m/m The Culling Parts 1-5

[fillups]

The Culling Part1

The thaw began early that year.

All the boys between the ages of ten and 16 in our village were standing in line, in front of Agnieska, the wise woman, as she performed the ritual.

The ground was muddy, wet and cold but I could feel beads of sweat run down the back of my neck as she stared at each one of us in turn. Her gray eyes seemed to linger longer over me.

She sang some sort of song in a strange language. I could feel a vibration in the air as she summoned.

She plucked several of the bright orange flowers from the slushy earth. She shook them hard releasing a cloud of pollen which held a vague blob like shape near her. She then violently pulled out the thick stamens of the flower and then pulled them apart. The pollen glittered at the sacrifice and then began to move and fan out over the boys. It fell in an even sheen over all of us. All of us except a dark haired 13 year old boy named Ulric. There was a clear space around him, not even a particle landed on him.

A hiss of breath came from the villagers watching us. Ulric's mother stifled a cry as the wise woman moved toward him with a knife. He stood silent in his clear space. The villagers stood silent around us boys as she silently cut his throat and he fell to the ground. After the body was taken away, the rest of us stripped and ran to the river and into the icy water, washing the clingy pollen away.

I forced myself to laugh with the other boys pushing down the deep guilt I felt in not being taken along with Ulric. It was my last year, I had passed and yet I knew I should have been killed as well.

***********************************

"It is a hard thing, but he died human, Mertha," John the Elder, said to Ulric's mother.

It was night and the villagers clustered around the fire in the great room to hear the story after the culling.

John the Elder turned from the bowed woman to address the rest of us with the story.

Durness, the mighty was the greatest ruler this world had ever seen. His army stretched from horizon to horizon with several score more waiting beyond. Some of the greatest of all knights, fought alongside each other. Men who had slain dragons and fought trolls and whose songs the bards of our kings still sing. He employed over 20 of the most powerful wizards and witches, whose spells protected the land and made the people prosperous.

His people were pious and good and performed the ritual every spring just as we do. Some years they escaped sacrifice altogether and the villages remained pure and unsullied.

But Durness was proud and felt beyond the laws of natural men. He did not subject his own sons to the test. He felt his bloodline could not produce a perversion.

His first son grew up tall and strong and good and Durness was glad he had never been forced to stand in line with the common boys. His second son, Eoghan was even more promising. His eyes were clear blue and his hair as dazzling as sunlight, his wit keen edged and his prowess on the battle field was twice his older brother's.

When he was fifteen, the change began. His shoulders grew wider. Wide enough that Eoghan had trouble walking through a door. His arms grew larger than a man's leg, larger around even then a sturdy man's full torso. In short he became an abomination to the sight of good people. Durness tried to hide him away in the dungeon, but one night the creature burst through the thick stone walls and escaped.

Durness used his resources to track the creature. Hoping to destroy it before it harmed his people. To no avail.

Several years later the great seeress, Lythum was able to divine that the creature had joined with more of his kind and that in the center of the great range of mountains that marked one of the great country's boundaries, there was a lair where his son was now living.

Durness in his great wrath and pride, set his full army to march against the lair of these creatures. He wanted to destroy all of them. He felt that if their kind was stamped out, the perversion would no longer infect the men of any family.

As the advance scouts approached the mouth of the pass through the mountains they saw a small encampment by the side of the road. Standing by the fire was a creature several times larger than Eoghan had been when he was imprisoned. They trembled as they approached, recognizing in the still blindingly handsome features the face of their former prince. He wore only a cape, heavy boots and a breechcloth held up by a leather belt.

His body no long looked human. There were massive mounds of hard flesh stretching out from his chest area like mountains. His arms were bigger round than a body of a horse and covered with craggy lines of muscle and veins. His legs were even more massive and he had to stand with his legs slightly apart accommodate their enormity. He carried no weapons that they could see.

The creature frowned at them and then spoke with a voice that shook the ground with its power, "Turn back your army or you will all perish by my hand. You shall not march against my brethren."

The scouts dashed back to the generals who surrounded by the leagues of men, fighting animals, heavy equipment, laughed at the message. They sent out a hundred men at dawn with instructions to bring back the head of the second son of Durness. The noon sun drew to the center of the sky and dark cloud swarmed over the general's tent. A hundred heads of the men who had been sent rained down upon them.

