Disclaimer: (Sex scenes types. Warning - spoilers.) This story contains explicit gay sexual content including tentacle sex with a mystical entity, oral sex and deep-throating of tentacles, simultaneous group orgasm, cum swallowing and full-body cum coverage, piss play (golden shower and face-soaking), edging, underwear and bulge worship through fabric, foreskin play, blindfolding by tentacle. All characters are adult men. All sexual activity between protagonists is consensual. Some scenes depict magical compulsion as part of a fantasy setting; these are fictional and not endorsements. No underage content.
Chapter 2 : The Oracle of the Grove
I was thumb-sized in the nest when the door opened. Joren stood by the central table. His fingers rested loose around his bulge through the trousers. The hand was half thought, half habit. I felt the heel of his palm rest along my back through the fabric.
Mossen came in first. Gap-toothed. Cheeks raw from the wind. Iron dust still on his forearms. Tariq followed with a scroll case under his arm. His eyes went straight to Vesper across the room. Holm stepped in next with a rope coil over one shoulder. Eben came last with flour still on his sleeve. They dropped their packs in a line by the wall.
Pisson came through the doorway a heartbeat behind them. Blonde. Luminous. Breath quick in his chest. He glanced once at Lirael and then away. Lirael did not look up from the table. Lirael’s thumb moved once across the back of his other hand.
“Report,” Joren said.
Mossen unrolled a soft hide on the table. It was marked all over in charcoal. Crosses. Loops. Small black bars. He set a finger at one mark and dragged it along to the next while he talked. The forges. The grain stores. A wall in the lower town. The bed of the market well scraped clear by a boy fetching water.
“Everywhere,” Mossen said. “Not a corner of the realm without one.”
Tariq laid a second hide alongside. Cliffs on the east road. A pool below the cliffs drained for a sluice repair. The bottom of it shot through with the same dull shine. Holm put down a third. The lakebed at Ven lower than it had been in twenty years. The cracked floor patterned in pale veins.
“The patches are everywhere,” Holm said. “The city. The countryside. The lakes. All of it.”
Eben set down a fourth hide. It was smaller than the others. The marks tighter. The bread ovens at the south wall. The mill stones at the river. The hearth slabs of three houses along his bread route scraped clean when he asked the wives. He tapped each mark with a flour-pale finger. “Inside the walls of houses now. Where the bread is made. Where the children sleep.”
Pisson stepped forward last. He had no hide. He had a strip of bark with knife-cuts on it. He set it on the table beside the others. His finger moved along the marks as he spoke. The south granary floor under a grain sack he lifted. The piss-pots of the upper drains where the flow ran strongest. The base of the privy stones in the lower town. Every place a man pissed or sweated or slept. “The places the wet goes,” Pisson said. “The patches are there too. Under the wet.” He looked up at Lirael. Lirael looked back at him for the first time since he came in. Pisson’s ears went pink and he looked down at the bark again.
Joren took the four hides and the bark in. He stood very still. He kept the hand on his bulge while he read. I pushed my face into his shaft. The pulse ran strong.
Vesper folded his arms. “Realm-wide. Then it is not a Thorendale problem.”
Lirael lifted his head. “The baby stone must go to the Stone realm. Milliane said so at the fountain. We have carried it long enough.”
“She is counting on us,” Joren said.
I felt his hand close once around me through the cloth, then open. A beat-level squeeze. Bare acknowledgement. He did not speak for a moment.
"There is a road," Lirael said. He moved to the hide and pressed a fingertip down. "Three days west, the forest changes. The trees there are old. Older than the trees we know. Inside that wood there is a clearing. Some of my order called it a gate. Some called it a threshold. None of us could ever tell which. I have not been there in two hundred years. I think this is a place where people have got answers in the past."
“A gate to where,” Vesper said.
“No one knows.” Lirael’s voice flattened. “Some who went came back. Some did not.”
Joren lifted his fingers off me and rested them flat on the hide. “Then that is where we go.”
Pisson cleared his throat. He waited until Joren looked up. "I would like to come with you."
Joren waited.
"This is on the way toward the Elven lands," Lirael said. "Pisson's training begins there. It makes sense he comes along."
Joren nodded once. He thanked the scouts. He told them to keep their eyes open as they went back to their normal lives. If they saw anything very big happen, if there was something they thought was really, really important, they were not to hesitate. They could come back to the tower, go to the top, and ask to speak to the Servant. The Servant would hear them. He thanked them again.
“Then we leave at noon,” Joren said. Then he winked at Mossen, the dwarf. "Happy to shake you again when we get back". The dwarf chuckle.
