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“I can’t.”
“Why not?” He is starting to sound agitated, as if he thinks I am disobeying him at the worst possible time.
I point to my neck. “The collar.”
“Oh! Fuck! Right.” He rips the collar off my neck as if it were made of nothing more solid than construction paper and slaps my pink suit at me. “Put this on. It’s going to be colder back there.”
I dress quickly. If death is coming in a white snow army, I don’t want to meet it naked.
Manik leads me back to the rear of the cave. I’ve never seen this part of his lair before. It is very dark, or it would be if it didn’t glow with a nearly neon blue phosphorescence emitted by various mushrooms. There are brighter spots where he has used mirrors to direct sunlight down to the pumpkin patch where my lunches come from. Astonished by all I am seeing, I find my feet taking me deeper, and deeper, and….
THUNK.
I turn around to discover that he has sealed me in. He didn’t even say goodbye. I feel a sudden welling of fear. Manik is a monster, but he cannot fight a fleet alone. If he is killed, then I will eventually die here, sealed in the dark. The thought is terrifying, and I do my very best not to let it take control of me. All I can do now is wait. And snoop.
He has some private things back here, clothing and items from what I guess must have been his old life. I always thought he was just a pretty ubiquitous criminal, but the things I find here befuddle me. There is a big star-metal chest in a dark corner, and on it is a seal that if I didn’t know better, I would say belonged to a king. When I touch the metal, it has a smoothness to it and a heft that you only get with very well-made things.
Pushing the lid open, or rather, apart, because it slides back from a seam in the upper middle, I find a small trove of jewelry and clothing, and a crown.
Now it all makes sense! He stole from a king. No wonder they are sending armies after him. He must have angered someone very rich and very powerful to elicit this kind of ongoing military response.
I close the chest and go back toward the mouth of the cave. Whatever thunked has un-thunked and the door between the area where I have been kept and Manik’s dark cave is now open. Hm. Weird. But fortunate.
I hesitate before going through, wondering if I am going to be greeted with soldiers, and wondering if those soldiers are going to do terrible things to me.
My suit is sitting next to the door. The one he made me that allows me to brave the exterior of this icy world. I put it on, even though it is still outlandishly oversized. I need as much protection as I can get. I probably need a weapon too, come to think of it.
I grab the pot Manik uses to make pumpkin soup. Is it a gun? No, but it will do some damage. It’s more like psychological weaponry than actual weaponry.
Armed with my pumpkin pot, I leave the cave and step almost directly into Manik. Thank god I didn’t have to search for him. I don’t think I have the cardio to slog through all this snow.
Speaking of snow… it was white this morning. Now it is red as far as the eye can see. Manik is also red. The only part of him I recognize is his golden gaze. Even the sky seems to have been turned red by his sanguine massacre.
“How…”
“I don’t want you to see me the way I had to be to achieve this result.”
“What did you turn into? A fucking saw-blade?”
He shakes his head, exhausted. “I need a bath.”
Manik grabs me by the suit and drags me back indoors. I let him take me, curling up in his grip like a puppy being carried by its mother. He drags me back into the depths of the cave with him where he strips off and runs himself a bath. I sit and watch and try to figure out how to broach the myriad of subjects begging to be talked about.
He is soaking peacefully in warm water by the time I pipe up.
“I found your stuff.”
“Oh?” He opens an eye and looks at me.
“You stole from a king?”
He lets out a chuckle. “Is that what you think?”
“I mean, yeah. You should probably not make really powerful people angry, you know? It might lead to being holed up on an ice planet forever while they send army after army to…”
Manik emerges from the bath naked. As almost always, I lose my train of thought when confronted with his massive, thick, prehensile cock. It is just very distracting.
“Uhmmm… What was I saying?”
