After mourning for a few hours at his loss- probably of his entire species, he cried himself to sleep. This at least explained why the Gryphons had taken the castle.

Several hours later.

Schultz, being one of the only gryphons allowed on deck 5, the first fauna laboratory ever set up in the Frozen North by anyone in history, was making his rounds as a guard.

Normally, he would object to being ordered to stand guard like some common enlisted soldier, being a major himself, but it was oddly relaxing to be performing a rote, though almost foreign action to which he had lost accustomation since he was commissioned as an officer twenty years ago. He felt like a boy again, performing an action left for the youth of the army. He almost walked down the restricted hallway with a bounce in his step before approaching the overhanging observational deck. When he passed by, as on his earlier patrol routes, the human was in the same corner as he was through the previous five times he had passed through.

Through the boring, but relaxing patrol, Schultz’ cruel mind tried to think of some sort of reason the human would be acting like he was now– his weeping was highly unusual. However, being the psychopathic flesh-ripper that he was hardened into being through thirty years of service to the king’s army, he couldn’t even try to form any sort of sympathy for him. His past experiences prevented him from understanding emotions like grief or fear anymore. Schultz was a textbook case of psychopathy. Of course, it was hard to really see anything through his gas mask.

Every gryphon who had been assigned to the upper state-rooms of the castle, including the library and deck 5, was required to wear a breathing apparatus at all times to prevent one of two things: a gryphon being infected by any air-borne diseases from the sample, or an air-borne disease from one of the gryphons infecting the sample.

The gryphon peered through his mask’s lenses at the weeping human, who was, at this point, barely twitching on the ground. If Schultz was capable of doing such, he might have been crying with the human, seeing him in such pain. Alas; his mind was incapable of registering pain, especially the pain of others. Perhaps he could ask Hermann about the human’s strange activity. Perhaps he might be able to explain the human’s anomalous fits of moaning and squirming. He looked at his watch.

“Oh, good. It’s almost time. I’ll start early and wake up Hermann. I think he’ll be interested in this,” he mumbled through his gas mask to himself.

The fat Gryphon Hermann lay snoozing in his cot. No officer was deemed superior to any other soldier in Boss’ eyes- all of them slept on the cold, hard floor in one of the lower rooms of the castle, even Boss himself.

Hermann’s dreams wandered through the events of the past few days. He had been trying to communicate with the odd creature on Deck 5, though with little success. The human seemed to be angry with him whenever he spoke. Hermann supposed that this was understandable given that he was mumbling behind a gas mask and that the human was trapped in a stone castle with no means of escape.

Hermann suddenly felt a surge of pain cross through his claw. His eyes popped open, as did his mouth, which let out a long scream as Schultz pinched his claw with his own, sending waves of pain through his arm up his spine. The pain stopped as quickly as it started.

“Hermann, come. The human is sick.”

“Great gods, Schultz! Why did you have to hurt me like that?”

“Sir, pain is the most efficient form of awakening other than fear: even now, your heart-rate has increased twofold and your sensory perception has recovered in one fifth the amount of time that a simple alarm would awaken you.”

That veteran had a point, though Hermann never understood why it was necessary to put him through all that pain for the sake of a couple seconds’ time. Schultz never really did understand the concept of fear or discomfort. Damned psychopath.

“Let us go, sir. The human is sick.”

Hermann’s senses perked up immediately. He didn’t just want to preserve this human and his well-being; if Boss found out that the human might have died on his watch, he would be chained to a post and left for the vultures. Or the frost bite. Whichever came first.

He waddled through the hallways and put on his gas mask before entering the restricted section of the castle. All of the other gryphons and oxen on the journey were told that toxic chemicals were being kept there; there was no need to post a guard. Gryphon soldiers never questioned their leaders.

When Hermann came up to the observational deck, he saw that, indeed, the human was weeping. He instantly felt sorry for him. Looking on the clip-board near the desk and control panel, he saw that it was now almost feeding time. Perhaps a bit of food would help the human feel better? He slapped three fish onto the hook and grasped the controls.

