a Castle.
In honor of the end of the first season of Game of Thrones last Sunday, Laurea honored me with this Fastest Possible Drawing of a Castle. Did you know that the latticed iron gate of a castle is called a “portcullis”? I did not. It’s critical to the drawing of a castle of any sort, but especially so for a Fastest Possible Castle. The happy little flag up on the turret there is also crucial, for without it the castle is haunted.
My only two concerns with this drawing—and I have generally kept my mouth shut on such concerns in the past—are the number and variety of turrets, and the peculiar pedestal on which the castle rests. Is the castle secure merely because it is tall? Where is the moat? The spikes? Is this truly the Fastest Possible Castle?
I will go out on a limb here: This is the Fastest Possible Drawing of the Fastest Possibly Built Castle, for which architects had no time to lay out a sensible defensive strategy, and whose masons had no foreman to direct their turret-building. Its enemies, short of stature and confused by the battlements, looked upon the fortress and saw the work of angry gods whose pens moved so quickly that even the invaders’ swiftest stallions and craftiest spies could find no crack through which to enter. Stranded at the base of a looming blank wall, they waved their swords uselessly in the off-white air and cursed the gods of the castle, foreswearing it as haunted.
Hearing their mockery, the gods glanced down for a fraction of a second at the massing hordes and, with a flick of their pens, sketched out a crisp little flag at the pinnacle of this strangely tall, asymmetrical, well-defended, and Fastest Possible Castle.
It is known, my people, for so it is told in the songs. Happy weekend!
