Disclaimer: (Sex scenes types. Warning - spoilers.) This story contains explicit gay sexual content including mass involuntary urination, piss play (golden shower between partners, piss drinking, piss used as architectural element), oral sex performed on 67 people simultaneously, anal sex (Felching), cum collection and cum storage, underwear and bulge worship , size difference, and physical transformation. All characters are adult men. All sexual activity between protagonists is consensual. Some scenes depict magical transformation as part of a fantasy setting; these are fictional and not endorsements. No underage content.
The Elven Realm
We had walked since morning. The light went copper through the trees. I was small in Joren's underwear, riding his cock on the right side, the sac warm behind me and the shaft a long wall against my back. Every step rocked me forward. Every step rocked me back. I counted them for a while and then I stopped.
He smelled of clean sweat over the salt-bread baseline that meant Joren. I pressed my face against the shaft and breathed in once. Twice. The third time I held it.
"You are smelling me," Joren said through the bond.
"I am cataloguing you."
"Same thing."
"Not the same thing. A catalogue is for later."
"For later when?"
"For when I cannot reach."
His hand went to his bulge. Not to me directly. To the cloth over me. Fingers pressing through, finding the shape of my back. He did it without thinking. I had watched him do it a hundred times. He did not know he did it. I did not tell him.
"You are thinking about dinner," I said.
"I am thinking about a bed."
"Same thing."
"Not the same thing."
I laughed in the bond. He did not laugh back but his hand pressed harder for a second and that was the same.
He shifted his stride to clear a root and the shaft rolled in the heat of the walk and pinned my leg against the seam of the cloth. I pushed at it. It did not move. I got a knee to the sac and shoved and it rolled back the other way and now my arm was under it.
"Move it," I said.
"Move what."
"You know what. You have rolled over me."
"I am walking."
"You are walking on top of me."
His hand came to the front of the cloth. His thumb found the lump of the shaft through the fabric and lifted it a finger's width off me. I pulled my arm free and got my back to the wall of him again. The cloth settled. The space was mine.
"Better," I said.
"You live in a fold of me," Joren said. "You do not get to file a complaint."
"I am noting it for the record."
His hand pressed once and stayed.
At the front, Lirael walked quiet. He had not spoken since the noon stop. His back was straight. His hands were in his sleeves. Beside him Pisson was also quiet, but his head turned toward every sound. A bird in the trees. A branch breaking somewhere off the road. The water that I could hear now though I could not see it yet. Pisson heard it before I did. His ear turned.
Vesper was behind them, dry as he had been all day, the ink still on his fingers from the morning notes. "These trees are wrong," Vesper said, to no one. "Count the leaves. They do not move when the wind moves." No one answered him. He kept walking. Garrick was at the rear, watching the trees. Not nervous. Working. His eyes went to the gaps between the trunks and not the trunks.
The road narrowed. The trees thinned. Then the gate.
Two living trees bent toward each other, the branches woven where they met above the path. The trunks pulsed slow. A glow that came and went. In and out. Like breathing. The same rhythm as a chest rising and falling. Between the two trunks the air did something I could not name. A thickness. A waiting.
The fabric pressed against Joren's skin carried a mineral charge through to me. Not the wrong-cold of the patches. A clean charge that ran up through my spine and along my ribs and out into the small bones of my hands. A hum that used me as the bone it sang through. Joren felt it. His hand went to his bulge again, slower this time, fingers pressing through the cloth and finding me warm under them. The current between us and the gate ran through the place where his palm sat. The fabric between. His skin. My skin. The two trees ahead. The bones of my hands buzzing in the dark of the cloth.
Lirael stopped at the boundary. Turned. He met each of us with his eyes. Garrick. Vesper. Pisson. Joren. He looked at Joren's bulge for the second it took to find me through the cloth.
"The elves know we are coming," Lirael said.
No one asked how he knew.
We crossed.
The air thickened, then opened. We were through.
The landscape opened. A window going up in a closed room. The trees here had silver leaves. The grass was pale and moved in patterns that I could not follow with my eyes because my eyes were too small and they passed too fast. The water beside the road flowed in two directions at once. I watched it for a moment and then I stopped because I did not want my head to hurt.
The buildings were woven from the living wood. No seams. No nails. Branches grown into walls and floors and stairs while the tree was still alive and then the tree kept being alive around them. Everything was elegant in a way Thorendale was not. Thorendale was built. This was grown.
