The Balcony

Dreamer, a young, gangly-limbed man with wide, eager eyes, looked past his and his companions’ small campfire and down the corridor which stretched beyond. The hallway, comprised entirely of gray marble with countless arches on either side leading to yet more rooms and chambers still unexplored, seemed to stretch on endlessly. Dreamer hoped otherwise. “This is it. After all this time, the balcony is finally within reach. I can feel it.”

Sharp, one of his two companions, a young woman with a wiry build and long, straight hair, snorted in disbelief. “Right, Dreamer. You’ve been saying that the balcony would be right around the next corner for as long as I have known you, and yet it never is.”

“And yet,” Dreamer retorted. “You don’t turn back, either.”

Sharp only rolled her eyes at that. As much as Dreamer enjoyed teasing her, they both knew that this expedition would have been impossible without her. Her razor-edged senses, especially her eyesight and hearing, proved she more than earned her name. Dreamer was merely grateful she put up with his many jaunts and tests, as he dealt with hers. He picked up the broken leg of some unidentifiable piece of ancient furniture and tossed it into their fire, watching the flames blaze up slightly with the added fuel.

Guy, the third member of their band, shivered slightly and stretched his hands out to soak up more of the fire’s warmth. The newest addition to the group, Guy was an enormous, burly man with a surprisingly gentle air that surprised many when they first met him. “It’s so cold in the upper halls,” Guy said with a groan. “Can you even imagine what it will be like outside?”

“If there even is such a thing as ‘the outside,’” Sharp said with a shake of her head.

“If you don’t believe, Sharp, then why bother coming all this way?” Dreamer asked. Sharp gave him a piercing stare for a moment without replying, then glanced away.

The Palace, the only world the three had ever known, consisted of a vast complex of chambers and passages interwoven in a structure too large for the mind to comprehend. It was commonly accepted among the many nomadic inhabitants of the Palace that the building had no true end. Although there were windows within the Palace, all looked out onto other rooms. Most believed that, even if an outer extent of the Palace existed, and one could reach it, beyond those walls stood nothing at all. Dreamer believed otherwise. Dreamer had hoped to find the castle’s limits, beyond which an “outside” of which only the oldest of legends spoke could be found. His tribe had labeled him Dreamer for his aspirations, shortly before exiling him.

Dreamer had wandered aimlessly after that for a while before coming across a raving, delusional explorer, near death, who had entrusted him with a map before passing on. That map, to Dreamer’s joy, showed a path to a balcony on the exterior of the Palace, allowing a true view of what existed beyond. Shortly thereafter, Dreamer had recruited both Sharp and Guy, and together they had set out on their quest, the end of which Dreamer’s map claimed lay within reach.

To prove his point, Dreamer took out the withered parchment of the map and spread it out before them once more. “Do you see?” he asked excitedly, tapping the uppermost right corner of the map. “All we need to do is walk up these final flights of stairs and travel this one corridor, and we will reach the balcony. We will at last see what’s beyond.”

Sharp stood up and kicked at their fire, scattering it into tiny piles that smoldered on the marble floor of the Palace. “Let’s get going, then. We have had enough rest.”

As one, Guy and Dreamer stood up as well, with Guy lifting the pack full of the meager remains of their supplies. It consisted solely of rats and other vermin, the only other living things in the Palace besides humans and all any of them had ever eaten.

They stepped through one of the many archways of chiseled marble, finding themselves in a narrow passageway lined with doors leading to yet more of the Palace’s labyrinthian rooms. Emerging out of the other end of the claustrophobic passage, the trio found themselves in its exact opposite: a staggeringly enormous space, so wide and tall that the walls and roof were nearly lost in the gloom. Less than ten paces in front of them, the ground abruptly dropped away, creating a chasm. To their left and right, spouts in the wall allowed water to pour out in graceful waterfalls that cascaded down into the chasm below, filling the room with a faint mist.

Disorienting them further, on the opposite side of the chasm the ground was reversed, with the “ground” descending from their ceiling and the door opposite them flipped in relation to themselves. Directly in front of where the trio stood, a staircase without railing or supports headed across the chasm, spiraling in mid-air so that, when one descended down the opposite side, they would be right-side up as they approached the opposite platform.

