Contrast, First Impressions

Alexander felt sore all over.  Not that he felt hurt, just sore.  Sore like you were on your feet for hours on end, sat down for a few minutes then stood up again and felt the bottom of your feet were on fire.  Sore like that, but with any part he moved save perhaps for some shallow breathing.

Then a noise hit his ears and he almost bolted upright, only to have a jolt of pain make him settle for lifting his head.  Half a second after opening his eyes, he was surprised that he wasn't given a headache from unfocused morning eyes.  Had he been in a well lit room, he new he would have one.

Alexander carefully sat up and forced his body to wake up while trying to get his bearings.  After a few minutes he was able to figure he was in an old fashioned prison cell.

"OK, Alexander Almond Barke, where the hell are you?"  He finally spoke as he looked around the dark room cluelessly, barely able to make out the bars and bucket in the corner.

With the aches of his body subsiding to functional levels, his ears focused in on that same strange noise that woke him up; hooves on stone.

He went over to the bars at the front of the cell, finally noticing the shackles on his arms and legs.  "Livestock?  I'm probably not in the city anymore."

Looking back at the shackles, he gave them a once over.  "Hmm...  Wherever I am, I'm not getting out of these without a key or bolt cutters.  But why do the cuffs have just as much chain as the legs?"  He flicked his arms to cause the chains to do a brief outward arc in front of him.  "Not very restrictive, I could choke someone with this."

The hoof steps quickened their pace and drew near.  Alexander snapped to attention and stepped back as gently as he could as he heard a garbled noise from the creature approaching.

It made what sounded like a mutilated whinny as a horseshoe scraped against the bar nearest to the stone wall it came from.  Sparks revealed a small horse head in decorative armor peaking out from behind the stone.  He couldn't see much, but a quick image of bared teeth, flattened ears and one eye looking strait at him told him what he needed to know:  This thing was not happy to see him in the slightest.

With a shot of adrenaline through his veins,  Alexander's body suddenly didn't care about what little pain there was still lingering in his joints and his eyes got an emergency override to put a rush on waking up and focus.  Noting every little detail of his situation as best he could in the near pitch dark, he took up a defensive stance.

He was glad that the bars were between him and the silhouette of a small, but still intimidating, war horse emerging fully into view.  The creature continued to snarl strange sounds at him for a short time, but Alexander simply stood back up after a few seconds.

"Look, I'm not happy I'm here either little guy," He quipped at the tiny horse creature.

Alexander was already on high alert before, but upon the lighting of a weak flame out of his immediate view, he saw two things that took him strait from DEFCON four to DEFCON two; a quick unfurling of wings from the armored creature's sides, and a second horse like creature coming forward—somehow holding a spear in its twisted front hoof and spitting out a flint into a nearby bucket.

As the first creature reared up in a quite successfully intimidating fashion, Alexander couldn't help but fall back on the bed. "We're definitely not in Pennsylvania anymore, Toto."

The next few minutes were a blur as the second creature proved quite capable with the spear it had, jabbing at him while he dodged again and again.  When the spear finally hit the bed along the grain and stuck, Alexander grabbed it and heaved upward, against the grain, while putting enough weight on the bed to make it pivot, losing the spear from the creature's grasp and bringing completely into the cell, out of their reach.

In one of the bedchambers of the palace, a pony lay peacably in bed.  Slowly it opened its eyes and stared strait up.  "OK," it tried to speak, only to be interrupted with a cough. "OK, Alexander Almond Barke, where the hell are you?"