic as she always has been, she arranges with a long string of bribes for books on spells and forbidden potions to be smuggled along with her meals. She studies them while the clock ticks down for either a prince to arrive or her marriage to be finalized. Either one will doom her, and she wants to enjoy herself as much as possible until her marriage. She pours over the books long into the night by candlelight, and all day, she rests her pale, tired eyes. She experiments, and she reads, and she studies non-stop, barely stopping for meals and littering her books with an assortment of food stains. She cuts off her hair to use in bubbling gold potions, her skin becomes scarred with a rainbow of the consequences of failed experiments, and her dresses turn into makeshift cheesecloths and fire-fuel. She washes late into the night after she is done with her work for the day in the darkness, not glancing into the mirror that has become cracked and dusty. When her eyesight starts to fail from strain and working in darkness, she fashions for herself bottle-round glasses, blown by herself in the depths of her tower. Engrossed as she is in her studies, she does not notice the tower warp, and the meals stop rotting, and how she started out in one circular room but now has a loft and a second floor and the fact that the tower seems much much taller then it was originally.

What she DOES notice though, is when brushing crumbs from her face she feels facial hair on her upper lip.

She rushes to the bathroom and thrusts a candle into the holder as she looks at herself. In the dusty mirror, she sees the beginnings of a bushy mustache sit on her upper lip, much further along in growth then be logically possible without her noticing. It’s a pale blonde, like her hair, and she notices faintly that there are streaks of grey in it, a very familiar shade of classic wizard grey. She brings a trembling hand to her upper lip.

Much, much later, a prince rides up to the tower. It is tall, and warped, and very clearly belonging to a wizard, despite the royal family claiming their daughter lives here.

He shouts up, a bit nervous because of the thorny vines wrapping the beautiful stonework.

“Hey! Does a Princess live here?”

A young man with large bottle glasses and a rather impressive mustache leans out of the tower, his short, sandy-blonde hair spilling lightly in the wind. He starts to say something, then glances back into his house. A smile breaks out on his face as he seems to realize something.

“No!” He shouts back, after a moments hesitation. “But a wizard does!”