Prologue (10)

15 YEARS AGO...

"Anna, Anna! Wake up, wake up!" Bibi shouted as he opened the door of his junior sister's bedroom.

"Take your little daughter Suzie with you and both go hide in the cave!" He ordered her.

"The Monster of the Forbidden Mountain is attacking the empire. The beast is right now in Okunde and will soon arrive here in Ekule," he reported to her.

Anna who was barely asleep, bounced off the bed in panic and rushed to the opposite room where the three-year-old infant Suzie was profoundly slumbering.

Gently but with hastiness, she instructed the little girl to get up.

"Sweetheart, get off the bed! We have to go to the cave. Do you remember? I told you we will have to hide there each time a villain comes around to harm us," Anna murmured to the child's ears.

"Oh, Mommy, please leave me to sleep!" replied the little girl very annoyed.

"Sweetheart, don't be vexed! But do you remember what I told you we will have to do anytime a big monster comes around? It's to go hide in the cave, isn't it?" Anna insisted.

"Yes, mommy, true!" Three-year-old Suzie answered without opposing further resistance and then followed her mother.

Bibi escorted his sister and his niece to the underground.

"Ok, that's awesome! Now that things are in order, I can leave you with my conscience in peace. I have now to head back to Okunde and join the imperial forces which are on the brink of collapsing before the incredible might of the Monster." Uncle Bibi said as he left the two females in the hideout.

But before the young soldier's departure to the warzone, he stopped by his room at the end of the corridor near the staircase and wore his uniform constituted of two steel bracelets -one on the right arm and another one on the left hand-, along with silk trousers, and a long curved sword. As it was of tradition he let the chest, proudly exposed. Ready, he walked out barefoot.

In Okunde, the imperial army had already sustained a significant loss of valiant soldiers. More than a hundred men of honor had perished under the claws and beak of the Monster of the Forbidden Mountain.

It was a massive bird that weighed about twenty thousand kilograms and measured almost ten meters long and five meters large. It could not then fly for a lengthy moment nor hover enough high in the sky to not hit trees.

So its preferred way of moving was on its legs. It dwelt in the mountain situated in the north of Okunde. The hill was proclaimed forbidden by the late Great Batang IV. No inhabitant in the empire was permitted to hike there after the fifteen-year-old Emperor's son, Dida the First, was killed by the Monster during a promenade.