Story for the Day: The Impediment

Guards have their uses: they do guard things occasionally. They simply cannot guard and stop a coup all at once:


Leaning on his spear and dozing away, completely insensible of the coup that was about to burst on him, was the guard, his cheek crushed against the staff of his spear, his mouth open, his lips drooping, his face rapt in the bliss of a sanguine sloom. He was sleeping so soundly as he stood with his back to the empty cells lining the corridor to the brig that he did not hear the boom...