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A New Era

We dragged the slaughtered enemy from where they had fallen. The warriors lay beside each other in long rows of naked carrion—the final formation of their defeated army. Warm sunlight shone down upon the bodies of the dead, even as the mounds of muscle on their quiet chests reached skyward.

Gripping knives and satchels, several two-man details busied themselves among the rows of manly carnage. As the harvesters cut the cocks from the bodies of the defeated warriors, other crews collected a different kind of wood, stacking the timber and kindling on which the slain enemy, as well as our own fallen brothers, would be committed to eternity in great bonfires of the dead.

Unlike all the many other battlefields our army had overrun and left soaked in blood, gore and spent seed, we would not leave this ground littered with the dead. The packs of wolves that feasted from our victories would no longer be sated by the slaughtered meat we left behind. From now on, our chieftain told us, we would not leave the corpses to the sun and the wolves. We would burn them. We would tread the ash and bones into the earth and claim the ground as our own. For the first time after purging a great enemy, we would not sack and destroy his fortifications before roaming to other lands to slaughter their inhabitants. Instead we were to occupy his fortresses and his land.

Our chieftain calls it “becoming civilized.” He tells us we can make ourselves greater by learning the practices of the enemies we have vanquished, as well as the ways of distant, supposedly cultured lands that are said to be greater than our band of clans. Rather than seating themselves on a different log or stone each night before the transient fire of an encampment, their leaders sit on thrones, hidden away behind walls. The chieftain wants seasoned warriors such as myself to observe and recommend enemy ways that might better us if we made them our own. Our warlord also speaks admiringly of an empire of powerful caesars currently spreading around the Middle Sea. The chieftain seeks to learn more about these distant rulers and their legions. He queries at length all captives who might have come into contact with them, before he has the prisoners beheaded or impaled. Having united our many clans, despite all the odds against such a feat, our warlord now aspires to shed the label “barbarian.” Barbarians, he claims, are remnants of a bygone age. The chieftain speaks instead of a new era, in which we, like some of the peoples we have overrun, call ourselves a “country.” He speaks of settling in one place, with forges where we can make our own swords, rather than rely on weapons wrested from the death grip of men we encounter and slay. So far I have not questioned his judgment, but I have offered him no observations and have made no recommendations. On more than one occasion, the brains of a comrade have splattered onto my chest as our leader responded to an unwelcome opinion by swiftly visiting his spiked club upon the man’s skull. I also refrain from pointing out to our warlord that clubbing underlings to death is not the surest embrace of civilized behavior.

I harbor many doubts about this new era. After all, the army we had just wiped out was not saved by their trappings of kingly rule. Unlike their monarch, our chieftain did not inherit his leadership from his father. He came to power by challenging and killing his predecessor. Such may be his fate as well one day, if a stronger or wilier warrior can better him. It is an enticement that grows more prominent in my mind each time our chieftain speaks admiringly of our enemy’s more civilized ways. Our uncivilized means of determining who leads us has not prevented us from defeating every army that has confronted us, including the warriors whose severed cocks we are harvesting and counting. Clearly, civilization would not save the king and his few surviving generals, whom we had taken captive and would shortly execute. True, the final tally of the enemy’s impressively thick phalluses will be a testament to their endowment as men, but to an even greater extent it will affirm the enormity of their defeat and the magnitude of barbarian victory.

As for the imperial caesars, what I have heard of them has not impressed me. Like cowards afraid of death, their legionnaires clad their heads and even their breasts in metal. They hide behind cloaks and vestments. A man’s cock and balls should swing with his stride and drip sweat in the heat. Free to rise to any occasion, the shaft of the true warrior oozes studseed in anticipation of the next rut. The muscles of his exposed torso provide all the armor he needs or deserves. At least the enemies we had just destroyed, despite their futile pretentions of nationhood, still fought naked and died with hard cocks, as do we. But I dread the day when our chieftain calls upon us to conceal our proud manhood with useless emblems of warrior status, or when he conveys officer ranks upon his most trusted comrades. The number of scars on a man’s body is testament enough to his knowledge of war and to the respect and fear he must be accorded. As is true of the chieftain, with his near seven-foot stature, broad shoulders, wild blue eyes, fiery hair and even fierier disposition, my authority, and that of other true warriors, is conveyed not by lineage or rank, but by our strength and valor.

Unlike the clans, the vaunted legionnaires are said to refrain from slaughtering all of their defeated populations, choosing to enslave many instead. It is a senseless practice that merely creates a breeding ground for later rebellion. A man cannot fight you if you have gutted him or cut off his head. Enslavement is merely delaying the execution of the defeated. Overseeing slaves and quelling inevitable revolts from within are costly enterprises that do not justify whatever grunt labor the practice might provide.

Our chieftain has also heard how the empire of the caesars executes its rebellious slaves. He tells us of a laborious spectacle called crucifixion, which ensures a long and agonizing death. Our leader intends to implement the practice among the clans for those occasions when we terminate enemy warlords and other prominent captives. I hold my tongue but see little wisdom in adopting a method that requires spikes and hammers -- implements that we do not always have. We are destroyers, not builders. Our single recent attempt at crucifixion failed miserably. A month ago, when an enemy scout was intercepted near our encampment as we were preparing to attack one of the king’s outposts, the chieftain spared the man’s life long enough for a death cross to be constructed. Our leader’s description of the two-timbered device, based on second-hand knowledge, was not sufficient for our impaler, who had been ordered to assemble the beams. Accustomed to employing a single piece of spiked wood, the impaler’s attempt at a more elaborate construction merely fell apart after we had nailed the doomed scout to the wood and hoisted him. First the crossbeam fell away, allowing the condemned man to fall forward. His face hit the ground as his broken and mutilated legs remained spiked to the upright. Shortly afterward, the vertical beam became dislodged from its anchoring hole and tumbled forward as well, completing the debacle. I lost patience with the experiment and pulled the scout’s head up from the tangle of writhing muscle and splintered wood, so that I could cut through his neck and end him. Looking at the severed head as I held it aloft, I am certain the man’s frozen face conveyed an expression of gratitude for having received the blade.

