It’s verging on dawn when you arrive at the bottom of the endless braid. The air is crisp, cold. The dark locks sway gently in the breeze. The braid stretches upwards in a long, unbroken line. Far above you, it vanishes into a shroud of mist.

The tower rises up from what once was a clearing in a wood. Now, the clearing’s meadow is subsumed by brambles, a thicket you sliced through on one of your many days of preparation. New thorns are already encroaching at the edges of the path you forged. Beyond the brambles are the trees—young when the tower was first built, now towering ancient and stately, spring-green leaves tufting from their branches.

The wood is full of noise, the familiar shuffle of small creatures. You spied a fox with kits last night as you made camp and took it as an omen. Of good luck or ill, you are not yet certain.

You straighten your back, hoist your pack a little higher on your shoulders. Approach the braid, equal parts trepidation and enthusiasm. Grasp the hair and lift yourself onto it, as you’ve done in testing so many times before. It holds your weight.

You wrap the hair around your left foot to use as an anchor, like the aerialists taught you.

You take a deep breath of the cool morning air, wondering if it’s suffused by old magic—drifting down from the princess above you like flakes of dead skin from a corpse.

With that pleasant thought, you begin to climb.

The witch told you she’d been soused when she came up with the idea.

“I didn’t have a particular someone in mind,” she said, levitating briefly from the chair so you could swipe a damp cloth beneath her legs. “It was a frivolous concept. A spell of perpetuity. A princess whose curse was to live a cloistered life, trapped in a tower, until someone broke the spell—but with a twist.”

The cottage was small, homey, touched by the scent of the honeysuckle in the yard. As a child, you’d stolen blossoms from the plants and popped them into your mouth, heedless of warnings not to touch the witch’s property. (You knew, for one, that she’d never catch you.) The flowers were in full bloom then, and the windows cast open to let the fresh air gurgle through.

“The hair,” you said, thinking of your own. Your tight, short braids, jouncing as you moved to the witch’s crowded worktable and began to wipe down murky glass bottles rattling with indeterminate contents.

“The hair.” The witch swept a hand beneath her legs and, finding her seat dry, descended onto the chair once more. A flurry of spent magic swept past you like a breath. The witch’s power, like her vigor, had waned in her old age—but she was still stronger than most. “Ever-growing hair, and an ever-growing tower to match.”

“Ambitious.”

She laughed, bright and loud. “Foolish. The confidence of youth. Don’t forget the deathcaps.”

“I was getting there.” You wiped down a dusty vial of crushed deathcap mushrooms and wrinkled your nose at the witch. “Patience.”

“Hah! The nerve of you, to talk to me like that.” But she was smiling.

“Tell me more about the tower.”

Her stormy eyes went distant, drifting. “The hair was easy,” she said. “A few words of power to give it tensile strength, fortitude against the cut of a blade or touch of fire, growth at unnatural speeds. And a lightening spell to lessen the weight—though even with that, I knew it would break the bearer’s neck if left to grow too long.

“The tower, though—my masterpiece. Nonorganic material, no follicles to coax into fulfilling more than their normal purpose. I had to lay in the groundwork for it to draw materials to itself, slowly build from the ground up. Steady its construction so the upper levels didn’t crush the lower when new foundations shored up the old. Like a sort of icicle, inverted.” The witch leaned back in her chair, knotted muscles relaxing into the curve of its wood. “Ah, but it was a fine piece of magic.”

You cleaned the last of the bottles and started on the jars. “It sounds complicated.”

“It was.” She sighed, the edge of her voice lined with bittersweet. “Would that a witch could break her own curse. That spell draws on me now.”

Your chin jerked up, eyes darting to her. “Still?”

The witch’s fingers curled on the arm of the chair. Her expression floated between regret, acceptance, and…something else. She met your gaze evenly. “Haven’t you noticed?” She asked. “The tower’s still growing.”

The hair is thick as a twisted cord in your hands, strong as a sailor’s rope. Beneath you, it stretches down until it just brushes the meadow; above you, it winds up into the mist. Unbraided, you think, it would fall straight or in waves, even longer than its current reach. It is a few shades lighter than your own, an effect perhaps due to long years of battle between the sun, bleaching its color, and the witch’s preservative magic.

