An Isekai Story

Buried deep in the bones of the Cradle, the Black Iron Galley is less a kitchen and more an engine room for the living. Its curved ceiling hangs low with soot-stained stone ribs, pressing close as if to silence idle chatter. Narrow workstations divide the space with rigid symmetry, and no scent ever escapes them. Cooking fires are replaced by black-veined ore hearths that hum with a dry, unrelenting heat—enough to boil broth, sear flesh, and sterilize tools in seconds. Storage is minimal and clinical: cold-iron lockers, pressure-sealed bins of grain, and slow-turning meat racks that never drip. Ingredients arrive in weighted crates with no labels. Recipes are unspoken, memorized by rote. There are no cooks, only attendants in soot-gray aprons who move with ritual precision. The meals are gray, beige, or bone-white. Everything that comes out of the Galley sustains, but never satisfies. Even hunger seems to leave the room hollow.

A narrow stone chamber glows faintly orange from embedded furnaces, their mouths dark as voids. The walls glint with sweat and iron, rows of sealed lockers pulsing faintly with frost. Tables are set in rigid lines, each bearing unlabeled knives and heat-scored pans. No smoke, no flame—just dry heat and the soft hiss of steam trapped behind glass. The air smells like hot stone and metal, and every surface looks recently scrubbed… and never clean.