Genevieve Valentine is a writer based in New York. In addition to her work as a columnist and editor at Defenestration magazine, her short stories have been published by Strange Horizons, The Green Muse, and 10x10x10. She tries to balance the demands of writing with her insatiable appetite for lame TV and awful movies, a battle she tracks on her blog.

I woke from nothing. No dreams had stirred me. I had been a hundred years in darkness. I was a stone, waiting roundly. Blank.

I thought, Perhaps it is all over.

(When the sun was high I used to stand in the garden, toss a little golden ball to watch it shine. I played for hours that way.

It is for the best I pricked my finger.)

The keep was suspended, spider-webs gleaming in the open mouths of the half-dead. The vines had covered everything. There was no light left. I thought, Perhaps the sun has gone out, and despaired.

The table was still set for a feast, the plates buried in dust. I slid a knife from the bones of the boar. I had never touched a blade before; it was my first sharp edge.

The gatekeeper barred the way; he was trapped in the gears of the drawbridge ropes, melting into the machine.

The knife leapt in my hand.

When his arm was severed he fell without a sound, floated on the brackish water from a hundred rainy summers. The water swam into his mouth.

The gates opened for me and I clambered out across the bridge. I had to know what had happened to the sun.

"So the walls held you?"

They'll ask. They must ask. They need to know it was a prison that drove me mad. They must have something to tell one another.

"So the walls held you?"

The knife held me.

I stood barefoot on the bank and watched the morning burn across a foreign kingdom, knowing anyone who has called me beautiful has lied.

The first sun after a hundred years is beautiful.

(The little golden ball has fallen to the robbers now, I think. It was quite valuable. I kissed my father on the cheek when he gave it to me. His gifts were always round.)

I could not look away. I needed the light.

There are no dreams, I knew then. The sun is the only living thing.

When it was too beautiful to bear I closed my eyes again.

The knife held me.

The scars under my brows are sharp and raised, like the bones of a boar. I do not miss anything.

My eyes were closed a hundred years; I am used to the dark.