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The Story:
“The mountain has a living heart,” they said. It can feel—love, cry, hold a grudge. And the keeper of its heart dwells within it.
An adventurer and explorer, Daniel Hollow had to know if it was true. He had seen mummies and their boobytrapped tombs, jungles and their deadly creatures, seas and their monstrous waves, but he had never seen a mountain with a living heart. He was skeptical but willing to be convinced.
From its base, the mountain didn’t look like much. It had a long trail wrapping around it where hikers could drop a coin into a hole at the end and make a wish. At the trail’s starting point, there was no entrance. He had to circle around to the other side of it to find the cavern that entered the mountain.
Stalagmites and low hanging stalactites kept him stumbling through the cavern until he reached a tunnel that wove upward through the mountain. He climbed it for hours, sometimes straight up, until he reached a small interior room with a hole in the wall. An old man was squatted beside a glistening golden pool of water, crying.
“Are you the keeper of the mountain’s heart?”
He barely lifted his head from his arms.
“Sadly, yes, lad. Sadly, yes.”
“Where is it?”
“You came here to see it, did you? Well, you can’t. You can only… only feel it.”
He broke into sobs again.
“What’s wrong?”
The old man lifted his head and sniffled. He stood himself up as straight as his hunched back would allow and leaned on a wooden staff.
“Everyone wants to see the heart, maybe feel it, but no one cares about the condition they leave it in… Nobody!”
He sighed and looked into the pool.
“Such pure waters flowed here… Then, I let all of this greed trickle in, coin after coin. I did nothing.”
“Can’t we just clean it out?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed.
“You would steal our gold?”
“No! Just toss it out.”
“No one touches our gold!”
The old man charged, but Daniel dove around him. He grabbed a fistful of coins from the pool and tossed them out of the hole. The old man fell to his knees and disappeared.
To this day, Daniel Hollow still keeps the mountain’s heart pure.
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