By the time we reached the outer court, a procession had already formed. They emerged from the buildings without being called. Tall. Lean. The ears long and pointed. The skin had a faint silver sheen in this light. They were beautiful and I looked at them too long. Joren felt me looking.
"Stop staring," he said.
I am cataloguing.
You are staring.
I climbed out of his collar to perch on his shoulder. Same size. The warm smell of him still on me. From here I could see the king come down the steps.
His name was spoken once. Lirael said it quiet. The shape of the word did not stay in my head and I forgot it the moment after I heard it because of what happened next.
The king greeted us. Joren answered. Then the king turned his face to me and welcomed me by name. He said it in elven. I understood him. The words passed through the bond between Lirael and the realm and into me as meaning. I did not know the sound of what he said. I knew what he meant.
"Welcome, small one. Welcome to the realm."
I opened my mouth to answer him.
Then his stream started.
He was standing on the steps. He was mid-sentence. The front of his robes went dark from the inside out. He stopped talking. He looked down. For a moment his jaw was set, his eyes fixed on the floor. He looked down at his own robes. His mouth was open. He did not speak.
Then the guard on his left did the same. Then the guard on his right. Then the page behind them. Then the councilman in the green sash, then the steward, then the boy holding the welcome bowl. Every male elf in the courtyard. Streams darkening robes, running between cobblestones, pooling in the pale grass.
We were not exempt.
Joren's hand went to his bulge and his face changed. Not pain. Pressure. I felt it through the cloth against me, the sudden tight fullness of his bladder that he had no say in. He pissed where he stood. The cloth warmed around me from the front, the heat coming through the fabric in a wave. I was sitting on his shoulder. The piss ran down inside his trousers under me. I could smell it before I could feel it.
"This is not me," Joren said through the bond. His jaw was set. "I am not doing this."
"I know."
"I do not piss at a king's door."
"I know, Joren."
Vesper swore under his breath. "Every realm has its one thing." He looked down at the dark spreading on his own trousers and did not finish the thought. Garrick looked down at his own trousers and then at the cobblestones and then at nothing. His jaw worked once and stopped. Lirael said nothing. His stream was already running. He was looking at Pisson.
Pisson was dry.
His trousers were clean. His face was pale. Every other male in the courtyard was voiding and Pisson stood among them clean and trembling. He knew. I could see he knew.
"Pisson," Lirael said.
Pisson's hands went to his ears. "They hurt," he said. His voice was high. "I feel they are going to break."
The sound was what I noticed first. A hundred streams at once on stone, on grass, on fabric. The smell rose off the whole court warm and sharp and mineral, a thick column of it climbing toward the silver leaves. The king stood in his wet robes and he was not ashamed. He was watching Pisson. The crew was wet and uncomfortable. Pisson was dry. His fingers were pressed to his ears and his mouth was open and his eyes had found Lirael and they did not leave. The elves were dripping. The pooled piss ran between cobblestones toward drains carved into the edges of the court. The sun came through and the wet patches in the pale grass shone. Above us the silver-leafed trees were still. They were waiting.
Then Pisson's ears began to grow.
The soft human round of them stretched. Pointed. The bone inside reshaped and I could hear it from where I sat on Joren's shoulder, a small dry crack like a green stick breaking under cloth. His hair shifted colour from the root outward, falling gold down the length of each strand, the brown pushed out at the ends. His skin changed. The silver-honey of the elven complexion came up from underneath the human skin and replaced it. His shoulders widened. His waist narrowed. His chest deepened. His clothes did not fit the new architecture of him. The shirt split at the shoulders. The trousers split at the thighs. The fabric fell away in pieces. He was taller now by a hand. His stance widened, crotch-forward, the round of his ass visible as the split cloth dropped. The transformation was not a blur. Each change came in sequence. Ears. Hair. Skin. Bones. Stance. When the last wave passed he was an elf. The puppy face was still there underneath. The young brightness of him was still there. But it was rendered now in elven proportion and the other elves in the courtyard turned their heads to look.
"By the rod," Vesper said in the bond, low, to all of us. He had stopped caring about his own wet trousers. He was watching Pisson and his mouth was open. Garrick had taken a step forward without knowing he had taken it, one hand half-raised, ready to catch the new height if it pitched over. Lirael lifted two fingers without looking back and Garrick's hand went down.
Joren's hand came off his bulge. His body went still. His face had nothing on it, no set to the jaw, no line at the mouth.
"Your face has gone flat," I said in the bond.