The impaler is well-liked, and we hoped the chieftain’s anger over the botched execution would not spell his doom. Our warlord exacts a death sentence within seconds of failure, and we were relieved that a moment later the spiked death club had still not visited our friend’s close-cropped, sandy-haired head. Instead, the chieftain took up a narrow strand of tanned hide with which to flog him. A stocky man endowed with powerful musculature but short legs, the impaler had passed his thirtieth year. In younger years he had excelled in battle with the throwing axe, his weapon of choice. He had whirled the hatchet with deadly accuracy into the chests of many men, and despite his short stature, he was quick to advance upon his kill and pull the weapon from the splintered, blood-gushing rib cage of the downed fighter, only to hurl it into his next victim. He saved my life in battle once, flinging his death axe into the sternum of a spearman who was about to put his shaft into my neck. In a later encounter with the enemy, an arrow had ruined the impaler’s right shoulder. Though the wound ended his axe-throwing career, he found a new use for the instrument and became a weapons maker. The stocky craftsman honed very fine spears, far superior to any enemy shafts we pulled from our dead brothers after a battle. However, it was his expert design of impaling pikes that most impressed us. Their carefully crafted length and diameter were always proportionate to the particular statures of the condemned men who descended upon them. The sharpness of the tip, or the lack thereof, were likewise deviously engineered to produce only the most satisfying executions.

Grateful for his extended lease on life, the impaler complied with the chieftain’s directions to resurrect the toppled upright beam from his rickety cross. He dropped it back into the hole and placed his hands against it, extending and spreading his legs behind him as he leaned forward to accept the punishment lashes on his bare back. His feet sank into the scarlet mud that pooled at the neck stump of the beheaded scout. The chieftain angrily cut into the impaler’s muscular back and ass, striping him twenty times. The craftsman’s bull balls, one of which hung much lower than the other, swung pendulously between his stocky legs as the whip struck him, and his thick cock flopped up and slapped his belly with each impact. The chieftain’s heavy sac likewise swung between his thighs as he wielded the whip with full force. Always a stalwart stud, the impaler held his tongue for the first five lashes, but he grunted in pain with each subsequent stripe and cried out in agony with each of the last five. Even so, he kept his grip on the timber throughout the ordeal and never shirked from the punishment he deserved.

In the aftermath of the kingdom’s great defeat, the harvesting of cocks was an extensive endeavor. The defeated king had deployed all his remaining manpower in desperate defense of his last bastion. Together with nearly a thousand men, the king, his sons and his top generals had marched forth from besieged fortifications to defend their crumbling realm. Their courage and determination were to no avail. Though we too had lost many comrades, our victory was complete, and the Beautiful Deaths of our brother warriors merely enhanced the glory of the clans. We joyously collected any usable weapons from the battlefield and dispatched the wounded enemy troops who lay bleeding and moaning on the field of death. Our chieftain is renowned for never taking prisoners, though it remains to be seen if this custom too could end in the “new age.” For now at least, we know only two categories of warrior once a battle has ended: the living and the dead. None of those left alive are enemy warriors, and none of our vanquished enemies retain cocks between their legs. These crude ways earn us a reputation as barbarians, yet our backwardness has not kept us from slaughtering armies that were supposedly more disciplined than ours. Besides, I have come upon many of my own brother warriors lying dead on the battlefield, whose cocks or balls or both had been similarly hacked off by men who fought for the now defeated king. I have no doubt that today my own meat would reside in the satchel of a “civilized” enemy warrior, if this most recent battle had ended differently.

Joining me in surveying the dead was the strapping young warrior Agron. An archer of great skill and even greater beauty, Agron had been entrusted to me by the chieftain for protection and mentoring. He was a bright young stud who had acquitted himself well in the battle that had just ended. Though his years were significantly to my junior, his six feet in height came within half a foot of matching my own stature. His tall frame and powerful arms made him a natural for the longbow. Agron had eagerly and efficiently emptied two quivers during the opening assault on the king’s army, when dozens of the enemy fell under the relentless rain of our deadly, slender, unbarbed arrows. None of Agron’s shafts had failed to strike the body of an enemy warrior. Indeed many of the dead now laid out before us had one or more arrows from Agron’s arsenal lodged in his chest, belly or throat. During our inspection of the kills, the young man’s impressive biceps flared as he tenaciously extracted any projectiles from the dead which might still be useful. He was curious to see how deep the shafts had sunk into the tough muscle of the men he had slain. Some arrows had to be discarded, because they had splintered against bone or had broken when the man fell dead, but other shafts were still strong and true. Agron approvingly returned the salvaged weaponry to his quiver, hoping no doubt that his longbow could soon send these same arrows into the muscles and guts of other men.

Despite Agron’s prowess with bow and arrow, I soon came to see the chieftain’s wisdom in assigning me to guard his back. After the rain of arrows was complete, the lad took up a sword and accompanied me onto the battlefield to engage the enemy one-on-one. He killed five of the enemy before the battle ended. While I was gratified to see that his handsome young cock rose to full erection each time he lethally penetrated a man with his blade, it was clear to me that much of his success was due merely to good fortune. The first of his five sword victories was impressive, but the elegance of the kill filled his head with an unfounded confidence that hindered his judgment in the encounters that followed.

