This is a work of fiction. It contains explicit descriptions of sexual acts. It is not intended for minors.


Ironcleft Genesis part 3
By Boondocker (Boondocker42@gmail.com)


The Fruitful Valley


Jennifer slept for a few hours around dawn wrapped in a couple blankets and then carried on. Her breath showed in the crisp spring air but her body stayed warm from exertion and she remained naked. The leather straps supporting her load would have worn through any clothing in under an hour. They did nothing more to her tough skin than leave pale pressure marks that faded within minutes.

Jenny made good time, her long tireless strides eating up the miles. She bypassed two homesteads that she recognized by the trails of smoke they cast skyward and never saw another soul.

After a day of travel, she came upon a river. She didn't know its name or if it even had one but she was pretty sure it was the one Ironbrook fed into. She followed it for about fifty miles along its east bank. She was looking for a place to cross as well as the stream that would lead her home.

Jenny couldn't swim. She had tried but it was perhaps the only physical activity for which she was ill suited. Her dense body sank like a stone. Of course, even if she could swim, that wouldn't get her pack across. She had to find a crossing where she could wade. She had been so young when her family had fled the valley, she had no idea how or where they had forded the barrier.

Finally, she did find a broad and shallow stretch. She load on her back weighed her down and gave her additional purchase against the current. She had some difficulty when the water got deep enough to start washing against her packs. They extended down to her hips and when the water started pushing against them, she had to fight powerfully against it. The load made her extremely top-heaving and balance was a challenge. The riverbed was coarse gravel that slid from under her feet continuously.

By keeping her stance spread wide and by constantly digging her toes deep into the river bed, she was able of make slow progress and finally crossed to the other side.

The river crossing had been stressful and had been the most tiring thing Jenny had ever experienced. She hastily removed her pack, not taking the time to untangle its stand but letting it collapse onto the ground. She'd have to reassemble it later but she had no schedule to keep.

She went to drink from the river.

The clear, cold water tasted wonderful. It almost made her toes tingle. It took several minutes for realization to dawn on Jenny. There was a taste in the water that she recognized. A taste she had been craving for all the years she was separated from her rightful home.

Plunging her face into the waters, she drank deeply. The medley of flavors, bitter and metallic and acrid all at the same time, were faint by unmistakable. She was on the right track. It must be the essence of Ironcleft that she tasted.

Quickly eating some hard bread and a hunk of pork, Jenny rebuilt her rig and slid into it. Eager now, she headed upstream.

It was early on her third day of travel when she came upon a confluence. She held her breath. Was this the Ironbrook? There was no way to tell just by looking. She tasted the waters of the tributary. The flavors she sought exploded in her mouth. The woman trembled with excitement. She'd found it. She could follow this glorious stream up into the mountains and finally be home.

She quickly covered the final ten miles, following the Ironbrook upstream. Shortly after noon, she came across the first ruined homestead. The small, doomed settlement into which she had been born had been comprised of eight families by the time the people had given up in the face of pervasive sickness. Jenny stood with her load on her back, staring at the weather-worn cabin. The shutters had fallen away from both its windows and she could see grass and weeds sprouting thickly from between the rough floorboards.

Jenny would have liked to explore a bit but that would have meant taking off her pack. That was a chore that she had quickly grown to hate.

So she pressed on further upstream. The settlement had been widely scattered along roughly three miles of the stream's course. Jenny vaguely remembered that her family's home had been on the southern side of the stream and was one of the furthest up the valley.

As she went, she saw signs of former habitation. The small fields the people had worked had been invaded by native growth but still also contained a lot of the corn and wheat that had been planted there. As she remembered from her childhood, there were rabbits and field mice everywhere. The cursed valley was a haven for small creatures... they seemed immune to whatever it was that killed off the larger creatures while foxes and wolves and bears most certainly were not immune. Of course, predators from neighboring valleys did often stray into the toxic territory and the land's poison was very slow working but on average, there were fewer threats to small creatures here.

Jenny had her face towards the afternoon sun and could see little of the terrain in front of her. Because of this, she almost passed her former home. But after nearly tripping over an old fence rail, she looked around and saw the old cabin a couple hundred yards away.

She ran the final distance, half a ton supplies rattling around about her violently. The small yard in front of the house where she clattered to a stop was completely overgrown. Shaking with excitement, Jenny wrestled her pack off her shoulders and cast it aside. Her gear flew twenty feet and crushed a path through the tall grass.

The door was still on its hinges. She opened it gently.

****

Over the next several months, Jenny Stram worked to make a home in the old settlement. She scoured the area for anything useful that had been left behind. The people of Ironcleft had been in bad shape by the time the decision was made to flee the cursed land and they had left most of their possessions behind. Jenny had her choice of a half-dozen plows and there were two anvils, though the woman knew nothing of blacksmithing. She also had her choice of houses but remained in her family home.

