The gate crashed into the moat.

The human almost started laughing at their blunder: they let the gate fall too quickly, causing it to splinter into dozens of pieces. One gryphon managed to cross, however, and the human recognized it. The fat one!

He immediately burst off southward, but the fat one was fast. He closed the distance between himself and the fleeing human. He edged closer and closer, the human arching his back so as to attempt to prevent him from grabbing his coat. Hermann was just barely in range to grab him when his back paw lost traction and he faceplanted into the ice.

The human broke the sprint, gasping in the icy air. He also slipped and fell, but quickly recovered. He looked back quickly and saw the gryphon looking up at him, a defeated look in his eyes. The human did a double-take and looked more closely.

The Gryphon was in a state of utter defeat. He looked the human in the eyes with his own.

‘Forgive me,’ they said. ‘I’m sorry’

‘I know,’ said the human’s eyes. ‘There’s nothing I can do now but run.’

‘Go. Be free. I’m sorry.’ The old gryphon’s eyes fell to the ground.

By the time he looked up again, the human was already hundreds of yards away, disappearing into the mist and the snow.

The human’s seemingly endless trek brought him out of the ice-scape, through the tundra and along a river into a canyon.

His breakfast those days usually consisted of snow.

His lunches were mainly snow, garnished with the occasional bit of snow.

His dinners were usually snow, with the rare exception of his third day, when he encountered a bird frozen solid in the snow.

Who’s the vulture this time?

The canyon floor bent gradually into the river’s bank. The stones were cold and gray– matching pretty much everything in his life so far: hardened, colorless, soulless. His hunting skills were put to the test here, though most of his meals were now composed of fish. One can only eat fish for so long, however, before becoming painfully constipated. The sensation was barely beginning to come upon him the day he left the castle.

It took days to defecate. Every time he had to was the most dreadful part of his adventure. The pain was comparable to being hit in the testicles with a club, stretched out over two days each time.

He writhed on the canyon floor, buttocks exposed to the cool of the day, which was becoming less and less miserable as the summer began to heat up and his position moved ever southward. He lay on the rocks; his entire body was sore. By nightfall, he was relieved and horribly dehydrated. As he stumbled through the canyon, he barely noticed that the path ahead was steadily climbing upward.

Soon, he was in a daze between sleep and wakefulness, when his eyes spotted something green. He felt himself moving towards it, and biting into it. Leaves. Fresh, succulent, soft, juicy leaves. Fiber rich leaves to clean his tormented intestines. He ate an entire patch of grass on that spot. He fell asleep soon after.

He thought he saw a vision of a four-legged figure in the darkness surrounded by stars. Before his dream progressed even further, he felt the sensation one gets when falling. He then hit the ground.

The further south he traveled, the more fiber came into his diet, the less painful it was to move. Following the river, he soon approached a forest. With his brain on stand-by mode for most of his 2 months of travel, he almost didn’t notice the howling in the distance. It was actually almost too late when he pulled his rifle from across his shoulders.

The human suddenly found himself surrounded on three sides by four wolves, two at his front, one to his left, another to his right. He slowly brought up the rifle and aimed for one’s head. A squeeze of the trigger, a loud bang, and a kick later, and one was dead. The one to hit right leaped up at him. He ducked and rolled backwards as adrenaline rushed through his system. The wolf’s claws and teeth snagged into his overcoat, almost giving him whiplash as he stopped at his knees.

Turning around, he saw the other two wolves moving towards him. He jabbed hard with his bayonet, cracking through its skull. The second one backed up.

The one on his coat unlatched her teeth from the leather and made to pounce him again, only to be met with a slash to her jugular. She limped away with her tail between her legs. The remaining wolf, outgunned (literally), fled farther into the canyon. The human pulled back the bolt on his rifle, aimed, and fired. No reïnforcements were going to ruin his night anymore.

There were originally 95 bullets in his possession. 90 are in packs of thirty in his pockets. 5 were in the gun’s magazine. He expended one in the attic, and two more on the wolves. He now had 92.

The journey pressed onward. A tall line of mountains appeared on the horizon through the trees. Several days later, he stood at its foot. His next plan went as follows: climb up the mountain and search for friendly civilization, then inquire about the fate of his own species.

The trek up the mountain was grueling. He shed his outer coat at the base of the mountain in a conspicuous place, hoping that some other poor soul could use it for warmth, or even that the wayward bird could make use of it after it has been torn up in the wind. Now with a single trench coat, 92 bullets, a rifle, belt and sword, the human continued on.

High up in the mountain, about half way to the top, he spotted a cave jutting inward toward the mountain center. The sun was setting and the heat of the day is fading quickly. Walking cautiously into the cave, he noticed no features within.

When he looked down, however, he noticed a widening crack in the cave floor. The ground suddenly collapsed beneath him, and he fell into shadow.

Author's Note

Too rushed? I feel like I need to flesh out some of these scenes. I'm not sure where exactly to add more details or not. It kinda feels unbalanced.