CCCCCC: Siblings through the maze to uhoria: 05/30/19

The next way for siblings to travel through time is through the maze. My exemplar here is The Phantom Tower by Keir Graff. I will be posting a review of the book in a future date. If you haven't read the book and might want to, be warned that this post contains spoilers that the review won't have.

Sibling travelers as I've stated before are same generation travelers who somehow share a filial bond. They are most typically in the examples I've read blood relations with the same parents but they can be adopted, they can be separated at birth, they can be orphans who have decided to call themselves siblings (see We Bare Bears as an example). They are also often children but they don't have to be (see Sam and Dean Winchester of Supernatural).

In our exemplar, the siblings are actually twin brothers: Mal and Colm. When their mother needs to scold them together she collectively calls them Malcolm. In The Phantom Tower, their status as twins gives them extra power in traveling through time both for their own use, as well as the use of the antagonist. Twins can be in two places at one time, or in the case of the Brunhild Tower, the same place at two different times.

The destination in this journey is time itself. It is a place out of time. It is a place with no time. It is a place running out of time. It is a destination where time is the most important aspect above all else.

Uhoria can be presented as literal time travel. It can be shown through the presence of ghosts. It can be through things happening out of order. It can be a count down timer.

In The Phantom Tower time is a two fold destination. There is the phantom tower itself that connects once a day for an hour to the actual tower and leads to a ghostly Chicago where people who have lived and died in the city are. There is a secondary temporal destination in the form of a countdown tower where everyone in the Brunhild Tower will be thrust into this phantom Chicago even if they are still alive.

Finally there is the route to uhoria — the maze. The maze is a twisty, confusing path rife with blind alleys and other sorts of traps. For The Phantom Tower the building as well as greater Chicago serve as the maze, with most of the blind alleys and traps existing in the phantom tower / phantom Chicago. Ghosts and people do get trapped in the tower. For the ghosts, it's a forever entrapment. For the living, the possibility of escape comes once every 24 hours, if they can find their way back to the elevator that connects the two towers.

In the case of The Phantom Tower, the maze and the uhoric state of the phantom tower are nearly one and the same. Other forms of this journey could involve a journey through a more well defined maze that leads from one time to another time, or if it has multiple exits, different times. Or the narrative could be contained within a maze where the goal is to escape to one's proper time. Or it could be a maze that is haunted but is otherwise in the mundane world.

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