Jenny drank her fill of Ironbrook water at every opportunity. It continued to fulfill her in ways no other food or drink had since she had left the supposedly cursed land. It was early in the season and the corn and wheat struggling to grow in the weed-choked fields were far from harvest but there were rabbits and feral chickens in abundance.

The young woman knew nothing of trapping and the twine snares she tried to devise failed to catch a single critter. However, Jenny soon abandoned these knotted tangles when she discovered how easy it was to bring down a rabbit with a thrown rock. Her reflexes were no better than an ordinary person's but she had a knack for throwing accurately and the small stones whipped from her powerful arm with shocking speed. The only problem was that the blows her missiles inflicted tended to shatter bones, making dressing the animals more difficult.

The meat of the chickens and rabbits she killed was as deeply satisfying as Ironbrook's water. Jenny gorged herself repeatedly, eating eight or ten rabbits a night. Several times she went to bed with a visible bulge in her stomach.

Jenny wore no clothing. Nothing short of ancient plate mail could offer her better protection than her own skin and short of that, her hard labor would quickly shred anything she tried to wear. She left her few cloths packed away for some unforeseeable future occasion.

As long as she was active, she never felt cold. She did bundle up thoroughly when going to sleep though and would feel the chill each morning as she began her day.

With food so abundant for the time being, Jenny's days were free of care. She spent much of her time exploring the valley. In the open plains of the lower valley, she would run everywhere.

Jenny could run faster than a galloping horse for four or five hours without growing tired. It was sometimes difficult to get started and even harder to stop or turn but in a straight line, Jenny could cover ground at an amazing pace.

Free of any burdens, Jenny would even leave the valley for a time, exploring for a couple hundred miles in every direction. The un-named community she had recently left was within this range and was the largest but there was a score of lone homesteads and small villages in the area. Jenny realized that eventually she would have to have some contact with other people. If nothing else, she intended to have more than just one child.

Jenny passed the summer in idyllic bliss in this way. Slowly, her stomach began to grow with the life that was taking shape there. She would probably be giving birth in late fall. This should have concerned the girl but it didn't. She was merely excited. She was feeling better and stronger than ever before in her life. She was more certain than ever that Ironcleft was her place in the world and it would be for her children as well.

Jenny ate freely from the vegetable gardens that had been left behind by the settlers. They were in very poor shape by any standard but they did produce a little fresh food. As fall approached, she harvested corn and wheat as best she could. Her methods where crude and inefficient but being alone, she didn't need an enormous stockpile.

Over the course of the summer and most of that fall, Jenny Stram grew another two inches in height.

She slowed her activities some as her belly grew heavy. There was nothing about the negligible weight of her baby and its support system that made anything difficult for her but she feared hurting it. As the weather grew colder her breasts swelled in preparation for the child that was to come. At her reduced level of activity, Jenny began feeling the cold more. She clumsily stitched dozens of rabbit skins together in multiple layers to make herself a coat. She also made a thickly lined pack to carry the baby in.

Jenny stockpiled water, dried rabbit meat and stacks of the coarse flat-bread she had been making as she sensed the approach of the birth. Her wood pile was always well stocked. For a week she kept to the cabin doing nothing more strenuous than patching cracks in the walls. She had ignored them before but with the approach of winter and her baby, it was something that needed to be done.

The big day was clear but quite cold and she struggled to keep the cabin warm. She felt the first pain as she bent over to stoke the fire. She sat on her straw-filled bed, hands over her belly, waiting. It was a full hour before she felt the pain again. It made sweat bead on her upper lip.

The next thirty hours were hell.

The birth turned into a battle of enormous forces. It was reminiscent of her fight to remove her virginity though on an infinitely greater scale. The enormous strength of her body fought against its phenomenal resilience. Jenny's birth canal was every bit as smooth and pink as any other woman's but it resisted stretching as if made of steel. On the other hand, the freakish girl was fully capable of bending and stretching that metal.

Jenny experienced many long bouts of panicked fear as she was certain her struggle must harm her baby. Indeed, the pressures she was being forced to exert would have crushed brick. But Jenny's baby was made of stronger stuff.

The sun had fallen and risen again before the battle ended. It ended not with a final titanic effort but with hours of unrelenting force. The bed was torn apart, its frame turned to splinters early in the ordeal. Jenny had sweated literal buckets, constantly refreshing herself from the casks of water she had stockpiled.

Finally, the baby was free of its prison. Jenny was beside herself with grief for nearly an hour when she saw the red, misshapen seeming mass. She had never attended a birthing and didn't know that babies usually looked like that. But, the baby had begun to breathe on its own and was soon wailing. Jenny examined and cleaned the infant. It was a boy and less misshapen than she had thought. Indeed, as its color improved and its tiny limbs waved weakly about, it began to look human.

Actually, he was beautiful. Despite the scrunched-up face.

She named him Stanley.


©Boondocker