I was in the nest. The undertrousers warm against my back. I lay flush along his shaft with my cheek to the seam. The cloth was silk and the silk was alive. It answered his heartbeat now since the gift in the Lesbian Realm. Each pulse moved through the fabric like a slow ripple.
His hand found the bulge as he stood ready. The grip was firm this time. He squeezed once, held, let go. I rolled against his head and the slit nudged my forehead. A bead of clear pre-cum slipped loose and wet my cheek.
“There you are,” Joren said, low in his throat.
“Here I am,” I said through the bond.
“Long walk today.”
“I will keep you company.”
The bond carried a small laugh I did not hear aloud.
In the main chamber Garrick was already inside Vesper. I knew because Vesper had the look he got. The small private smile. The shoulders a touch lower than usual. Lirael lifted the satchel and shouldered it. The baby stone sat in there wrapped in old linen. The satchel sagged more than it should.
Pisson stood near Lirael. Not touching. Close. He had a satchel of his own now, plain leather, tied with a piece of cord. Someone in the tower had packed it for him.
We walked out into the noon light. The plaza tilted away from the tower down toward the western gate. The huge crystalline thing in the middle still stood there. People still walked around it as if it had always been there. I looked at it for a long breath and then looked away.
The west road took us through the lower town, then through orchards, then into the forest. Dappled light on the trail. The trees here were friendly trees. Beech. Hornbeam. Old oak in places. A small stream ran along the right of the path for a while and then turned away.
Pisson talked. Not at first. For an hour he walked behind Lirael, watching the back of Lirael’s head. Then somewhere past the second crossroads his mouth opened and he just began.
“I want to say something,” he said. His voice was young and clean. “About me. So you know who you are walking with.”
Vesper looked over his shoulder. “Speak.”
“I was a man in Thorendale before I was anything else,” Pisson said. “I worked at the south granary. I had a small room. I had friends.” He paused. “When I was a boy I wet the bed. I grew out of it the way boys do. Then I grew back into it. I was eighteen and one night I woke up and I had pissed the sheets and I lay in it for a long time before I got up. And I noticed I was happy.”
Then I understood it was not my own piss I liked. It was the piss of other men."
Lirael's back did not move. Pisson looked at the road ahead and kept talking.
“So I tried it on purpose,” Pisson said. “In the bath. I would lower myself in the water and piss into it and put my face down and drink some. Just to know the taste. To know if I still liked it as a man. I did. I liked it a lot.”
Vesper laughed once. Short. Not cruel. “Go on.”
"It is not the taste. I have tasted enough to know. It is not a delicacy. Asparagus for some of them." He made a face. "It is what it means. When a man pisses he stands straight. Sturdy on his feet. He looks down at his cock and he pisses. There is a small thing that happens in him at the start. Like a tiny release before the release. A micro ejaculation. And he plays with the stream. Side to side. He does not have to. He does it anyway. That is the moment. The man pissing. The result of that. That is what I adore."
He took a breath and went on.
"Having a man piss on you is intimate. Some find it funny. They spray everywhere. They treat it like a joke. But some take it seriously. They aim. They want to give you joy. Nothing is better than that. Looking at a cock being a cock. Carrying the piss out of a man. I watched Garrick at the orgy. He enjoys the fact that a penis exists. I could see it. Mine is the want to get that on me. In me. The warmth of it. The gold of it. The bigness of the man that made it.
Garrick's head appeared at Vesper's waistband. He looked at Pisson a long moment.
"I get you, kid," he said.
Lirael walked ahead without turning. His back was straight. A small smile on his face.
“I heard about Lirael,” Pisson said. “Travellers in the granary kitchen. Stories about an elf who came down out of the forest and made people drink. I listened. I thought about him for two years. I never told anyone.”
Garrick’s voice came again. “Two years is a long time to be quiet about something you like.”
Pisson laughed. The laugh was bright. “I know. I am not quiet about it anymore.”
“No,” Joren said, walking. “You are not.”
Pisson lifted his chin. “The Elven world has the piss tradition. It is the centre of the world there. That is what Lirael tells me. So I am going to learn it where it is whole. I am lucky he came for me. I am grateful he wants me near him.”
He stopped. He had said the whole thing. He walked the next ten steps without speaking.
Lirael did not turn his head. He lifted his right hand without looking and rested it for one heartbeat against Pisson’s hand at the strap of the satchel. Two fingers, brief. Then his hand returned to his side.
Pisson swallowed. His ears were pink.
The forest closed a little tighter around the trail. The dappled light still worked through the canopy but the green was darker. A wood pigeon lifted off somewhere to our right and then there was no more sound but our boots.
“Garrick,” Vesper said, mild. “You are quiet.”
“I am thinking,” Garrick said, faint, from inside.