You move steadily, at a pace you are certain you can sustain for much of the day. In accordance with your research on the tower’s potential height, your mission is one of endurance more than speed.

Near the bottom of the tower, the structure is oddly modern, smooth bricks laid in a pattern in the recent fashion of the buildings of the rich. The corners are squarish, and there are tiers as you climb, false windows rimmed by elaborate metal sconces.

You know they are false windows because there are no rooms in the body of the tower—only the one at its top. The witch told you this, in those earliest of days you were drawn to her company. Thirty minutes into your climb, you pass by one of these windows and peer in.

It is a room and not a room. You know that if anything, the illusion you see is a bit of personhood pulled and twisted from the witch’s mind into her spell, an unintended magical echo.

Through the window which is not a window, in the room which is not a room, you see three children and an older woman. The unroom is ringed by tapestries and carpeted with intricate woven rugs; a fire crackles in a hearth near which the woman sits, fingers nimble with a needle and thread.

There are two girls and a boy. All three have dark hair, long hair, hair like the braid you climb—but then, many people in these parts share such a trait, and it may mean nothing. One girl is taller, older perhaps, a spray of freckles painting her cheeks. She seems to lead the others.

The children run about the room, laughing silently. Ghost laughter, unlaughter, that doesn’t reach you through the glass.

It happens fast—the freckled girl, the leader, dodges the boy’s outstretched hand and trips on an uneven stone near the edge of the fireplace. She tumbles forward into the hearth, arms braced, and you can see her future laid out before her: the fall, the burning.

She lands, palms flat, not in hot coals but in a bed of flowers.

The younger girl has one hand cast out. You can almost feel the afterwave of the spell.

You press your thumb to the glass, dangling from the braid outside the window, and the younger girl’s shoulders tense, like she knows you’re there—though this is as impossible as flame turning floral, or more so, since you’ve seen the witch transmute matter before. A blink, and the image is gone.

Through the window, all you can see is a mirage, an optical illusion. When you close your left eye, you see an empty room; when you close your right, a layer of brick.

You leave the window behind and keep climbing.

The witch told you the princess had asked for it. “Or, not quite asked,” the witch said, kneeling on the soft ground of her garden. “We’d spoken of the idea. A flippant conversation. We were young, and I’d been sent away for most of the year to apprentice with an archwitch of the neighboring kingdom. Pass me the seeds.”

You carefully withdrew the folded paper you’d purchased at the goblin market, where you’d stopped up your ears with wax to keep any spelled voices at bay. (You’d suggested this precaution yourself, to the witch’s approval.) You passed the packet to her. She shook three seeds out into her palm and sniffed in satisfaction. “You didn’t get swindled, did you? Didn’t trade your firstborn or a year off your life?”

“You taught me too well for that.” You pressed a hand over your heart, gave a teasing pout. “I’m wounded you’d think me a fool.”

“Your mother was a fool,” the witch grumbled. “At your age, she’d trade a firstborn for a marginally rare book.”

“I’m not my mother,” you said, “and you know it. I traded a week’s worth of dreaming.”

“Hmph. Good trade.” The witch dug three holes in the earth, sinking her thumb into the loam, and dropped the seeds in: one, two, three. She smoothed the dirt back over and murmured a few words of power beneath her breath—arcane renderings of spellcraft. If you’d been like her, born with magic rife in your veins, you’d have been able to understand, to remember. But you were as common as an ox; you’d inherited none of your mother’s scant skills, had none of the witch’s thrumming power. And so the words passed through your comprehension like evaporating water, and you forgot them as soon as they were spoken.

You’d once wished for magic, to be a true witch’s apprentice, but these days you knew better. The witch was always grumbling about magic having a mind of its own. About her inability to break her own curses. About the tower.

She returned to the tower, and the princess, like scratching an itch. The way she talked about them, though—this you found particularly intriguing. She spoke of the curse always at its edges, and never for long. Revealed details that you collected and wove into a story—a truth—it seemed she didn’t wish to face in the light of day.

“The princess?” You prompted, recalling where this conversation had begun.