The first of the king’s men to challenge Agron was taller than the lad and broader in the shoulders. Thick, sculpted pectorals displayed a healthy brush of light brown hair that was tellingly absent in those places where battle scars gave testament to valor in previous contests. These slabs of chest muscle jutted out over a smooth, ribbed abdomen. The enemy warrior’s thick bush of crotch fur could not conceal the enormity of his cock nor the weight of his low-hanging bull balls. Massive arms and huge hands propelled his sword with great power. Perhaps six years the senior of Agron, the opponent was at the peak of his fighting ability. Agron never recoiled from the challenger. Sparks flew from his blade as he skillfully parried the man for several minutes, before driving his blade bone-deep into his opponent’s left thigh. Soon afterward a second gash to the right shoulder further slowed the king’s warrior. It clearly vexed this brawny stud that a young upstart such as Agron was further marring his virile body. But the worst was yet to come. I shouted in spontaneous excitement as Agron’s blade found yet another opening and lacerated the man’s sword arm, slicing the muscle upward from the crook of his elbow to the top of his shoulder. The strike cut the warrior’s hard biceps cleanly in half and caused him to drop his weapon. His ruggedly attractive face now deep red with rage, the losing fighter gripped his torn right arm with his left hand and unwisely advanced on Agron without a weapon. Agron stood his ground and calmly pointed the tip of his sword toward the advancing soldier. By locking his arm outward at the height of his waist, Agron allowed the doomed stud to impale himself on his opponent’s extended weapon. The fighter stopped in his tracks and looked down in amazement at the sight of the blade penetrating him just above his cock. His manly fuckrod rose in final erection, until the cockhead pressed upward against the blade that was gutting him. Grunting from surprise, anger, pain and manly lust, the stud began to issue forth his final seed. Agron was not content with his sword’s passive visit in the man’s gut. The lad’s right arm had grown particularly strong from pulling the tight drawstring of his longbow. Agron’s biceps flared as he cut swiftly upward with the inserted blade. Using only one arm, he opened the man from cock to sternum with a single powerful rip through the warrior’s tough musculature. Backing off the intruding blade much too late, the king’s man dropped his guts onto the ground. They were quickly striped with the huge ropes of death seed that spurted from his wildly throbbing cock.

In what was likely the first and only retreat of his warrior life, Agron’s opponent continued to step backward. His massive hands instinctively and futilely clenched the lethal slit that had opened his midriff. The doomed warrior stood his final ground only so that he could bring his shoulders back and turn his head skyward to force an anguished, full-chested death call from his powerful lungs. It was but one of hundreds of death calls that filled the air that morning as scores of stouthearted men fell to the earth to become carrion. Surrendering the last of his resistance, Agron’s opponent removed his hands from his opened gut and fell forward. Making his descent even more indecorous, the man landed with his handsome face half buried in the bloody heap of his own bowels. Agron’s young cock was rock hard as he pressed his bare foot onto the back of the warrior’s head and held him down. The man’s beautifully muscled ass rose and fell in rapid rhythm as he desperately fuckhumped the ground beneath him. He expelled the last of his studseed as he suffocated in his own gut gore.

As much as I admired the final flourish that Agron gave to his victory, it was an injudicious distraction from the frenzied battle that surrounded him. He had scarcely noticed two mates of the gutted warrior who were seeking to make Agron’s first kill the last of his career. I swiftly ran one of the attackers through the belly, pulled the sword from him, and hacked off half the sword arm of the second man, just as the weapon was about to enter Agron’s back. Agron turned to see me behead the attacker as he knelt in helpless defeat, clutching his bleeding arm stump. It was only then that the lad had become aware of the danger. There were other occasions as well, when I saved the inexperienced young stud from an enemy sword or spear to which he had carelessly left himself open. I did not deny Agron the satisfaction he felt from killing four more men during our great victory, nor the pride with which he emerged from battle with his first wound, a cut to his forearm that would leave an honorable scar. However, his thick flaxen hair, blue eyes and golden skin would be lost in a pile of dead comrades, nothing more than fuel for the bonfire, had I not dispatched several more attackers before they could kill my young charge. Fortunately, Agron receives instruction well and listens to my advice. Someday he will doubtless become as great an infantryman as he is an archer . . . should that be the task to which our chieftain assigns him.

Looking at my charge now, I take a curious pride in knowing that Agron owes his life to me. With him at my side, I have come to think of his strong body, his handsome face and his prodigious manhood as extensions of myself, much like my sword. While I am accustomed to sleeping with my blade pressed against me, my cock emulating its constant hardness throughout the night, I find it even more satisfying to spend the night with Agron pressed against me, and to penetrate him before sleep and after waking.

I directed Agron’s attention to the cutting of phalluses, demonstrating with a firm grip on a dead warrior’s cock how to pull the shaft up and back over the belly with one hand and with the other hand apply the blade to the base of the penis, just above the scrotum. If a sharp blade is used, the full length of a man’s now unneeded sex can be detached with a quick slice. I realized as I cut him, that the slain warrior lying before me was one of my kills. I had taken him that morning, early in the battle. The stud had not been easily defeated. Indeed, a cut he inflicted on my arm still pained me slightly as I squeezed his thick cock. My opponent now lay spread and dead, his open eyes gazing emptily at a sky, which, like the ground beneath his ass, seemed now to belong to the barbarians. His hairy, once handsome chest was now mutilated with deep gashes left by my weapon. With a thrust under his jaw and into his throat, I had finally brought him down. The soldier’s deathseed had dried and was flaking on his belly fur, but residual cock cream still oozed from the slit as I removed the penis and tossed it into the satchel.

Though only the cocks of the dead enemy are mandatory trophies for the body count, some of our men have found a variety of personal uses for testicles. Accordingly, these clansmen take not only the stilled shafts of the dead men, but also their balls. For one thing, the sacs can be tanned and converted into useful pouches. Several cleaned, stretched and tanned spermbags can also be stitched together to fashion larger satchels. Other clansmen cut the ample stones from the ballsacs of the men they have killed and wear them on a leather strand around their necks. And warriors from one particular clan among our horde always eagerly volunteer for cock-collection duty after a battle, so that they can harvest and eat the enemy’s nuts while fulfilling their directive to butcher off the pricks. Rather than decorate their chests with the plundered stones, these clansmen devour the remnants of enemy manhood in the ancient belief that a warrior absorbs the strength of his adversary by ingesting the dead man’s virility. Before the meat can turn in the warm sun or be picked at by crows, the harvesters cut the oysters from their fleshy home and pop them into their mouths. I put no stock in such superstitions and have discouraged Agron from a practice that I consider to be a waste of time. In my own experience, a man’s nut is as unpleasant to chew as a gristly chicken gizzard. But chew it one must. Given the often considerable size of the warrior stones sacrificed on the battlefield, I have no desire to swallow such a piece of meat whole and risk choking on it. I am convinced, however, that there is no need to partake of men’s balls. I have found that I fight and kill with the same effectiveness, whether I have a man’s sperm-maker in my gut or not. I wanted the decision to be Agron’s choice, though, and not mine, so I sliced open the sac of the next dead stud we de-cocked and freed one his gonads. I offered the bloody tidbit on the tip of my knife, nodding to Agron to give it a try. He pulled it off the knife between his teeth and grinned at me as he chewed the chunk of manhood, his cock again fully erect. Blood and sperm-laden gore spilled out over his beautifully thick lower lip and trickled down his strong jaw. His glinting blue eyes met mine as I watched for his reaction. The young novice managed to swallow the harvested testicle, but when I offered to extract the other stone so he could ingest it as well, Agron put his hand to his hard, smooth belly and shook his head, indicating that his appetite for men’s balls had been more than sated. Still grinning, he stared at my own hard cock and licked his lips. There were other things he would much rather swallow.

