Castle
Open-topped towers crawl with spiraling staircases and narrow, twisting turns, reaching upward with long, stark walls that sweep from windscoured cliffs into darkened skies. Scaling a path to the heavens, stretching into billowing, blackened eternity: this fortress that clings to the edge of the world.
Every stair is overseen, defended; by sharpened point flying from archer’s slit, by oily flame spilling from suspended cauldron; cascades of death, raining down. Each shallow step is angled against the mailed foot that climbs it, forcing the invader to reach, to stretch, to balance; to exhaust, expend, cease. Reflexive hands grasp, scraping at featureless stone, and the hollow men slip, screaming, to fall back from whence they came, dragging with them along the blood-slicked path multitudes of those who follow behind, like scattered toys falling from the playground of the gods.
One life, one sword; all lives, all swords; littering, layering the perilous path, new staircase, new surface, shifting recklessly beneath the careful feet of determined, unsteady brethren, sliding in bloody, screaming tides of death, of dying, cresting and falling to crushing, pointless defeat.
Still, the central pinnacle, ever the ambition of these fragile, fleeting men, remains undisturbed.