= The Wishing Coin =

Deep underground in the castle beneath all things remembered living, a
prisoner was held in a vast chamber of darkness.  The only light came
from an unseen barred window far above.  The faint lux served only as
a reminder of an existence monotonous.  Long forgotten by his captors,
his water he found from a continuous drip running the wall.
Sustenance was molds and insects that could survive the subterranean
lightlessness, and the occassional rat found him a spot of meat.

One day's eventlessness was interupted by a sharp pain in his head and
a clean metallic ringing.  Seeking the source of the sound, the
prisoner came upon a coin that must have fallen from above.  The light
was too faint to see the coin, but feeling it he discerned a design he
had never hithero beheld but that he imagined dated to the realm's
atinquity.

The drip parted about a stone, under which was a slot just the size of
the coin.  The prisoner let the coin fall in upon a wish.

Some would think he would wish for salvation. But when one has been
bereft of senses, of all contact with one's kind, identity dissolves.
The prisoner below the castle wished for the glory of the ancient
kingdom, as he imagined it to be, to be restored.

Desparately, he put his eart to the slot to listen to the coin fall.
He heard it roll down, bouncing, careening, rolling again, as it grew
ever fainter in its descent.  Down it went, past ghosts of prisoners
still fettered beyond death, past bones of dragons, lifeless pools
home to fish without eyes, and deeper creatures of the earth beyond
sight and knowledge.  At last when the sound fell beyond the threshold
of hearing or even imagining of quiet echoes, still he sat, his ear to
the wall, awaiting an answer that could never come:  if a wish, so
given, falls, what must rise upon its wings?