Beneath the witch’s hands rose three blooms: red, yellow, orange. Her hands were deft, crisscrossed with the wrinkles and scars earned over time. The surety of those hands had intimidated you in the early days—before you’d seen her apply them to myriad practicalities, magics, and small kindnesses. A cup of tea set out for you in the morning; your ripped traveling cloak mended the next time you went to don it; a sleeping draught by your bedside for nights when insomnia loomed. For your part, you ensured her boots were always well-oiled, her ingredients stocked, her bottles polished. That was the way between you: your bonds lived in gestures, not words. Perhaps this was why you could sense she left details unspoken when she touched on the curse.

“Oh, yes,” said the witch, flipping open the top of her basket. She patted the soft woven blanket laid within, making three small depressions. “She’d asked me about spells. How they worked. I told her most of the ones I’d learned from the archwitch, and she asked if I had any of my own, and I spoke of the tower, and the hair.

“‘I wouldn’t mind the hair,’ the princess told me, ‘nor really the tower. These days I almost wish I would catch the attention of a witch somewhere. I could do with a good cursing.’ She grinned at me, a kind of wicked grin, and gave my shoulder a playful push. We had known each other since youth, you see. It was a small kingdom, very small, and I had been a foster in the palace.”

The witch kneaded her fingers into the dirt around the blooms, then lifted her hands to the petals. The red one, on the left, unfurled. Inside was curled a child in perfect miniature, eyes closed, only about the length of a pinky finger.

“She was joking,” the witch said, lifting the flower-child carefully and setting it into the basket. “I knew she was joking. She meant that she felt stifled, and she knew she’d be married off soon, and she wanted a way out of it. She was a free-spirited thing. I…I harbored a great affection for her. A great…”

The witch’s eyebrows descended. Her moods could be like that, falling in moments from amiability to depths you still couldn’t navigate. It was another reason the tower intrigued you, as did its inhabitant. The witch removed the second flower-child; the third bloom opened to reveal not a child, but a fawn, dappled with orange markings, hooves tiny as milk teeth.

The witch cast a glance at you, and your burgeoning frown, and this seemed to bring her back to herself. She laughed, twitching one gnarled finger your way. “One bad seed of three,” she said merrily, in a way that told you she wasn’t truly upset. “So you were swindled after all.”

She spoke no more of the princess that day.

Sunset comes when you have reached a section of the braid that is shot through with iron grey strands. First, it was just one line of grey, like a thread of gold in a haystack. The change was gradual—the longer you climbed, the more strands went grey, slowly and steadily.

The change in the tower’s architecture is gradual, too. Where you stop for the night, the angular edges of the modern day have given way to the softer curves of brick you remember from your youth. The tower is now round.

You can no longer see the ground.

You keep your foot wrapped in the hair as you rummage through your pack for your sleeping harness. It loops around your legs, supporting you. Allowing you to rest. It is in the moment when you are pulling it out of your pack, one-handed, that a strong breeze sweeps by and you lose your grip.

With a cry, you fall backwards, clipping the tower as you flip upside down. Your foot is entangled in the braid, still: your only connection, your only protection from the fall below. You feel a few belongings tumble out of your pack; your fingers clamp around the sleeping harness, knuckles white and world spinning.

Blood rushes to your head. You’re swaying slightly, swinging, and there is a window in the periphery of your vision, small and round.

Inside are two kneeling, dark-haired figures, knees touching, foreheads pressed together. This is all you see before you drift away from the pane: an intimacy, a private moment witnessed. A memory, but not yours.

More important matters claim your attention. Breathing hard, you delicately right yourself, fingers of one hand buried in the hair. A headache beats a tattoo behind your temple.

You secure your sleeping harness, ever so carefully, and allow your weight to rest on it. This is how you will sleep: with a few leather straps and the strength of a cursed woman’s hair standing between you and the fall of your life.

You check your pack. You’ve lost a smattering of foodstuffs, a knit cap—and, most importantly, your knife.

You’ve always been resourceful. You suppose if it comes to it, you’ll just have to use your hands.

The witch told you the princess was no longer a princess. “Nor has been,” the witch said, coughing, “for decades.”

You offered a bowl of crushed herbs to the witch. You’d traded the two flower-children and a vial of deathcaps for it in the goblin market. Strong medicine. Perhaps not strong enough.

“Not a princess?” You gave the witch an encouraging smile. The fire roared, the windows of the cottage all shuttered against a blizzard of snow and ice. The witch lay on a mat piled with blankets and quilts and wools. Still, she shivered as she spoke.