The generals sent a dispatch to Durness that the battle might need magical support and the wizard's climbed to the top of the their towers to summon their most potent magics against the creature once known as Eoghan.

The army then marched forward reigning death upon the single man. They attempted to surround and destroy him. The creature's bronze skin glistened in the sunlight as he moved quicker than the eye could follow obliterating the soldiers and their weapons in fleshy explosions of motion. The bronze blur would come upon a heavily armored group of men and equipment and there would be an eruption of chaos as man, beast and objects were destroyed. Spears were pulled from the grips of strong warriors and then flung with such force that they pierced the armor and bodies of a score of warriors often bursting thick trees before they finally cleaved to a wall or burrowed long trenches into the ground.

Then the Wizards sent down bolts of power to stop Eoghan. He grew even larger swelling three times his already gargantuan size as the power burned down upon him. The energy destroyed anything near Eoghan but he laughed as the blue power crackled around him and flung powerful bolts from his hands that were several times more powerful, reducing the wizards and their impregnable towers to dust mites with single strikes. One wizard set a tornado twisting across the land to destroy the creature and Eoghan drew an enormous breathe and sucked the entirety of the storm within his body and then breathed out a storm hundreds of times more powerful that boiled the very earth and drenched the earth in the blood of thousands of men. The storm traveled to the city fortress of the wizard and destroyed all, whipping him with lightning and agony and then leaving his body impaled on the city's highest tower.

in the course of a single day, the mightiest army known to our history and the empire that linked over a hundred countries in peace had been destroyed. The battleground was a place of desolation and when Eoghan, massive as a mountain himself covered in the gore of the men and creatures he had destroyed, stood before one young soldier who was the last of all the mighty armies, "Tell them what you have seen so that no others will ever be foolish enough to march on the Taiga lands. You are marked with my sign so that all who see you will know you speak the truth." He traced a sign with his hand which burned into the forehead of the terrified soldier, who forgot for moments his loathing of what Eoghan had become and kneeled before him as to a god.

In a flash Eoghan was gone leaving the soldier alone in the center of the devastation.

It took the soldier several days to cross the vast plain where the great army had been destroyed. There was nothing living in that place. No grass or wildlife, nothing stirred in the charred remains of the land. The land was twisted into weird fantastic unnatural shapes and the journey was slow and difficult. When he came at last to the great capital, now with its ancient towers sheared to the ground, he saw a body hanging from battlements. It was Durness, dead by his own hand.

Of course the great empire was destroyed and we now live in hovels ruled by petty tyrants and squabble with each other, all because of the perversion. For those men who desire other men will become creatures of death and destroy all around them for their perversity is unholy and should be destroyed before it blooms.

Everyone nodded silently their faces hardened and there was no grief for Ulric. But I, Gregor, the eldest son of a widowed mother, also desired other men. Parts of the story describing Eoghan's power and size actually made my manhood become hard and I worked to conceal my aberration.

I knew some men gave themselves up for death to save the village but I could not bring myself to do that and I could not run into the forest and leave my family to fend for itself. so year after year I pass the culling somehow and pray that my passing means that soon I will look not look upon men with a longing that burns through me and haunts my dreams.

The Culling Part 2

The thaw was in retreat as storms off the north re-froze the land and destroyed the early flowers.

I pulled my body into a ball trying to conserve my body heat against the cold. I could hear the timbers shift around me in the fierce winds and thought of Eoghan who had swallowed a greater storm into his body. I could not imagine the power.

I slept then with the wind and cold and the golden presence of Eoghan in my dreams.

The wind moaned and the room was still dark as my mother groaned out of her bed. I rose as well and threw some small sticks of wood on the coals and then carefully built the morning cook fire.

My mother trudged in and pulled a pot with congealed fat over the flames, "You waste too much wood," she grumbled as she warmed her hands over the flames. "Don't be a layabout! Fetch your brothers!"

I grunted and pulled on what warm clothing I had. It smelled of sweat and animal grease. Warm smells. I punched the sleeping mounds still on the mat we all shared as a sleeping place. Niklas and Ralf gave twin yawns and started shuddering with the cold.

I hefted the frozen water basin near the flames and went out into the wind to see to our poor few animals.

When I returned, I could smell the thin gruel of the morning meal and saw Agnieska's girlservant, Betha, a wiry, suspicious eyed creature, huddled next to our hearth.