“Dangerous,” Vesper said.
“I am thinking about the elf and the granary boy,” Garrick said. “I think they will do well.”
Lirael’s shoulders moved once. Not a laugh. Something near it.
We walked for two more hours. The forest changed around us without warning. The trees here were wider at the trunk than any we had passed. Three men with their arms held out could not circle one of them. The undergrowth thinned. The ground was cleaner. There was no birdsong. No insects. The light came through the canopy in long, slow shafts.
I was the first to feel it. My cock stirred inside the nest. It was half-hard against Joren’s shaft and the touch surprised me because I was not thinking about anything at all.
Joren’s cock answered a moment later. I felt it grow, fill the cloth at the seam, push my back flat against the silk. The pulse through the fabric went faster.
“Spark,” Joren said through the bond.
“I know,” I said. “Me too.”
I pushed my head up through the waistband to look. The crew was walking the same as before but they were walking different. Vesper had stopped, one hand on a tree, weight half on his palm. Lirael’s formal stride had shortened by half a step. Pisson’s neck was flushed all the way to his ears.
“Anyone else feel that,” Vesper said. His voice was rough at the edges.
Lirael breathed in slow. “Yes.”
Joren rolled his shoulders. He looked at me. He turned away from the path toward the trees on the right. I felt his cock soften an inch. He turned back to face the path. His cock filled again, harder than before.
“It points the way,” he said.
“What does,” Vesper said.
Joren turned his hips a quarter to the left. Soft. He turned back. Hard. Harder than before.
Vesper made a sound that was half a laugh and half a groan. He set his own hand briefly to the front of his trousers and turned himself, one quarter, then back. His own answer rose through the cloth. “The cock is a compass,” he said, and laughed again, loud, the laugh bright in the dead air. “The Oracle has a sense of humour.”
Pisson stared at his own crotch. He looked up. He looked down. He said nothing. His face was dark red.
Lirael stood very still. His jaw was tight. He swallowed.
We started walking again. The trail bent. Every hundred paces the air got thicker. My cock was fully hard now and pressed flat between my back and Joren’s shaft. The pressure rolled me with each step. A bead of pre-cum from Joren wet the back of my head. I licked it off my palm without thinking.
Joren's breath shortened. He put a hand on a tree to steady himself, then kept walking.
It was not only my cock. Every one of us was at the edge. It was like someone had a thumb pressed to the head of each of our cocks and was rubbing without stopping. The pleasure was sharp. It was also too much. I wanted to come. I wanted it to stop. I could not decide which. The feeling did not stop.
"Do not stop," Vesper said. His voice was suddenly clear. "Keep walking. Do not touch anyone. Do not touch yourselves. You hear me. Keep moving."
“Vesper,” Lirael said, low.
“I know this feeling,” Vesper said. “Not from this. From other things. You walk through it. If you stop you stop.”
We walked. Each step took longer than the last. I could feel every one of them through Joren’s body. The thigh muscles. The clench of his stomach. The slow drag of breath through his nose. He held the rhythm by the count of his own steps.
Pisson stumbled once. Lirael’s hand caught his elbow without looking and let go again.
Vesper coached under his breath. “One more. One more. Pisson, eyes up. Lirael, breathe out. Joren, keep going.”
Joren kept going. I felt him keep going. The pre-cum was running steady now and the seam of the cloth was wet. I did not lick. I was holding on the way the others were holding on.
The trail bent one last time and opened.
There was a circle in the forest. Perfect. The trees around it formed the wall. The grass inside it was shorter, the colour a half-shade paler. The edge of the circle was a clean line on the ground. Inside the circle the air shimmered very faintly, the way air does above hot stone in summer.
We stopped at the verge. Five of us standing in a rough line. Pisson’s breath was sawing. Lirael’s hand was on the base of a tree.
“Step in together,” Vesper said.
We stepped in.
The moment the last foot crossed the line every man in the crew came. My own body went with them. My cock pulsed hard against Joren’s shaft and I emptied myself into the cloth. Joren’s release flooded through the seam at the same instant. A thick, hot wash that soaked the silk against my face. I heard Vesper shout once, a real shout. From deep inside him Garrick roared as he came, the sound muffled through flesh. Lirael made a long broken sound through closed teeth. Pisson cried out, high and surprised. Their cum hit the grass in front of them. I saw the wet patches dark on the pale green.
Five orgasms inside one heartbeat. The grass went wet around us.
Then the air in the centre of the circle moved.
The air gathered. It folded in on itself. Something was coming up out of nothing. Not from the ground. From the centre of the air itself.