He did not answer.
Pisson looked down at his own body. His hands were longer. His fingers tapered. He touched his own ears with the tapered fingers. He touched his own face. He was breathing fast.
"Lirael," he said.
Lirael stepped toward him. Did not speak. Stood close enough that Pisson could fall against him if he needed to. He did not touch him yet. One step short. Close enough that the air between them was warmer than the air around.
Pisson's body moved on its own.
His spine bent backward. Farther than a spine should bend. His arms opened. Palms turned up. His cock, which was hard from the transformation, angled toward the sky. I watched it from the shoulder. The shaft was long now in elven proportion, the head a flushed silver-pink.
He pissed.
The stream went up. Not an arc. A column. Straight into the air, past the tree line, past the tallest spire of the elven building behind the steps. The court watched it rise. It kept going. It was past the height where a stream should break and become drops and it did not break. It stayed a column. It rose.
It reached the clouds.
The first cloud it touched dissolved. Not parted. Dissolved. The blue opened where the cloud had been. The stream kept going, climbing into the new blue, and the next cloud over began to thin from its farthest edge. The clouds went in order of how far from us they were, the far ones first, the near ones last. The king tilted his head back to follow it. The guards tilted their heads. Every face in the courtyard was turned up.
"That is one man emptying a sky."
The sky above the Elven realm was clear now. No clouds anywhere. A blue I had not seen since I was thumb-sized in the high grass of Thorendale.
The stream stopped.
Pisson straightened. His spine returned to its curve. He blinked. He looked at the sky, then at the cobblestones, then at Lirael.
The last drop came off the head of his cock and met the stone.
Every male in the courtyard was dry.
No trace. The pooled piss between the cobblestones was gone. The wet robes were dry. The wet grass was clean. Joren's trousers under my shoulder were dry. The cloth against my back, dry. The smell was gone. The mineral column above the court was gone. It happened. Then it was unhappened. The court was dry. The stone was dry. The grass was dry. No man had pissed here.
Pisson stood in the middle of it. He was naked. His clothes were pieces on the cobblestones around his feet. He was shivering, not from cold. Lirael reached him. Pulled him against his chest. One hand went to the back of Pisson's head and held him there.
Pisson cried. Not from pain. His hands hung open at his sides. His chest shook.
The king stood in his dry robes.
He looked at Pisson. He looked at the clear sky. He looked at Lirael. Then he turned to the court and his voice carried to the back walls.
"I name this day. I name this hour. The realm has known no such event in living memory or in any record of the dead. The sky above us was not open. Now it is open. The clouds did not part. They dissolved. This is not a thing the realm did. This is a thing that passed through one man."
He turned. He looked at Pisson.
"The realm will know him. The realm will teach him. The realm will serve him as he will serve the realm. We have had no High Priest of the Piss to walk among us. We have one now, under our own sky, made plain to the whole court. He will dine with us tonight. The kitchens will prepare the feast for him."
Pisson was still pressed against Lirael. He nodded against Lirael's chest. Lirael felt the nod against his sternum and looked at the king.
Joren stepped forward.
"We will stay," he said.
The king gestured. The stewards began to move. The court broke into motion. Elves peeled off in groups. The stillness collapsed into people doing work.
An elf stopped. Pulled his own cloak from his shoulders. Handed it to Lirael without a word. Lirael took it. Draped it over Pisson's back. The elf walked on.
Lirael did not move. Pisson was still against his chest, still being held, the hand still on the back of his head. The court flowed around them like water around two stones.
Pisson spoke low against Lirael's neck. I could hear him from the shoulder because I was very small and very close and because Pisson was speaking into Lirael's skin.
"The Oracle said a change was coming to me. He said I should not be afraid of it. He said I was a special being."
Lirael's hand on the back of his head moved once. A stroke. One.
"You are," Lirael said.
He pulled back to look at Pisson's face. The new face. The elven proportion of it. He looked for a long second.
"You were the most beautiful man I had ever seen," Lirael said. "And now you are the most beautiful being I will ever see."
He kissed him. Once, then again. His hand on Pisson's jaw. The second kiss was longer.
His other hand went down while he kissed. I heard the rustle of fabric. His robe parted at the front. He pulled Pisson closer, their hips pressing together. Lirael put his cock out, pressed shaft against shaft.
Lirael started pissing.
It ran onto Pisson's crotch. Over his cock, his balls. Pisson's breath caught against Lirael's mouth. He did not pull away. His hands came up and gripped Lirael's robe at the sides. He pressed closer into the stream.
