Surveying her remote surroundings the heir apparent realized that a dragon with the face of a boar eyeballed her for reasons unknown and soared in front of the child when bearing in the right direction until she found a way out of the forest and came to the strange city shadowed by its impregnable mountaintop castle. The avenging girl who would be queen hid under a carriage that entered the superstructure gateway. She crept stealthily through corridors to the monumental throne room.
Encased within a glass sculpture, the enchanted sword appeared different to the daughter. Before, the design of the hilt and blade were majestically refined. Now its mutated edges were twisted and wickedly sharp. Reunited with their orbits aligned in league at the cruel king's command, the corresponding crown and sword forged ahead in one dreadful course.
Just as she lifted the outer glass shroud, the raider king entered flanked by a brigade of armed guards more than a dozen strong. Unfaltering in her vow to regain the magic sword the daring outlander told the king, "You are going to need more help."
The petulant king roared with laughter. In an instant the cavernous room was completely filled with a garrison of soldiers. Her body armor fended off fierce blow after blow with flashes of lightning. Ababuo was amazed how the suit reacted to her gymnastics by becoming a weapon itself. Sharp points extended like fishhooks. Canisters of exploding powder flung in rapid succession, but alas, the protective shell was badly damaged and some was lost. The crusader was seized and taken to the dungeon. The despot ordered that the intruder be his subterranean guest for seven years, one for each word she spoke, and then executed by hanging until half dead, then cut down and beheaded. After, the remains were to be pickled and cured, for setting on spikes above the castle's black wall as a testament to any morbid curiosity someone might have about stealing from the supreme.
In two other rusty traps resided the tailors who were cunning and full of tricks, and despite any unreasonable or irrational situations they found themselves in were never once homesick. Upon seeing the girl doff her helmet the neighbors got into an awkward discussion between themselves about how it's a thing -- or is not a thing well known to tell a disguised lass from bloke by distinguishing characteristics such as an Adam's apple lump or length of the ring finger.
"Let's get on with it shall we?" the captive adolescent said to herself determined to escape from her dismal lodging and began to dig a secret tunnel. Conditions of the odorous underground pit were so dismal that the inmate found if she simply shoveled dirt from the passage into her cell or flung it down the corridor the guards never took notice. They believed no one could ever escape and that the piles of dirt must have just fell from the ceiling. It had been generations ago that the only prisoner went missing, and since the man named Pip was never heard from again guards surmised the poor lost soul must have perished ignobly, buried in a nameless grave by a cave in without ceremony or the consecrated earth of a churchyard.
The ball and chain wearing bards gained favor with their new sojourner by telling her curious and interesting stories. Although charlatans by trade, the pair of scoundrels were also talented craftsmen and repaired the princess's battle-worn armor with a panoply of shredded metal from knights whose armor-clad skeletons laid shackled in the dank torture chamber. Iron manacles incorporated throughout interlocking metallic scales with turned up edges resembling feathers made Ababuo look like a valorous mythical avian creature.
On the eve of the seventh year the two lifers bid goodnight with hangdog expressions to their friend whom had grown into a young woman. "You have been kind to me and I am grateful," said the princess. "Be ready to escape when I come for you," and then she vanished in the darkness.
"Not so bad here really, with spoiled garden to table Midday and all," said one jailbird to the other.
"Ambition is like one of those seven or eight deadly vices, so we're good to sit here in the sandbox and play knuckle bones. Blow on 'em for luck," he held out his hand.
When guards came to collect the prisoner at her most desperate hour for the gallows they were gobsmacked. After searching the empty room they discovered the hidden crawlway. Ababuo heard echoes of the angry pursuers advancing toward her. Suddenly the wall of wormy earth in front of her collapsed. The noble adventuress had stumbled upon the tunnel Pip made decades before. A draft of fresh air brushed her cheek. Surprised by a dusty ray from the rising sun, the princess followed a pinhole of light like a lodestar. Then she saw the antique skeleton of Pip, who little did he know had toiled this close to breathing the intoxicating air of freedom, but could drag himself no further.
Guards grabbed at the princess's bespoke metallic sheathing. The young woman cleared away the soil and found herself on the narrow ledge of a crumbly precipice. She rapidly descended the treacherous slope, but lost her footing and took a horrible fall head over heels.
The king's men peered down the precipitous chasm as the goblin loomed menacingly out of the primeval forest. The venomous-looking fiend drooped the motionless quarry over its shoulder and then vanished amid the perplexing thicket. The guards playfully shoved each other toward the ledge laughing boisterously in agreement that the princess would be devoured by the pooka for its morning and evening meal, and since they found the moldy bones of Pip with wind now whistling through his ribs, the dungeon remained the dark exemplar of what a prison should be.
