Spiremonkey

As Welkin climbed the spire, the ground vanished beneath the cloud bank.

The bitter gale frosted the spire's surface into a crystal tower, but his feet and hands held fast.

For longer than anyone could recall, the spiremonkeys had been the village's only hope to see over the Great Wall. The guards killed anyone even touching the wall. But climbing the spire was an indulgence they permitted.

Welkin was raised to be a spiremonkey. In his infant cradle, his spine was stretched with straps and brackets. As a child, a brace expanded his vertebrae and bulked up his intercostal muscles.

Now, age 14, he was seven feet and four inches tall.

Growing pains are noble suffering, they told him.

The freezing cloud bank thinned as Welkin passed halfway.

In these upper reaches, the material of the spire became stodgy and sagged, suppurated by precipitation.

He felt the blast of frigid wind which overtopped the wall.

He'd never got this far before. But the task was not complete. To see beyond the wall, he must reach the pinnacle then use the slate mirror he carried on his back.

With his lungs burning in the icy slipstream, he willed himself on.

Although the guards permitted climbing the spire, they didn't make it easy. If a spiremonkey neared the tip, they would extend the wall upwards a few additional feet. Welkin couldn't let that happen.

Through exertion and excruciation, his muscles aflame, he forced himself upward until at last he was balanced at the spire's outstretched fingertip.

Every moment he lingered, the air tried to mummify him. He snatched the slate mirror from his back and raised it high. The mirror shimmered with green plasma, ionised by the storm. The wind stole his gasps.

In the mirror, he saw the guards on the wall.

His biceps bulged, shoulder aching, torso straining for another quarter inch of precious, precarious elevation.

Welkin's eye bulged at the dark grey plane of the slate, straining to see beyond the mesh of razor trellis, between the narrow artillery crenellations, something, anything...

His tears froze on his eyeball. Ice stiffened his lashes and turned his clothes to rock. Frostbite blackened his arms.

But even as his body calcified, he felt close to his purpose, his destiny, his birthright – a glimpse beyond the wall.

"Where did he go?" demanded the chief.

"Just," mumbled the clerk, "up..."

"Is he a bird?" the chief snapped. "Perhaps a cloud?"

"We don't know–"

The chief slumped, despairing.

Another spiremonkey gone... Lost. Unreachable. And this close to pinnacling.

"Ascend another," he muttered.

"But sire, why–"

"ASCEND ANOTHER."

From the top of the wall, the guard saw a glint through the cloud. He recognised a slate mirror's shimmer. He scoffed, shrugged.

It always took a few months for new spiremonkeys to master the ascent, and each one always took longer than the last.

Not just because the guards had built the wall higher.

But because the spire was seven feet and four inches taller too.