No one was surprised when it happened. But the would-be assassin flew backward out the castle window, scattering shards of glass through the air. He landed on the ground roughly, and it was a moment before he could stand back up. Meanwhile, a figure appeared at the window he had just exited — the king, wielding a long wooden baton.
Everyone knew someone would try to assassinate the king eventually. But few expected the king himself to rebuff the attack.
The assassin climbed up to one knee and looked back up at the window. His eyes widened to see the king step up onto the windowsill and drop lithely to the ground just a few meters away. The assassin wasn’t getting out of this without a fight, oh no. He felt his pulse quicken in panic and sweat broke out on his brow. This was not what he had bargained for. His stock and trade was silent death — quick, clean, utterly non-confrontational. This, though, this was absolutely the opposite of that.
He didn’t even know how the king had thwarted his attack. One moment he was standing over the sleeping monarch, ready to plunge his dagger into the king’s heart. The next he was being propelled through a window after a resounding crack across the midsection with the baton the king was now holding. It didn’t make sense.
And yet, this was the reality he was facing. And the king was now slowly pacing toward him, the look on his face menacing and focused. The assassin decided he had better hightail it away before he became the hunted. It may already have been too late for that.
The assassin ran. He was out of his element here. Assassins didn’t flee. They completed contracts, killed without mercy. They didn’t run away. And yet, here he was running as though his life depended on it, and it very well may have.
Something tangled up in the assassin’s legs, and he went sprawling once again. He looked and was astonished to see that it was the king’s baton. The king had hurled it with precision at the assassin’s legs, and it had knocked his legs out from under him.
There was no time. He had to get up. But before he could, rough hands, the king’s hands, grabbed his collar and lifted him off the ground.
And that was how the assassin found himself chained up in a dungeon deep beneath the castle. He just hoped the Guild didn’t hear about his failure because if they did, not even a dungeon would prevent them from finding him and finishing what the king had not yet done.
[Note: this is NOT an allegory based on recent events here in the US. This is merely where the prompt and my imagination took me. Please don’t interpret it as anything else.]
