Chapter 50: The Gold Palace
Stefan’s POV
We continued the journey and even without a clock nearby, I could tell the hours were blurring together as fast as the horses ran.
"How far exactly is this town?" I couldn’t help but wonder for the umpteenth time. I couldn’t ask Jonquil because she had been too busy riding the horse to even hear any word I said.
"What’s the name of this place?" I had asked once but she didn’t even hear me. So I stayed quiet and kept my questions to myself.
We’d stopped once to eat, some kind of dried meat and fruit passed around while the horses grazed, and then we were moving again, the ride stretching on so long I lost any real sense of time passing.
My legs had gone numb somewhere around hour five. My back ached in places I didn’t know a back could ache.
By the time dusk started bleeding orange and purple across the sky, announcing that it was evening, exhaustion had turned me into a slouched, half-asleep passenger clinging to Jonquil’s waist out of habit more than alertness.
After what felt like forever, the trees broke, and a town spread out below us... I sat up straight so fast my spine cracked.
"Oh, we are finally here." I muttered.
My eyes started moving right away, taking in every detail. I caught sight of the buildings around and I squinted to see better...
The buildings weren’t brick, weren’t concrete, nothing like the skyline I used to know back on Earth.
They were built from something pale and smooth, clay maybe, packed dense and reinforced with braided fiber running through it in visible lines, giving each wall a faint woven texture beneath a glazed surface. Sturdy. Warm-colored in the dying light. Genuinely beautiful in a way I hadn’t expected from a planet that had mostly shown me tents and dirt.
And then I saw the people.
Women. All of them. Every single person moving through the streets below, from the ones tending stalls to the ones walking with baskets balanced on their hips, was female. There was no one man in sight.
And the most shocking part of it is - they all looked *young*. Early twenties, mid twenties at the oldest, like time itself had simply stopped moving the second any of them hit that particular window and just never continued past it. No older women. No wrinkles, no gray hair, nothing that suggested age had touched this town at all.
And every one of them, without exception, carried the same kind of body - full hourglass curves, heavy chests carrying large breasts, wide hips, like some invisible sculptor had been working from a single template this whole time.
I stared, genuinely stunned.
The townswomen, upon spotting the warriors approaching, dropped whatever they were doing immediately - baskets set down mid-stride, conversations cut off mid-sentence - and bowed low, deep, holding the position until the column had passed.
The warriors had slowed down now, moving through the town.
"Hey," I said, leaning close to Jonquil’s ear. "Is there no man here either? Same as the camp?"
She tilted her head slightly. "What do you mean? I do not understand that." She said.
"People like me," I quickly clarified.
"Oh." A pause. "Bounds?" She asked.
"Yeah. Bounds."
"We do not have them originally. We bring them from another planet. One we used to travel to for war." Jonquil said.
The information was hard to process and I sat with that for a second, something cold crawling up my spine despite the warm evening air.
"Wait. So there has never been a man - Bounds, I mean, actually born here?" I asked.
"No," Jonquil said, the response coming out simple, unbothered, like this was the most obvious fact in the world.
"Then how does anybody get born at all?" I pressed. "No men, no - " I gestured vaguely, "- reproduction. How do new warriors even happen?"
"I have no answer for that," Jonquil said. I swallowed hard but I still had more questions to ask.
"Okay, different question. Who are your parents? Where did you come from?"
"I have no answer for that either," she said, flat, entirely untroubled by the massive gap in her own history. "We have simply existed, as we are."
My mouth actually fell open a little. An entire population with no birth record, no family history, no explanation for their own existence, and every single one of them seemed completely fine with that?
"Our Queen," Jonquil added, almost as an afterthought, "would know such things. If you wished to."
Something in my chest lit up at that.
"Oh, I definitely wish to know." I grinned, then I added mostly to myself. "Can’t wait to meet this Queen of yours."
~~~~~~~~~
After a short while of riding through the town, we reached the palace gates not long after, and whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t this...
The palace stood four stories tall, glowing in the last light of the setting sun. Every wall seemed covered in real gold, shining so brightly that I had to squint. This wasn’t gold paint or decoration. It looked like someone had built an entire palace out of gold without caring how much it cost.
I had to squint just to make sense of the shape of the place.
Above the gates, golden birds stretched their wings as if they were flying across the top of the wall. Each feather had been carved so carefully it looked almost real. At the center of the entrance was a giant golden sun with long rays spreading across the archway. Even the huge metal hinges on the gates were made of gold, groaning under their weight as the doors slowly opened.
I couldn’t stop staring.
I blinked hard, half convinced my eyes were playing tricks on me. But the way light bounced off every surface, the sheer *weight* of it all pressing down on the eye - my gut told me this wasn’t cheap decoration dressed up to look expensive. This was real. Actual gold, stacked floor to roof, standing there like it cost this kingdom nothing at all to build a whole palace out of something my old life on Earth would’ve called a fortune.
"What kind of a Queen, has this much gold lying around and still finds room for more of it?" I thought, staring up at four stories of solid shine.
The warriors reined their horses to a stop at the gates. Slowly, with a deep groaning creak, the massive gates swung open.
Inside, it was worse. Better. Both at once.
Gold pillars lined a long entrance hall, each one wrapped top to bottom in fine detail - vines, flowers, small carved birds perched among the leaves, every inch worked by some hand with far too much patience and far too much metal to spend on it. Braziers burned along the walls, and every flame bounced twice, three times, off polished gold before it finally settled and dimmed. The floor itself held a thin inlay of gold running through the pale stone in long winding lines, like veins.
I felt my mouth curve into a slow, satisfied smirk.
Whatever waited for me inside this planet’s version of a palace, one thing was already clear;
I was going to play with wealth.
"This is going to be good."
I hadn’t finished that thought when suddenly, the door to the entrance of the palace opened and something unexpected happened.
The slow smirk curving my lips dropped instantly.