Sweet as Sugar

Sweet as Sugar Chapter Thirty Six
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather is a wondermous and Busy as Hell ™ Beta ;) Thanks to everyone for being so patient and reading/reviewing as you can! I really appreciate it!

Previous chapters can be found here: http://tv.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=544190551&chapter=1


Bara felt the cool slide of stone under his back and winced as his skin dragged across the jointures between the flat plates of rock. It was far too dry in the Lady’s private dome to do him much good but he did not protest, remaining as limp and quiet as possible when Jaris engaged the hand tractor and he rose from the floor, suspended several feet up and floating thanks to the handy piece of technology that someone had long ago imported to the planet. His head throbbed but he could manage, he decided, a small wave of nausea passing over him as Jaris used the hand tractor to pull him quickly down the narrow hall. He did not have to open his eyes to see how close the walls were to his arms and legs—he had walked the corridor often enough to know it’s dimensions and know that he was dangerously close to getting a nice layer of skin scraped off on rough stone walls. This section of the dome, he had been told, was designed to be remindful of ancient Earth and something called Dungeons. He had translated the word into his own tongue once and it came out to mean “place of bad dreams”. He would, he mused, have to agree with that. Jaris stopped his progress with an audible click of the hand tractor and, for the time being, he floated mid-air.

“I know you are awake,” she intoned softly. “Your life signs altered slightly some time ago. But I commend you for your attempts at pretending.” There was a long pause and Bara felt a cold blast of air over his entire body. Jaris had opened the doors at the far end of the hall that only the Lady Herself had used. She had not let even her most trusting and pleasing consort through them, he reflected bitterly. “I am about to set you down,” Jaris interrupted his thoughts. “Prepare yourself.”

He tried to bend his legs and just set down in a standing position but ended up falling on his back anyway. After a moment’s pause, he rose to his full height and towered over the petite acolyte and her imperious nature. “What is this? The Lady’s Inner Sanctum?” The room beyond the doors seemed to stretch on forever, dark and seemingly throbbing with some inner pulse, cold air forming a wall just before Bara, like an invisible indicator of something changing, some difference between the present and whatever lay just past the threshold.

“You might say that.” She smiled faintly and shut off the tractor entirely, the last of the blinking lights fading as she tucked the device into her robes. “I am not helping you, Bara. I am helping myself. For years now, I have known of the deception of the Lady. I have no other home. This is my life…” she trailed off, looking over her shoulder at the cavernous space beyond the doors. “Her secrets are mine to keep, to die for. She trusts me implicitly…I have seen much in my time as her chief servitor and have earned her trust. I know how she works, how she maneuvers…” She shifted and faced Bara again, her eyes impossibly dark now, hooded in thought and something more, something he could not quite describe or even want to name. “But that does not mean I like it. My entire world is a creation of her hands. She forged me out of materials of her making. She fancies herself a god… There is no god, Bara, other than what the mind creates.” Without another word, she turned and walked swiftly into the dark space beyond, disappearing as soon as she crossed the threshold.

“WAIT!” He started after her, fear and nervousness roiling in his belly as his feet carried him across the line of demarcation. Darkness swallowed him for several long moments and he stumbled, blindly. His fingers brushed hard stone and hot metal and for a brief second he thought he might be falling. Light flooded his eyes before fear could fully engulf him and what he saw both dazzled and stunned him. “Jaris?”

“I am here,” she called softly, her hand closing over his wrist and pulling him behind a thick stone pillar. “We have not left the domes,” she added in response to his unasked question. “This, too, she forged from whole cloth. Of course, some of it is spare parts…” her gaze drifted over to a hooded figure who seemed to be standing guard near another pillar. “Most of these beings are not truly themselves. Long dead remnants of ghost worlds… Some are very much alive and intact, but under her spell, as it were. She is very convincing when she chooses to be, the Lady is.” She met Bara’s gaze with an intent one of her own. “This is where your friends will be taken. This is where the trial will be held. It is not some distant world at all, merely another dome on this so-called pleasure world.”

Bara let his gaze travel over the room, his breath stilling in his chest as he took it all in; robed and hooded figures lined the galleries along the walls and a throne sat in the middle of the room. Silence reigned. No notice was paid to him and the servitor. “What are they doing?”

“Waiting. They will not do anything until the Lady gives orders…” She smiled again, this time less sad and more angry. “She perfected her abilities long after gaining my service. I am one of the few remaining who thinks for themselves.” She dropped her hand from his arm and gave him a hard look. “I am helping myself, Bara.”

“So you said,” he agreed. “Mind if I ask why?”

“I am old. Three hundred by my count. It is time I moved on from this body, this plane…” she sighed and shook her head slightly, clearing out old thoughts and dreams. “I cannot do that while I am tied to her. I am tired of the slavery I see, the war all around me being waged silently and softly. I have been considering doing this for a long time but did not have the proper impetus until today… Until you spoke earlier, I believed that I was the only one who knew the truth about Her.” She tilted her head to one side and tensed, her eyes fluttering closed. “She comes.”

Bara barely had time to duck behind the pillar, out of sight of the robed figures, before a soft hush of movement swept over the group. The Lady was there, ready to start.