“You know the Tower’s fate.”
“I do.”
“And still you want in there? To join the doomed?”
“… I do. Kinda.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m excluded. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to want? Those things that are denied me? Those things I’m not supposed to have because people like them find me unworthy?”
“Is that what [those in the Tower] told you?”
“… Some of them. But… What else is there? I know this won’t last, but nothing does. But, what else is there for people like me? I’m cut off. Cut away. I’m the inheritor of their [generational maliciousness] and because of that, I’m their red garlanded scapegoat to be driven into the wilderness.”
“That is their myth. What is yours?”
“… I have none.”
“You breathe. You bleed. You have flesh and bones. You have a myth of your own. What is it?”
“… Every time I think I have found it, it crumbles like the Tower.”
“I will tell you [a thing]. They made the Tower to house their myths. And like yours, their myths crumble. But where you adapt to what remains, they strive to never lose anything and so lose it all. The Tower is built to mimic a thing but in their likeness. A thing they can’t accept because they can not bear to not be the focus, to not be in control. Would you like to see what the Tower is a hubristic substitution for?”
“… Yes, please.”
I did not know I was in darkness until the light illumined through thick clouds overhead. The wind blew both warm and chill as it stirred the flowering grasses and plants that covered the low mound. I would have thought the structure to be just another earthen ripple on the plains if I were not standing at the stone lined entrance to the barrow.
“Towers rise. Towers fall. [The grave] always remains.”
The presence left me with an unspoken question for a companion.
Do I enter?