"She needs to see ya this mornin'." Betha said in a flat inflectionless voice. "You need to hurry with no eatin." She slyly smiled at my frown and the sound my belly made at her announcement.

My mother looked disgusted, but said, "Leave soon so you can work soon. Go see the wise woman."

The snow blinded me as I walked into the wind, watching for the marks for the path in the snow to Agnieska's hovel. My clothes were patched together pieces of fur and too small, i kept pulling pieces and trying to make myself smaller as I trudged as quickly as I could.

"You're late boy," Agnieska stared at me with something like hatred and something else. She had called me in like this every few months since I was a child. She had a large fire in her hovel and the place stank of drying plants. She muttered chants as she stirred a pot on the fire.

"Sit down laggard. You know by now what to do.". I pulled off my clothes and sat naked before her fire. The scented steam wove around me and I felt far away. The room seemed to fade away from me and I was in a gray mist and could only hear the harshness of the wise woman's chants. A cup was pressed to my lips and I drank the hot, foul liquid down.

There was a long silence and then the mist glittered green around me. Then a triumphant whisper, "You're mine now."

I don't remember going home, just suddenly becoming conscious and finding myself doing my usual work at our house. My empty stomach rumbled as I tried to stay patient with my two younger brothers' games as we tried to patch holes during the lull in the storm. The noon hour was drawing near, "Be careful not to waste and put everything back, I need to get me to the blacksmith's.". They grunted and Niklas tried to kick Ralf's legs out from under him.

"Hurry," I hissed at them, "before the storm comes."

John the elder was the strongest man in town and the only blacksmith for miles. Fate had given him many children but all of them girls. He employed two of the village boys to pump the great bellows for food and iron working skills.

The heat of the shop smacked me in the face, John stood before the anvil an unfinished hook shaped piece grasped in the tongs. His brawny forearms bare and bristling with hair, I tried to sneak a look at the working of the muscles as he swung the heavy hammer down.

"Quit your gaping boy, Maugh needs spellin'. I quickly ran over to replace the exhausted boy and pulled hard on the bellows, creating an intense flame.

And so it went for several hours. I occasionally felt dizzy but shook off the feeling. I was in the back room finishing the clean up when I heard the door open and close. John began, "i'm sor..." he stopped.

There was silence and then a deep voice rattled the tools on the wall, "I"m looking for Gregor."

John had always been the biggest man I had ever seen so I was shocked when I came out and saw the huge man in front of John. He made John look puny and childlike. He wore a cotton tunic and leather jerkin and breeches with a hooded cloak thrown back to expose his dark, reddish hair. While he was properly covered, his musculature was so extreme and overly developed that his clothing bulged outwards all over the place. His chest pushed out in front of him and I could clearly see the fantastically huge mass of the muscle deforming the leather. I could see the indentation where the deep canyon ran between those fantastic shieldplates of brawn. The cotton of the tunic was stretched like a second skin over the magnificent craggy roundness of his upper arms. His incredible hands, big and thick were easily several times the size of John's own large hands.

John seemed to shrink away intimidated by this immense man.

"He, he's in the..." John gaped speechless.

I stepped forward held mute by this man's power.

He smiled, briefly, dazzlingly. I felt my knees buckle.

He sternly faced John and said authoritatively, "We are going."

Outside, he carelessly picked up a huge leather pack one handed and slung it over one of his monstrous shoulders. I marveled at his thickness and the graceful, confident ease of his movements. His thick heavy legs easily broke a path in the snow. He looked more beast than man, but even the great bears seemed smaller.

"But my mother, my brothers,". I found the strength to ask.

"I bought you from your mother," he looked at me almost gently for a moment, "We need to move Gregor. The soldiers will be coming soon and I don't want to be near this or any other village when they do."

I stopped for a moment and he turned impatiently again towards me.

"Sir, what should I call you?"

The brief dazzling smile shone out and he laughed, "Gregor, you may call me Jedrek."

The Culling Part 3

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 eyes 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 of 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 blowing bursts of air. He had so much power and precision that the air bursts lifted mainly only 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.

The Culling Part IV

I woke up in the dark. It was soft and I had never been so comfortable in my life. I snuggled down into warmth savoring the comfort. Then I smelled the delicious smell of roasting meat.

I sat up. I was in a small dark tent. Some kind of springy mat was under me and Jedrek's cloak had been thrown over me. I crawled out of the tent into the daylight.