When we set about severing cocks from the dead, I had wondered whether Agron might balk at taking the meat off of the youngest of the dead enemy warriors. The king had apparently emptied his military academy in a desperate effort to save his main fortress, dispatching striplings even younger than Agron to the front, where we slaughtered them alongside their veteran comrades. Yet Agron showed no more hesitation in completing his task by clutching and slicing off the youngest of the dead cocks than he did removing the phalluses of the more experienced warriors who had fallen.

A few hours earlier I had already noted with appreciation my young comrade’s seriousness of purpose when in the immediate aftermath of battle I instructed him in dispatching the enemy wounded. For this task several pairs of men roam the extent of the killing field equipped with spears. They take useable weaponry or other items from the enemy dead and pile the plunder in a central location. A spear is shoved under the jaw and into the throat of any fallen foes who have not yet died. Agron paid close attention to my demonstration of the most efficient way to flip a man over onto his back if he lay prick down. My charge skillfully emulated my insertion of the right foot underneath the upper part of the fallen soldier’s chest, after which I forcefully heave the man over. The carcass flops onto its ass, arms and legs conveniently sprawled, after which the stud can be chucked in the throat if he shows signs of life, and of course de-cocked. Overly cautious about his responsibility, Agron speared the throats of many men who I was certain were already dead, but with experience he will learn to expend the effort only when it is truly needed. Certainly no downed enemy soldier whom Agron encountered on the ground survived the young warrior’s deadly visit.

We came upon one seriously wounded stud who lay chest up with an arrow in his shoulder. A sword had cut a thick slice of muscle away from one side of his rib cage, exposing the bones, and one of his knees had been completely destroyed. He had lost his grip on his sword, which lay well beyond his reach. The blade was coated with the blood of our comrades. Indeed three of our brother warriors lay dead around him, a testament to his prowess as a fighter. Upon seeing that his army had been wiped out, the downed warrior had obviously hoped to perish from his wounds before the dispatchers of the wounded speared him, but such was not to be his fate. When he saw us approach, the doomed soldier propped himself up on his elbows, grunting with pain. I saw his huge cock rise in full hardness as his body greeted imminent death. The stud gestured with one hand toward his sculpted pectorals, indicating his last request that a spear or sword honor his manly chest and send him to join his fallen comrades. He hoped not to die like an animal, with the victor’s spear shoved under his handsome jaw. Seeing our three slaughtered mates lying nearby, Agron snorted disdain at the enemy’s request and positioned his spear at the man’s throat. I pushed the weapon aside, though, and intercepted Agron’s kill. I placed my own spear against the man’s chest instead, just as the enemy fighter had requested. Agron watched in surprise as I quickly found two ribs and inserted my spearhead between them, pushing the valiant warrior back onto the ground and killing him with a thrust through the left slab of chest muscle. His cock shot a solid rope of deathseed, as if by pressing the sword into his rib cage I had forced the spew from his loins. The bull’s milk splattered onto his sternum and into the hollow of his still intact throat. It ran in rivulets down the shaft of my spear as his heart blood gushed up from the wound. As I placed my left foot on the man’s belly for leverage and extracted my spear from his chest, I explained to my young charge that any man who demonstrates his worth in battle and proves his fearless manhood deserves a Beautiful Death, even if he has slain our brother warriors. Each of us can only hope that when our time comes to die in battle, the death blow is a tribute to our manliness, and that we join the thousands of others who have been honored with the Beautiful Death of the true warrior.

Later in the day, when the two of us were helping to harvest enemy cocks from the collected rows of the dead, we again encountered this same warrior. His thick meat still retained its noble stiffness as it arched over his belly. Agron gripped the cock and applied the knife. Before dropping it into the satchel, the lad held the warrior’s severed phallus in his hand for a brief moment and admired it with the respect that is due to a man who has died well.

Not all of the brief survivors among the enemy casualties showed such fortitude and courage. Neither Agron nor I have any respect for a man who tries to drag himself away from the spearing party or who lies still to feign death, hoping perhaps we would not notice the movement of his chest or the flow of blood from his wounds. I was certain that even their own king would disapprove of such a dishonorable and sniveling defeat and would have dealt harshly with such men. Any time we find an enemy soldier crawling on his belly to save himself from the spear, we vigorously gig him in the lower back, then flip him over and stick his throat. Agron laughed when I stopped one such wounded coward from fleeing his inevitable death. I inserted my spear into his anus and impaled his guts before I yanked it back out of his ass and ran it through his back into his heart. While I had the man pinned down, Agron grabbed the bastard’s hair and pulled his head back in order to slit his throat. The speared soldier humped the ground as he wheezed from his throat gash and died, as if in a desperate attempt to fuck while he still had a cock. A wounded mate of his lay on his back nearby with a small pool of blood beneath one shoulder. His clenched his eyes shut and tensed his jaw as he feigned death. Not surprisingly for such a bastard, however, his long cock was draped over his thigh and did not betray his survival with throbbing stiffness, as would the phallus of a true warrior. The soldier’s beefy chest glistened much too brightly with sweat from the heat of sun and battle than would be true of a dead man. Agron pressed his foot onto the man’s sternum, which forced the wounded warrior to reveal his cowardly ruse. The doomed survivor opened his eyes, lifted his head, and struggled beneath the strong bare foot that pressed him to the ground. Agron’s spear quickly entered the man’s throat and ended his final craven protest. As the malingerer succumbed to the spear, he did not even spurt deathseed.