“Hers—ours—was a small kingdom,” the witch said. “If I’d have known it would be conquered—subsumed into a neighboring realm by treaty, not war, but conquered in all but name—I’d never have cursed her when I did. They lost sovereignty only two months after the tower…after I worked my spell. You’d be shocked how quickly people stopped caring once her title was stripped. Gah, this is godsawful.” She pushed away the bowl, cheeks flushed; a little of the precious medicine sloshed over the edge.

“Don’t be a fool,” you chided, with the sudden sense that you had switched roles. “Drink up.”

Irritated, she swatted at your hand. You steadied the bowl, managing not to spill a drop more. “You’re acting like my mother,” you said, trying to sound stern.

If anything, this got through to her. You made her drink the herbs—or perhaps she allowed you, despite her protests. The witch may have preached independence, but she trusted you.

Late that night, just before the fever broke, the witch startled awake, eyes darting and wild. “I hope she’s dead,” she croaked out, a frantic breath of a plea. “I hope that hair broke her neck. Oh, gods, for her sake, let her be dead.”

The second day is marked by a change in temperature, your breath beginning to frost the air. You feel the loss of your knit cap. You had anticipated this, from the knowledge that the air in the distant mountains has bite, but there isn’t much you can do besides keep climbing, keep the blood pumping strong in your veins.

You are beginning to tire, so you allow yourself ample breaks. The waterskins bound to your hips will last you until tomorrow at your current rate of drinking, so you begin to ration yourself.

The architecture has finally shifted from brick to stone. It’s woven through with a hardy variety of ivy, a few strands of plant life here or there; small rectangular windows are set into the stone as if lining an internal stairway, circling up the side of the tower.

You pause by one of them, curiosity pricking, and glance in.

You know it’s not a window, not a stairwell, but the image is strong. The freckled girl you saw in the first room, taller now, older. Her companion—the same younger girl as before? In their late teens, by your judgment. The younger one faces away from you, but her fingers spark with magic.

They are arguing. An ugly fight, spittle flying. The freckled girl turns to storm down the stairs and the other casts out a hand, just as before.

But there are no coals and flowers here.

You see the spell latch on, snarling into the freckled girl like a claw—her tunic, her skin, her hair. A curse.

The caster turns just slightly, anger strong in her features, and you catch a glimpse of her profile. You jerk back from the uncomfortable, strange, fluttering sensation that you were looking at yourself.

The image is gone, your likeness with it. Strong magic, as familiar as it is to you after so long with the witch, still unsettles you. You press a callused hand against your chest, feeling your own heart beat, a steadying force.

You shake your head, take a small sip of water, and keep climbing. The braid is fully grey, now, not a strand of its former color remaining.

(At some point, you pass through an eddy of magic. Your own memories pool to the surface in response, a snippet of an argument you’d long forgotten. Your mother’s disembodied voice, pricked with irritation, sweeps past you like a leaf caught in a current. “You’re stubborn as a dog,” she scolds. “You latch on and lock your jaw and won’t let—”

You push up and out of the eddy, her voice ebbing away. Your mind finishes the memory in lieu of the magic. You’d thought, fiercely, setting your chin: the world needs people who won’t let go.)

By the time you stop for the night, the hair is pure white.

The witch told you it was the worst mistake she’d ever made. “I’ve done a great wrong to that woman,” she said, voice softened by sickness. She’d lived nearly a century; long for a human, short for a witch. She was on her deathbed and knew it. Had told you as much.

You knelt by her side. You would’ve been crying, but you’d spent all your tears in the long weeks of caring for her. You’d just suggested the unthinkable: that you would go to the goblin market, make a trade. What was your firstborn, after all, if it meant a few more years of life for her?

“No, no,” the witch groused. “A great wrong to her, and a great wrong to me. It’s why I’m dying, dear. I can feel it. That curse, unbroken—asking more of me each year I live. Why, I can barely work small magics anymore.” Her lips pressed together in a thin line, one corner twisted up. “Serves me right,” she said. “What a fate. A curse with an impossible exit condition. I’ve never been more a fool than the day I cast it.”

You took one of her gnarled hands in your own. You traced her raised veins with a gentle thumb. “I’ll break it. I’ll save you.”