Jedrek was outside, unfortunately fully dressed, but the incredible bulging of his muscles still happily apparent under his clothing. Even after all I had seen, the shock of seeing a man so thick and massive almost stunned me again as I saw him walking around the fire.

The ground was all filled in as if two trees had never stood in the middle of the clearing. Our clearing was bare of snow but that was the only sign of how the ground had been disturbed. I noticed a circle and several signs had been drawn in the ground around the tent. Near the circle was a small silver bowl with a few inches of water in it.

Jedrek stood before the fire turning a spit with several large pieces of meat on it. It smelled heavenly.

Jedrek looked at me and smiled, "Good day, sir! I'm glad you're up. That trip was rougher on you than I thought."

I blinked in the light and gaped at the meat. "What's that?" I asked like the ill mannered peasant I was.

"A bear fooled out of hibernation by the false thaw. He found me while I was working on the camp and decided to attack." He paused and I looked at sinews bunching and unbunching under the skin of his massive hands, hands that were capable of killing a bear with no weapons. "There is a lot of meat. I salted a bunch of it and hung it up some distance away. If we stay here long enough we'll have some decent provisions."

I was overcome again by his strength but also wondered why I was here.

He looked up seriously at me, "Gregor, we have serious work to do." He glanced into the distance, "The soldiers are almost here but we still have a little time. In your village, there is a witch. I felt her webs spun all over the place."

"You mean Agnieska, the wise woman?" I asked, my mind struggling to keep up with his rapid shift of subjects.

He rubbed his hands together with something like anticipation, "Ahhhh Agnieska, good. I have one her names. I would lay a wager that she frequently employs young girls and looks at you as if you were bear droppings she stepped in."

"Betha works for her now and before there was a girl we called Twig, who ran away with Matthias several years ago.

"Agnieska always looked at me as if I was something vile. But I think she liked me better than it seemed, because she took me in for special treatment and I was spared at the culling." Jedrek seemed to hate her and she had saved my life.

He seemed to read my mind, "There is much you don't know, Gregor, about the nature of this Agnieska and many "wise women". That witch's magic is all over you and that magic did keep the pollen away during the culling. But she has no love for you Gregor. Rather she sees in you a path to power that her kind is usually denied."

"I....I have no gift no power." I stammered.

Jedrek walked over to me and looked me directly in the eyes. I noticed his eyes were green with flecks of gray in them. "Gregor, I am like you. I do not lust for the company of women. I am drawn to men. Some call it an obscenity, a perversion, an inversion. However this perversion is my strength, my power. Men like us are gifted. That is part of why other people fear us. You have a lot of potential. I know that witch saw that and wanted to use it."

"LIke with Eoghan." I whispered the name. I had secretly dreamed that I would get that power, "But I'm not strong like you or him. In my village, I was one of the strongest boys but not strong like you."

"Aaaaaargh! They teach you nothing," he spat and moved quickly and pulled the meat from the fire. He blew gently on the roasted meat and then slid the slightly cool hunk into my hands. I was ravenous and devoured the delicious roast in minutes.

"We don't have much time, Gregor. However let me explain, men and women draw power in very different ways. Women work through the slow passive power of the earth. They often can redirect natural energies healing and withering that sort of thing. Their magic depends on a sexual purity for its greatest strength. A woman taken by a man loses much of her magical power. That's why so many witches hate men."

"Men's power often comes from active energies like lightning and fire. Sexual activity only enhances their power. With men like us, Gregor, sexual activity wakens our power and intensifies it. There is much more... " Jedrek spun around quickly alerted to something, "The soldiers are approaching."

'What soldiers would dare chase you?" I asked disbelievingly.

"That is a tale unto itself, Gregor. They are an elite force sent from a neighboring country and they have been tracking me for some time. I need to teach them and their masters a lesson."

Jedrek began to pull off his tunic revealing his colossal physique, "I must be at my most defenseless when facing them."

"You look scarier without your shirt," I mumbled in awe.

"I think that was a compliment. My thanks, Gregor," Jedrek smiled and flexed his arm. The muscle jumped up and expanded to almost four times its already gigantic size with his casual flex. It was at least the size of five large morningstars.

