The Final Days of Springborough

When he began to stir, he had no idea where he was. This was the first time in recent memory that Patrick had awoken inside a building built so solidly. Why, even waking up on the stone floor instead of the dirt ground was disorienting where some people would be disoriented from waking up on the ground anywhere. Patrick’s barn, his home, his hovel in the middle of the field, was fine. He knew the carpenters that built it, and they were all very nice, good people. But, wood comes with cracks, and so most of the time, when Patrick woke up on the bed made of hay bales, covered in several thick blankets so it wasn’t itchy, he could feel the wind through the cracks. He could hear the mice and other creatures scurry in and out. Birds would peck at his home, they would fly in and around the ceiling. Patrick always felt at one with nature.

So, waking up in the desolate, cold castle was very off-putting to him. He felt separated from everything that made poor people feel poor and he felt poor because of it. He loved the fields and the wild life. If this castle with its stone and privacy was how the castle felt, well, his family could keep it. He longed to be outside… just as soon as the storm died down.

His sense of self was thrown off by being in the castle as well. If he was in his barn, he would have noticed he was several inches taller than when he fell asleep. He would have noticed his arms were longer when he reached for the handle of the barn door. Perhaps his ankles would have been hanging off the bed. But, all Patrick noticed as he awoke on the castle hallway floor was how the pain in his stomach had yet to go away, and how groggy he felt. He didn’t remember stopping where he stood in the hallway as he was making his way to his parents’ bedroom. He didn’t remember bending down, putting his hands down on the ground, lowering his body, and resting on the carpeting that was there, while the castle creaked and crowed to the storm.

He simply was walking, and then he was waking.

What disrupted him, he didn’t know. The mere fact of being on the ground could have been what had done it. Truth be told, Patrick had slept in much more uncomfortable areas, so he didn’t necessarily feel like the castle hallway floor was much different in terms of comfortability. He did feel like people might have walked past as he slept. It was a hallway after all of the royal castle, and one would think servants were always milling to and fro. He wondered if any of them stopped to try and help him to a bed. Maybe they thought here is a nine year old boy lying in the hallway. Let me just pick him up, and- oh, no. No, no. Much too heavy. Maybe I’ll let him lie there. He looks peaceful anyway.

Patrick thought that was probably how it happened. He had been out of it, as evidence by the drool on his cheek. Man, the more he thought about how many people saw him sleeping on the floor, the more embarrassed he was steadily becoming. His mother always said that there were plenty of ways to tell how tired one was, and one of them was the fact that you couldn’t do one of the most basic human functions, keeping spit in your mouth. Patrick wiped it away on his arm, and stood up, yawning and stretching as he did so.

A roar shook the castle.

At first, Patrick had been so involved in his yawn and stretch, he didn’t know if the sound had come from him. He had been known to give out some awfully loud noises, attributed to the giant inside of him, but this seemed to rattle the walls. It wasn’t until he heard the shouts of others that he knew what actually made the loud noise, and that was from his new best friend in the entire world, Lucky the Bear.

Patrick took off running, and at his first step, he realized he had to be careful, for his foot sank into the castle floor, which was made of great big bricks that had never been stirred before by anything. But the first step the small giant took dislodged one of the bricks, and sank it down, crumbling down to the floor below him. The castle shook a little, dust and grit from who-knows-where fell from the ceiling, and Patrick received a not-so-subtle reminder that he had to be vigilant. His propensity for acting like a child was deep within him.

I’m coming, Lucky! he thought to himself, walking quickly, but silently. tip-toeing like a kid sneaking out of their bed late at night, but this was how Patrick had to move in order to not topple his family’s castle, and kill everything inside of it.

“This is where you must stay,” Queen Jenniffer had told him as he held onto her neck, not willing to let go. And with his strength, he couldn’t make her. She was laying him down in the barn, in the field, on a quiet, summer’s night. She had made sure he would have everything from his room, although it wasn’t a lot, before bringing the final piece- him. All day long, he had been playing with his siblings, and when they were all going to bed, his mother had taken him by the hand, and brought him out to the field. He felt special… but only for a short awhile.

“I don’t want to be here!” he cried, clutching her. In memory, Patrick could tell that she was in pain, that he was actually hurting his mom with his strength, but she kept calm. She looked upon him lovingly, knowing that in the end this was going to be worse for him than it was for her.