It took shape slow. First a dark mass, the size of a small house. Then tentacles, lifting out of the mass on every side. Then a glow underneath, faint, deep, the colour of old amber.
The mass was not frightening. It was not frightening. The presence inside it was male and warm and old. Older than the forest. Older than the trees that were older than the other trees.
The tentacles were not the same as each other. I counted as best as I could. One closest to Joren was smooth, the colour of wet stone, thick as his thigh. Its end was a head, broad and dark, with a clear slit. A drop of clear fluid trembled at the slit and fell onto the grass.
A second tentacle floated toward Vesper. This one was fatter, softer, the head wider and paler. The skin of it puffed and gave the way a cheek would give.
A third reached toward Lirael. Slimy. The shaft of it glistened. A long thread of clear slick hung from the head and swung as it moved.
A fourth came for me. Hairy. Coarse dark hair along the shaft, the head bare and pink, gleaming wet. It was moving toward the waistband of Joren’s trousers, toward me.
I knew at once I could not meet this from inside the nest. I pushed through the seam and slid down Joren’s leg to the grass. I grew as I went. Three breaths to five feet. By the time my bare feet touched the cool grass I was the size of any of them. The hairy tentacle stopped in the air a hand’s breadth from my face and waited.
A fifth lifted higher than the rest. It hung above Pisson’s head. It did not come close to him. From the underside of the head a slow stream of warm clear fluid began to fall. It ran down through his hair, over his face, across his shoulders. He gasped. He stood and let it.
Garrick said nothing. He was still inside Vesper.
The Oracle did not move toward us. It presented. The tentacles waited. The pre-cum dripped onto the grass in slow points. The silence in the clearing was wet sound and breath.
Then the Oracle put meaning in my head. Not language. Meaning, the whole thing at once. You come because you choose to come. Nothing is taken.
“He is asking,” Lirael said aloud. His voice had dropped. The formal cadence had slipped.
“Then we answer,” Joren said.
He took one step forward.
I could not tell this whole thing in order. Five of us and an Oracle was not a thing that happened in a line. I was inside it the same as the others and I had my own tentacle at my mouth, so what I said about the others was what I caught in the corners of my eyes. I told it as I held it.
Joren stepped to the smooth tentacle. The tentacle did not grab. It opened around him. The head found the front of his trousers and the trousers came undone on their own, the silk garments doing their work. His ten inches came out heavy and dark and the tentacle wrapped the shaft from base to head in one slow coil. A second tentacle rose from below and cupped his balls, the long sac in the soft pocket of the tip. A third pressed up under his perineum and started a slow circle, broad and warm. A fourth, muscular, the thickest of them, slid around his thigh and held him open from behind.
Joren made the sound he made. He planted his feet. He stood.
The smell of the clearing came at me at full height. Crew sweat. The grass cut and bruised under our feet. Joren’s cock. Pre-cum from five tentacles. The slow warm thread of fluid still falling on Pisson. Underneath all of it the smell of the Oracle itself. Old water, deep wood, the faint salt of a sea I had never seen.
The hairy tentacle that had been waiting for me came up to my mouth and rested against my lower lip. A bead of pre-cum touched my tongue.
I opened my mouth.
The hairy one was at my mouth first. The coarse hair brushed my lips before the head did, and the hair carried pre-cum already, salt-bitter on the brush of it across my mouth. I opened. The bare head slid past the hair onto my tongue. Polished. Heavy. The taste of it was salt at the front, salt-bitter at the back. The slimy one was at my cheek then, sliding along the side of my face, the slick of it leaving a wet line from my temple to the corner of my mouth. The slick on it was sweeter than the hairy’s pre-cum. Different sugar. It pushed for my mouth where the hairy one was and I turned my head and took both. My lips stretched. The slimy slid in along the hairy and the two slicks mixed on my tongue. The smooth one found the back of my neck. Cool at first. Warm under the skin. It ran down the line of my spine and pressed flat between my shoulder blades and stayed there. The fatty one came at my ribs from the other side. Wide. Soft. The head puffed against my side and gave when I pressed back into it. It rolled down my flank, found my hip, found the curve of my arse, pressed there without going in. I had a body covered in tentacle. The hairy and slimy in my mouth. The smooth down my spine. The fatty against my arse. My own cock was hard against my belly and a fifth thinner thread of the Oracle, no bigger than my own thumb, had come up under it and was wrapping it the way the smooth one was wrapping Joren far away. Pre-cum ran out of me into it. Pre-cum ran out of them into me. The hairy swelled in my mouth. The slimy swelled alongside. The smooth pressed harder along my back. The fatty grinded slow against my arse. I was held from every side and I was giving from every side and I was taking from every side. The first to come was the hairy. It pulsed hot straight into my throat and I swallowed and I kept swallowing. The slimy followed a heartbeat behind, against the side of my tongue, salt-sweet, and my mouth was full of two seeds at once and I could not swallow fast enough. Cum ran out of the corner of my mouth, down my chin, onto my chest. The smooth came against my back and the warm streams down my spine and my arse. The fatty came against my arse-cheeks and the wide head spilled cum across the cleft and down my thighs in slow thick pulses. I was wet from neck to knee. My own cock pulsed into the small thread under it and I gave what I had.
