A/N: May 2012: Lightly rewritten: No major editions, plot or even style changes, just slight grammatical fixes and some sentence rearranging. I return to this story sometimes and find I still like it even though it's simple – the slightly childish narrative kind of suits the fairy tale nature of it. So I thought I'd just come back and neaten it up.
Marth was combing his hair. No easy task, as it was long enough to reach all the way from the single small window in his room down to the very base of the tower where he was imprisoned. Not that he ever put his hair out of the window of course; it would get filthy against the grime of the tower walls.
He was the son of the Queen of Eloausia and a young knight who was never seen again. The King, in his rage when he found out, had locked Marth in this tower and had never let him go. The room he had been locked in so long ago was his mother's dressing room, complete with five full-sized wardrobes packed with her dresses. With no other choice he had worn these and over the seventeen years he had been kept there he had slowly grown into them, and having known no different he thought nothing of it.
o
Lord Ike sat at the bar in the Inn Catli and drank his Souja quietly. Beside him two men sufficiently past sober were discussing the famous story of the Rapunzels, the royal family that reigned over the land of Eloausia. He eavesdropped without qualms, not entirely sober himself.
"They say the princess is the most beautiful woman ever seen!" one man declared passionately, a bit of spit flying at his companion, who didn't seem to notice.
"To be trapped for seventeen years! The torture!" the other man exclaimed, the first man nodding in agreement.
"And the tower where she is kept is in the centre of a massive fortress, guarded at all times with men crossed with bulls, nine feet tall with horns that can pierce steel."
"That her own father should do that!"
"But he's not her father, is he, poor king." They both laughed at this. Ike finished the rest of his Souja and declined the barman's offer of more. He felt like declaring that he intended to go to this fortress and save the princess but instead he kept quiet, knowing the men would surely laugh at him.
"The princess has long hair, so long that it is the height of the tower she is trapped in!" one man cried, laughing and falling off his stool. The other man just grinned foolishly. Seeing that he was going to get nothing further from eavesdropping, Ike got off his stool and left the bar. He walked around the back of the inn to the stables and saddled his horse. It should only be a week's journey from here to the fortress, he thought happily. And then he would save the beautiful princess, hold her ransom, get millions of pounds off her mother to give her back, and live happily ever after.
o
Marth had stopped thinking about escaping a long time ago. He spent every day much in the same way, with little to write in his diary, the entries for the past year reading little more than 'did the same as yesterday'. At this particular moment in time he was spending his ritual hour of staring at himself in the mirror, and thinking. He always set this time aside for thinking about life in general, speculating what it would be like if he wasn't trapped in this tower. Mostly this involved rather ridiculous fantasies of riding on a white unicorn down a street covered in rose petals as a huge crowd stood either side and cheered, gazing on in awe as he rode past them. Sometimes they involved slaying a gigantic golden dragon, or swooning in the arms of a knight in shining armour. His entire education had been from fairy-tale books, and he expected little different from his own life. He was the classic damsel in distress and assumed that, at some point in his life, some handsome man would come along and try to save him from his peril.
Sighing he got up from his chair and headed into the bathroom and towards the bath. This had to be the best part of the day, he thought, sighing as he lowered himself into the bubbling water.
o
Lord Roy pulled on his black helmet, as ever loving the way the red plume on top of it swayed slightly when he moved his head. Today, he had finally found time in his extremely busy schedule to go out and save the Princess Martha Rapunzel. The fortress was just an hour's ride down the road of Pain and Destruction and then a short walk across the bridge over the Lake of Darkness, through the main door, into the booby-trapped central courtyard, past the guards employed from a concentration camp specialising in torture, into the tower and up the 3052 stairs, and through the door to Princess Rapunzel's room. She would naturally be extremely grateful, and fall instantly and deeply in love with him. And then he would save the beautiful princess, marry her, and live happily ever after.
He pouted and then added a bit more lip balm, admiring his reflection in the mirror. Quite the athlete, he thought. All those hours having his muscles flexed for him in an electrical impulse machine had done the trick. Finally satisfied, he called for the servant.
"Bring me my black stallion!" And then as an afterthought, "And make sure the mane's been plaited so it's all pretty."
o
Marth had just finished plaiting his hair and now he coiled it and hung a large portion of it on a hook on the wall, leaving just enough free so that he could walk around the room and into the bathroom without discomfort. Sighing, he sat down at his desk and opened his diary before writing in a neat, flowing hand:
I have just finished plaiting my hair. Apart from that, nothing new has happened today.
And then he put down his fountain pen and walked over to the window to see if anything had changed outside. His heart leapt in his chest when he saw a small figure in the distance, just at the beginning of the road of Pain and Destruction. The figure wore black armour which glinted in the sunlight as he rode confidently atop a black stallion, the plume on the top of his helmet bobbing with the horse's canter.
"I thought the armour was supposed to be silver, and the horse a white unicorn," Marth muttered, crossing the room to his trunk of books before taking out the most worn one and flicking to his favourite page. On it was a picture of the knight that saved the princess in the story. Yes, it was silver armour, and a white unicorn. Although the red plume on the helmet was the same. Marth frowned. So who was the man in the black armour? A messenger of some sort? But messengers never came to the fortress. What was a messenger anyway? Marth looked through the trunk and picked out a different book. Nope, messengers wore short robe things and sandals with wings on the back. So he wasn't a messenger. Not a knight coming to save him, not a messenger. Marth panicked, walked over to the pipe jutting out of the wall near the door and yelled into it.
"Intruder! Intruder! There's an intruder at the end of the road!" Then he walked back to the window to watch, nervously fiddling with his hair.