“This can’t possibly be the right set of stairs,” Sharp muttered, taking a step back as she did so. “You’ll fall off halfway across!”

“It may look like it,” Dreamer said. “But I’m sure that it’ll work.”

“I don’t know,” Guy said uncertainly. “Dreamer, this doesn’t look safe to me.”

“When has it ever been safe?” Dreamer asked the other two. “Think of everything we have been through just to get to this point, how many mazes and traps we had to overcome! Are you really going to turn back now?”

The other two said nothing, Guy biting his lower lip nervously, Sharp watching Dreamer with her hands on her hips. Dreamer took a deep breath and, turning away from his friends, said, “Fine. I’ll show you.”

“Wait!” Sharp cried out, but Dreamer, ignoring her, ran forward, leaping onto the stairs and racing up them, taking two or more at a time with every step he took. Soon he was at the halfway point, where the stairs and indeed the entire room flipped. Closing his eyes and charging ahead, Dreamer took the last fateful step and felt a lurching sensation within his gut as he began to fall.

Only for his fall to be cut short as his feet landed on solid ground.

Opening his eyes slowly, Dreamer looked down to see in amazement that he still stood on the stairs, but that now the platform across from his seemed right-side up, and that the platform he had started on, along with his friends, now appeared upside-down.

“Did you see that?” he called back to his friends excitedly.

“I see it,” Sharp admitted. “But I’m still not sure I believe it.”

Dreamer let out an excited whoop as he ran the rest of the way down the stairs to the final platform, stopping to catch his breath and glance back at his friends’ progress. Guy started up the stairs, bounding after Dreamer and reaching the halfway point sooner than he had. Without hesitation, Guy crossed over, in one smooth motion flipping in midair so that he now appeared upright to Dreamer, and quickly joined him near the farther door.

“Come on, Sharp!” Dreamer called encouragingly. “It worked for both of us!”

Sharp, slowly and reluctantly, made her way up the stairs to the turning point. She stood there for quite a while, eyes wide, breathing slowly as she gathered her courage. At last, she took a single, hesitant step forward and let out a surprised gasp as the room rotated for her as well. Legs wobbling beneath her, she made her way down the other side, where Guy and Dreamer helped to support her while she steadied herself.

“I never want to do anything like that again,” Sharp said, breathing heavily as she did so.

“Hopefully, we won’t have to,” Dreamer said. “Once we reach the outside and are beyond the Palace, we’ll never have to walk up or down another flight of stairs for the rest of our lives.”

Sharp couldn’t help but laugh at that. As soon as he was sure she felt sufficiently better, Dreamer walked over to the door at the far end of the platform and scrutinized it. A massive, ponderous thing, made of metal polished to an almost unnatural sheen, the door had ancient hieroglyphs carved into its rim and an intricate, knob-like handle jutting out from the direct center of the door.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“What does that text say?” Guy asked.

Dreamer narrowed his eyes, comparing it mentally to the language of the ancient books he had studied when they had passed through an abandoned library on one of the Palace’s lower floors. “I think…it says something about a warning.”

“A warning?” Sharp said warily.

“Yes,” Dreamer said, leaning forward as he tried to fully interpret what the door said. “It’s warning us…that the answers we seek lie beyond.”

“Why would we be afraid of answers?” Guy asked.

“I don’t know,” Dreamer said quietly.

Sharp gave a nervous little laugh. “Well, we aren’t going to let a door threaten us, are we?”

Dreamer took courage at that and pushed on the door. When nothing happened, he frowned, then pushed harder. With a sigh, he said, “It’s locked.”

“Let me have a look,” Sharp said. She stepped forward and, noticing the knob handle, grabbed it and gave it an experimental twist. She heard a faint clicking from within the door and smiled slightly to herself. “This will be easy to take care of,” she told Dreamer and Guy confidently. “Just step back and give me some room to work.”

Dreamer and Guy did as she requested, and Sharp quickly got to work, pressing her sensitive ears against the door and listening carefully to each and every click and whir of the gears within as she delicately spun the knob back and forth. With each turn, more and more of the combination lock’s cogs fell into place. Once she felt satisfied about the combination, she stepped back and gave the door an experimental push. To Dreamer and Guys’ delight, it swung open without effort, allowing them to continue onwards.