The human scrambled over to the place where the hook was usually lowered. Hermann looked away, always imagining that the human didn’t like to be seen when he was eating. Suddenly, on the control panel, an alarm light blinked on. He turned his gaze down to read it:
WEIGHT OPERATIONAL OVERLOAD

Wait- what? That can’t be right. The fish weren’t that heavy. The only thing that could overload the cheap magical crane that they were using would be a gryphon, or possibly… the human? … "SHIT!" Hermann looked up and saw the human, gingerly sitting on the rope with his right foot on the hook. He gracefully swing the rope and disappeared over the roof of the overhang. The hook swung back into view, and both the human, and the fish, were gone. His claw instinctively pressed a big red button.

Attention, expedition security units: internal sample breach: biological Y2-70. Internal security team, Alert. Assemble escape B hard point immediately. Sound general quarters. All containment doors sealed and locked.

Warning: potential toxicity with biological specimen. All units, apply your respirators immediately.

The alarm rang. Red lights haphazardly wired along the hallway walls lit up and flashed. Gryphons scrambled out of their beds when a gruff voice sounded over the intercom, much unlike the scary, metallic, cold feminine voice before: “You guards start from the bottom and work your way up to the top. Everyone move to the cellars. He can’t have gone far!”

The human quietly trod through the castle’s attic. The smell of old wood with the slight tang of mildew passed through the still air, along with the faint sounds of chaos from below. If the castle was as large as it was before, it would take hours of searching before they reached the attic. He was at least 10 floors up. He carefully observed his location. When he crawled through the hole in the wall, he saw the familiar part of the attic that used to be part of the Northern edge of the castle keep. If he headed straight, he would be moving south, just west of the front doors.

Seeing that some of the boards had collapsed over his thousand years' absence, he wracked his brain to remember any of the crossbeams underneath the floor to step on. That would be his surest way to get to the southern end without falling through the floor and ending up in one of the royal bedrooms.

He came upon a boarded up edge of a parapet. This must have been some half-assed expansion of the castle. Nothing was familiar anymore past this point. He climbed between two merlons of the wall and crawled in. He almost passed by an armory before stopping. Carefully crossing over, he gingerly stepped into the allotted section of the attic. The first thing with which he armed himself was a belt, one of the most useful objects a survivor could have, no matter if you have pants on or not. The next was a knife and small scabbard. The knife’s grip had a strange hole in its hand-guard, and he noticed a large, awkwardly shaped spear shaft that looked perfectly positioned to attack to it.

He suddenly took interest in it, not realizing that this was a rifle designed for the bayonet in his hands. Humans really had advanced in their secret knowledge in the 900 years that he was gone. After 30 minutes of looking through an instruction paper, which was written in the crudest, most oddly written and casual slang he had ever read, he figured out how the rifle worked.

Unfortunately, this gave the human’s general location away rather quickly, as pulling the trigger after loading the bullet elicited a rather loud sound and tore a hole through the roof. Realizing that he was going to need to hurry, he grabbed the instruction kit, and several heavy boxes of these “bullet” things, a comfortable coat and a pair of boots that actually fit him. He then continued along.

It was a slow and tedious, but strangely quiet journey. After such an enjoyable, quiet, adventurous, almost relaxing crawl and catwalk, the noise of alarm began to reach him. He was just beginning to hurry before the roof ahead opened up and he saw daylight. He didn’t feel it, however. Just wind and cold.

He scrambled over to the frozen parapet and looked down. His small cloak wouldn’t help him withstand the cold even if he were able to get out. He retraced his steps and ran across the boards (the ones which he knew were safe) and ran into the armory again. He then put on another coat on top and grabbed a grappling hook, gloves, and a chain then added a sword alongside the rifle strapped to his back.

Running back, dragging the chain with him, he heard the sound of painful squawking and crashing of boards behind and below him. The Gryphons, unable to fly because of the freezing wind, were crashing through the weakened planks one by one. He returned to the parapet and wrapped the chain around a merlon, grappling the chain with the hook. After scaling down the wall, he used all his might to swing the chain around and loosened the hook. Hook and chain clattered to the ground. He was now in the courtyard. And so were they.

Author's Note

You might have noticed that I'm cranking these out rather quickly. This is actually something I had worked on almost a year ago and found on my computer. I then proceeded to lengthen and edit the story at large. I'm actually still planning out what I'm going to do when the human finishes escaping.