Anoril
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The Fortress of Baron Sudoku and the Goodges
Hanging onto the window ledge by my fingertips, I looked down and realised, with horror, that the Goodges were just meters below me. Dozens of them, their cruel beaks glinting horribly in the twilight as if to remind me how pathetic my own sword was, dangling uselessly from my belt. I did my best to pull myself up and through the window even as I heard the Goodges’ talons scrabbling for purchase on the smooth, vertical stone wall. To my dismay I found myself lacking the unnatural grip on the wall that my pursuers possessed.
As I was, possibly hundreds of feet off the ground, I found myself fearing the bloodthirsty beasts below me more so than I did their murderous creator whom I’d been charged to slay and whom I’d climbed so far to face.
The Goodges moved closer, their bloodstained silvery talons allowing them to scale the wall as though it were the flat ground of the distant world below. Looking down I stared into the mock-aquiline face of the nearest of them, it’s huge eyes dilating. I readied myself as it withdrew its arm from the wall to make a sweep at my unprotected legs. I felt the rush of air as the attack came and I lifted my foot to plant it, just for a second, on the creature’s scaly shoulder, I was then able to push myself up and through the window.
I didn’t wait around when inside, ignoring my darkened surroundings I hurriedly drew my sword and stabbed outward into the chest of the monster about to enter the room after me. I knew better than to think that such a blow would slay it but the Goodge fell, crooked arms flailing, backward and out the window allowing me time to close the heavy wooden shutters on the rest of them.
I panted heavily, imagining the Goodges outside clutching the stone wall, surrounding the window from all sides trying to gain entry…and sure enough I heard thuds coming through the wood and then…a creak, a groan of splintering. The shutter would hold them off a minute at best.
Wasting no further time I set off across the room toward a crack of light issuing from behind a door. Once on the opposite side I grabbed from my belt the wall-hooks I’d used to make the great ascent up the near-impenetrable fortress and jammed them into the door handle, hoping it’d be enough to hold them another minute.
I gripped my sword tighter and turned around to face a flight of stairs so old that they looked to have been carved from the mountain itself. But if I thought that they were old it was nothing to what I found when they terminated.
At the top of the stairs, so worn they may have passed for a slide, was a room bathed in the light from hundreds of yellow candles, illuminating the only occupant of this room.
The Baron Sudoku stood in the centre of the room his eyes open, his eyelids having long since rotted away, but quite obviously asleep. The reason I knew he was not awake? The fermented anger in those eyes indicated plainly that this was a creature that would not knowingly allow me to stand in its presence longer than a second.
I’d heard tales of the Baron before now; I’d read tales of him in the oldest of books. Some sources had informed me that he’d seen the formation of the mountain he now dwelled in, others said he himself had caused the mountain’s formation. I had not believed them, until now. Sudoku was aged beyond anything I’d ever seen before, his face lined and crumpled, so yellow and cracked that anyone would have been forgiven for thinking him to be made of nothing but century-old parchment. Many people spoke of Sudoku as a vampire, they would have been forgiven for thinking that too, albeit the first ever vampire to exist. But now I saw him in the ever lasting, decomposing flesh I knew him in fact to be ancient beyond any common vampire.
In his sleep my adversary let out a deep sigh, a breath I could well believe he’d been holding for decades, surely at such a great age Sudoku no longer needed to breathe as the mortal he had perhaps once been.
Prior to piercing his shrivelled and hate-filled heart. I saw his eyes flicker; he may have been awake after all, too tired to prevent his own demise or perhaps welcoming it. Either way he put up no resistance to the blow and as his body slid to the floor, disintegrating before my eyes, he let out another sigh as if to say that having seen so much was no gift, but a curse. To be so ever lasting was no prize but a onus he’d been forced to carry. A cross he’d had to bear to long.
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