The plug detected the overflow. I felt it know. The plug was mine, made for me, and it sensed that my mouth had lost its share and that there was fluid on my skin that was not going where fluid should go. It engaged. The receiver-side drew on. I felt the suction start at the rim and pull inward, slow at first, then steady. The cum on my arse cheeks was drawn toward the plug and into me. The cum on my thighs ran upward against the pull of its own weight and went the same way. The cum on my chest the small thread of Oracle gathered and carried down my belly and the plug took that too. The plug had grown with me. It was five-foot-Spark sized. The pull of it reached up into my belly and I felt it working there, warm, steady. My mouth swallowed what it could swallow. My body drew the rest. Nothing was wasted. The hairy gave me the last of itself against my tongue and I took it. The plug took the last of what fell.
I did not lose track of where the others were.
Vesper was on his back on the grass. The fatty tentacle was on his cock. It had wrapped him from base to head and it was moving slow. Vesper was using his hands too, gripping the tentacle, pressing it down, pulling it up, taking pleasure in the doubled control. A second smooth tentacle was at his perineum, pressing in slow circles. His breath was broken. He was laughing in pieces. The Veil flickered on his skin in blue static along the underside of his arms, down his ribs, into his thighs. The static raced. He was being edged hard and he knew it and he was grinning at the sky. Then it tipped. He screamed. The blue flared hot under his skin. His cock pulsed in the tentacle’s coil and the tentacle drank. He shook. He laughed once, raw, real. “Garrick,” he called. “Garrick, where are you.” But Garrick was not in him anymore.
Garrick had been brought out. A tentacle came to Vesper’s arse before Vesper went under and pressed gently at the rim. Garrick emerged. The Oracle wanted him separate.
I saw Garrick stand alone in the grass for a heartbeat. Small. Looking up. A tentacle came down over his eyes. Soft, dark, blindfold-warm. Garrick did not move. He trusted it. His shoulders dropped. His hands relaxed at his sides. He went still.
Then the Oracle brought the world to him.
I could not see Garrick’s sight because Garrick could not see. But I could see what the Oracle gave him. The tentacles around Garrick changed. They took on the shape of a sac. The shape of balls. The hot press of a male body’s warmth against his cheek. He stood blind in a forest of warm male presences he could not name. The Oracle was feeding him every smell at once. The musk of crew sweat. The salt of skin under skin. The tang of pre-cum on air. Hot breath. Damp wool. Wet silk. The copper smell that came from people who were close to each other.
His mouth opened. He did not say anything. His cock was hard and his hands stayed at his sides. He did not touch himself. He could not. The Oracle was doing it for him and not with hands.
He came standing. No touch. His cum pulsed out of him and fell on the grass between his feet. He did not stagger. He breathed once, hard, and stood.
Lirael was on his knees. The slimy tentacle was in his mouth. It was thick. It was the size of a cock that filled the mouth and pushed against the back of the throat. Lirael’s hands were wrapped around the base. He was sucking. He was working it. He was not the formal elf of the morning. The mouth around the tentacle was shameless. The chin was wet. The wet ran onto his chest. A second tentacle was pressed flat against the back of his trousers, against his arse from outside, not entering, leaning. His warm-lap plug must be on because his hips were working against nothing. He was undone.
Pisson. He was receiving a proper shower of piss. He was being drenched in gallons of piss from the tentacle above him like he was standing under a waterfall. He jumped like a kid that has discovered water, swirling, dancing. His mouth was open and his eyes were shut and he was joyful. It was an incredible thing to see.
The first orgy was done but the Oracle was not done with me. A fresh tentacle, smaller than the others, came up at my lower lip. I opened and the head pushed onto my tongue. The taste was Joren’s warm dick in the morning. Exactly. The clean salt at the slit when he first stirred. The musk of his skin under the silk after a night curled around me. The undertone of the nest’s accumulated layers, sweat and dried pre-cum and the iron note of long sleep. I had tasted this every morning for five years. I was tasting it now on an Oracle tentacle. The shape was wrong, the texture was wrong, but the taste was right. I ran my tongue along the underside of the head and the taste deepened. I closed my lips around it and breathed in through my nose and the smell was the smell. Joren’s morning cock, on the Oracle’s body.
