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The Watchtower part I

February 01 2026

A rigid structure influences a person’s behaviour in the first part of this creative short story, by Joseph Hickman

The Architecture 

The watchtower did not announce itself as a tower. It had no silhouette, no horizon line where it cut the sky. It arrived as instruction. As tone. As the subtle correction in a voice before the sentence finished forming. Elias learned it the way one learns gravity: not by explanation, but by falling correctly.

He did not remember an entrance. There was no moment of before. Childhood, for him, was already interior. The earliest memories were of corridors that adjusted when he paused, of thresholds that narrowed when he hesitated. Space was conditional. It responded. The walls were sensitive to doubt. Some children learned to crawl. Elias learned to measure himself.

The tower trained him gently at first. It rewarded alignment. When his thoughts followed approved contours, the air felt smoother, as if friction had been temporarily suspended. When he wanted what he was supposed to want, nothing resisted him. This was how safety was taught – not as protection from harm, but as the absence of resistance.

Discomfort, on the other hand, arrived as sound. A low hum beneath the ribs. A bell-tone too distant to locate, too intimate to ignore. The tower did not punish mistakes, it anticipated them. It rang at the almost. At the tilt toward deviation. At the premonition of a desire not yet confessed even to himself.

Elias learned to interrupt himself mid-thought. He learned to smooth rough edges before they could catch. He learned that silence was not empty, it was monitored.

Adults spoke of conscience. They used words like responsibility, maturity, self-control. Elias absorbed these as architectural terms. Load-bearing. Structural. Necessary for the building to stand. He did not question why the building needed to be so tall, or why it grew faster whenever someone tried to leave a floor unfinished.

At night, the tower rearranged itself.

Sleep did not dissolve it, sleep made it stronger. Elias would dream of staircases that ascended only if he named each step correctly. Of rooms that locked when he tried to describe them. Of windows that showed him versions of himself he could not recognise but somehow knew were accurate.

He woke with absences. A word he had liked, now unreachable. A memory thinned to outline. A want reduced to a sensation without object.

These were not taken violently. They were filed. Archived. The tower was meticulous. It believed in future use.

He did not miss the things at first. He only noticed that choosing felt heavier. That each decision carried the weight of invisible appendices. That even joy arrived annotated, footnoted with conditions.

Joy was suspicious by default. Especially joy without witnesses.

The tower did not forbid happiness, it regulated it. It preferred joy that could be justified retroactively. Achievement-based joy. Serviceable joy. Joy that could withstand questioning. Anything spontaneous triggered inquiry. Anything excessive required explanation.

Elias learned to keep his pleasures small and well-documented.

Language was where the tower tightened its grip.Words were not neutral. They were corridors. Some widened into permission, others narrowed into traps. Elias learned which phrases kept the air circulating and which ones made it stale. He learned that certain sentences, if completed honestly, would collapse entire sections of the floor beneath him. So he learned to trail off, to imply, to substitute.

Adults praised him for being articulate. What they meant was that he was precise in his self-erasure.

The tower grew with him. Not symmetrically. It favoured vertical expansion – more levels, more oversight. Each year added new rules that pretended to be refinements of old ones. Nuance masquerading as wisdom. Complexity mistaken for depth.

By adolescence, Elias could feel the tower through his spine. Vertebra by vertebra, each rule nested inside the next. Standing upright required constant calibration. Slouching was dangerous, it suggested collapse. Relaxation looked too much like refusal.

Other people lived inside towers too, though they described them differently. Some called theirs tradition. Some called it duty. Some insisted they felt nothing at all, which Elias suspected was a different kind of noise.

There were those who loved the walls. They spoke warmly of structure, of clarity, of knowing one’s place. Their towers hummed contentedly, fed by routine and repetition. Elias tried to emulate them. He studied their posture, their certainty.

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