She laughed, harsh, and you could hear something deep catch in her chest when she did. “Unbreakable, at this point. No one left alive who loves her.” She closed her eyes, and you read pain in her features—you’d spent enough time with her to know it wasn’t physical.

“Who…loves her?”

“Impossible exit condition,” she repeated. “The only way the princess gets free is if someone climbs the tower. Out of love. That’s how I set it. I thought…there was a boy. We knew him, as children. He said he loved her. I didn’t know they were engaged until I came back to visit after a long stretch of study. She hadn’t told me. ‘I like him well enough,’ she said. ‘What did you expect? I can’t have my head in the clouds forever.’

“And she was angry I’d been gone so long. Said I’d become someone different. Obsessed with magic, reputation, making a name for myself. Spending all that time away, and still, I’d never be anything more than a hedgewitch…

“I thought the curse would last a week at most before her fiancé broke it. I was prideful. Wanted to teach her a lesson about the kind of power I could wield. And it hurt me, that she would clip her own wings. It took me too long to realize she was lashing out because she’d missed me.”

You pressed a damp cloth against the witch’s brow. “That’s good,” she murmured. Winced. “The fiancé,” she added. “It hadn’t been love. Just…social climbing. My mistake. He made an attempt at the tower, in the early days, when you could still see the room at the top. Came back without her—he couldn’t enter, and she of course couldn’t leave. He’d never loved her.” She laughed, bitterly. “And I couldn’t make the climb myself. Magic, bah. Witch can’t break her own curse.

“So you see,” she said, blinking up at you with that sort of distant stare you knew well, “it’s too late now. No one remembers her enough to make that climb out of love. I’ve done her a great wrong, dear. Made her a story without an ending.”

“When you die,” you said carefully—direct, just like her—“the curse will break. Won’t it? She’ll be freed.”

“I wish I knew.” The witch’s brow furrowed. “It has a life of its own at this point—it’s grown beyond me. I don’t know if it will outlive me. I fear it might.”

“A great magic,” you said.

“A great wrong,” she repeated. Ah. You saw it, then, that unidentified emotion that skittered across her face whenever she spoke of the tower, the princess, the curse: guilt. A deep and abiding pain she had carried with her thrice as long as you’d been alive. “I think of her up there,” the witch whispered. “Bound by my magic to life, unfree, unable to die. A curse beyond ken.”

You leaned in, pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. “If it is a great wrong,” you said, “then I swear I will right it.”

Something flickered in her eyes, then: doubt, hope, perhaps both. She spoke no more, just lifted a hand to your cheek and rested it there.

The witch died before morning.

The curse did not die with her.

You climb up and up and up, the morning air sharp wherever your skin lies bare. The hair is white as snow. The tower is a crumbling ruin, held together only by the vibrancy of a dead witch’s magic. You are impressed, even now, by her craft.

You move with the dogged determination of someone who has dug her own grave and wants it just a little deeper. Your limbs ache, your legs stiff and sore and your arms near numb with effort and cold. You are out of water, out of food. The only thing you are not out of is stubbornness.

It took half a year of preparation to make this ascent. The memory of the witch’s confession is still strong in your mind, as is the oath you swore to her.

You inch upwards into colder air, thinner air.

Your mother, you think, would never have been strong enough for work such as this. She had always been too much a fool.

You climb, climb, climb.

“Perhaps the princess will be dead,” you murmur to no one, watching your breath ghost out into the cold afternoon air. “And perhaps I will have come all this way to free a skeleton. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.” You sing a little song to yourself, climbing to its rhythm, looking only at your hands on the braid, and so when you reach the top it takes you a moment to realize.

Your hand strikes the pulley—the pulley? Hair strung through an elaborate pulley system, distributing weight—and you turn to look at the window, shutters flung open, white hair ghosting through. You blink owlishly at the maw, the darkened core of the tower, until your sluggish brain realizes that this is no unwindow, no conjured memory, but the room. The room.

The princess’s fiancé could not enter, you think. You swing on the braid a little, reaching out a foot, and hope for all the years you’ve spent with the witch that you understand magic as well as you think you do. Towers and curses and loopholes.

Your foot settles easily onto the sill. You release your hold on the braid and step inside.

It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the lack of light. For you to adjust to the heat. Crossing the threshold of the wide windowsill was like passing through a membrane held between tower and world. It is comfortably warm within, though dark.

