The Culling 3
by fillups44
My head was bursting with questions as I followed Jedrek away from the village where I had spent my entire life.
Who was he? Why had he bought me? It was not so unusual to buy indentured servants, but he had never seen me before. What was to become of me?
When I looked at his impossibly wide back which made his cloak flare out at an improbable angle and his incredibly thick powerful legs, I wondered WHAT he was.
He had money that was clear, the huge leather pack that he easily carried was made with fine leather, the leather quality of his large boots and overstretched breeches were the finest I had ever seen. Why would such a man want me as his servant?
He had acted kindly to me so far and I focused on that as we climbed the hills away from everything I had ever known.
After several hours, he stopped suddenly. The sun was just coming down and the air was charged with orange light all around us. "You need food." he said striding back towards me. He set his pack down, and pulled out a round loaf and then rummaged around and pulled out a small jar.
He broke the loaf apart and slathered each piece with the dark purple substance from the jar. I smelled berries. "Here, sit down on my pack. Rest a moment."
"All of this? For me?" This was more food than I sometimes had in a full day. He smiled again and nodded and then sat down on the ground without any food and studied me while I devoured the first food I had eaten all day.
It was bread with blackberry jam. The best bread I had ever eaten. A hard crust but soft inside. The sweet jam was bliss. The tart berries made me feel like it was summer. And as I ate, all the tiredness I had felt was gone. It was as if it was a new day and I had just woken from a restful sleep..
"We have to go on through the night, Gregor. We won't set up camp until we've had at least another day's march. That should help keep you going."
Jedrek walked up to a tree and pulled a thick branch off of it. It broke like a twig in his grasp. He quickly ran his hands along it breaking off twigs smoothing the wood with the pressure of his hands and again breaking the ends and in moments had a perfectly
polished staff. I blinked my eyes in disbelief at the sight.
Jedrek looked back the way we had come and then turned to me, "We must continue."
We walked on. When darkness came Jedrek somehow fixed a flame of some sort to the top of his staff and kept the darkness lit. No animals came across our path as we marched through the night. After eating and feeling restored, I somehow had the strength to keep walking.
In the morning, Jedrek gave me more bread and we continued on. Midday we broke from the main road and veered into the forest. Jedrek did not move stealthily but broke a large path through the snow. Easy to follow.
We stopped where the trees were a little less full and Jedrek sat down on a fallen log near two giant oak trees and gestured for me to sit next to him. I felt worn and somehow like I was as thin as paper and could be blown away by the wind. As I sat down near him and looked up at his handsome face, I was struck yet again on how truly massive he was. I could see mounds of muscle pushing up against fabric on either side of his thick, thick neck.
"The bread and berries can only sustain for so long. We will have a proper rest tonight and I need to talk to you a bit now that we have some time." Jedrek said looking at me with some concern. He continued, "I come from the lands your people call the Taiga."
I gasped, "Like Eoghan."
His eyebrows raised, "Your people still talk of Eoghan? Good."
So many feelings rose through me. It was like a wave. I had only half believed the story. "Is it true? Can you do that? Are you a...."
He laughed again. "I had heard you were silent, Gregor. Of course everyone in your village falls silent around me."
"We will talk more of Eoghan. As for what I can do. Let me demonstrate."
He stood up, and pulled off his cloak and then gradually pulled off his tunic. I watched intently, feeling my manhood stirring as the material lifted revealing his pale skin dusted with reddish brown hair. First his stomach which was small but covered with bricks of muscle. HIs sides were covered with creases of muscle, like the smith folding and refolding metal until he achieved a perfect edge in the tempered iron. His midsection looked hard like the metal and the heat from his body steamed the cold air around him. Then my eyes traveled up and out the enormous sweep of his back visible no matter which direction he faced. His back was rutted like a rocky slope with deep trenches and high hillocks of muscle and small tributaries of veins.
He turned and I could see the hairy mounds of his chest projecting impossibly far out from his midsection. HIs big nipples pointing downwards by the heavy mass of muscle that carried them. He saw where my arms were wandering and somehow flexed his huge chest so the muscle lifted and slammed back down. SLAM! SLAM! The sound knocked me off the log and I scrambled quickly back up to keep watching. His shoulders stretched far out to either side of his neck and rounded up larger than me and my brothers heads put together. As I stared at him I could feel a dampness in my trousers spewing from my manhood.
Jedrek looked like he appreciated the attention but he wasn't done.
"We need a little more space and firewood for a proper camp," he said striding up to the two giant trees in the center of the clearing. Jedrek stood between them and I realized his body was much thicker than either of the huge old trees. He tensed his muscles a bit and his body exploded with rippling, defined, huge muscles over his monstrous chest, shoulders and arms. The light fur of his body glittered in the cold sunlight.
