Outlines

I crossed the room five more times before I admitted defeat and sunk down against the wall. My feet hurt, my body ached and I shivered from cold. I pulled on the dress again. It was thin, but better than nothing, and it was not like the extra light had help me see anything.

I had found no exits. Nothing to help me out of my predicament.

I bundled up as well as I could in the thin dress, hiding my arms and legs under it, hugging my knees, trying to regain some of the lost warmth. I don't know how long I sat like that, pondering my options and coming up with nothing, until I noticed that something had changed.

A faint, faint light, coming from above, from the middle of the room.

Had it just emerged, or had it been there all the time, obscured by the light emitted from my own skin, visible only now when my eyes had adjusted to the dark?

I watched the light for a few thoughtful moment. It was diffuse, barely visible, most likely bouncing on more than one stone surface before it reached my eyes. I saw no movement that would indicate the flickering of flames, but I could not rule out a diffused enough light source would not have carried over such a pattern anyway.

I closed my eyes in an attempt to preserve their adaptation to the low light and slowly started to walk forward, towards the middle of the room. It was harder now, when I only had my hands and feet to guide me past lose lying blocks of stone and gravel, but I slowly made my way forward. Two times I sat down, hid my arms and legs in my dress and quickly opened my eyes to gauge my proximity to the light source. Then I stood up again and went on.

The third time I found myself roughly below the spot in the distant ceiling the light was coming from. I wrapped myself up as well as I could and stared upwards, forcing my eyes to take in every stray photon.

The light emerged from a spot in the ceiling separated from me by at least three times my body length. It did not appear to me as a perfect circle, as could be expected from a single light source, but rather a slightly oblong object.

A rod emitting light?

An oblong opening to a lit up room?

I squinted. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but it seemed to me the oblong object I perceived was slightly darker in the middle than around the edges.

The edges were letting in light, with a dark object in the middle, obscuring it?

A rectangular square in the ceiling?

Trap door.

The certainty washed over me as I hit upon the thought, just as I was now certain that I had identified my entry point to my current resting place.

Poor little princess, tossed down a trap door into the dungeon to be discarded and forgotten.

No wonder I couldn't find an exit - there was no reason for there to be one.

Not if my only purpose was to disappear.

No.

That was not my purpose. I knew it in my bones.

This was not the end of my journey. This was the start.

And my exit from this prison was not the trap door I had came from. It was impossibly high, I would never reach it on my own accord.

There must be another way. Another way out.

I turned my eyes from the ceiling. I started out into the dark cave that surrounded me. Slowly, unblinkingly, I moved my head, slowly scuffling my body until I had scanned almost half the room.

Until I saw what I had been looking for.

Another light. Even more faint, even harder to notice. It was dull, slightly red, and it emitted from no more than twenty steps from me. I closed my eyes, stepped up and walked that direction. When I sat down and hid my arms and legs again, I saw the red light emit from much closer now, from under a little pile of stone. It was not big, but it was noticeable enough that, had I come across it during my stochastic walks through the room, I would have remembered it. With closed eyes I crept forward until I felt the stones against my hands. I covered up my arms and legs again and watched.

A rough pyramid of stone covering a metal slab in the floor. From the cracks between the metal and stone, the red light filtered.

I felt a jolt of triumph surge through me. I had found my exit.

With eyes and fingers I examined the slab. It had been forged. Shaped. Fit for this hole with a purpose.

A door.

No hinges. No handle.

I turned my attention to the stones on top of it. The pile was small, but the stones themselves were impressively heavy. I attempted to lift one, and I had to strain my muscles.

I could just imagine the dedication needed to put this pile together, one rock after the other, working alone in near darkness, slowly, painstakingly working in a feeble attempt that the door would never again be opened.

To keep something out?

To keep someone in?

Like I said, futile.

I leaned down. I put the palm of my hand against the door. I felt my warmth meet the cold of the metal.

"I am the princess," I said, voice clear and loud. "I demand entry."

Power surged through me. The door slammed open, flinging off the rocks painstakingly piled on top of it like it had been just a handful of rubble.

I stood up with straight back. Shining like a torch I left my cell and walked down the small stone staircase hidden under the door, towards the red light.