It is never twice the same.
It is never once different.
It is a cycle smaller than the whirling breath-dance of suns and planets that is the universe, but, in its own way, it is just as important.
Always, a child is stolen. Not always one, sometimes many, but always, at the very least, one. Taken from where it belongs, it is disquieted.
A child sings in the statue that is her home, unaware of the machines below her or the watchful eyes around her, content to study books and locks.
Always, the thief builds a tower. The tower has been stone, it has been cities, it has been worlds. But always it is built by, for, and in many ways out of the thief. Sometimes it takes years to build, but time is fluid, it is for the purposes of this cycle, utterly unimportant.
A thief takes seven days to create his tower. Before this tower, there was nothing. The thief speaks, "Let there be light."
The child will always be the source of the thief's power, guarded jealously, though often for reasons thought noble. For the thief, though he can never see the full loop, sees farther along the cycle than the Hero.
A thief waits in one of his eight towers, claws scoring the stone as his underlings prepare the spinning chains, the fire. He knows he may not stop the bounding heroes in red and green, but he has his part to play, just as much a captive as the princess he has taken.
Always the hero sees only what is in front of him. Though it does not need to be a him. Often, it is a her, but most commonly, the hero is something more fluid. Something harder to define, because sex, in this cycle, is also unimportant. All that is important is that the hero reclaim the child, and in so doing, destroy the tower and the thief.
A hero grips the hilt, fear still dancing in his eyes. He is thankful for the protection, as now he knows that it is dangerous to go alone.
Though time is unimportant to the cycle, the players are not exempt from its passing, and often child is no longer an apt descriptor by the time the hero finds them.
If one could view these cycles, these spinning repeating stories like grass in a limitless field, they would be dotted by the igniting of countless romances.
A child in a stone tower uses the last of her golden power in a single tear to mend a hole in her lover's breast.
And as many would be blackened by despair. Though the players must play their parts, the thief is not always unhappy to be rid of the child, the child is not always happy to be freed, and the hero is not always happy to destroy the tower.
A red-haired hero shouts for Roxas to abandon his thief, despairs that he might never return from this virtual tower.
As with so many things in the limitless realities, there is no set purpose. Perhaps the thief must learn to build with their own strength. Perhaps power unearned must be bought with imprisonment. Perhaps the hero must learn to forge their own path even as they tread one as well-worn as the most familiar road.
A defiant thief dies as a man chooses, or perhaps as a slave obeys.
There are constants and variables, impossibilities and mundanities, certainties and doubts. Through everything, the cycle continues, uncaring.
Never once different.
Never twice the same.