More commonly, however, one sees amazing tableaus of manly death when roaming the battlefield at the conclusion of hostilities. We came upon a pair of warriors who were entangled in a terminal embrace. One of the men was a slain brother of ours. His chest lay on top of an enemy soldier, an arm still wrapped around the dead man’s neck. His other hand clutched the knife that he had driven into his opponent’s side, killing him just as another of the king’s warriors had apparently come upon him from behind and stuck a sword into our comrade’s back. When we pulled them apart, our brother warrior still clutched his knife tenaciously. We had to break his fingers to get the weapon from his grip. The cocks of both men were still rock hard, and as we laid the deathfighters out side by side, we saw that a mixture of our comrade’s final seed and that of his opponent was prominently smeared over their muscular torsos.

The killing of our own wounded was a task that I preferred to keep from Agron for now. Unlike the mandatory slaughter of the fallen enemy, dispatching a brother warrior is a more delicate matter. An inexperienced comrade should be introduced only with great care to the occasionally necessary practice of killing our own wounded. A novice given no orientation to mercy killing could balk at the regrettable task, since he may be required to finish off a man he loves. Most of our clansmen accept the equation of a debilitating wound with uselessness, and thus the need to be eliminated from the ranks. Accordingly, brother warriors who have been wounded beyond healing roll or fall onto their swords or knives and end themselves, if they are able to do so. However, if they cannot dispatch themselves, we send our wounded brothers on their way. By terminating his suffering as well as his life, we grant our comrade a Beautiful Death. The wounded brother warrior gave his all to the battle and merely had the misfortune to be left on the battlefield alive but unable to fight. It is a sacred obligation for survivors of the fray to send him on his way, and the suffering soldier far prefers death at the hands of a comrade to slaughter by an enemy warrior who will finish him off and take his cock, not necessarily in that order.

At least one of the clans maintains the custom of mercifully clubbing helplessly wounded mates in the head in the aftermath of victory. I have witnessed such kills on several occasions and am continually impressed with the unflinching resolve shown both by wounded clansmen and by their club-wielding brothers, as one downed warrior after another lifts his head as high as possible and smiles at his mercy killer. Often the man will even stroke his own hard cock before his brains are smashed from his skull and strewn upon the rocks. A final spew from his aroused phallus adds his seed to the bloody muck. A more common practice in several of the clans involves assisting the wounded brother to his knees for a swift, honorable beheading by sword. The farther the man’s head flies when it is hacked off, the more admiration a headsman receives for his skill. The distance that the severed head flies is also understood as a sign of the mercy killer’s love for his doomed brother. Profound comradeship demands that the wounded stud receive a swift, powerful strike to the neck, a kill that sends the head flying far into the distance, dispatching him to honorable carnage. However, as I have made clear, my own preference when mercy killing is to maintain fixed eye contact with the man I am dispatching and honor his powerful chest with a frontal penetration. If I am ever wounded beyond further fighting ability, rather than killed outright in battle, and if I am unable to drive my own sword into my chest, I would hope to die in that manner. A brother warrior should put a sword or spear into my torso and allow me to take my cock with me into death, before I rot beside my fallen brothers, or join them in the bellies of wolves, or -- as the new way would have it -- before the funeral fires turn us to charred bones. I must inform Agron of my thoughts on this matter, in case he should one day be the brother warrior who dispatches me.

My attention returned to the matter at hand as Agron and I continued the collection of our enemy’s decommissioned cocks. As our satchels brimmed with the heavy meat, we both found it advisable to relinquish our much-used blades and exchange them for sharper ones. Our defeated opponents were a well-endowed race of men. Many of their stiff rods offered a resistance not unlike cutting through green wood, gradually robbing our knives of their edge, even as we forever robbed them of their manhood. Always resourceful, my young archer friend slipped the quiver from his back once our satchels had been filled to capacity, and we finished our harvest by placing two or more score of severed penises among the other shafts which Agron carried in his wicker. When he pulled the heavy basket onto his back again, its straps crossed his chest and pressed into his flesh, perfectly framing his smooth, tanned pectorals and accentuating his imposing physique.

The chieftain summoned us to the great celebratory assembly at which the enemy cocks would be counted out into several reed baskets and ritually tallied. The captured king would be executed as part of the celebration, along with a surviving royal attendant and three generals who had not perished in battle, but would soon wish they had. My thick cock stirred and touched Agron’s strong, perfectly shaped ass as the young warrior stood in front of me, curiously observing the captive king and the few survivors from his entourage. The four men, one of whom was about the same age as Agron, were being forced to await their fates in a crude pen that appeared previously to have been used by a swineherd. A phalanx composed of our lusty spearmen encircled the pen as guards, though it was clear from the resigned and stoically dignified demeanor of the occupants, that they would make no attempt to flee.

None of the king’s sons stood with the condemned. All three princes had given their lives in the battle that had just concluded. Without knowing his identity, I myself had killed the eldest of the royal progeny after encountering him on the battlefield a few hours earlier. He was a tall, darkly handsome warrior of some twenty years. Regarding me fearlessly with his piercing gray eyes, this stalwart fighter, whom I later learned was the heir to his father’s throne, engaged me in a pitched sword duel that showed his considerable skill and his limitless determination. However, like the ability of most of the rest of his father’s army, the prince’s endurance and agility while wielding a heavy sword were not sufficient to save his life. After several moments of combat I ran my blade through his gut, pulled it from his lean, muscular body, and then gripped the hilt with both hands before swinging it laterally against his strong neck to behead him. Though he let his sword drop to the ground, the decapitated prince retained his footing momentarily as blood geysered upward from his opened neck and urgent spurts of seed emerged from his cock. A glint of gold caught my eye as the young man’s headless torso finally buckled, permitting him to slump into his own blood on the field of death. Upon closer inspection I was surprised to see that a small gold ring pierced the left nipple of the fallen warrior. I quickly sliced the protrusion of pink meat from his dead pectoral in order to salvage the ornament, though I was unaware of its significance at the time. Later, once the enemy forces had been subdued, I presented the bloody ring to the chieftain and inquired as to its meaning. Impressed and gratified by my discovery and by my curiosity, he explained that among the customs of our enemy’s leadership, a chest adorned with gold was the signifier of royalty. Turning again to observe the captives in the pen, I could now clearly recognize a tall, bearded, broad-shouldered captive as the king himself. Both of his solid, hairy pectorals glinted with royal nipple rings. While his princely sons had worn a single gold ring in their left nipples, the king’s station was represented by two such ornaments. Each of the generals who stood beside their ruler likewise wore a ring in the left nipple, but their embellishments had been cast of silver rather than gold. Our defeated enemy used the shiny white metal to signify high status in the royal retinue, but of a lesser stature than gold-ringed royalty. The muscular lad whom the captives appeared to claim as part of the royal party was a mystery to me. Lacking marked resemblance to the king or to the prince I had slain, the handsome captive did not appear to be of royal blood. His smooth, as yet unscarred body denied the possibility that he was a warrior of significant experience or rank, and his lean chest was unpierced by precious metal.

