As he shut the door, Lefty felt the fatigue hit him like a sack of bricks. Dropping to the bed, he was unconscious the moment his head hit the pillow. In fact, he was out so cold that when the innkeeper later arrived to ask if he wanted any food, Lefty didn’t even stir.
Feathers also slept.
So it was, several hours later, when they both awoke to someone shouting and banging on their door. Lefty, bleary eyed and head tingling, wiped the drool from his mouth as he looked around the room. For a moment, he had no recollection of where he was or why he was there until he heard a quack from the floor where Feathers was looking up at him.
The duck had asked if he was going to get that, to which Lefty’s response was an incoherent series of groans.
Rolling over on the bed, Lefty sat up and shook his head. Somewhere inside his skull, thousands of gray matter cells were arguing over whether or not the banging and the shouting constituted an emergency worthy of their being conscious. Unfortunately, the debate was so heated that no one could make out what the voice on the other side of the door was saying. Lefty, for his part, was attempting to answer that exact question. However, as he rubbed his eyes and concentrated, he just couldn’t seem to get his ears to work. So he sat there, staring at the door which had begun to shake from whoever was battering it on the other side. Meanwhile inside his head, an insurrection was brewing. Factions had formed. On the one side, the radicals had formed up beneath their prophet Paranoia as they insisted that whatever lay beyond the door was key to their continued survival. While on the opposite side, the loyalists firmly held the bed was still their best option. The battle raged as Lefty attempted to listen. He heard something about rain and fine … no fire. And then something about a wight, no … a fight. That’s it. A fight. Someone was fighting. Inside his head, things suddenly weren’t looking good for the loyalists. The battle had begun to turn. Then a word that shook Lefty so hard he could hardly hear it. He perked up, listened again to make certain he had heard it right and then there it was, the radicals had it. There were goblins. The voice was shouting about goblins and some nonsense about him doing something about them.
Lefty yawned, found his staff on the floor, and walked over to the doorway where he calmly unbolted it and looked out to find the innkeeper standing in the hall.
“Sir, sir, sir!” the innkeeper shouted as he pointed down the stairs. “We need you downstairs, right away!”
Wiping the sleep from his eyes again, Lefty looked out the window. Something outside was burning. Inside his mind, the Cerebellumberg trials were beginning. Loyalists were taking the stand. Lefty turned back to the innkeeper. “Right, and just what exactly is going on?”
“Goblins are attacking the village! We need every able bodied man to hurry down and help defend the women and the children!”
Lefty was unsure he had heard the man right. Inside his head, the first execution was about to take place. The great cleansing had begun. “Now, just a second here. Exactly how many goblins are we talking?”
“I don’t know, sir. There’s a lot. Dozens, maybe hundreds!” The goblin waived his hands at Lefty. “You’re an adventurer. This is your hour. The people need you. Please, sir. Hurry!”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Lefty did his best impersonation of how he thought a brave person might look as, with all of the confidence he could muster, he said, “Okay, don’t worry sir. I’ll have everything under control shortly. Just give me a moment to gather my goblin fighting equipment and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
The innkeeper gave him a curious look, seemed to think about this for a moment, and then finally nodded before he turned and walked toward the stairs. Lefty waited until the little man had disappeared down the staircase before he shut the door, walked over to the window, and undid the latch.
He was pulling the window open when Feathers let out a derisive warble.
“What do you mean, predictable? This is a full on emergency. If we don’t get out of here now, whatever’s going on outside could spread to here and we could find ourselves in a burning building surrounded by Goblins.”
Feathers quacked again.
“Well if you think I’m getting in the way of a goblin horde for a bunch of people I don’t know, then you just happen to have another think coming. Now are you jumping out of the window with me or not?”
When the duck glared at him, Lefty simply shrugged, climbed out, lowered himself down, and then dropped. As he landed on the ground, he looked up to see the duck fluttering down after him. Then, as he surveyed his surroundings, he saw that nearly everything around him – the trees, the buildings, the people – was on fire and anything that wasn’t on fire was being attacked by a goblin. So it was that before he could take another step, there was a goblin running at him with a sword.
Panicked, Lefty screamed, closed his eyes, and whirled his staff wildly at the little green monster. There was an impact. After a moment, Lefty realized there was no stabbing pain in his gut and so opened his eyes to see the unconscious laying on the ground.
“Well that went better than I expected it to.” Lefty then turned to look for Feathers and found him pecking at the heads of two very dead goblins who looked like they had just died from an acute case of violent waterfowl.
“Should I maybe just stand behind you while you cut a path through these bastards?”
The bird quacked sarcastically.
Lefty was taken aback. “Is that a threat?”
The duck did not respond, but wiggled his tail feathers as he walked toward the fray.
All around them, people were fleeing, fighting, dying, or otherwise struggling terribly against what seemed to be an endless horde of the tiny green devils who seemed to be everywhere as they ran around with their pointy little weapons. In contrast, the goblins all seemed to be having a wonderful time as they assaulted the villagers, stole livestock, fought the remaining watchmen, and looted the buildings they had not yet set fire to.
This is horrible, he thought. Not only am I surrounded, there doesn’t appear to be anywhere to hide. He ducked as a stray arrow soared over his head, then stepped gingerly over a dead fisherman whose guts were splayed out over the grass. If I don’t find somewhere safe soon, that’s going to be me.
The problem was, there wasn’t anywhere he could see that was immediately safe. Behind him, the inn had caught fire. To his right, the goblin horde was marching through the street unimpeded. While to his left, was a pitched battle playing out over the docks and the shore of the river.
“Help!”
The cry was high and feminine. Lefty looked to see a young woman and her two boys trapped against the side of a barn as four goblins circled around her, gibbering and laughing as they poked at her with their weapons. The mother had a pitchfork and was desperately trying to fend off the goblins as her children hid behind her back.
Feathers quacked and began waddling toward the barn.
“Feathers!” Lefty snapped, “This is not the time to be heroic!”
The duck’s reply was clearly derogatory.
“Dammit!” Lefty bit his lip and trudged off after the duck.
Creeping through the dark, the wizard and the duck sneaked through a small copse of trees and then around a fence where they stopped to size up the situation. The mother, armed with her pitchfork, stabbed and missed at the goblins who danced just out of the reach. The mother, her dress torn and her shoulder bleeding, was clearly beginning to tire as she listened to the goblins laugh and chuckle at which of her children they planned to eat first.
“Gives us the little girl, missy!”
“No, gives us the boy. We’ll have the girl for desert.”
“Yes. Yes, the girl for desert.”
“I bet she’s sweet, she is.”
“The boy looks sweet too, he does.”
Back at the fence, Feathers let out a quiet warble.
Lefty looked down at his companion. “Oh, you’re the one coming up with the plans now?”
The duck glared.
“Well, I …” Lefty thought about it and then shrugged, “you know what? Fine. Go with what you said. But only because that’s what I think too.”
Feathers, with a wiggle of his tail feathers, turned and waddled bravely toward the barn.