A Story Less told (The Legend of Greg) Book 1 of 2

Chapter 4: Bacon

The cabin was still silent.

The rain was cool and clean, and he did not mind the feeling as it ran into the open door and washed the mud from his visor. He lay there for some time, deciding if this was a good place to rest or not. He slowly stood up, now able to see his surroundings...not with his eyes, but somehow with his feet. The raindrops sent vibrations through the floor and into the roots that filled his metal boots. He could feel the room clearer than ever. He was made more aware of the familiar smell in the air...burning leather. It was faint, distant and stale, but it was less than a day old. He knew the smell of a burning village with certainty; it was the same smell that he detected before his forest was scorched. He needed to understand why. The mass of metal and wood walked slowly and calmly, but deliberately, in the direction of the smell. He stopped, posing like a statue in front of his headstone. He pulled the shovel from the dirt and tapped it's iron tip on the fence to see of it made a mark. It was sharp enough to gouge pine...so it was sharp enough to cut bone. He made his way to the dirt road and began walking with his shovel and his purpose.

For a day and some additional hours, he walked at a slow pace, stepping over any obstruction so as to always point towards the smell. He arrived as the morning sun crested the fog on a smokey village road. The smell was strong now, he was there. The sound of sobs and peasants walking his direction, bearing bundles of clothes and food was strange to him. As they neared, the voices rose to gasps and alarm as they made wide arcs in their pat to avoid him. They must have never seen a Walking Oak before, or perhaps was not aware that they did. They tend to move slowly and not very often. He sensed one person that was not moving with the others. He veered to study it further and came across a puzzling find. Within the wreckage of a small hut that had been burned, there was a young girl sitting on what may have been a wooden chest before the fire. She was crying, and there was another person on the ground. He did not understand why the girl was moving and he was not. He reminded him of the old man in the cabin, the day he refused to wake.

"Are you from the city?" she asked him, wiping her tears and barely even noticing what he was, clad in metal. He stood silently.

"Because you got what you wanted. He's dead. Congratulations, you burned half of a village to kill one old man who meant no harm top anyone. An old blacksmith with no family and a bad back." she said looking up at him and getting a strange feeling. He clearly wasn't from the south, and upon further inspection, he wasn't even human." as the others left briskly to avoid the menacing stranger in armor, the girl found herself more curious than afraid. The faint hue of the orange seeds behind the slits in his helmet were luring, alien and intriguing.

"What are you exactly?" she asked, leaning awkwardly close to see behind the metal. She could see the dark, charcoal black shimmer of burned timber in the gaps of his jaw piece. She grabbed her gadget bag and took out a pair of crude glasses, made from shards of something foreign and placed them on her tiny nose to see closer. She closed one eye at a time, back and forth to get the best view of each of the different lenses, shifting from an ominous halo to a strange, almost transparent view.

"You are made of wood?" she asked, "Do you have a name?" she added, as he stood eerily still, allowing the non-threatening creature to move about.

"Fascinating. Do you speak at all?" she asked. He didn't understand entirely, getting a vague sense of her trying to communicate, he watched her neck and mouth move as she made sounds and with great difficulty. He tightened the timber behind his jawpiece, making a crude grunt, like a deep groan of an old house in a strong wind. She grinned, finding it mildly humorous. For a second, she thought he was trying to say a word, perhaps his name, unaware that he had none.