It might have been a plea for help.
This must have been the meaning, surely. The maiden was there in the tower, she was real, and he would see her soon. This token she’d sent him was an omen, a sign of hope. Lancelot’s heart soared. Only one more day, perhaps less.
They did not stop building the scaffold, and the knight gazed up at her window — as she saw in her mirror — with such an expression of longing and assurance that her heart nearly gave out. She swooned, falling back upon her pallet. Oh, how she loved him! He must be the noblest knight in all the world!
And she wept, because she did not know what would happen next, and she was terribly afraid.
Her unfinished tapestry looked down on her, bright colors mixed with pale, swirls and patterns that she once thought made a picture, even a blurred one, of the world she could never see — what she thought she might see if she ever looked out the window. Now she saw that the picture she had woven was chaos, all abstraction: shapes and shadows, meaningless splashes of clashing color. The cloth now seemed to expand, mocking her, filling the room with the beautiful and terrible truth of her life, of her curse: none of it was real, and none of it mattered.
Only he mattered. The knight. He was perfect.
If she was cursed anyway, if the workmen and the scaffold came relentlessly closer, if they were so determined to ruin her by disrupting that boundary that encapsulated her life — why then, she would look out. She would see the knight with her own eyes and know the truth before the curse — whatever it was, whatever doom it held for her — came to pass.
First, though, she tore the tapestry from the loom, ripped apart every careful knot she’d made, sliced through it with her knife until the chamber was covered with a flurry of wool and silk. Fiber flew everywhere, a choking mess of it that made her laugh. The true worth of all her work, all this time, however much time it was. Colored bits of thread flashed as they floated through the air, catching bits of sunlight.
Then she fell to the floor and crawled. Her goaclass="underline" the stone ledge of the window. The space within its arcing frame shone blindingly, the sun coming directly at her. She reached up, put her hands on the ledge. Gripped hard, pulled herself up, and looked out.
Where the images in the bronze mirror were blurry, wavering, uncertain, what she saw directly with her eyes was clear and sharp. The pale naked wood of the scaffolding, the brown and green tunics of the men working, passing to and fro across the newly made clearing around the tower. The brilliant blue of the sky — the blue thread she had been using to make skies was dull in comparison.
She passed over all this quickly, wanting only to see one thing, one solitary image: the knight in armor. He was tall; he was handsome. He stood with hands on hips, gazing upward. His smile was uplifting; his eyes shone with depth. She could see rivets and fluting in the steel across his chest and shoulders that she couldn’t see before.
Leaning on the window ledge, she gazed her fill of him.
She had a hope, for just a moment, that nothing was going to happen. The curse wasn’t real, and she wouldn’t be punished in any way for looking, as she always believed she would be. She leaned out the window to feel the sun on her face, a fresh breeze on her skin. She smiled, and then she laughed, because the world was beautiful and she was free.
The knight saw her and raised a hand in salute. She started to wave back.
That was when the skin of her hands split and red flesh spilled out in a ropey mass, dripping blood.
An earthquake rocked the land, shaking the tower, rattling stones from the walls above her. Clouds gathered, blocking the sun, turning day to night. And she thought — ah, so this is the curse. So this is what happens if I look out the window.
And the monster that burst out of her swallowed the trappings of her mortal self.
He saw her, and she was lovely. Because of course she was, being a maiden in a tower in need of rescue.
She waved at him, laughing, and his heart sang. This was a worthy maiden. Perhaps this was fate, and they were meant to be together. He cupped his hands and started to shout at her, to ask how she fared and assure her that all would be well —
And then things got very confusing very quickly.
The maiden vanished. Or something. She was, apparently, instantly replaced by a spray of blood and a glabrous mass of dripping tentacles, writhing out from the window as if reaching for the sky itself. They curled and gripped like fingers around the edge of the window and ripped, tossing the stones away. The tower cracked like a snail’s shell, and a massive, pulsing body oozed out. The thing was far larger than ought to have been contained by the tower that had until recently stood there.
It smelled of swamp and despair.
The chief castle builder came up to Lancelot, shoulders slumped, a defeated look in his eye. His men were running, screaming in terror. One of the tentacles grabbed one of the workers and thrust the poor screaming soul into what was presumably a mouth. It wasn’t entirely clear.
“I told you,” the chief castle builder said tiredly. “Cursed.”
“Huh,” Lancelot replied.
Well, he was here to either rescue maidens or slay monsters. He could no longer attempt the former, but at least he still had the latter. He drew his sword, which would have glinted nobly in the sun, but undulating black clouds had roiled in from every horizon and now covered the sun utterly. An unbreakable darkness fell upon the land.
Lancelot wanted to drop his weapon and weep uncontrollably, but that just wouldn’t do. He was a knight. Of Camelot. And he was here to slay monsters. This encounter would be legendary.
He gave his sword a swing, and it whistled as it sliced the air. He squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and knew that this was what he’d been born for.
One of the dozen — three dozen? three hundred? — gray and veined tentacles came for him, cracking like a whip, curling as if weightless, ready to snatch him and squeeze until he popped. But Lancelot was ready. With a quick lateral cut and a slash down, he separated the tip of the offending limb from the rest of it, and stabbed it where it lay writhing on the ground. The monster groaned, a bone-leeching noise that rattled the very earth. Thunder and lightning rocked the air continuously.
The next awful limb attacked before he could catch his breath, and he dispatched this one as well. His heart was proud, his arm strong, and his sword true. He turned to the panic that had erupted throughout the clearing.
“Men! Draw weapons! To me, to me!”
But these were workmen, not knights and warriors. Not a trained soldier among them. These were men who might pick up a pitchfork to defend a homestead from marauders, but they were not his vassals to call to some greater need of war.
Still, at his voice they paused at the edge of incipient madness. They looked at their hands and saw their tools, looked at Lancelot and saw his sword. And they saw what might be possible. They raised a cheer and turned to face the monster that was now sprawling over a great swath of countryside.
For a while they rallied. Axes, saws, awls, and hammers in hand, the workmen formed a line, slashing and stabbing until the thing’s fetid blood soaked the ground. The shattered stone of the tower seemed to melt in the acid ooze of it. More tentacles grew to replace the old, but for a time they seemed to keep ahead of the onslaught, and drove back the creature from whence it came. They learned to brace against its howls and screams. They somehow grew accustomed to the stink of its slime.