The tentacle withdrew and another took its place. The taste changed between one swallow and the next. This one was Vesper. The scholar’s sweat at the back of the tongue. The Veil-tang underneath, sharp and metal, like a coin held against the gum. The dry skin smell that was only Vesper, drier than Joren’s, sharper. The Oracle was wearing Vesper now. I had never had Vesper in my mouth. I had it now. The Oracle had taken the scent off Vesper’s body across the clearing and put it on this tentacle for me. The shape under my tongue was not Vesper’s cock. It was the Oracle’s. The taste was Vesper’s.
The next one came hot. The taste was Lirael’s piss. Sharp, clean, elven, the cut of it across the back of my throat the way it cut the morning when he gave it to me. Not the slow leak of pre-cum on a stalled tentacle. The full hot stream. The Oracle had pulled Lirael’s piss-taste out of my memory and pressed it onto the head against my lips and the head was leaking it. Hot. Real. I swallowed and the swallow was Lirael’s piss-swallow, the elven sting at the root of the tongue, the small jolt up the spine.
Then another tentacle, and the taste on this one stopped me. I had not had this taste in five years. The night Lirael was under the grip of the Evil. The night Joren fought Lirael. The night Joren fucked Lirael who fucked me, the three of us in a chain, Joren deep in Lirael, Lirael deep in me, the working of the ritual running through all three bodies. The taste was the whole of that night. Joren’s battle-sweat, sharper than his rest-sweat, more metal in it. Lirael’s release, sour at the edge then cleaned mid-stream by the act itself. The press of Lirael’s hips against my arse. Joren’s hand on my shoulder from the far end of the chain. The Oracle had pulled it out of me whole. I did not interpret it. I reported it. The taste was there. It was real. I took the tentacle deeper and the taste went deeper.
The scent of all four filled my nose at once and the four tastes mixed on my tongue. The plug was still pulling at me from inside. The taste was still in my throat.
Joren was still standing. He was the centre of it. Four tentacles on him. Smooth on the shaft. Slimy on the sac. Hairy on the perineum, working slow circles. Muscular around the thigh. He had not moved his feet. He gave. His cum fired into the smooth tentacle and the tentacle took it. I heard him groan, low, real. He gave again. He gave a third time, and a fourth. He kept giving. The Oracle kept taking. His ten inches stayed hard. The shaft stayed straight. The pulse of him was steady through all of it.
The tentacles slowed.
The orgy was finishing itself. The pre-cum on me dried into the wet on me. The amber light under the Oracle steadied. The presence in the centre of the circle was warmer than before. The Oracle had been fed. The Oracle had fed. The tentacles around me lowered their heads to the grass.
The tentacles uncurl. Slow. They do not let go all at once. They unwind, lower themselves, draw back toward the central mass without ever fully releasing us. They become a thing to lean on rather than a thing to be held by.
The Oracle pulls us in. Not commanded. We move. Joren first. He takes one step toward the central mass and a tentacle becomes a low support behind his back and he sits against it. Vesper rolls onto his side and props himself against another, his cheek to the dark warm surface. Lirael walks on his knees to the mass and presses his forehead to it. Pisson, shimmering still, lies down on his back beside Lirael and stares up.
I am pressed against Joren’s chest by his own hand, the broad palm flat over me, the heat of his ribs behind me. Garrick has slid back into Vesper without ceremony. I see the small shape disappear and Vesper exhale.
The Oracle holds us. The tentacles drape over us, loose. Each man is half on the warm dark mass and half in the loop of tentacle. No grip. No pressure. The pulse of the Oracle is slow under our backs.
It is a hug. That is all. A hug from a thing the size of a house.
A hum starts. Low. Not in the ears. In the bones of the chest. It runs through Joren and through me where I lie under his hand. The hum is contentment. It runs slow under my back.
No one speaks for a long time.
Then a small pulse goes through the crew. I am thumb-size against Joren’s chest and I feel it on him before I feel it on me. The cum that had been on his belly is gone. The cum on his hand around me is gone. My own thumb-sized skin, the sticky on me from when I was big at the orgy, is drawn off in the same heartbeat. Clean. Joren’s palm cups me dry against his dry chest.
Then I feel what is not pulsing. Far off, lower on Joren’s body, the silk undertrousers stay exactly as they were. The nest. I know it without looking. The magic skips the nest. Holta said it would. The magic knows when a sprite has already tended a thing and there is no point cleaning what has been properly tended. The accumulated layers of five years are still in there, soaked, layered, untouched. The nest is empty of me right now but it is not empty of itself.
