The Prison - Part 4

“And you?” The gatekeeper asked. “Name?”
“John Barnhill.” I replied.

The gatekeeper again ran his hand up and down the ledger until he found my name. “John Barnhill: brought here by the watchman Unexpected.  Do you have anything with you?”

“Just my scroll from the King. I gave it to the watchman at the entrance.”

“Very well. Enter.” The gatekeeper replied.

I stood for a moment, unsure. I had thought that the scroll would have saved me from the prison – perhaps as a pardon that would allow me to go free. The gatekeeper realized that I was still standing there and looked up.

“Well?” He asked. “I’m not going to personally escort you to the door.”

“I thought… I thought…” I began, suddenly beginning to lose hope.

“All must enter the prison.” The gatekeeper sighed, as though he had given the speech a million times. “You are no exception.”

“Then… what was the scroll for?”

“You should know. Enter.”

So I did. I walked through the gaping doorway. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the different light, but soon I could see clearly. The prison was an enormous cavern, reaching hundreds of feet over my head and hundreds of feet below where I stood. I took a small step forward to better survey the situation and found myself hurtling headlong through the air to the bottom of the cavern. I landed hard, yet nothing was hurt, nothing was broken, and nothing felt wrong, but I fell unconscious when my head hit the floor.

When I awoke, I looked back up the slope and immediately saw that I would never re-scale the heights. I surveyed the rest of the cavern and instantly noticed a large rock rising from the floor and nearly reaching the ceiling of the cavern. Its sides were neither smooth nor steep, making it very easy to climb. Most people in the cavern were far from it, wandering around the open spaces, aimless. Some of the crowd gathered at the base of the rock, looking up its sides and thinking. A very few actually had scaled the rock and now stood, seemingly victorious, at its top. As I looked, I saw that I recognized many of the people, including my family. I realized that I must have been here for a very long time, and that the watchmen had now brought my whole family. There were no words spoken throughout the cavern, as if in anticipation of something about to happen. Suddenly, a voice rang out through the cavern.

“The Dragon is coming!”