As the purple light grew stronger, I could make out only a few footprints that remained in the dissipating snow. I had no way of knowing who they belonged to. As Old Rufus and I approached the gate, it reminded me how this was already our second journey.
The first started nearly the same, and not long ago. This creature had been there, nearly from the start. As it would happen, I was lucky to have him by my side.
I looked to him, but Rufus still had his head hunkered low, he was sniffing the ground intently. We were now within a few hundred yards of a weathered door, giant wooden planks sealed by a large metal brace and rivets that looked almost modernistic. Together they formed an ingress as big as the entrance to an airplane hangar.
The door was surrounded on both sides by the perimeter that the gate formed. The gate itself seemed to stretch into infinity in opposite directions. Directly surrounding the entrance, the snow had either been disposed of, or had melted away, as it was nearly non-existent. Tundra grass and dirt were exposed in countless patches and tufts. Flanking the door small bushes, devoid of leaves, begged to be put out of their misery. To look at them was to know they had been burned. Except for one curious thing, a speckle of green couldn’t hide even behind the scorched bushes. It was a pine bough, fresh enough to still have it’s scent. Preasus?
As soon as I had noticed the pine bough Old Rufus seemed to as well. He darted forward. When he did this, I heard a shout from above. My eyes followed the noise, up and up for seemingly forever. Until I saw a dot of a man perched in a tall turret.
“Restrain the beast. And tell me, what business do you have here?” the voice was steady, and I noticed the man speaking had drawn an arrow from a quiver upon his back. It was primed and rested taught in his bowstring.
“Rufus, come back here.” Old Rufus unconcerned about the archer, lazily returned to my side. “Don’t shoot! Err, don’t fire. My name is...well my name isn’t important. I followed a man here, a umm, a villain!”
The man in the tower hollered, “Keep your sights on him. I’m going to meet him.” Then he disappeared out of sight.
It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t talking to me. My eyes followed his gaze. There was a second turret, again with a platform at its apex, on it was another archer, this one a woman.
“Call reinforcements. Don’t move stranger.” the woman shouted down. Her lip curled in a smile. She seemed to be thrilled to have something to aim at.
“Do you want me to hold up my hands?” I shouted up to the woman.
She shrugged, “If I shoot you, I’m not going to shoot you in the hands.” I pondered this for a moment until I heard a horn sound from within the walls. It was a single long note. The machinery behind the walls groaned and squealed. Moments passed until I heard the mechanisms of the great door being swung open.
When it finally was moved aside four men and another woman greeted me. By greeted, I mean they all gazed at me with dour expressions. I waved, and Old Rufus wagged his tail with minimal effort.
The lot of them had swords, except for the first archer who pushed past the crowd and spoke, “You stated you followed a villain here?”
“That’s right.”
“What did this villain look like?” said a bulldozer of a man with a broadsword at the ready.
“Umm, blonde hair, long, in braids.”
The archer spoke again, “This man is your enemy?”
I don’t know why but I laughed, “You could say that.”
The group narrowed their eyes at me. The female archer, still atop her post yelled, “You want me to shoot him?”
My entire body flinched at the question.
“Not yet.”
“Yet?” I asked.
The archer spoke, “The man with the braids was caught in front of our walls a short time before daybreak. He was covering his footprints with a branch. Sort of the behavior that inhabitants behind the wall might find suspicious. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded.
“Much like the fact that another stranger shows up just after we’ve locked him up. Again, odd don’t you agree?”
“Wait a second,” I raised my hands, begging off.
“Shoot him.” the archer commanded.
Before I could argue any further a white light lit up my right temple, and my vision went black. The last thing I heard before I fell to the ground was, “Get the dog.”TO BE CONTINUED!
