Death
I returned to the turret-filled scene, which had now fully taken on the aura of an impending battle - the silent thunderous roar being now almost deafening – so I scurried into the first entrance I came across and dashed up the stairs in what would have been unseemly haste if an invading army had not been hot on my heels. Such was my effort to get up the steep stone stairs that I paid no heed to the interior of the tower and simply charged headlong through the hatch in the ceiling as soon as I reached it. No sooner had I arrived in the oblong, oak-beamed room, when the single hatch was battened down by an almost insane, quite elderly man, dressed in full battle regalia: chain mail from head to toe, a strikingly impressive red and gold cloth coat of arms, heavy boots, gauntlets and a massive ring on the fourth finger of his right hand.
He might have been a ghost, but he obviously felt like a man of substance. “SWORDS, SWORDS, HURRY YOU BLOODY FOOL, WEAPONS, I’M FIGHTING, THEY’RE HERE, THEY’VE ARRIVED!!!”, he roared with wild impatience. Ghost or no ghost, I was galvanized into instant action by the sheer urgency and authority of his voice, even if I was startled by the knowledge that I had somehow become the last remaining brother in arms of a besieged Medieval Lord. He looked like a crusader. What a situation - I didn’t’ even know if I was on the right side or not, in fact, I rather thought I should have been part of the invasion, seeing as I had come the same way as they had. Perhaps, though, I had just been keeping watch without realizing it.
My flurry of conflicting thoughts did not, however, interrupt the course of my actions, which had caused me to pelt headlong into the armoury situated at the other side of the room from the entrance hatch. How I had known it was there was unclear – I suppose that the force of the command had propelled me successfully in the right direction – and it was with a certain sense of blazing triumph that I picked out the two swords. The larger of the two – doubled-edged, heavy, bejeweled and glittering – I grabbed for my Lord, and on second thoughts decided to bring the smaller one along as well, although it did not occur to me that I would use it myself. I thought I could give them both to him.
I dashed back into the main room (entirely devoid of furniture, although there were several large windows and the walls were draped with thick red and gold tapestry) where the commotion at the hatch was reaching crisis point. At the precise moment that the bolts on the hatch broke apart, and the arms of invaders groped up into our territory, I flung the two swords in the direction of the
mad knight. He caught them with a terrifying bellow and with a manic cry of “BEHEAD THEM, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS”, single-handed decapitated an unknown number of enemy troops. What happened next is something of a blur and it is unclear how long he managed to hold them off for. This appeared to be the last stand of my randomly chosen citadel.
I’d had enough by now. The pages of relatively modern history were appearing to me in completely random violent chaos and my attention wandered back to the refined destination to which I now had both the conscious will and reason to return. I floated without realizing across the hazardous pitch without once looking down, my concentration fully devoted to the reappearance of that lovely field. Fences, trees, walls, hedges, ditches, hills, rivers, plains, no natural barrier could prevent the fulfillment of this journey to the initial stage of completion.