After I had presented the chieftain with the first royal nipple ring that our forces had ever claimed, he sent me back to the place where I had accomplished the kill, requesting that I return with the head I had hacked off the shoulders of the man I now know to have been the king’s firstborn son. With some difficulty I spied the handsome, dark-haired countenance among a heap of similarly severed heads, separated limbs and lost entrails. The remaining vestige of the prince was recognizable from his aquiline nose, powerful jaw and cleft chin, but the beauty of the regal gray eyes that had so closely watched my weapon during our duel to the death could no longer be appreciated. Crows had already pecked out the young man’s eyeballs. One of our corpse-dragging details had by that time removed the body of the decapitated prince from the battlefield and laid it out among the rows of other enemy soldiers, where they were to be de-cocked. Perhaps Agron or I had been the cutter who had unknowingly claimed royal meat, which, after all, was indistinguishable from the phalluses of the ordinary infantry. I returned with what I could gather, apologizing for the mutilated eye sockets. The chieftain dismissed the dead prince’s now grisly appearance with a forgiving wave of his hand and smiled appreciatively. His cock jutted fully erect from his reddish crotch hair as he clasped the skull between both hands. For him, the empty eye sockets were merely inviting orifices. The chieftain finds pleasure in many ways, and none of them is civilized.

On the occasion of my retrieving the trophy, the chieftain informed me that I was in his good favor. He invited me to sit among an inner circle of warriors, representatives of the various clans, whom our warlord intended to gather in a new type of leadership that included a “council.” It was then that the chieftain also put the promising young archer Agron under my tutelage, instructing me to elevate my charge’s swordsmanship to the same high level of competence that Agron already exhibited with the longbow, and to educate him in the ways of men and war.

The bodies of the other two princes were also discovered among the carnage, thanks to the gold which glinted briefly on their smoothly muscled chests before a clansman butchered it off. The youngest son was a handsome, leanly muscled stripling perhaps two years the junior of his oldest brother. He had apparently died very early in the campaign, succumbing to the initial rain of arrows released by our squadrons of longbowmen. The corpse of the hapless young prince was found only a few steps from where he had first entered the fray. The sword he gripped was unbloodied. The lad’s chest, neck, belly and legs bristled with a score of arrows, one of which had devastatingly pierced his fuzzy, untested balls. His next older brother, the middle prince of some nineteen years, had advanced farther across the battlefield and had lasted longer. This second-born prince had managed to kill two of our brother warriors before he was taken down. He died when two spears were hurled at him simultaneously. One shaft had fucked him through the lower gut to emerge from his back. The young man’s gigged liver hung from the spearhead. The second of the hurled shafts had destroyed his throat and granted him a quick end.

The news had spread rapidly among our horde that the remains of royal princes lay among the dead, their carcasses recognizable by a wound where the plundered left nipple had been. Men from the clan of ball-eaters were particular excited by the report and set about to find what they considered to be prize testicles. The quest was successful, and the ballsacs of all three of the king’s sons were butchered off. An unfortunate incident occurred, however, over the body of the second-born prince. The gored and de-nipped carcass had been located by three clansmen, each of them eager to pop a royal nut into his mouth. Alas, a man’s sac, even that of a prince, only carries two stones. Since none of the three clansmen was willing to forego the prospect of eating a trophy nut, a vicious brawl erupted among them. Other clansmen cheered them on. Annoyed at the disruption, the chieftain settled the dispute by smashing the skulls of all three fighters. The heads of two of the men were suddenly reduced to a pulp of brains and skull fragments as the spiked club descended onto them. The third brawler sank to his haunches in dismay, his chest and face gooey with the brains and mashed eyeballs of his mates. The chieftain angrily grabbed the severed sperm bag they had fought over and stuffed the entire scrotum into the clansman’s now reluctant mouth. Our leader gave the jaw of the doomed fool a mocking pat with his hand, then gripped the club with both hands and reared it back over his shoulder. The chieftain swung laterally this time, greeting the side of the ball-eater’s face with swift and ultimate justice. The clansman’s entire head detached from his shoulders and flew into the distance. With royal testicles still clenched in its mouth, the thick skull dropped with a squishing sound into a pile of entrails many paces away.

I was pleased that the chieftain had quashed not only the heads of three unworthy warriors but also the notion that the balls of royalty are superior to the gonads that swing beneath the cock of any other man.

