Sat at the foot of her bed, casting a shadow in the moonlight along the length of her footboard, was a tiny male shape. Naked except for a belt, to which was attached a curved longsword, he watched over the woman as she slept.
He had lost count of how long he had guarded her; a hundred nights, maybe two. Why had he decided to guard her? What enemy existed out there that she would need his protection against? He couldn’t remember. But he returned to this spot each night, from the moment he heard her bare feet padding across the room to her bed, shaking the floor he lived beneath, to the moment he saw the red glowing symbols on the box next to her bed change to those that foretold the screeching noise that would soon wake her.
Some hours had passed since she’d drifted off to sleep this time, and cautiously he had crept through the crack beneath her baseboard, tiptoed stealthily across her dark-wooden floor, and pulled himself up the cotton rope he’d left trailed up the leg of her bed. And there he sat in silent meditation, with a stillness he had learned while hunting white-footed mice in the fields and woods of his youth. He watched her through half-closed eyes, and his breathing matched hers perfectly.
His attention, up to now focused on the outline of her body through her duvet, was suddenly distracted by the sound of scratching through the open window. It was an unfamiliar sound, and it put him on edge. Soon, atop the woman’s window ledge stood the figure of a man wearing the traditional dress of his own tribe. But why would a member of his tribe have come here? They had long since given up raiding women’s homes for food after too many casualties had thinned out their numbers.
The Invader on the windowsill pulled a length of vine in through the window. He threw it over the opposite side of the window ledge into the bedroom and abseiled deftly to the wooden floor below.
The Guardian’s heartbeat quickened at the presence of this Invader in the woman’s room. Leaping up, he reached the edge of the bed and descended to the floor down his rope in three leaps. His tiny feet padded along the floor through a shaft of moonlight as he ran to intercept the Invader, now already half-way across the floor. As they encountered each other, they both drew their swords.
“What are you doing here?” the Guardian called out.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Have we both come for the same thing on the same night?” The Invader’s voice was bright, but there was a tone to it that made the Guardian uncomfortable. The two men circled one another from a few feet distance, their sword-arms extended.
“What do you mean?” asked the Guardian, frowning, “Come for what?”
The Invader indicated to the sleeping woman with a nod, and winked.
“No,” the Guardian responded with a frown, “I’m the Guardian of this home and I won’t let you near her.”
The Invader laughed. “The Guardian, eh? Why does she need a Guardian?”
“That doesn’t matter. You just need to know that I’m a hunter and a fighter, and I will kill you without a second thought, unless you go back up your rope and leave.”
The Invader smiled. “We’re all hunters round here, boy. Tell me, what do you hunt? Mice? I hunt much larger prey than that. I hunt pussy.”
The Guardian’s face fell and he took a step towards the man. “You hunt what?”
“You heard. I could smell her from outside. Don’t tell me you can’t smell it too?”
“You’re disgusting. How can you dishonour a woman with words like that? Where’s your fear?”
“Fear? Ha! What kind of hunter lets fear stand between him and his quarry?”
The Guardian was bewildered. He’d never heard a man talk in such a way before, and his sword briefly dropped to his side. “How’s she your quarry? Have you seen what her kind does to men? I was there when our tribe’s lead hunter strayed too far out of the the undergrowth into one of the women’s paths. She never even noticed him. All that was left was a wet mess pressed into the earth.”
“Ha! You should see what one of our kind can do to a woman like her! Let me at her and I’ll show you a wet mess.” The Invader grinned, and stepping out of his pose for a moment, stood upright, puffed out his chest, and twirled his sword in his hand.
“Oh you’re just an idiot. And if you don’t leave I’m going to have to teach you to be afraid.” The Guardian lunged forward with the point of his blade.
His adversary sidestepped quickly, narrowly avoiding a piercing stab. With the Guardian’s arm still outstretched, the Invader pushed against his exposed side with his foot, toppling him onto the floor, and sending his sword clattering away.
“You can’t stop me.” the Invader laughed. “I could fight you all day, and you’ll tire before I do.” He skipped backwards away from where the Guardian lay, and reaching the foot of the bed, grasped the hanging rope firmly in his hands and began to ascend, twisting the rope around his wrists and climbing hand-over-hand.
The Guardian recovered quickly and, retrieving his sword, sped off in pursuit of his adversary. At the foot of the bed, the rope was swinging wildly from side to side and the Guardian struggled to catch it. After a few attempts he took hold and followed the Invader upwards.
At the top he found the man halfway along the edge of the footboard, peering over the edge at the mattress some thirty feet below. There, the woman’s foot was poking out from under the duvet, her sole turned upward, lined with horizontal wrinkles along its length.
