Stairsby
hanserikComment by K3Master: He was late, that day, and was busy going over the excuses for why in his mind, when he came upon the stairway.
He had passed it, of course, a dozen times a day during his tenure there, and thought nothing of it every time. For whatever reason caused him to stop this time, when urgency and tardiness were screaming within him that he could not stop, he would never know.
Yet stop he did, and gazed upwards. Round and round it went, reaching to the very top of this rather unremarkable place, built like so many other buildings of the period. Yet something caught his attention and his mind, and he found himself unable to look away. He looked up there and wondered. Wondered what he would find, up there at the top. Wondered how fantastic it would be to go running up there, round and round, maybe getting a little dizzy, to then look down again and see what he could see.
A giddy sort of excitement grabbed him then, and all thoughts of being late were stripped from his mind. With a small shout of anticipation that startled some others walking past, he dropped his briefcase to the floor, and began to run up those winding stairs. Indeed, he went up them so quickly that on occasion, his momentum nearly sent him over the railing, a wild look in his eyes, nearly inhuman. He ran, faster and faster, his breath now coming in ragged bursts, his face red and inflamed, his eyes bulging. He ran, circling those wondrous steps, with complete abandon.
Then, reaching the stop, a scream of triumph ripped from his throat and echoed through the cavernous hall, and people below all stopped and stared upward and pointed, and began talking amongst themselves at such a strange and startling disturbance to their usual routine.
And as they gazed, suddenly they saw a body fling out from the top and come rocketing towards the ground, for when he got to the top, the man up there had lost his mind completely, and the triumph of the climb had quickly changed into a desperate urge to fly. To fly from this height and conquer the world.
For a long time afterward, whispered in the offices and the bathrooms and the halls, came the tale of the man that had jumped from the stairway, but in another land, beyond the doorways of ours, lived the spirit of the man that could fly.
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