There is no effect. There is no axe.
See the muscles bunch in his back and shoulders. On the emaciated frame they are grotesque, transformative. The clean sweat in tiny rivulets makes it's way down his back, muddying, running slow. He hasn't been eating much, lately, and not only because there isn't much to eat.
'Round and round the tree he strains, pushing, pressing, probing imaginary weakness.
It's the work of an hour-then two hours-then six.
There is no effect. The tree takes no notice.
See the hands, those gnarled brown roots, grip the bloated trunk-find purchase in bark smoother than they are. Those hands are immense. Too long fingers, thick yellowed claws. The bones in them protest at too many hours of groaning effort.
The tree is young, strong. Younger than the hands who's efforts go unnoticed as the skin enveloping them begins to slide and blister. It's been a long time since they have done the work of this season, with no tools, no crew; every hand in this place is needed for it's own task.
Spring has arrived: a barren spring where survival hangs on constant grinding effort, 16 hour days.
The trunk disappears within them, a betrayed lover's svelte throat; but as though from no effort, there is no effect.
As well to wrestle a river.
See the eyes now.
They are as green as the thought of a forest, yet they burn; a forest consumed.
A conviction lies within them that they have never known. It is not that most of the food is gone now. It is not the desire for acceptance among this new, yet welcoming place, a place he might live and even call home. Nor is it a desire to prove himself to himself, or to the memory of a father and mother, both of which let go of this world long ago--let go of their own personal trees, in their own personal ways, and were turning even as dry leaves do, to dust.
In these past weeks; at the worst possible time for both himself and for everyone depending on him, he'd felt his day-to-day passions begin to seep away, felt desires, fears, flowing into the rock of this place as though by osmosis, until his heart had room for a singular need. Existence had become a distraction for him. He found himself living in a world built of buzzing flies, of shadows and reflections of what had once been real. It was though he had died, and now a single tendril of light begins to dance on the pyre surrounding his living corpse.
There is only the Sword.
The Tree shudders for the first time.
Cracks deep within itself.
He stops, then pauses to breathe and to stretch a little, clumsily. Moving to the opposite side, he gathers himself, gathering the weird fire inside of him, and imagines that there is no tree. For him there is only the sword. Straining again, gripping hard with knuckles like beaten iron, he pushes with legs of wire, lungs and heart pounding like bellows, and the hammer of a forge, but no forge hotter than the fire within him. A little air escapes his mouth, and again he pushes, with his body but with his thought more than his body.
It is a long, long time.
But less time.
The tree cracks again, and bends this time, so slightly, but that he can feel it in his hands and in his heart. His boots, soles worn bare, slide a little in the dirt. He stops and clutches the tree gratefully. He will kill this living thing, a young straight tree that may otherwise live for centuries, and plant things around it, and perhaps kill them to, or their children, or the children of other beings, that he and others like him may survive.
And it doesn't matter.
There is a cycle to shit. To dirt, to death, and to that which is dead. Rotten, dis-integrated, gone...but not really, not ever. The dirt on his shoes, and the salt that drips into his eyes, are proof of that. Proof of change, but proof also of eternity.
He shifts his grip, stares for a moment into the dying sun. Tears mingle with sweat, traveling down the wasted landscape of his face like streams to the sea.
The Sword is a weapon. A tool for the slaughter of thinking beings, yet dreamt up by a gardener who has never yet lifted a hand in real anger, who's heart has never known raw hatred for anything. What is there to hate in his life? The sky for not raining enough on the land he cultivates?
It always rains somewhere, sometime.
Tiny creatures plaguing the plants he gently tends? Mustn't they eat too?
Perhaps a bad boss, someday, somewhere. No boss has a reach longer than the road, and no bad boss need last longer than a single job.
His father did what was in his nature.
His mother really lived only while he did. Following him to another world that he'd always occupied was only a continuation of what she was.
Both had given what they had to give, and stepped aside.
The sword was a killing thought, a killing tool. A dream of fire, steel, gushing blood. It's glories would lay on the ruined fields of thousands of dying farmers.
