As autumn decayed into winter, Genevieve lay in the high chambers at Carracomb and despaired of her captivity. The machinations of her cruel uncle and the grim spectre of her enforced marriage to the bilious Marquis d'Ondellyn had reduced the passage of her days to a torturous tedium, relieved only by thrills of horrified anticipation and flights of masochistic fantasy. Her nights were now a pit of sleepless desperation.
These conspirators meant to have her title, the right of a dozen generations of Sophayms back to the sainted matriarch herself; they meant to have Genevieve's lands, consigning the fates of twelve thousand people to their sinister whim; and the Marquis meant to have her, in the basest sense possible. The very thought traced a glacial, spectral hand from breast to gullet and threatened to topple her reason.
Where were her ancestors at this fatal hour? The Theosophists of her College had sworn their spirits guarded her path. In the depths both of night and of terrified exhaustion she pictured their insubstantial fingers tearing unnoticed at her uncle's form, their howls of rage at this affront to the Sophaym lineage impotent as a child’s breath.
Genevieve's sole distraction in her imprisonment was the chamber's single, barred window. As tall as the room, yet narrower than Genevieve's shoulders it afforded a limited view across the turrets and clustered chimney-stacks of bleak Carracomb.
Dominating the skyline, the Lord's Tower rose at the centre of the fortress, an imposing granite obelisk that dwarfed the buildings clustered around it. Genevieve would lay listlessly upon her bed, before the high window and stare at the Tower beyond.
Here she knew, four centuries prior, the Decagogue had sat and dreamt of empire; ten princes, whose lands amounted to fully one-third of the civilised world, joined in unprecedented and fearsome union. For a small time all nations had been cowed in awe of them. Yet their ambitions strayed too far to the west and in the blasted, haunted reaches of cursed Aquillion something awoke.
Soon the Decagogue received news of the Aquillian horde carving a swathe of terror directly toward the fortress of Carracomb. They heard of the brutal, sadistic excesses of the Prince of Aquillion, dark consort to the insane immortal, Queen Maeve. They heard tell of the Queen's flayed and filleted body, borne before them as a standard, aloft and undying, singing battle-hymns to her monstrous army above the shrieks of their victims.
They took this ghastly news in silence and quit their chambers; ascended the Lord's Tower and as one, without even a word in prayer, the mighty Decagogue threw themselves from it's summit. Their bodies crumpled in the pentangled yard below, ten scattered rose petals among the screaming courtiers.
The Lord's Tower remained, bleak and brooding at the heart of the reconstructed fortress, the only structure not razed by the lunatic horde of the dark Prince. Genevieve wondered if they had felt some affinity with it?
She stared and fancied that she could see the Decagogue even now, could conjure their shades swooping down the Tower's face, falling in a broken line like sparrows quitting their perch. How she envied them their freedom.
Day after day she imagined herself walking through the huddled maze of Carracomb, every footstep, every doorway and courtyard and corridor, leading her on toward the Tower. Toward her only hope of defeating her uncle's foul ambitions.
Genevieve imagined climbing the Tower's narrow, endless stairwells. Pictured herself emerging onto the roof into fierce winds that would buffet her body, snatching greedily at her gown and hair. Imagined stepping up onto the parapet.
The flat granite flagstones behind her, teeming, ash grey clouds above, the implacable face of the Tower dropping away towards an uneven patchwork of rooftops and the courtyard far below. Perfectly straight, perfectly even, narrowing as it fell, lending it the effect of a causeway stretched out ahead of her, the exit walled off. She imagined gazing between her feet, swaying precariously, staring straight down.
Genevieve was there. She felt the giddy, confused shift in perspective, the gentle but undeniable tug of gravity as the world slowly tilted. The Decagogue were beside her, ten lords leaping all in a row as, with a flush of exquisite panic, her balance shifted, drifted and was lost...