Inspired by my beheading of the oldest prince, our chieftain ordered the heads taken from the two younger ones as well. The dead brothers lost yet another piece of their anatomy as eager knives sawed through their necks. Our impaler again demonstrated his consummate, if narrow skill, and quickly fashioned three display pikes of appropriate height and dimension. The chieftain instructed me to erect these sharply tipped poles within view of the captives’ pen. Agron assisted me with the piking of the trophies, deftly handing me the head of the youngest prince first, then the heads of the other two, progressing in order of the age of their former owners. The deposed monarch lowered his face as he took in the crushing sight. Even more than the slaughter of his army and the loss of his fortress, the death of his strapping young heirs meant the end of his world. Two of the captured generals braced their king as he staggered while watching us decorate the head pikes. The third general bristled with anger over our barbarous impudence and advanced upon the guards with his bare hands, screaming a damning curse. Two guards forced the powerful stud back at the points of their spears, yet the king’s man persisted in his futile rebellion, finally taking a spear in his midriff, just beneath the lowest rib. The prisoner collapsed and coughed blood. Still refusing to yield, he tried to lift himself. His big cock had grown defiantly erect. At a nod from our chieftain, the guard who had gigged the officer’s belly finished him by shoving a spear under his jaw and pinning his thick neck to the ground. The mortally wounded general desperately clutched the invading shaft as his pelvis bucked up and down in the fuck-throes of death. A final gush of cock cream erupted from his engorged meat and mixed with the blood on his speared torso. I tossed the spearman a knife and pointed to the general’s silver chest ornament. The guard quickly cut the ringed nipple from the man’s dead chest. The king, the beautiful young attendant and the remaining two generals scowled in helpless despair as the guard presented the liberated silver to our victorious chieftain. One of the generals idly fingered his own ringed nip as he imagined its same inevitable fate. Still gripping the knife, the spearman returned to the prisoner he had just killed and butchered off his cock. The cut was sloppy, though, and I frowned at the residual stub of shaft which the guard left on the man’s crotch. I pointed out this error to Agron, reminding him that a proper cock removal takes the meat off at the base and should leave no vestige of the enemy’s former prowess.

Always prepared to exercise his skill, our impaler had already cut five young ash trees and skinned them of their bark. The strong, hard wood of their unbendable trunks was excellent material for fashioning arrows, spear shafts and impaling pikes. After stripping the young trees, the executioner carefully honed the cruel pointed tips that would find their way into the asses, guts, chests and throats of the defeated king and his men. The impaler enlisted the help of a few other men to dig five shit pits in which to plant the poles, but when he saw that one of the prisoners had chosen to resist and thus die at the point of a spear, instead of on the tip of a pike, the executioner shrugged and tossed one of the death poles aside. Only four pikes and four pits were needed now. The handsome lad, whoever he was, would ride to his death alongside his king and the remaining two commanding officers.

Observing these preparations as they neared completion, the king and his men knelt with their hard cocks jutting out before them, ready to shoot their death seed. Each of the doomed men placed his right hand on his left shoulder, beside the neck, and tilted his head slightly to the right. With this gesture they were making an appeal for deaths they believed to be more appropriate for their station -- a civilized execution by means of a sword thrust downward beside the neck to fuck the heart. The impaler looked to the chieftain with concern, hoping his diligence in preparing for the impalement of the prisoners had not been in vain. He was relieved when the chieftain dismissed the royal party’s presumptuous request for special treatment. I knew the chieftain would regard their appeal as duplicitous arrogance, thinly cloaked by their kneeling submission to inevitable execution. They thought they were too noble to die on an asspike, and their request for the sword only further ensured their impalements. Besides, none of us had any doubt that if we had been captured together with our chieftain, the king would not have granted us honorable deaths. As barbarian killers of so many of their men, our fate would probably have been long and agonizing display on the infernal death crosses that were coming into fashion.

However, the impaler’s relief and my own confidence in our chieftain’s wisdom were short-lived. The pole maker cast his face downward in disappointment as the chieftain placed his hand on the craftsman’s scarred shoulder and told him that the forthcoming executions would be the last impalements among the clans. As part of the effort to become more civilized, we would henceforth execute captives of prominence by means of crucifixion instead. If he wished to remain useful, the chieftain’s executioner would need to abandon his current practice of whittling a sapling to accept a man’s asshole and learn the new two-timbered spiking method. The pole maker understood well that if he could not master the art of building and hoisting a death cross with a man nailed onto it, someone among the clansmen would figure it out, and the impaler would be the first clansman to die with his stretched arms spiked to the crossbeam.

Denied their hopeless appeal for a dignified death, the king and his generals resigned themselves to their fates and rose to their feet again. The youngest of the captives, however, remained on his knees with his face at the level of the king’s crotch. As the king pulled his stiffly erect phallus downward toward the lips of his attendant, the younger man’s purpose became clear. Obviously well practiced in the skill, he expertly pleasured the royal cock, which the king forced deep into the lad’s throat. Placing his hands on the shoulders of his loyal servant, the king tilted his handsome head back with closed eyes and released his seed into the cocksucker’s gullet. The emission was consumed in several large, rapid gulps. Having first administered final pleasure to the king, the lad proceeded to honor the cocks of the two generals. His eager face pressed back and forth into the crotch hair of the first man at a pace exactly appropriate for the officer’s maximum pleasure. The general’s cock impaled the attendant’s throat before the pikes could impale their asses. Again the young man deftly swallowed the studseed, accompanied by soft grunts from the big hairy-chested warrior standing before him. As soon as the general’s ramrod was pulled from his mouth, the other general replaced it with a third eager piece of meat. The last of the men took little time to shoot his load, filling the fuckboy’s already well-fed belly, which was now slightly distended by his final meal. As the guards approached with leather straps in order to bind the captives for impalement, the lad rose to his feet. The general from whose cock he had just drunk embraced him and extended the middle finger of his right hand into the young attendant’s tender anus, an orifice that had doubtless been seeded many times. In response, the lad sprouted a spirited erection even more vigorous than its normal state of arousal. The general immediately gripped the firm cock, squeezed it like a tit, and milked the young man of his seed. While the lad was still shooting his last load, the general grasped the handsome head with both hands and twisted it sharply, snapping his neck and dropping him dead. This final act of mercy in recognition of his services would spare the lad the pain of the pike. Agron and I watched the scene with intense fascination. As we locked gazes, a wave of understanding passed between us. It was the first time either of us had observed a commendable practice among the enemy, and Agron had recognized in this tableau of pleasure and death his own calling in the service of his superiors.

