"How can this be?"
All of them endured thebone-breaking labor of Kael’s pits precisely for those miserable scraps of fat. They knew hauling rotting carcasses and massive boulders was a death sentence disguised as labor, but they chose to endure it for the desperate chance to keep their families breathing.
Now, even that tiny sliver of survival was being ripped away...
Although a healthy man might survive a few days on a single strip of dry, lean venison, the crushing cold and the brutal labor would quickly cannibalize their own muscles.
Their lives, already a living nightmare, were about to become entirely unsustainable.
But for Korg, this wasn’t just miserable news. It was an immediate death sentence for his daughter, Elin.
He would literally watch her starve to death before the moon was full. Without the fat to generate body heat, she wouldn’t have the strength to fight off the shivering sickness.
His eyes turned bloodshot, and his vision swam with a sudden, all-consuming rage.
He clenched his fists so tightly that his ragged fingernails bit into his own palms, drawing blood.
Consumed by the madness of a desperate father, Korg bent down and wrapped his fingers around a chunk of ice, intending to cave in the fat overseer’s skull.
But before Korg could raise his arm, a furious roar tore through the crowd.
Another slave, a young man from a destroyed river clan, snapped.
Driven by starvation and grief, the young man charged at the overseer, brandishing a sharpened pine stick.
The fat overseer shrieked and stumbled backward off the boulder.
Before Korg could feel any dark satisfaction at the overseer’s terror, a towering figure stepped out from the shadows of Kael’s elite guard.
The warrior was draped in a cave bear pelt, and in his right hand, he held one of the strange, greenish-brown weapons Korg had seen hidden beneath the tarp.
Korg’s breath caught in his throat.
It was a dense sound of metal biting through matter.
The elite warrior swung the copper axe in a horizontal arc. The greenish blade cleaved straight through the pine stick of the charging slave, severing the wood without slowing down, and buried itself deep into the side of the young man’s skull.
Korg stared in horror.
If that had been a flint axe, striking bone at that sheer angle would have shattered the stone head into a dozen useless fragments. But the copper didn’t break...
The young slave collapsed to the frozen earth, blood and gray matter instantly pooling in the pristine white snow. He didn’t even have the time to scream.
Korg internally recoiled. *How? How could a stone do that?!*
org had hunted wolves and bears in his youth, but he had never witnessed a weapon that treated bone like soft mud.
His legs gave out. Korg fell to his knees in the slush, the chunk of ice slipping from his trembling fingers.
The rest of the slaves fared no better. Upon seeing the sudden, devastating execution, they began to scream and scramble backward, tripping over one another in a blind panic like a herd of cornered deer.
Two more elite warriors stepped forward, raising their copper axes into the air.
The crowd instantly froze in their tracks. The slaves checked their own bodies, terrified that the lethal weapons had somehow struck them as well.
The fat overseer scrambled up from the snow, his face livid, spitting mud from his lips.
"Listen to me, you filthy dirt-scrapers!" the overseer bellowed. "Be grateful you get anything at all! Lord Kael feeds you out of the mercy of his own heart!"
"The true warriors are marching to crush the mountain boys," the overseer sneered, walking up to the baskets of meat.
"We took losses, yes. But we still have meat. Be happy you are allowed to chew the scraps!"
With a disdainful laugh, the overseer grabbed handfuls of the dry venison strips and hurled them directly into the snow, scattering them like seeds to desperate birds.
Korg was still sitting on his knees, his face blank, shocked by the overwhelming display of Kael’s technological superiority.
As a miserable strip of meat landed in the mud a few feet away, Korg’s survival instincts finally overrode his pride.
He scrambled forward on his hands and knees, snatching the filthy piece of meat.
He noticed the piece was entirely devoid of fat, practically a strip of dried leather. But he did not voice his rage.
He didn’t want to die before saving Elin. He quickly shoved the dirty meat into his tunic and backed away from the guards.
As soon as he was clear of the central fires, Korg rushed back to the slave pits... a series of holes dug into the earth near the palisade walls.
When he reached his specific pit, he pulled back the ragged deer hide serving as a roof.
What he saw inside broke the remaining shreds of his willpower, pushing him to the brink of madness.
The mountain spirits were truly punishing him...
Elin was curled into a tight ball, trembling so violently that her teeth chattered like dry bones. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Her skin was a shade of pale blue, and her breathing was a rattling gasp. The ’shivering sickness’ had fully relapsed, tearing through her weakened body.
"Elin!"
Korg cried out, dropping into the pit and pulling his daughter into his arms, trying to transfer his own meager body heat to her.
Seeing her in such a critical state, he knew a single strip of lean meat wouldn’t do anything.
He dug into the dirt in the corner of the pit, retrieving the small, tightly wrapped pouch containing the twenty strips of meat he had literally starved himself to save.
He didn’t have enough to bribe a guard... The only option left was the camp’s Shaman.
Korg wrapped Elin in his own tunic, leaving his chest bare to the biting wind, and picked her up.
Normally, he wouldn’t dare approach the Shaman’s earth-lodge without a direct summons, as the old woman was known for her cruelty, but this was a desperate situation.
Witnessing his frantic sprint through the slave camp, even a few of the hardened, broken captives looked away in silent pity.
Soon, Korg arrived at the center of the camp, standing before the large, insulated earth-lodge where the Shaman resided.
He pushed past the hide flaps, instantly hit by a wave of glorious heat.
The lodge was filled with the smell of burning sage, roasting fat, and drying herbs.
Korg placed Elin on a soft bed of furs near the fire and waited.
From the shadows emerged an old, twisted woman covered in crow feathers and bone necklaces.
She frowned upon seeing Korg and his filthy daughter dirtying her furs. However, recalling that she had treated the girl with the temporary moss a few moons back, and remembering the high quality of the dried berries Korg had provided, she hobbled over to inspect the child.
Her frown was quickly replaced by a greedy scowl as she looked up at the father.
"The shivering sickness has taken her blood," the Shaman demanded. "The deep-root moss required to save her will cost you forty strips of prime meat. Pay me now, or take this dying filth out of my lodge."
"Elder... isn’t it twenty?" Korg asked, his voice cracking. "I have starved myself in the bone-pits to collect twenty strips. I have them right here. Why is it suddenly forty?"
He fell to his knees, extending his hands toward the Shaman, the small pouch of meat sitting in his palms.
He was on the verge of tears.