Jedrek carefully peeled off his leather breeches, revealing the massive long muscles of his monstrous legs. I felt awestruck at the canyons of muscle running along the front of those mammoth thighs lightly furred with his dark red hair. Each one was bigger than the girth of a large barrel and connected harmoniously with the rippling muscularity of his hamstrings. His calves stood out from his legs as if someone had halved the great summer melons and pushed them under his skin. He was standing in front of me clad only in his breechcloth; a study in intimidating size and strength. Once again the air steamed off his incredible body creating a halo in the sunshine.

"I want you to stay in the tent Gregor." Jedrek's deep voice was gentle. "If something happens, you will be safe in there. I have drawn protections around it. If you want to watch though, " he paused and I nodded enthusiastically, "here is a bit of magic." He picked up the silver bowl and handed it to me. "When you want to watch, you need to hold this bowl in both your hands and think of me and you will see what I am doing."

"I will return soon and answer more questions," he turned and walked away and I savored the sight of his massive body marching away from me.

I scrambled into the tent and pulled the flap down after me. Nervously I stared into the bowl, thinking of Jedrek. The water clouded for a moment and then cleared, showing a section of the forest from overhead. I could also hear the sounds from the area. A bird was singing and I could hear Jedrek's familiar heavy tread approaching.

10 figures dressed in white moved silently disappearing at times into the snowy background. Jedrek entered the area and several of the figures sprang up in a blur of motion and threw star shaped metal disks at him. Before they could return to their hiding places, Jedrek's hands moved even more quickly, catching the objects and throwing them back. The stars sheared through the men's skulls with loud CRACKS! and kept moving without losing speed. One cleaved through three of the men and all three sank silently to the ground, staining the snow red from the gaping wounds in their heads. The first ten men were dead within seconds.

More men moved around Jedrek in a silent circle. Two men cast dark wire at the giant pale red haired man while three others threw small swords at him. The wire was metallic and looped around Jedrek's chest and arms. The men started to run around attempting to fasten Jedrek's arms to his sides. But despite the pressure from the wire, Jedrek's arms moved as if nothing was tightening around them. He caught two of the swords and flung them back at the men, ripping through their chest cavities and causing them to fall. The third sword rammed into his side, but left not a mark on his muscular torso. The weapon fell to the ground bent by the impact to Jedrek's invulnerable muscle.

Jedrek sucked in some air expanding his chest and snapping the layers of metallic wire. He exhaled and a small hurricane of air furiously whipped the two wire spinners into the air smashing their lifeless corpses against two of the mighty oaks which swayed dangerously in the instant storm.

A net of heavy rope dropped down from above and several men instantly approached thrusting swords at Jedrek's net covered form and winding the net tighter and tighter to imprison him before he could respond.

Seconds later, the net exploded into small pieces leaving Jedrek standing in an awesome full body flex. Every muscle standing ridged under his pale skin, his back jutting out from side to side, his amazing legs corded with slabs of muscle Just flexing was enough to completely destroy the heavy cables of the net into particles.

The remaining thirty or so men all wearing light or heavy armor rushed in from all sides around Jedrek with all manner of weapons drawn. Bladed weapons ricocheted uselessly against his impervious muscularity blunted and bent. One warrior did manage to cut the breechcloth which fell to the ground exposing Jedrek's massive manhood which though soft was long enough to hang to his knees.

In one smooth motion, Jedrek grabbed three men in each of his gigantic arms. They all resisted but for all their frantic and sometimes skilled motion it made as much difference as tadpole changing the course of a torrent in the rapids of a river. His motion was unchanged by their thrashing as he began to simply contract his huge arms and shoulders. There was a loud cracking noise and every bone in those men's torsos was shattered the men's bodies were visibly crushed. While he was quickly crushing the six men Jedrek gracefully pivoted on one foot and kicked out with his massively muscular leg, through 3 men's chests and decapitating one man with the arc of a single kick.

Jedrek dropped the men, turned to the next soldier, grabbed each of his arms and tore them off his body. The man screamed blood shooting out of the sockets in a torrent and then fell instantly dead. Jedrek rammed the bones of the arms through several men killing them instantly and tossed the lifeless bodies aside with a flick of his wrist. The remaining soldiers were raining desperate blows with everything they had but with no effect on Jedrek at all.

Jedrek ignored their fierce blows and brought his fists together in front of his mighty midsection and flexed his chest, its already humongous size violently expanded by, what looked like several feet of dense, rippling, impregnable muscle, decapitating eight men as it rammed into their heads with his unstoppable power. Their heads snapped clean from the bodies and burst like overripe berries as they smashed into the forest trees.

