For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “15) prompt: ascension.”

The stairs twisting up the side of the mountain are a metaphor for the way my people came to their feet from the water below, climbing to ascendance. They are a defense against intruders, who must fight their way up the stairs against massed defenders. They are a meditation and a history book, our stories carved into their walls, an allegorical journey as well as a physical one.

To my “guests,” however, they were a very long set of stairs, over a mile of ascent and half again that much for the way they twist and turn, an exhausting climb after their ordeal. I wondered when they had last eaten, and how well; I wondered, with more concern, how physically unfit they were. Their ordeal here would tax them, and they would need all of their strength. If they weren’t up to it, it would, in the end, come down on me. I’d picked them.

That would come later. For now, I guided them into a landing, where a fountain bubbled fresh water. “We can rest here for a while.”

I was not, myself, feeling the climb; nor were the guards, who walk these stairs every day. The stairs from the great dining hall to my tower bedroom were nearly half the height of the great stairs, after all, my people are built for endurance. You can not swim the flood if you can’t manage stairs.

I sipped the sweet water and watched them pant, worrying for their future.

As I chewed over this story, I had setting after setting going through my head. Then I said, “hey, I have a setting involving a giant stairway already!”