Bowing slightly, Sharp stepped out of the way, allowing Dreamer and Guy to pass by her. “Thanks,” Dreamer said appreciatively.

Sharp simply smirked and fell in behind the other two as they kept walking.

“Almost there,” Dreamer said with hushed excitement. “I can practically feel it now.”

Beyond the door stretched a long room, the floor of which slanted ever-so-slightly upward. The occasional candle set in holders on the walls provided the only light. The candles sputtered with a dank, unnatural blue aura, which made the whole hall feel slightly surreal.

“This is it,” Dreamer told the others. “At the end of this hallway lies the balcony.”

Sharp tilted her head forward, eyes narrowing. “I can’t see the end. We’ll be walking for quite a while.”

Guy cracked his knuckles. “The less time we spend talking, the sooner we’ll get there.”

The other two couldn’t argue with that. The three of them walked down the hallway in a line, the hall silent save for their own footsteps and the distant roar of the waterfalls in the pervious chamber. They walked until they lost all sense of time, the hallway seemingly stretching on for forever, the upward climb only adding to their misery.

Suddenly, Sharp pointed forward and shouted, “There! I see the end!”

“Really?” Dreamer and Guy said simultaneously, relief in both of their voices.

“Yes,” she said, then stiffened slightly. “And there’s someone standing there.”

Dreamer paled. The idea that someone had beat them already to his life-long goal pained him, but so long as they were willing to allow them all access to the outside and not keep it for themselves, he supposed he could bear it. “Let’s go meet them,” he said.

The stranger at the end of the hallway was not what any of them had expected to see. They wore an enormous, intricate suit of armor, with delicate scrollwork carved into every facet of the gleaming plate. The stranger carried a massive battle-axe, slung carelessly over one shoulder. Their helmet totally obscured their face, save for a tiny eye slit through which two ruby-colored points of light could be seen. Behind the stranger, they could see a tiny, unadorned wooden door set in the wall, firmly shut tight.

“Halt,” the stranger said in a metallic voice far louder than it should have been. “You can proceed no farther.”

“Impossible. Let us pass,” Dreamer demanded. “We must see the balcony.”

“No,” the stranger said emotionlessly. “I cannot let you do that. To see the balcony, one must pay a terrible price. One you are unwilling to pay. Leave now.”

Dreamer stood there, clenching his fists at his sides. To come all this way, only to be stopped at the last moment, appeared to him the ultimate insult. He started to turn to leave, when, to his surprise, Guy spoke up.

“We aren’t going anywhere,” Guy said, crossing his burly arms across his chest.

Sharp glanced at Dreamer, then said, “This may be Dreamer’s dream, but that doesn’t mean we won’t fight for it. Let us pass, stranger, or you’ll be the one paying the price.”

The stranger merely said, “very well,” and hefted its axe in their gauntleted hands, as if testing the weight. With surprising speed and agility, the stranger suddenly lashed out, swinging the axe directly at Dreamer’s head as they charged forward. Sharp reacted equally quickly, shoving Dreamer to the side so that the axe swung by, missing his scalp by the narrowest of margins. As the axe completed the swing, Guy charged forward, slamming his right fist into the center of the stranger’s armored chest at the same time as his left fist hit their face. Although his punches packed enough force to make visible dents in the stranger’s armor, his foe didn’t act surprised or even injured.

The stranger kicked Guy in the chest with their heavy metal boot, sending him sprawling over backwards on the ground. The stranger then lifted their axe above their head, preparing to bring it down upon Guy.

“Guy!” Dreamer yelled as his friend rolled to the side, the stranger’s strike barely missing his head. The force of the blow sent sparks flying up in every direction. The stranger ponderously lifted their axe once more, but Sharp darted forward, grabbing the stranger’s arm as she tried to wrench the axe from their hands. In response, the stranger struck Sharp across the face with their free hand, the blow knocking her to the ground, senseless. Dreamer could see that she still breathed, albeit barely, a bruise already forming on the side of her face.

Dreamer screamed in wordless rage against his opponent. Undisturbed, the stranger advanced towards him, axe at the ready. It swung at him once more, and Dreamer desperately darted to the side, the blow slicing through the air where he had stood less than a second before. Breathing heavily, he tried to punch at the armored stranger, but his blows proved less than useless against the stranger’s plate, managing only to bruise his own knuckles for his efforts. In response, the stranger turned around to face him once more.