Finally, the last two warriors he caught in his blood covered arms. Each man's head held between his forearm and biceps. Their hair was black and I could see the terror in their dark eyes. Jedrek began to whisper in a strange sibilant tongue to the men. They looked like they understood what he was saying for their eyes widened as he spoke. I wished I could also understand and suddenly his voice made sense to me.

"With the smallest contraction of my arms my biceps will swell and obliterate your skulls and you will be dead," Jedrek hissed, "It is only through my self control that your heads remain intact. I am strong enough to crush you by accident. Feel the strength you never will have. Remember it and share it with your people. This is what all those who attack the men from Taiga will face. Your weapons are destroyed and your skills are useless. But I have given you life by not flexing my arm." Then he dropped the men. Like Eoghan before him, he made a sign in the air. Each of the men gasped as a shining gold sign drew itself on their foreheads. "This is my mark and all who see it will know you have met someone of power."

Jedrek walked away from the men not looking back. I took in the view of the carnage. Over forty bodies of the soldiers lay in the bloody snow. The trees and plants all covered with bits of bone, pieces of hair and blood everywhere. The two soldiers looked around weeping for their comrades and started back to camp.

The view in the bowl changed following Jedrek as he walked to the bed of a frozen river. He breathed in once again expanding his enormous chest, held the breathe for a moment and then let loose a blast of air that melted that section of the river. Within moments the solid river came back to roaring life. He walked into it, the water sizzling as the heat of his body met river, and let the water wash the blood off of his body.

He walked out gleaming as the water to steamed off leaving his body clean and dry. I could hear the water pop and crackle as it disappeared.

He turned toward the camp and I put the bowl down shaking from what I had witnessed.

The Culling Part 5

I was staggering from the sight of the carnage. I felt my body reject the meat I had eaten earlier and I wretched the entire meal into a snow bank. I stood shivering in the snow feeling sick, not wanting to return to his shelter.

"Are you alright, Gregor?" the deep voice sounded kind, gentle. I shivered when I remembered what that voice had said, how it had sounded.

A large, heavy hand engulfed my shoulder. I started shuddering violently and uselessly tried to escape his grip.

"What's wrong, Gregor?" he asked again, softer.

I turned to face him, briefly noticing he was fully clothed, there was no outward sign of the slaughter, "Why did you kill all those soldiers? They were fighting for their lives and you were just having fun showing off."

"Gregor, they weren't coming up here just to shake my hand, they were here to kill. Any one of them would have been fully satisfied to have my head on a pike."

"But they could have spent all day swinging swords at you and no harm would have come to you. You just defeated a small army with no injuries. You could have spared them with no harm for yourself. We arrived here a day ago and it seems you have done nothing but kill." Some distant animal part of my brain was warning me that this was a mistake. Jedrek had saved me from a horrible fate with no bloodshed (I hoped) and this was rank ingratitude. But as much as I had loved the Eoghan story, actually seeing the carnage had fouled me.

Jedrek did not look angry. "Gregor, you are seeing things with the eyes of a man who has not come to power. You will see differently when you are elevated."

"If my mind changes that much, than I do not wish your elevation, Jedrek." I stared him squarely in the eye. Almost like I was daring him to close his fingers and destroy me.

Instead he took his hand from my shoulder and faced me squarely, "I hope this helps you to understand. These men were sent by a man like us Gregor. He is part of the brotherhood as am I, as are you through our attraction to men. He needed to know he had sent a killing quest against one of the brotherhood in no uncertain terms. He will now lower the barriers to trade he had erected in his ignorance. The world is a harsh and brutal place and we need to keep our place in it."

Some part of me wanted still to scream at him and wash the horrible sights from my memory. But as he had been talking I was thinking of all of Jedrek's kindnesses to me and, selfishly, my fate without him. Also, there was perhaps more that I did not understand, that made such a bloodshed necessary.

I attempted a wan smile, "For all you have done for me, I owe you my trust," I said out loud but vowed to myself never to "elevate" if it meant slaughtering others.

Jedrek's smile broke over his seriousness like the sun dawning, "For one so young, you are a good man. We have one last chore before leaving this place and we best finish it before the sun leaves the sky."

"What do 'we' need to do today?" I asked fearfully.

"Snap the tether, Agnieska has on you." he said, savoring the syllables of her name.

"What tether?" I asked running my hand around my neck.

