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In the kingdom behind the Wall, there were two princesses. Identical twins. They were inseparable back then, spending their every waking and sleeping moment together. They had their own bed-chambers, of course, but Pandora still saw fit to sneak into Syra’s each night, and they would lie there giggling and tickling each other, making up stories about the wonders they imagined were outside the Wall until they found their sleep.

Their birth had left them motherless, and seeing as they were only girls, their father didn’t care much for them at all. It was Old Matron Sybil’s duty to keep them under thumb but her old age and their unruliness often saw to them gallivanting around the castle.

On this particular day, they were especially dismayed. Tomorrow, it would all come to an end. Tomorrow, they would make their vow and take the Shroud. It was effectively the last day of their childhood. They knew everything was soon to change and were looking for a final adventure to mark the end of their young, free, and careless years.

So when they found that old locked door on the lowermost floor of the castle, in the dusty crypts, it didn’t even take much convincing on Pandora’s part to get Syra to go into it. She braved one of the stone caskets, pulled out a rusty sword, and pried the door open.

Pandora trekked back to peel a torch off the wall, and they set off. They followed the tunnel for miles. At one point, it emptied out in the abandoned theurgynate mines, and Syra started expressing her desire to head back. But Pandora found another door and convinced her to continue on, remarking maybe the tunnel would lead outside the Wall completely, and they could flee and never be Shrouded.

The tunnel didn’t lead outside the Wall. Instead, it led them inside of it. The room was small, only twelve feet across, with stone blocks of theurgynate littering the floor. Pandora never imagined there was an inside of the Wall. It took her several minutes of studying the grey stone blocks for her to recognize it.

On the far wall was a door yet it didn’t lead out in the direction past the wall, only straight back into Eden. The spiral staircase leading up and up and up seemed to have no end. Several stories up, Pandora could see a small chunk cut out of the stone. A window. “Come, Syra, we can look out and see the other side,” she said gleefully, pointing up to it.

Syra was hesitant at first, but she gained enthusiasm as they climbed. The first window was on the Eden side and they could see their castle from the distance. They’d never traveled so far away from it before. The next window, several stories higher, was on the other side. They would finally see outside the Wall, something they’d been imagining for their entire lives. Pandora started running up the stairs in her excitement. Syra voiced her complaints for Pandora to slow down. These stairs were old and rickety, and there were no handrails, but Pandora ignored her.

Oddly, the temperature seemed to drop lower the higher she climbed. She had almost made it to the window when an uneasy feeling washed over her, and she slowed. A quiet humming sound permeated from the other side of the wall. She turned back to ask Syra if she could hear it as well when a burst of energy she could only describe as lightning or a gust of wind hit her squarely in the chest and launched her off the stairs. The pain of it was excruciating, and she let out a harrowed cry as she fell and fell and fell.