Moving with an unnatural burst of speed, they brought their axe to bear against Dreamer, swinging directly for his chest. Dreamer instinctively closing his eyes, accepting his fate. He heard the gut-wrenching sound of the axe cleaving flesh but found to his surprise he felt absolutely nothing. Hesitantly, he opened his eyes, only to see the worst thing he could imagine.

“Guy!” he whispered. “No.”

Guy had thrown himself between Dreamer and the stranger, and now stood there, quivering slightly, the axe buried up to its hilt in his chest. Ignoring the blow, Guy reached out and, grabbing the handle, wrenched it free from the stranger’s grasp. The stranger, seemingly as stunned as Dreamer, took a step back uncertainly. With a sickening sucking sound, Guy pulled the axe free from his chest. Breathing heavily, Guy swung the axe back and forth, battering away at the armored stranger with a frenzy that Dreamer had never seen from the ordinarily gentle man. With each blow, he dented the stranger’s armor still further, yet still their opponent did not react as if they felt pained. Then, with a single, mighty chop, Guy knocked the helmet clean, revealing the suit of armor to be empty. The helmet clattered to the ground besides the armor, which instantly froze in place.

“What?” Dreamer said, surprised.

Ignoring him, Guy slammed the axe into the empty armor’s chest plate, cleaving it in two with a single blow. The armor fell to the ground, whatever force that animated it having fled. Guy stood there for a moment, panting heavily, before his legs abruptly gave out beneath him.

“Guy!” Dreamer said, running over and kneeling next to his fallen friend. “You’re going to make it, Guy. It’s alright. Just trust me. I promised you I would show you the balcony.” He took a deep, unsteady breath. “I promised I would show both of you.”

Guy smiled slightly, although even that effort seemed to worsen his wounds. “It’s alright, Dreamer,” he told his friend. “Live your dream. See what’s beyond the Palace.”

“Not without you, or Sharp,” Dreamer said, tears coming unbidden to his eyes.

“Take care of Sharp,” Guy told Dreamer sternly. “And…don’t ever…stop…dreaming…,” With a peaceful sigh, Guy closed his eyes and fell limp. A moment later, he stopped breathing.

Dreamer beat his fists on the ground. “Not this close,” he whispered, miserable. “This can’t happen so close!”

“I told you that the price would be higher than you would be willing to pay,” the stranger’s voice said, emanating from the fallen helmet. “I told you…”

In a sudden fit of rage, Dreamer stomped over to the helmet and kicked it, watching angrily as it rolled down the hallway until it had vanished from his sight. Dreamer then wiped his eyes until they were dry with the back of his hand and, walking over to where Sharp had fallen, shook her awake and helped her back to her feet.

“What happened?” she asked hazily, gingerly holding a hand to her bruised cheek, before seeing Guy’s fallen body. “Oh no,” she said quietly.

“I know,” Dreamer said. “He died…saving us.” He turned to the unassuming door, the final barrier between him and his lifelong goal. “He told me to live my dream. Do you want to come with me?”

Sharp took a gulp of air, then nodded hastily, saying, “We should. We must. For Guy.”

“For Guy,” Dreamer echoed as they walked over to the door. Dreamer hesitated for a moment, almost scared to see what lay beyond, before with a final burst of energy he pushed the door open and walked out onto the balcony beyond. He stood there frozen for a moment, then began laughing quietly. His laughter slowly grew louder and louder, and more delirious, until he stood nearly doubled over, clutching his sides, wracked with endless peals of hysterical mirth.

“What is…,” Sharp started to say as she walked out besides him. Then, she froze. “Oh,” she said quietly. “It can’t be. It just isn’t fair.”

They could see the entire sweep of the Palace, stretched beneath them and beyond them in every direction, enormous but with a true limit. Beyond that, however, they could see a circle of colossal pillars, each as large as the entire Palace by themselves, soaring up to a gray dome above them whose surface was lined with glowing runes in a script neither understood. The impact of what those pillars and roof meant weren’t lost on either Dreamer or Sharp.

The Palace, their entire world, was contained within a single room of an even larger building.