“Patrick, you are going to grow big one day. You are going to grow so big, and so strong, you won’t know how to handle yourself.”

“No, I won’t! I promise I won’t grow! I want to stay in the castle-“

“And,” she said, ignoring him, “on that day, it will be safer for you, for all of us, if you were out in the field, in a place of straw and wood, a place of small, trivial things, than if you were surrounded by large stones in the castle.”

“No, I won’t!”

“Patrick!” Queen Jenniffer said, looking down at her boy, at her baby, with tears twinkling in the corners of her eyes for she loved him just as much as her other two children, but Patrick completed her family. When he came along, she knew she was done having kids because with Kyrstin and Thomas, Patrick was the final pin in the Lishens history. Her little giant, she thought to herself, her little man. “I know you don’t understand the logic. You’re too young to. But, I know you’re still old enough to trust your mother, and trust I have the best motivations for you, us, and the kingdom.”

Patrick calmed down enough to let go of her neck, and let her stand, which she did. All his life, which was a short handful of years at this point, everyone had called him a giant because of his weight and strength, but as he laid down on the bed of straw, and he looked up at his mother, the Queen, he had never felt so small in his life. She looked down at him, over her little button nose, as the moon shone on her blonde hair, and she mustered a smile to her rose lips, and begged him with her twinkling starlight blue eyes to understand.

“I’ll know my strength,” he said. “I will. I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Patrick,” she replied. “There’s no expert in the kingdom on giants. You will have no one to offer you advice. You’ll grow up learning based on your mistakes, and, in your case, they could be grave ones. We can’t have you learning how to live in a castle by destroying it.”

“I just want to be with you.”

“And I, you,” she said, sitting on his bedside. “Trust me when I say I will be out here as often as I can with you. And when we are apart, you will always be on my mind, and you will always be in my heart.”

Patrick remembered the night quite well.

He remembered the night as he made his way to the Great Hall. Some of his steps did seem to crumble the castle a bit, regardless of how carefully he stepped. He tried not to think about how right his mom might have been, but instead continued on his path to see how his Lucky Bear was, how the bear was probably hurting from his arrow-removal surgery, and might just be coming out of the fog of the ether. Maybe the bear was lonely, scratching at its stitches. Quite possibly, the bear was waking the same way that Patrick did, in a foreign place, used to nature and now surrounded by stone. Patrick could relate. He’d calm him down.

This was not the scene that Patrick had walked into, though, as he emerged into the room where his parents’ thrones were. The first thing Patrick saw was blood and steel. One guard was bleeding from his ankle as he crawled away, his armor grinding against the floor as he pulled himself from the situation of brown fur and aggression.

Another knight was sailing through the air, as Patrick stepped in, having been thrown by the bear and that knight smashed against the wall, his armor making a loud clang as his body rattled down to the ground. The airborne knight was knocked unconscious, it seemed, or at least had the wind knocked out of him. Either way, he was no threat to Lucky any more, by the way he was remaining motionless. That wasn’t stopping Lucky, as the Bear began to make its way toward the fallen guard, blood soaking Patrick’s bear from the stitches in its chest that didn’t appear to be holding its wound closed.

Patrick stepped forward, positioning himself between the ankle bitten guard and his pet, keeping one of the people in the hall safe. He could tell the Bear was in such a state of agitation, that not even seeing Patrick might have calmed him down. The chain that was holding him in place by the torch was now clanking against the stone floor, the torch having been pulled off the wall. Patrick felt if he called out to Lucky, the bear might charge him, and they would have to fight like they did in the forest- and who knows if the castle could take such a battle of the beasts.

That was the moment that Patrick saw his sister, Kyrstin, creeping up behind the bear with Thomas’ sword in her hands, raised in the air, poised to strike. He had no time to react, no time to shout. In a moment, Kyrstin was going to plunge the steel into his only friend’s back, and he had to stop her.

So, Patrick flailed out with his arms, and with his Giant strength- Prince Patrick knocked Princess Kyrstin off her feet, throwing her a hundred feet, clear across the Great Hall, where her small body slammed against the stone wall, bounced off of it, and fell face down to the even harder, colder floor. The two knights, the bear, and Patrick couldn’t tell if she was still alive.