(15) Like A Broken Dam

Tara gazed in wonder as she crossed the threshold into the mountain—or what she thought was a mountain. As she exited the colossal gate, she was greeted with a hollow shell, a facade.

A bridge hundreds of feet long connected the exterior shell of volcanic rock to a truly titanic structure rising from the magma below. It seemed to be a pyramid, though Tara could not see the top, which pierced through the stone a mile overhead.

Made of a smooth black stone that reflected the glowing magma, the pyramid was domineering, an obelisk hidden within a volcano. Each of the four corners was attached to enormous columns of twisting snakes. They wound around the columns and each other, some baring their fangs, others slithering to the top, as if attempting to escape.

Tara guessed that these gargantuan columns, as well as the point where the pyramid’s top met the ceiling, were structural, stabilizing the entire mountainous shell. Glancing over the railing of the wide bridge, she noted that the pyramid seemed to rise from the magma itself, though she did not know how such a thing was possible. Who could have built the foundation into the magma?

Curiously, despite the moat of magma hundreds of feet below that surrounded the pyramid, separating it from the shell, the air was a pleasant temperature and easy to breathe. In fact, the heat haze from below seemed to part around the bridge, as if it were surrounded by an invisible shield.

As she approached the pyramid, she was stunned once again by a second gate, the real entry, if she were to guess. It was made of a dark, reflective metal she had seen only a handful of times in her life: starmetal.

She had occasionally seen a warlord whose personal weapon contained starmetal, perhaps the blade, or a particular flange on a mace. Never had she seen an entire weapon made of the material, let alone a gate large enough to ferry an entire clan through at once.

Tara’s fellow slaves were gathered before the grand gate, staring in awe much as she. As she approached, the monolithic structure rose. It glided smoothly, the mechanism obscured. It did not seem to be raised with chains—the motion was too smooth. Before she could ponder the matter further, a voice boomed from the opening.

“Alright, come get your food! I see anyone not eating, I’ll have to force-feed you, so you better come get it, you lot of skin and bones!” a man roared.

A hulking behemoth ducked under the gate—already raised a solid six feet from the ground—to stand with his left hand on his hip, his right arm surrounding a huge pot that Tara felt she could sit inside comfortably.

The ‘man’ had a head reminiscent of the bulls that roamed the fertile plains far to the south. That alone would be intimidating enough. Those bulls at full charge could outrun birds and plow straight through metal. However, the bull’s head sat atop a mountain of flesh shaped like a man. His rippling muscles looked like they could threaten that starmetal gate, and his arms were as wide as Tara’s entire body.

The short brown fur covering his head extended down to his chest and back, where it faded into a man who could only be described as a ‘normal’ amount of hairy. He had a gigantic septum ring that knocked against his chin when he moved his head with a thud that made her wonder how he was not constantly wincing in pain.

“The name’s Theron, and I’m the chef around here. That’s ‘chef’—remember it! I ain’t spent centuries behind the counter to be called a cook! Haha!” he roared, meandering toward the crowd, laughing at himself.

Tara’s body tensed instinctively. She had seen many a slave think they were going to befriend Carga and escape their enslavement, laughing whenever he laughed, only to end up with a knife in the gut. Carga’s mood could change faster than the wind. One was always safer being silent and expressionless than being caught on the opposite end of wherever his next mood swing took him.

“Okay, one for you. One for you. Two for you—how can you even stand? One for you,” Theron counted, pulling a strange, golden ball from his pot.

Curiously, the pot did not seem to have a bottom, as he barely reached his hand into it, yet he continued pulling the fruit(?) from it without end.

“These are called ‘fraughts.’ They’re a fruit grown from a tree in our garden. Legend has it they were named after the man who first discovered them. They say he was so enraptured with their sweetness that he ate nothing else for weeks and died.

“Obviously, you can’t survive on just fruit, but perhaps, when you’re starving, it’s not so obvious. That would indeed make them ‘fraught!’ Haha!” the giant laughed, seemingly oblivious to the tense and confused expressions around.

“Here ya go, little lady. I like your fur, but I might be biased,” Theron said, smiling at Tara, holding a fraught out to her.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She reached out, taking the fruit gingerly with her still-manacled hands. It was a golden yellow and slightly squishy.

“You can just bite into it. The whole fruit is edible, and I’ve already washed them all. We’ve got more food for all of you, but without knowing how long you’ve been starved, we’re starting slow. Don’t want to fill your bellies just to make you sick and miserable,” Theron explained with a warm smile.

He moved away to continue distribution, and Tara stared at the fruit in disbelief. Why would these people feed them? They understood the situation, right? The guards outside slaughtered those magma crabs like they were butchering livestock, and this bull-man, this ‘chef’, was clearly just as strong. Surely, they understood that Tara and the slaves had been sent as spies, at best.

Yet they had not only been allowed entry, but fed. The starmetal gate was an outrageous display of wealth, but this—this was beyond imagination! Edible food was just as rare as starmetal this far north, and it was needed far more. Clans would slaughter each other for access to a single tree bearing fruit, yet these people were just…handing it out?

She brought the fruit to her mouth, which was beginning to water, but pain wracked her entire body, sending her into a spasm. The fraught fell from her hands, and her back arched so much that the back of her head almost hit the ground. Blue smoke rose from her body, as if the fur was burning off.

Poke.