Of Carpentry And Construction III

by **Trevor Hightly** on August 3rd, 2017, 12:44 am

Date: 56th of Summer
Time: Early-Afternoon
Continued From Here

The water in the air hung tightly together and felt as if it was unmoving, seeming to be ever growing hotter, and somewhat even capable of pervading into one's lungs with every breath that a man or woman might deign to take in. Syna had finally reached the break in her dance of mid-day, a time where the goddess hung high and heavy in the sky for quite a long period, before -- after the later chimes of the day -- she would resume her waltz across the azure horizon and milk colored clouds to allow her lover and undying love, Leth, to claim loving and cool dominion over Mizahar's sky.

Meanwhile, before the goddess could exchange her place in the sky with Leth, the denizens of Mizahar had to first go about their day, and their work, and their toils. Always somewhere there was a laugh, or a betrayal, a reunion, or a final departing, or a man working and sweating in the hot sun -- the last of which situations could be in any number of places on the planet, such as Ekytol's unforgiving and arid desserts or Cyphrus' harsh plains, but in this case it was on the shoreline of Falyndar's humid and hot jungles that two men worked hardily and in tandem with one another.

Randal and Trevor both labored together towards creating the latter man a lasting home. On Trevor's plot of land, the man's tent sat a ways away from where the two men worked; whereas a pile of lumber that the men had hauled in from Syka's thick and dense rainforest sat between the two of them. Trevor and Randal both worked hard at processing and stripping individual trees.

Eight, seven-foot poles. That was the first thing that they needed to get produced -- and that was just to have the resources to build the frame of Trevor's home. They had a good ten or so ten to fifteen-foot trees collected, so there was obviously more than just that to do.

Trevor's saw cut and dug and bite into the last of the limbs that he needed to remove from the tree that he was working on. The man had made his way up one side of the tree and then down the other, before turning and rotating the tree and doing the process all over ago for the limbs that sprouted towards the sky and that he had laid the tree down upon.

As Trevor moved his tiring forearm back and forth to power the cutting of his saw, it did not take long -- at least in comparison to how long he had been working -- for him to remove the last limb from the tree that he was working on.

Seasonal Wordcount: 468 + 32,355 = 32,823

by **Trevor Hightly** on August 3rd, 2017, 1:57 am

Date: 56th of Summer
Time: Early-Afternoon
Continued From Here

With his first tree of the day stripped of every last one of its branches, Trevor rose to his feet and walked to the middle portion of its trunk. The stripped tree was all rough and bare with spots of its inner flesh being visible where its branches had been removed at their root. In the middle of its trunk, there was a single sawed notch -- not a very deep cut, mind, just a bit of an indention that Trevor had marked out so that he could keep track of where the seven foot mark on the tree's length was, before he'd then moved on to cutting and sawing the timber's limbs from off of its gnarled body.

Trevor's forearm was actually quite a bit tired by the time he'd made it over to the middle of the tree that he labored with. He could feel the blood of his arteries putting pressure on and slightly stinging the sore muscles of his forearm as it flowed to his hand and back to his heart. At the very least, the man's feet and his left hand -- both of which had become quite sore after being forced to spend a bell or so dragging a heavy pile of timber through Syka's forest -- had recovered with a greater speed than Trevor would have expected. Only his saw wielding, dominant arm was still annoyingly sore, with the rest of his body simply reverberating and buzzing with a dull and only semi-consistent aching -- an aching that was, for the most part, motion dependent.

Still, Trevor was looking forward to the persistent and lasting comfort of a home -- it was something that he'd endure through his body's protests for. And thusly, on semi-tried legs, he leaned down before the middle of the knock that he'd marked the seven feet mark on the tree with. With intent, he allowed his left hand to brace against the trunk of the somewhat intact tree, before allowing the edged blade of his handheld saw to slip into the groove he'd cut into the tree earlier into the morning.

With a pushing and pulling motion, he sawed. His forearms had been given a breath's respite from sawing by his walk over from the tip of the tree; said muscles had cooled off -- if only a little bit. However, the man's lower arm's tendons and untrained muscles were quick to heat back up to an internally steamy and bloat causing temperature. Due to this exertion, Trevor's forearm quickly became red, blushed by the color of the ample blood that his heart was redirecting to his muscles to fuel their owner's prolonged and uncharacteristic usage of the force that they could create.

Seasonal Wordcount: 463 + 32,823 = 33,286

by **Trevor Hightly** on August 3rd, 2017, 2:35 am

Date: 56th of Summer
Time: Early-Afternoon
Continued From Here

Trevor's saw slid across and ground the skin and organs of the tree before him into slightly damp pulp and outerly dry wood chips. With each pass of his saw, he cut deeper and deeper into the tree. And as his saw found purchase against the sturdy and hard core of the small log, Trevor slowed the steadily pulverizing movements of his axe hand abruptly.

The man took in a breath and wiped the sweat from off his brow with his weak hand. The work before him was truly very labor intensive -- at least for an untrained, unseasoned, shortling of a man who was still just barely and technically in his teens, albeit his late teens.

With everything that he'd endured in his relatively short life, Trevor hadn't found himself feeling young as of late. There had been a series of moments, within his grief for his wife's disappearance an assumed passing, during which he had felt himself too young -- where he had thought that the world had been too harsh on him so early on and that his life would be tainted by his loss forever. However, after he had thought more and more on Elana's departure from the pages of his story, Trevor had felt himself become what he felt was more matured -- yes, truly more somber and reserved, but also with a persisting passion for life hiding under the surface and refusing to say die.