"Your witch woman has done something she has thought of as very clever. She has developed a way to siphon off your power into her own and she's using your own life force to do it. In other words, I remove the spell and you die."

"What do I do?" I asked going cold inside.

Jedrek's softened a bit and he once again laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. "There are ways to break this that will leave you unharmed. Agnieska does not understand completely the nature of the bond that holds you both and she will pay."

"You won't kill her, will you? I stand here thanks to her mercy."

Jedrek spat into the snow, "You stand here thanks to her ambition and pride. However she did do something right, unintentionally. But she will still pay, I will try to keep the worst of her payment from her. Better than she wished on you Gregor. Now take off your clothes and bathe in the river. Return and sit here on the mat in the middle of this circle.". He pointed to a circle on the ground with a silver material lying in the center of the circle.

I marched to the river. The current was swift and icy but I was able to stand it and the water cleansed me. Nothing in the forest seemed to move as I made my way back to the circle. Jedrek had his eyes closed and was singing softly under his breathe.

I knelt onto the silver fabric and....

pain shot through every part of my body searing me like my innards were being held over the smith's fire. I tried to open my mouth to scream but could not move. I was seized in a perfect vise that would not let me make the smallest movement. I could no longer see the forest or Jedrek just a kind of boiling blackness that entered my being.

Then all was whiteness and I longed to shut my eyes against the glare but could not and black tendrils were being pulled from my body. I could feel them pulling scablike from my skin. Ripping and tearing and then I heard a scream.

Agnieska was running but the blackness shot at her ripping into her soft, elderly body flaying her. I heard a thundering then realized it formed words; it was Jedrek. "You sought a power that was not yours and now you must pay."

The black tendrils from my body were now latched onto Agnieska, connecting us. She stared at me with naked hatred and loathing. Then as the tendrils thickened her face went white with pain. Tongues of blue flame burst on the tendrils and they writhed shaking both Agnieska and me. There was a roar and all was blackness.

I was aware of the cold, the blessed cold of the snow as it fell on my body. I started shaking feeling raw and exposed. My eyes were shut but I could feel myself being picked up gently and I was put in a soft warm place. I slept.

I woke up in the tent, my body was curled against Jedrek's back. It felt like warm marble but still it was solid and made me feel safe after what I had gone through. His breathing was soft and even. His back swelling slightly and pushing my body with each intake and then returning. I could hear the sound of the wind outside but the coldness could not get in to me. I snuggled in deeper and fell back to sleep.

The next day we began hiking. Jedrek admitted to not being that familiar with this region but knew the correct general direction. We were traveling through the wilds and even though this land is rumored to be filled with the most dangerous animals, we saw only signs of their existence, none crossed our path. They know an even more dangerous animal has come to their territory, I thought looking at Jedrek's massive form.

"Is Agnieska still alive?" I blurted out.

"She lives and I was able to spare some of her power as a favor to you, Gregor. Although that small favor cost me something. I am recovered. She will experience a much longer penance." Jedrek's voice sounded regretful.

"Thank you Jedrek once again. I hope I will be able to repay you."

"We are in the brotherhood, Gregor. You will soon see what that means."

I started to think of some of the things Jedrek had told me. Although some boys my age had been with the girls already, I was obviously not one of them. Jedrek had told me that sex was the path to the elevation. I had worried that Jedrek would take me just to awaken my powers and then I could be a better assistance.

Something on the second day of walking must have alerted him to my thoughts for in the middle of a talk about tracking he broke off and stared me in the eye, "Gregor, while you are a comely young man, I do not deflower virgins. Also the power does not come through rape. It must be combined with desire, although I think that is not lacking in you." he winked and I was almost overcome by his rugged handsomeness, but kept in my mind about my vow to resist the elevation.

Shortly after this conversation, we entered a canyon and hiked through it for another two days. The storms of the past days gave way to gentle sunshine and the day seemed warmer. As we approached the other side sheer unclimbable walls of hard stone rose in front of us. "I guess we need to travel back out of the canyon and find a way around this," I said my words echoing off the stone around us.

"I have a faster way," Jedrek said with a mischievous grin. He stripped off his shirt and breeches revealing once again his amazing muscularity. This saved his clothes when his muscles expanded with exertion.

He walked purposefully over to the looming face of the cliff. He seemed to peer intensely at the rock, like he was looking deep within the structure of the hard stone.I looked at the hardness of the stone and then the even harder and more rugged terrain of Jedrek's back feeling my organ respond by doing its own expanding and pushing against the rough material of my breeches.