Without bending his knees he placed his hands on each trunk as low as he could. I saw his forearms bulge a bit and watched his fingers dig in tree trunks with loud crunching and tearing sounds. His fingers completely disappeared in the trunk of the trees. Then he looked at me and smiled. The ground beneath us began to groan. The snow began to shake and the drifts to break up with the motion.
I looked at Jedrek and he was barely working. The thick ropes of muscles in his shoulders seemed bigger and there were more of them, but he seemed relaxed and calm. His smiled broadened and he simply raised his arms. The sound was deafening. Ice and snow and then roots and rock and dirt and were screaming with distress as his two obscenely powerful arms and shoulders simply tore the two giant boles from the earth with a ton or so of soil and rocks clinging to the roots. The air rattled with the sound and ice and snow fell from the neighboring trees with the force of it.
With no leg or back power he lifted the huge trees from the ground where they had been attached for probably hundreds of years. He stood there with muscles bulging a bit as he held the lumber aloft more securely than if they had still been in the ground. He then proceeded to easily walk as if unencumbered to the edge of the clearing and then he gently placed them on the ground upright where they stayed balanced.
I was breathing hard, panting at what I saw but Jedrek was breathing normally as if he had not exerted himself at all. "Stand a way a bit, Gregor." I climbed away from the gaping twin pits of frozen soil and the two upright giant trees.
"Now the firewood. This tree is good hard wood." He walked to the base of the good tree and picked it up with one hand near the bottom and began to shake it like a child would shake a stick. The enormous tree creaked with the force of it. Dirt and twigs and smaller branches and leaves went flying off the tree with a flick of Jedrek's wrist. After only a few moments he stopped and the tree was clean of dirt, leaves and any small branches. Only the core of the tree remained, the wood good for the campfire. It was ready to be cut to lengths.
He turned the tree horizontal by simply twisting his monstrous forearms. Easily aiming the length of the tree down the path we took to get here. He settled the monstrous tree down, the root mass overtopped his head by several spans.
"Do you have an axe to cut it?" I asked stupidly.
"I don't need tools," he said clenching his enormous hard fists, causing the muscles in his forearms to bunch up and writhe like the large water snakes from the river. He strode to the far end of the tree. The enormous heat from his body leaving a steaming trail behind. I heard a distant violent cracking and shearing sound and saw him quickly cleaving pieces of wood down the path with his hard knuckles. Somehow he was able to cleave the wood cleanly with a single punch of his fist. His body was a pale blur and suddenly I was staring at a neat row wood sections. Even the enormous root span had been divided.
"Now I'm going to show off a little bit," Jedrek's impossibly deep voice sounded almost boyish. He was enjoying stunning and frankly exciting me.
He pursed his lips together and started bursting blowing bursts of air. He had so much power and precision that the air bursts lifted the root pieces and scattered them out of the clearing. Then he turned to the sections of logs down the path and then made a sucking noise. Suddenly the first log pulled free of the earth by his suction and hurled itself at his face. He caught it easily in his huge hand before it smashed into his face. Again and again he did this neatly stacking all the wood in this manner.
He turned to the other tree. "This tree is starting to rot. I could feel a slight softness of the wood. I will let it rot naturally but not just standing here where it could fall and kill something"
He spread his hands and approached the tree. I could feel my own weakness and my knees wanted to buckle. The power I was seeing was too much to imagine.
Jedrek grasped the the trunk and his fingers disappeared through the tough bark.
He stood there for a second. I noticed his hands were placed on the tree at head height. He looked like he was going to push it over with his legs. Tree-trunk oak against trunk-tree legs.
Then he spread his already huge back even more. His mountainous back expanded wider and wider. He was at least three times as wide as the tree trunk. Then he flexed again. His back creaked and shifted and grew even more insanely thick with power.
I’m not sure what happened next. A huge roaring sound filled the forest. It seemed not to come from Jedrek but from everywhere and deep in the ground. There was a huge explosion. Dirt and stone and soil flew up from the ground around Jedrek. I ducked behind the log. A plume of dirt rose smokelike skyward and billowed in the air. The dirt cloud hung there although pieces were falling all around us. I heard a rush of air and saw the enormous cloud being blown away with a puff from Jedrek's lungs. He stood there with a smirk on his face, his muscles pumped and throbbing, empty-handed. PIeces of dirt and twigs standing out against his pale skin.
Where was the tree?
Then my slow mind started to stumble on the truth as I stared at the ground between his legs. I could see a small tip of the tree coming up from the distorted ground between them. He had somehow pushed the tree the fullness of its height into the frozen forest earth.
Jedrek strode away from the spot the sunlight glinting off his titan's body. He looked at the wood neatly stacked on one side and clapped his hands together with an enormous CRAAAAAAACK! as if to get rid of sawdust. The enormous sound crashed through the forest, knocking me off my unsteady feet. It was all too much, the exhaustion and Jedrek. I passed out on the forest floor.