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Battered or shining armor? Does it matter? As long as he comes.
Battering shows effort, battered armor shows that he has fought and put in the effort to save her. Shining on the other hand shows that he never took a blow, it shows how capable of a fighter he is, how he has never struggled. If that is the case then he is not for her. She has waited ten years, alone. The least he can do is know what it is like to want too.
Battered is better, she decides as she watches the clouds outside her tower window. Blue sky against the snowcapped mountains and white clouds lazily drifting over the dense forest. The same view she has always had. Everything is far enough away it always looks the same to her.
Her leg swings carelessly out the window a finger's breadth away from scraping against the outside stone; the skirt of her dress lapping with the wind.
Where is her prince? In the stories she hear as a girl the princes always come to save the princess from all her woes. “So, where is he?” she asks the air, not even a songbird calls out to answer. The prince is supposed to come. The prince is supposed to defeat the monster keeping her trapped behind this stone. He still hasn’t come. Maybe no one ever will.
Not for the first time she imagines saving herself. Tearing up her dresses, tying them together then climbing down the side of the tower. Sneaking out so the dragon never sees her or knows she is gone.
Quickly, she puts that fantasy away.
The dragon will know. It is smart enough to see a long trail of cloth fluttering out her window. With one breath from it she would fall. As much as she hates being stuck here, life is better than death, no matter how trapped she is.
The other imagining: armed with a broken off chunk of her bed post, she heads down the hundred stairs and fights it herself. Not a smart idea either. She doesn’t know how to fight her monster. She never has. She wants to be free of it more than anything, but has no idea how to defeat it or get away from its thrall.
Why won’t someone come save her? She doesn’t think she can do it herself.
A tear falls off her faces and starts on the long journey to the ground below. Instinctively, she wipes away the trail it left on her.
She has to be presentable; even if no one will ever come. That’s the way she always must be, no matter how much she feels like she is breaking apart inside. Her knight in battered armor would understand, if only he would arrive already.
She watches out her window, every day. From it she can see the only access to her tower. She would be able to see him coming. She should have seen someone by now.
Another tear. She growls in spite of it. Not very lady like.
Well, whoever was supposed to save her hasn’t been too terribly chivalrous, making her wait so long. If only she were capable of getting herself from out of these stone walls. She has the will and the means, just not the aptitude to do so.