“Let’s break some off and look at it,” he suggested. He held his hand up to the rock and cocked his middle finger behind the tip of his thumb. This caused a large knot of muscle to writhe on his forearm. Then he flicked his finger at the face of the cliff. It sounded like a gigantic hammer slamming into stone, only much louder. A large patch of rock around the point of contact, was instantly obliterated and flew out as a cloud of dust, leaving a bowl of depression about 2 feet across. Leading out from the depression on the top and bottom was a jagged crack that extended down to the bottom of the face of the cliff and up about 15 feet over his head. Jedrek had seen a fault line in the stone and flicked his finger at the precise spot to cause the cliff to crack like glass.

I audibly gasped into the stillness after the explosive sound in my disbelief at the power he had in one finger. Jedrek smiled at my reaction, his eyes wandering low enough to show me he was aware of my arousal. I felt myself blushing furiously.

He turned back to the depression he had created with his finger and pushed his huge beefy arm into the hole filling the two foot wide hole. He extended his arm and could see the big striated horseshoe shaped muscle on the back of his arm start to flex bigger against the stone around it.

The ground started to shake. Pebbles fell from above as part of the mountain began to break away. Jedrek was flexing his muscles…. Slowly. He was contracting the muscle and expanding it harder and expanding it some more, exerting millions if not billions of tons of pressure on one side of the crack with his flexed arm muscle. The crack got wider and wider, ever so slowly. Jedrek was giving Mother Earth a chance to adjust to his demands. To his stronger muscles. To his will. 

There was a thunderous BOOOM! The crack suddenly moved farther apart and the base of the cliff shifted abruptly also. Then he flexed his arm harder and the muscle expanded quickly and huge. A crack formed moving horizontally from the top of the crack above Jedrek's head traveled several feet and started downwards again some ten feet away from where he stood. The crack formed a large oval shape in the cliff fifteen feet high and and ten feet across at the bottom making up about a third of the entire cliff face. The entire one-third of the cliff face moved 2 feet. He had separated a huge block of stone from the rest of the mountain face. Jedrek relaxed his arm, that had just forced apart a chunk of a mountain. He walked to the corner of the slab, though ‘slab’ doesn’t really describe the mass of mineral he had broken from the cliff, and grabbed onto the huge chunk of mountain. His back and arms and legs exploded with muscle sinew and veins. With little effort, it seemed, he lifted and carried the half mountain out in the open where we both could see the enormous mass of stone fully. He kept pulling until the piece came out fully over a hundred feet from deep in the mountain. It must have weighed hundreds of tons and Jedrek just carried it out in the open.

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM! He dropped the monolith of stone by the side of the canyon where it flattened the ground underneath it.

Jedrek again did not look like he was winded but his magnificent muscles were even bigger, he looked like he was maybe fully three times his normal size."You're not going to be able to put your shirt back on." I said in awe.

"This is just a little pump I get when I use my muscles a little. It will go down eventually. But you will get a bit of a show before we get through this mountain. He gestured and his staff flew to his hand with a light blazing upon it. "Hold this," he said thrusting the staff into my hands, and he pulled on his large pack and started into the tunnel he had created.

The back of the tunnel was jagged with rock from where Jedrek had wrenched the stone apart with his muscle flex. He shoved his thick fingers into the edges of the rock in front of us. CRRRRAAAAACK! CRRRRAAAAACK! The rock around the edges made thunderous noises and then Jedrek placed both his hands on the jagged rock at the end of the tunnel. I could see the muscle tension in his back, arms and legs as thick ropes of muscle stood out taught creating ravines muscle across his body. Jedrek shoved and there was a vast groan from the mountain around us as the earth gave way to Jedrek's superior power. Then there was a vast roaring sound as the whole of the rear wall suddenly shot away into the darkness.

Jedrek's back had grown even more massive. In the half light from the staff he seemed to take up almost the full width of the cave and the rest of him was even more muscular. Vast mounds of muscle pushed up around his neck and his chest thrust out almost three feet in front of him. And his arms were bulked up bigger than several barrels and furrowed with veins. His legs so wide they pushed his feet out. He was a monolith of a man.

I found myself once again spewing seed into my clothing but I was so awed by his power I was not even embarrassed.

"We should be able to continue our journey now." said Jedrek.