The Invader was gauging the drop down to the mattress where she lay, and was preparing to jump. The Guardian unsheathed his sword and ran as fast as he could to confront his enemy. It was only when he had almost reached him that the Invader drew his own blade from his belt and raised it to a defensive position.
Their swords clashed, and the Guardian glanced across in fear at the sleeping head of the woman. Hearing her breathing unchanged, he turned back to face the Invader.
This moment’s distraction gave the Invader the opportunity to step aside, positioning the Guardian between himself and the woman. With a push against the distracted man’s shoulder, his shoved him backwards off the footboard, down towards the woman’s foot.
The Guardian landed with a slap against the woman’s upturned sole. For a moment he lay still, dazed, his arms outstretched. It was only the sound of a long inhalation coming from the direction of her, and a sleepy moan vibrating down the bed towards him, that shook him back into an awareness of where he was.
The woman rolled in her sleep onto her side, turning her sole, and tipping the Guardian onto the mattress. Her foot sole pushed towards him, hitting him square in the face and sliding him along the bed sheet. He pushed against her to try to slow her foot down, but for all of his comparative strength, he may as well have been trying to stop a landslide. Changing his approach, he instead repositioned his body to keep his limbs from being caught underneath her. If an arm or leg were to get trapped between her foot and the mattress, he would be dragged underneath, and there would be nothing left to see of him except a smear across her sheet.
This fight for survival against her obliviousness took him some twenty feet across the woman’s bedsheet before she stopped moving. The Guardian sat panting for a moment in the shadow of her sole, his heart beating like a panicked bird in his chest. Her breathing soon settled back to a sleepy rhythm, and the Guardian looked back up at the footboard from which he had fallen to see the Invader grinning down at him. With a taunting wave, his enemy darted away out of sight. The Guardian clambered forward and peered around the woman’s toes, to see the man leap down onto the mattress, landing in a crouch, then stand and run up the bed towards the woman’s head.
Gathering his resolve, the Guardian set off in pursuit of his enemy. “Stop! If you wake her, we’re both dead!” he hissed in his wake.
The Invader disappeared past the woman’s arm resting on her duvet. The Guardian followed, turning the corner past her elbow, and then he saw her: the woman, her sleeping face half hidden from view, sunk into her pillow. Beautiful beyond measure.
Wait, what is he doing??
The Guardian stopped dead and put his hand to his mouth. His enemy had climbed up onto her pillow, and was standing a few feet from the sleeping woman’s mouth. He was dancing and gyrating provocatively towards her, gesturing his cock near her parted lips. As he danced he looked back, grinning, at the Guardian who stared back at him, his hand to his forehead.
The Guardian tried again to plead with the dancing man. “Get down from there, quickly! If she wakes up we’re both dead. Come on, you can’t just walk up to a sleeping woman in her bed.”
“What? Of course I can. Have you any idea how men and women used to work, before we became like this? You could walk up to a woman and take whatever you wanted.”
“But that’s exactly why they did this to us. Men like you took without asking, and now we all have to deal with the consequences. Now get down from there before she wakes up!”
The Invader laughed mockingly, and shimmied forward to bring his penis to her lips. As he danced, the fingers of his outstretched arm brushed against her septum, and her head jerked backward, tickled by his fingertips. The pillow shifted, and the Invader toppled back down onto the mattress.
The Guardian watched her face with wide eyes. A confused frown formed on her forehead, then smoothed over again and she fell back to sleep, sinking her face back into the pillow. The Guardian walked to the Invader who lay on his back on the mattress chuckling. He put his sword to the man’s throat.
“Get out of here, now.” he whispered, emphasising each word.
The Invader stopped laughing and stared back at him, steely eyed. Then with a deft movement of his feet, tripped the Guardian onto his back, rolled on top of him, and put his blade against his throat.
“There boy.” whispered the Invader, “I win.”
The Guardian looked into his eyes, and noticed that they now looked oddly familiar to him. He felt the sharp metal of this man’s sword against his Adam’s apple, and waited for the thrust that would silence him and fill his lungs with blood. He closed his eyes.
He waited.
He could no longer feel the blade.
He opened one eye with a squint.
The Invader was gone.
The red glowing symbols next to the woman’s bed changed to those rarely seen by the Guardian, and were shortly accompanied by a cacophony of screeching beeps.
She rolled over, reached out with her hand and pressed a button on top of the box. The horrendous noise stopped. With her eyes still shut, she yawned, then opening them, her eyelids fluttered as she adapted to the morning light through the window. Looking up at the alarm clock, her pupils came to rest on something sat on the bedside table in front of it. They focused in on the cross-legged figure of a tiny man. He was looking right at her.