"A little girl once lived in a tower at the End of the World. She lived at the very top, in a tiny room, and it was her world for as long as she could remember.

 

Her room had crooked floorboards and gray, stony walls. She slept in a pile of hay and used a three-legged stool as her table. From her lone window she would look down at the clouds, and at night she would try to count the stars until they blended together into one glittering sheet. The tower rose so high in the sky that she couldn’t see anything else—she had no idea if anything existed underneath the clouds, or beyond the blue, blue sky. It never rained, snowed, or hailed. Sometimes, on nights when the wind died down, she could hear faint rumbling from below or see light streak through the clouds.

She did not find any of this strange, at least in the very beginning. In the very beginning she was an even smaller girl than she was now, four or five or six years old, hardly able to see over the window’s ledge. People in dark robes came to visit her three times a day. In the morning they would come to give her a bowl of milk and a slice of warm bread. At midday they would give her bread and cheese and a little meat, and at night they would give her the same. Twice a week, an old woman would bathe her and help her into clean clothes—always a white linen shirt and a pair of linen pants. Then she would brush the knots out of the girl’s dark hair and leave her to her thoughts.

No, the girl did not wonder often about what might exist underneath the clouds. But she did wonder, now and then, why the people who served her always gave her looks of terror.
Why should they be so afraid of a little girl?"