Still, there were times when his youth and still underdeveloped body would remind him of his lacking of years to hold under his thin-waisted belt. As his forearm's thin muscles clenched, and released, themselves semi-randomly and of their own angry and volatile will, Trevor was truly reminded of his age. It was an odd feeling -- inadequacy that is -- and something that Trevor was struggling with; life had granted him a bit of wisdom when it came to his own emotions and the emotions of others, but he had yet to seize anything truly great for himself from out of Destiny's sometimes-tight and sometimes-loose grasp.

The most complicated bit was, of course, that Trevor didn't know what he wanted out of life -- he found comfort in knowledge and even in creation, but he had yet to find a place where such things could be found in abundant enough amounts. It was true that Syka was allowing him to learn so many things -- including medicine which he had discovered a passion for -- but even the small settlement didn't feel quite like home. And yet, the stories and the interesting persons of the beach city provided a certain level of comfort to the people-loving Trevor -- but still, not a true purpose that could satisfy him deeply, truly, and to his most intimate core.

Seasonal Wordcount: 476 + 32,823 = 33,299

by **Trevor Hightly** on August 3rd, 2017, 3:13 am

Date: 56th of Summer
Time: Early-Afternoon
Continued From Here

With the sweat swatted from his brow, Trevor returned his hands to the work of driving his borrowed handsaw through timber. He'd already put a decent enough amount of time into cutting through the center of the stripped log, despite his momentary break, and was quickly making his way through the wood. The man did not speed up too much, however, knowing that there was yet more work to come.

Yet -- even though he only kept at a mostly consistent, but perhaps somewhat slowing, pace -- Trevor made his way the rest of the way through the tree's core and lower skin. With a bit of a jump of the tool that he held, he pierced through the last of the small log's lower bark. The tree itself split unceremoniously and with very little commotion -- both bare sides merely falling further into the sand and rustling about a bit after being jostled apart from one another.

Trevor removed his hand from the fallen wood and pulled his saw blade up off of the sand from where it had fallen after finishing off its targeted section of wood. The young man took in a deep breath and lifted his head to the azure sky. The skyline of Syka was almost always quite beautiful -- that said, Trevor's back muscles were pulsing pounding in discomfort from bending to the cut wood and it was a bit painful for him to lift his head up to gaze at even a gorgeous sky. For the most part, he had titled his head skyward so that he could draw in a few deep breaths of air with a widely opened windpipe and so that he could allow his eyes to rest on something while he did so.

Trevor half-sighed and half-grunted and tiredly pulled himself to his feet.

The man may have made his way through the seven-foot mark on the log that he'd been working towards tearing down for the past bell; however, the log that he'd been cutting had measured a total of fifteen feet in length. Randal had specified that they needed exactly eight, seven-foot poles -- not a few seven-foot poles and one of an eight-foot tall variety. And thus Trevor had known all along, even as he had stripped the log of its limbs and as he'd sawed through its middle section, that he'd have to remove around a foot of wood from one end of the tree -- it was the reason that he hadn't rushed through the last cut, even as he had drawn near to completing it.

Seasonal Wordcount: 438 + 33,299 = 33,737

by **Trevor Hightly** on August 3rd, 2017, 4:54 pm

Date: 56th of Summer
Time: Early-Afternoon
Continued From Here

The felled, limbless timber lay split in two, now more of a pair of posts than an intact plant that resembled a smaller version of Falyndar's giant and towering trees. The notch that Trevor had cut to mark the middle section of the wood had been deepened and sawed completely through, entirely splitting the log that it had once been etched upon into two separate pieces.

Meanwhile, there was another notch on one of the separated logs that Trevor had marked out with a pass or two of his handsaw earlier on in the morning. Towards the top end of one of the two logs, which had been created when he'd cut through the tree's middle section, there was another indentation that Trevor had marked out before he'd even started removing the limbs and foliage from off of the original lumber. It was this notch to which Trevor now approached.

The young man lowered himself down to his knees before the indentation in the tree and notched his handsaw within the depression. Diligently he sawed, back and forth, and back and forth.

By the time he'd reached working on the last portion of the tree that would need sawing, his dominant arm had become a bit dull-feeling from all the work -- his muscles felt stretched to looseness and heated by his labor to a degree of light numbness. Nevertheless, his arm continued to move, despite its growing weariness and fatigue. And, within fifteen chimes, he had removed the errant foot from the stripped log and had reduced it to the proper height for the construction of his home.

It was then that Trevor took a moment to put down his handsaw and fall back to sit on his heels and knees. The man's lungs were not burning; cutting wood was not an anaerobic or quickly exhausting activity, but rather it was one that truly but slowly tired one's body and worked knots into one's many muscles.

Trevor used his moment of rest to glance over the pile of unworked trees that lay between himself and Randal. The carpenter had been working on stripping trees for the past bell or so, just as Trevor himself had. The difference between Randal and the young man, however, was that Randal had already worked his way through almost three entire trees; meanwhile, Trevor had only managed to work through one.

"Randal," Trevor called out to the carpenter, remembering that the man had advised that they keep apprised of one another's work -- so that they didn't produce too many poles for the house's frame and thus waste valuable wood.

The carpenter looked up from his work, as he was addressed. The man had been well on his way to removing the limbs off of his third tree.

"Yea?" the carpenter called back. "You alright over there?"

"I've only gotten through one, but it looks like you're already almost through the others ones that we need," Trevor called back.

Randal paused, rather than replying right away.

"I know, I've been glancing over to keep up with you," Randal replied. "Just let me get through this and we'll be able to move onto to cutting out the roofing poles."

"And good work," Randal added. "This kind of work takes some acclimation -- especially in this coastal heat."

Seasonal Wordcount: 558 + 33,737 = 34,295