But the sword was part of the cycle, too. Death was a thing that the farmer understands as well as life. All life is born from death, and can only find a place to grow because of the sacrifice of previous generations. The blood of farmers, kings, and little biting things would shed to defend the fields, maintain the peace, to make room for the next spring's growth.
It is a long, long time.
But less time than before.
The tree groans, wounded deep within itself.
The roots are losing their grip, even as his fingers tighten their stranglehold. It won't be long now. He sees the sword, but sees it against a green field. No plough, or spade, or scythe; yet no less a tool of the fields. They will need defending, even in this place of seeming kindness, seeming emptiness. The others have told him something of winter here. Of the time he'd just missed before his arrival, and why he should be grateful that his road to this place had been so very long. The sword could find a use here, could be a part of the cycle.
It's the only thing he has to hold on to, as everything else within him burns so brightly away.
A popping is heard, deep within the tree. A long moan heard as the soil shifts and fingers/branches shiver.
He turns away from the setting sun gathering purple clouds in the darkening sky. Removing his hands from the tree, he spits on them and rubs them together, feeling the soggy leather flesh slide together, bright with pain. A distant feeling, like that cold night wind he hasn't noticed. He will plant hops here, he decides absently. Incorporate the trunk into the trellis.
"Less a crime to do murder-with need-than to waste with need." He repeats the mantra by rote, a saying his mother drummed into him over decades.
Even as he says the words, he knows what a lie they are for him.
To forge the Sword, he would burn the mountains down. To quench it, he'd boil the seas.
Boil his own living blood to steam and ash. Sheath it in his marrow-bones.
For a final time, he grips the tree. Shoving hard but carelessly now, with a final certainty, swatting another fly,
Cracking, lurching, uprooting...
Bursting from the earth in a sudden shower of red mud...
He stumbles in the direction of the tree, panting. Fresh earth has exploded from the roots of the fallen adversary. Little particles fall down his shoulders, down his back.
Closing his eyes, he wipes muddy sweat from his eyes, carefully, slowly. Blinking. It's the youngest of seventeen trees he's taken down in this area. Two fully grown crabapple trees in the middle of the biggest field had needed the full participation of everyone. Felling the second one ruined the only axe the had between them: a copper headed hatchet Morion cut down from a broken battleaxe that had once been forged by the group's metalsmith--before that dwarf's skull was smashed to pink paste by one of the terrible things born of the cold and the darkness of last winter.
Suddenly, none of the other efforts of springtime were anything like this.
The perfectly straight trunk lies forgotten on the ground, but suddenly he can feel it again, held in his hands, alive and growing.
He blinks again.
There is something there, under where the tree was.
Something there... A stone?
The rocks around here are light in color: pale yellows and oranges, pale gray. Whatever this is, he sees it as smooth and very dark despite the obscurement of the soil. Starting to drop to the ground, Mat'tock catches himself with a chuckle that sounds much closer to a groan. He's been out here for hours, and his back is screaming, nevermind his knees. Pain doesn't matter much these days, but injury is still a concern, today still anyway.
A few short steps puts his walking-stick, leaned against an ancient, half shattered wall, within reach. He holds it not unlike the tree, and slowly slides down to the ground. It's undignified, ridiculous, but it saves pulled muscles and wrenched tendons.
Everything is stiff and clumsy.
He hasn't had a drink in far, far too long.
Ignoring the violence going on in his knees, brushing the cool mealy soil away from whatever is there...The dirt falls easily away, revealing the face of a smooth black boulder, uncharacteristic of any of the rocks he'd seen around here. Crawling across the muddying ground, he retrieves his waterskin. A few drops of water-all that's left-wash away a portion of the muck.
Crimson, like heart-flesh, with streaks of orange, dried blood. A feel more like metal, and...melted?
Tiny congealed pockmarks stare out at him like the hollowed sockets of a dead man's eyes.
Digging excitedly, he first finds the circumference, then uncovers a hole through the center of the rock, right through the center of which, the sapling's taproot had bizarrely found a path. Beyond exhausted, he strains to shift the rock, to no avail.
More will have to wait for the others, for the distant red dawn, but he somehow knows it's what he's been looking for, without ever looking.
See the stone. See the Sword within it.