You make out, with increasing clarity, a small but cozy room. Bookshelves line the walls, spewing loose papers from atop dusty tomes. There are papers everywhere, really, cast across the floor, crumpling beneath your feet—a glance tells you they are covered in writing, art, and—for some—angry dark gashes of ink. There’s a small table with a covered bowl, lid scribed with sigils, and you recognize it from the witch’s stories: the spell of ten thousand meals, a different one each time the lid is lifted.

And there is a bed.

The white hair trails in through the window and webs the inside of the tower, strung in sagging circles along hooks secured to the walls, to the shelves. The great mass of it crosses the room again and again, a bird’s nest; loose strands tangle in knots. The rest of the hair pools on the floor, heaps of it piled up as high as your knees. Concentrated around the bed. And the woman lying atop it.

She’s staring at you with dark brown eyes. She’s old—as old as the witch, or older, and with none of the witch’s restorative magic to ease the march of age across her features. Wrinkles fold her brow, her mouth, the corners of her eyes. Freckles pattern her cheeks.

“It can’t be you,” she says, and you’re surprised to find her voice strong, husky. Her hands are folded over her chest, and they clutch at the fabric of her bedcovers as she speaks. “You’re so young.”

You step forward, wading through waves of hair. “Oh,” she says, her rheumy eyes still sharp as she sorts out the differences. You understand the momentary error—you’ve always taken after the witch in looks if not in magic. “It’s not…you’re not her. But you’ve come for me?” There’s no confusion in the question—just wariness.

“Yes.” You purse your lips. “I’ve come to end it.”

“Ah. To kill me, then.”

“It’s an ending.”

She smiles at that. “One I’ve been waiting for.”

You take another step—and she lifts one finger. “Wait,” she says. “I don’t understand. How did you…why did you come? Please, before the end. Tell me.”

And there’s no harm in something like that.

So you perch at the foot of her bed, and you tell the princess what the witch told you. All of it—secrets bared, regrets made fresh, flowing out of your mouth.

“But she was right,” the princess interrupts, as you near the end—the witch’s last words. “This curse, it’s unbreakable. You and I, we don’t know each other. How could you climb the tower out of love for me?”

You take a steadying breath. “I didn’t,” you say, and you think of the witch. All those years at her side, from the moment your mother, not knowing what to do with you, sent you to live with your intimidating, powerful, wonderful grandmother. Cleaning her cottage, seeking out ingredients for her spells, learning how to make a proper market trade. Fights and apologies and stories and secrets and a final promise to be kept. “I didn’t climb it for you,” you repeat, lifting your chin as you look at the princess. “I climbed it out of love for her.”

“Ah.” The princess nods. “Loopholes. A descendant’s devotion.” You can see in her what the witch described to you—intelligence. The look of a woman whose brain is slotting pieces into place.

“You know,” she says, after a beat, “it wasn’t the worst life.”

“No?”

“No. I made something of it. Wrote letters, while messenger birds still came. Read. Created. There were dark years, certainly. But…a good life, in spite of it all. And I’m too old to hold on to vengeance, don’t you think? Besides, she’s already dead.” The princess settles her gaze on you once more, intent. A long, searching look. “I hope that means something.”

Then she closes her eyes. “All right, then,” she says. “End it. If it helps—it was supposed to be a kiss.”

The tower is silent but for you and the princess, breathing. It’s so quiet, so still, that you almost think you can feel a slight tremor in the floor beneath your feet. The tower, still growing; or perhaps the layers of memory and magic that have come together in concert to create this curse, shifting beneath your feet. You don’t know what will happen when you break it, when the princess dies—if it will topple, taking you to your death. If a hidden stairwell will open to carry you downwards and out. If nothing will change at all beyond the magic ending, and you left to rappel for a day down a dead woman’s braid.

But if there’s a price, you will pay it. The witch’s mistake—your grandmother’s mistake—is your burden to bear, by choice and by necessity. A harp string plucked decades ago, reverberating yet.

So you wade through the waves of hair—still, you think, growing—and sit on the bed by the princess’s side.

So you lean down to press your lips to her forehead—dry, soft—and feel a tremor, a ripple. A curse: breaking.

So you bring the story to its end.

© 2025 Tia Tashiro