A second pulse, further off. Vesper’s trousers, then his shirt. I hear him breathe in sharp. He runs a hand down his chest where there had been cum a moment before. Lirael’s robes pulse next. The chin that had been wet is dry. The chest that had run with slick is clean. Garrick from inside Vesper makes a small sound through Vesper’s mouth, the kind he makes when his own cloak has done it to him.
Vesper raises his head off the Oracle’s mass. “Holta.”
Lirael laughs once, low. Even Pisson, who does not understand the name, smiles at the sound of the laugh. The crew loosens. The grove loosens with it.
The amber glow on Pisson is still there. He looks down at his own front. He is still wet, head to foot, with the Oracle’s clear thread of fluid. He looks at the dry crew around him.
“I have no magic clothes,” Pisson says. “But I am as formal as I will ever be. I am the High Priest of the Piss.” He says it without bowing his head. The shimmer on his shoulders catches the amber.
Lirael’s fingers find Pisson’s hand on the Oracle’s surface and rest there, two fingers across the back of the hand.
Then the Oracle speaks.
Not sound. Meaning. The Oracle puts it into each of our heads at the same instant and I know it is in everyone’s head because I see Vesper’s jaw move and Lirael’s eyes go to the sky and Pisson’s lips part and Joren’s chest go still under my back.
The Stone realm has no time. The Oracle gives it whole. Not slow time. Not fast time. No time. The word does not apply there. The realm is matter changing into matter, constant becoming, movement without before or after. A stone being does not remember yesterday because yesterday has no shape. There is no yesterday. There is no tomorrow. There is only what is happening, and what is happening never stops. If I asked one what it did the day before, the question would have no answer in it.
We have been getting this backward in our heads. The stones have not stopped. They cannot stop because there is nothing for them to stop in. They are moving. They are moving fast. They always have been. From their place we are the still ones.
To enter, we must match their speed. The Oracle shows it. We must push ourselves through our own time at speed until what looks like frozen geology resolves into movement. The realm only becomes visible from inside its own pace. We are not slowing down to meet it. We are accelerating until we can see the action that is already running.
Once we are inside, there is no clock to follow. No beginning. No end. Only the changing. We will be in it, not crossing it.
I feel Vesper's shoulder rise against the Oracle's mass. He has the shape of it.
You will need anchors. The Oracle gives "anchor" heavy and physical in the head. The anchor is not for inside the realm. Inside there is nothing to anchor to. The anchor holds the root of the self to the moment we left our own time, so that when we step out of the stone realm we step back into our world at the place we left it, and not somewhere ahead or behind. Without it we would come out wrong. Lost. The Oracle does not show the shape of the instrument. Only that it must bind at the root.
I feel Joren take the meaning of root in his body. His hand on me tightens for one count.
The patches are the problem. The Oracle gives this in one moment. All the patches. The walls in Thorendale. The cliffs on the east road. The lakebed at Ven. The bread ovens under the south wall. The crystalline thing in the plaza. The off-colour overlays the crew has been finding. They are all symptoms of one thing, and that thing is in the Stone realm. Every piece of matter in every realm comes from the Stone realm first. The crystallisation begins there and propagates outward. Thorendale’s patches are downstream pollution. We are looking at the runoff. The source is where we are going.
The baby stone is connected to this. The Oracle does not say how. The Oracle says it will be clear when we find the entrance.
The entrance will open when we find it. The Oracle does not give the place. It gives the nature of the lock. We must find the place ourselves.
Vesper speaks aloud. His voice is low and worn. “No time. Constant forward transformation. We accelerate to match. Anchors at the root or we lose the way back. The patches are downstream of the Stone realm.” He laughs once, short. “I had it the wrong way around. I was looking for slow.”
“Yes,” Lirael says, without lifting his head from the mass. “The old texts speak of the Stone realm as a place running ahead. I read it as poetry. It was not poetry.”
“The Elves will know the anchors,” Lirael says. “I will know when I see them. We were told there were instruments for this work, but the order did not keep them. The Elves did.”
Joren says nothing aloud.
Then the meaning shifts. The Oracle has spoken to the room. Now the Oracle speaks to one of us alone.
I feel it through Joren. His chest goes still under my back. Truly still. His breath holds. I do not hear what the Oracle says to him because the Oracle is not saying it to me. But I feel his body take it. His ribs lift once and stop. His hand on me presses harder for half a heartbeat and then loosens.
Through the bond a closed door. Not a wall. A door that has shut. Behind the door something the Oracle has said, and something the Servant said to him beside a fire at the end of our last night in Thorendale, the two of them now meeting in his head.
I do not press the door. He does not say anything aloud. The Oracle does not elaborate.