After likewise witnessing the summary execution of the youngest prisoner, the impaler muttered a curse and removed yet another of his finely crafted pikes from the shit pit where he had planted it. Now only three poles would be needed. With their arms pinioned behind them, the remaining captives were prodded at spear point to their pikes. The execution procedure was well-practiced. Three crews of four men each hoisted the doomed studs onto the pointed tips. I assisted in the execution of the king, gripping his stout left thigh, while a spearman guard held his other leg and two other mates grasped his pinioned arms. We extended our arms and lifted all three of the condemned men at the same time, carefully lowering them onto their uncomfortable perches. As the king ascended into the late afternoon sunlight, I saw glints of silver in his hair and beard. He was advancing in age and declining in fortune. It was time for him to die. Once the prisoners were situated in an upright position for their painful descent, we released our hold on their limbs and left them to their fates. The tops of the poles pressed between their leg and into the vulnerable flesh behind their dangling spermbags. The pull from their body weight forced the hips to split apart, giving the death pikes free access to their anuses. Initial muscle resistance to the invading tips was short-lived, and the shafts began their relentless deathfuck. The two generals immediately became flaccid, but the king, to his credit, retained a hard cock several moments into his ride. A small emission of seed emerged proudly from the tip of his fuckrod and dripped into the shit pit below, where the last of his sperm died ingloriously.

The impaler moved quickly from one man to another, using their phalluses and testicles as grips with which to pull each man into upright alignment with the vertical pole as soon as one of them began to lean awry. As the poles began to disappear into their bodies, the men dropped their bowels. Excrement, blood and gory, torn guts streamed down the shafts, pooling in the pits that had been dug to receive their leavings. They desperately sought to slow the execution by scrabbling their heels against the poles, hoping to arrest the rate of descent. The pikes were too slick with gut muck for them to gain traction, though, and their efforts were hopeless. The impaling pike destroys the dignity of even the most stalwart of men. As is true of every man who has ridden the pole, all three captives erupted in full-throated screams of agony as the pikes penetrated guts and bellies and fucked upward into the chest cavity. The assembled horde encircled the death site and watched intently, each clansman stroking his cock in appreciation of the enemy’s vocal surrender. The impaler deftly guided them by means of his grip on their phalluses, ending the steerage only when he saw blood and bile spew from the men’s mouths. Their hearts had been stilled. Now mostly impaled, the king and his generals needed no further assistance in completing their ride in proper alignment with their death pikes. We were eager to see where the tips of the poles would emerge from their bodies, and we watched closely as the men slowly sank. The first bloody tip of wood to appear poked through the upper chest of one of the generals. It emerged beside his neck, just above the left collar bone. The second general was the next man to reveal the completion of his skewering. His pike ripped out the hollow of his throat and pushed his chin back as the dead stud made his final descent. The king’s impalement was perfect. He had thrown his head back to gaze skyward and yell out his death call, and the pike had passed neatly through his throat. Scarlet with heart blood, the point emerged from the king’s open mouth, passing without hindrance between his teeth, where it pointed toward the sky.

A signature innovation of our executioner is the short length of bare tree branch which he incorporates into his impaling pikes. On each pole the remnant of one of the tree’s small lower limbs is deliberately left in place. This short protrusion from the upright is located at the height of a man’s crotch. The purpose of the feature becomes evident with each execution, when the impaled stud sinks only as far as the broken-off branch. The impaler carefully guided each of our three captives toward this perch, allowing their ballsacs to descend onto the horizontal protrusions and splay onto the wood as their descent was arrested. The result was an elegant death pose. With their legs extended downward and their knees unbent, their toes could now touch the bottom of their shit pits. The three skewered men appeared to be standing in death. We left the carrion-laden poles in place, so the dead riders could observe the burning of their lost army.

With the shroud of dusk descending upon the killing field, our victorious clansmen removed the cockless bodies of the enemy from the neat rows where they lay. As they heaped the dead soldiers in jumbled piles, I likewise gripped the ankles of the retired fuckboy and dragged him from the pen where he had died. I de-cocked the lad and tossed the broken carcass onto one of the mounds of sprawling dead meat. In the same way, we gathered our own mates from the battlefield and tossed our brother warriors on top of one another and onto the firewood that would help send them on their way. The death toll among the enemy had been massive. Many more bonfires consumed men without cocks between their legs than were fueled by our fallen clansmen. The impaled bodies of the enemy leaders and the piked heads of the king’s trio of dead sons cast long, dancing shadows over us as the flames rose and filled our nostrils with the sweet smell of burning manflesh.

The chieftain approached the impaled prisoners with his knife and cut the ringed nipples from their dead chests, relieving them of all vestiges of former rank. Then he relieved them of their cocks. The last three phalluses completed the count of the enemy dead. The reed baskets, each containing a hundred severed pricks, provided an accurate tally. The bushels were nine in number. A tenth basket was half full of meat.

Exalting in our victory, we encircled the bonfires, both those of the enemy and the kindled heaps of our own fallen comrades. As night fell, the dead joined one another as ash in the sky, united in the brotherhood of warrior death. With one arm around the firm shoulders of a fellow clansman and the other hand pumping our strong, hard cocks, we roared in unison and shot victory seed onto the burning corpses. Its sizzle was audible even over the howls and yips of the disappointed wolves that scavenged in the nearby darkness, their customary feast of freshly slain muscle replaced by a lesser banquet of strewn guts and severed limbs.

Basketfuls of enemy pricks were tossed into the flames, making the bonfires higher. However, some of our mates skewered trophies on the tips of their spears and extended the shafts over the flames to roast the meat and enjoy a meal at the expense of the enemy and his unspawned descendants. Always protective of the weaponry he had crafted, the impaler gently discouraged this deployment of fine hardwood over open fire. He quickly fashioned roasting sticks for any clansmen who desired them and even joined in the celebration by sticking a handsomely large cock onto a skewering stick of his own.

Pulling his shoulders from my embrace as he stood beside me, Agron knew well that my cock was far from spent. As the lad silently knelt and took me into his mouth, I saw the chieftain’s massive frame silhouetted against the fire as our warlord approached us. The bull balls hanging between his thighs from the base of a fully erect cock cast an impressive shadow on the ground. The glow of the fires magnified the red of his mane, and his chest likewise ran crimson with blood from freshly pierced nipples. The firelight reinforced the authoritative gleam of the gold rings that now decorated the warlord’s chest. The spikes on the club he clutched in his right hand were clotted with torn muscle, shredded brains and stringy guts. The chieftain’s other fist clutched something else. As I bucked my cock deep into Agron’s throat, the chieftain extended his closed hand toward me, unfurled his fingers, and revealed a silver chest ring.

My cock exploded in Agron’s mouth. For the first time the young man drank the seed of a general, and together we entered the new era.