Twilight has come down on the grove without me noticing. The trees around us are dark. The Oracle’s amber glow is the only light. Lirael’s face shows in it as a pale shape.
“Anchors at the root,” Vesper says again, mostly to himself, working the idea in his hands.
Lirael lifts his head off the mass. His eyes find Pisson. Pisson is looking up at the canopy. The shimmer of the Oracle’s baptism is still on his skin, catching the amber.
The crew does not move. Everyone is still in the embrace. The hum of the Oracle is still under us.
Vesper turns his head toward Lirael. His voice is stripped. The usual edge is gone. The orgy and the meaning together have taken it out of him.
“Lirael,” Vesper says. “Tell me about the link with him.”
Lirael does not deflect. He does not look at Pisson. He answers Vesper directly. “Elven bonding can hold two beings for a life. But it does not happen on the first attempt. It rarely happens on the second. I have had seven bonds. None of them held.”
Vesper waits.
“One lasted thirteen years,” Lirael says. “He was a singer at a court in the western forest. After the thirteenth year the bond thinned out. It was not anyone’s failure. It was not anyone’s betrayal. It thinned, the way a thread thins. We saw it and we let it go. Sometimes one of the two disengages. Sometimes both at once. It is weather among us. There is no shame in it.”
His formal register is holding, just. His hand rests flat on the dark warm surface of the mass.
“And Pisson,” Vesper says.
A pause.
“Pisson and I have sensed something could begin,” Lirael says. “No more than that. The sense itself is real. It is too early to know if it will hold.”
The precision slips on the last sentence. The disappointment is in it. Lirael does not look up.
Vesper is quiet for a count. Then, dry: “But Pisson is human.”
“I know,” Lirael says.
A longer count. Lirael’s hand opens flat on the Oracle’s surface. “And actually I do not know. Elven bonding works on elves. What it does to a human, I have never tried. The old texts do not speak of it. I am as far ahead in this as Pisson is.”
Pisson has been listening. The smile is still on his face. One of the tentacles where he is lying stirs and lifts him, carrying him slow across the dark mass toward Lirael. He comes to rest beside him. Lirael turns his head. Pisson leans in and kisses him. A real kiss. A French kiss. Lirael's eyes widen for half a heartbeat. Then he leans into it. The kiss holds for a long count. When Pisson pulls back, Lirael is looking at him.
Pisson says, "The Oracle told me I should do this."
The crew stirs. Bodies that have been held release themselves slow. The hum begins to drop in tone.
Joren’s hand presses me once against his chest. I feel his breath start to come back. The closed door is still closed but he is moving with the rest.
We pull ourselves out of the embrace.
The Oracle lets us go. The tentacles uncurl from us one at a time and withdraw toward the central mass without sound. The mass itself settles down into the air of the clearing, smaller than it was, and dims to a faint amber pool of light at the centre of the grass. It does not vanish. It rests.
The grove is dark. The amber from the Oracle is enough to see by. The grass is wet and pressed.
We make camp inside the circle. No one suggests it aloud. The crew just lies down where it is. No fire. The Oracle is warm enough through the ground. Lirael lies on his back beside Pisson. Their hands are not touching. Their hands are close. Vesper rolls onto his side and pulls his coat over himself and Garrick. He is asleep before the coat is fully arranged.
Joren lies on his back near the edge of the circle. He has not spoken since the Oracle spoke into him. He pulls his trousers off and folds them under his head. The silk garments take the dust off themselves with a small quiet pulse. He is naked from the waist down on the cool grass.
He takes me off his chest with two fingers. Lifts me. Lowers me onto his belly. His cock lies thick along the line of his hip, half-hard, warm, the foreskin loose at the head.
His other hand moves the foreskin forward. The skin rolls over the head into a soft hood that closes at the tip. He opens it with his thumb. He picks me up again and tucks me inside.
Warm. Dark. Wet. The inside of him.
I lie curled in the small hood of skin with my cheek against the slit. The pre-cum is already on my face. The smell is Joren’s, pure, no nest layers, no silk, no day. Just the inside of his foreskin where nothing else has been.
His heartbeat is over my head, slow, through the thin skin between me and his cock.
He closes the foreskin over me with his thumb and lets go.
I am sealed in.
Outside, very faint, the breathing of the others. The Oracle’s low hum, slower now. Lirael’s hand finally finding Pisson’s, two fingers against two fingers.
Night passes.
At some point I come back to myself. The hood around me is tighter. Joren has stirred toward morning. His cock is filling. The walls of the foreskin are pressing in along my body, warm and snug and slick with the night’s pre-cum. The slit has opened a little and a fresh bead has touched my cheek.
I am inside Joren’s body.
It is dawn.
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