I could see his face. The comfort on it. Lirael was pissing to calm him.
The piss should have cooled. It always cooled. But the warmth stayed. Constant against him. He noticed it. I felt him notice it.
His mind had been a storm since he arrived. Everything had changed on him. But this, the warmth not cooling, was different. A good thing. A strange good thing. His hands tightened on Lirael's robe.
He tested it. He wished the wetness gone. His skin went dry. The piss stayed warm while he wanted it. Then it was gone. No cold. No shiver. No wet mess. Just dry skin and the warmth that had been there.
I felt him relax through the channel. His breathing slowed.
Then the channel stopped. A cut. Not a fade. Pisson was gone from it. The place where he had been was empty, the way a struck note is empty the moment after the string is stilled.
He stayed against Lirael. Eyes shut. He had no idea I had been in there. I had no idea how I had been.
I pressed my palm flat on Joren's bulge. I filed it away. I did not say anything. His hand covered mine through the cloth.
Joren was watching from a step away. His hand had found his bulge again. His fingers pressed through the cloth to me. I was very small. I pressed back through the fabric, my shoulder against his palm.
"That was a good kiss," I said.
"It was," Joren said.
The Grand Hall was not like any building I had been inside.
The walls were alive. The walls were tree and the tree was still living and the sap was moving in the walls. Piss ran through channels carved into the living wood. Not stored. Not waste. It was part of the building. The channels glowed faintly amber where they passed through the walls. The light in the hall came from piss-crystals set into the ceiling. Each crystal was a captured prism. The light they cast moved slowly across the hall as the crystals turned on their settings. The amber swept across the long table and then back, a slow tide.
The table was one slab of living wood. Polished to a gloss you could see your face in. Wide enough for thirty. It curved at the ends so every seat faced the centre.
We were seated at the high table. Pisson next to Lirael, now dressed in elven robes that fit his new body. Pale green at the shoulders, deeper green at the hem. He was quiet. He watched everything. He had not let go of Lirael's sleeve since they sat down.
We had a moment before the elders came. The first since the courtyard. Vesper put his cup down and looked at the front of his own robe, where the wet had been and was not.
"I have wet myself in front of kings before," Vesper said. "Never with so many men doing it at the same instant. There is almost a comfort in company."
"You felt the pressure too," Garrick said. "No say in it."
"My body decided," Vesper said. "I was a guest at the decision."
Joren said nothing. He had felt it. I had felt it through him. He ate.
Garrick turned his cup on the wood. "What is a High Priest of the Piss?" he said. He was not asking Pisson. He was asking the table. "What does the man do?"
Lirael was quiet a moment. "I do not know," he said. "I named him. The name came to me whole, at the fountain, with the whole world voiding around us. It came without instructions. I have been waiting since then to learn what it asks of him." He looked at Pisson. "The elves may know more than I do. That is why this matters."
Pisson did not say anything. He was holding Lirael's sleeve and watching the crystals turn. It was too much to hold and to speak at the same time.
Lirael reached under the table. Pulled the pouch from his belt. Opened it. He put the detection stones on the polished wood. He put the limestone baby beside them.
The elders gathered. Three of them, then four, then six.
Lirael did not sit. He stood and turned to the wall behind us. The one with the two patches, above the third piss-channel, where the amber light caught the surface wrong. He pointed with his open hand.
"There," he said. "On the wall. Two patches."
The elders turned. They looked at the wall where his hand aimed. They looked at each other.
The eldest one, white at his temples and grey at his throat, said, "I do not see anything on the wall."
The others shook their heads. No shame in it. They told him what they did not see the same way they would tell him the time.
Lirael did not argue. He took one of the detection stones from the pouch on the table. He crossed to the eldest elder and put the stone in his hand. He closed the elder's fingers over it.
"Look again."
The elder looked. His face did not change at first. Then the stillness came. The hand holding the stone went still. His mouth went still. The stillness moved down into his shoulders, his chest.
"I see it," he said. His voice had dropped. "On the wall. Like a crack in the air. Like a vein of something that does not belong here."
He turned the stone in his fingers. He looked at the wall again. He did not blink.
"A sickness in the middle of the wood."
The stone passed to the next elder. He held it. He looked. The same stillness took him.
"It is not a crack," he said. "It is growing. The wood is grey where the patch sits."
The stone went to the next elder. Then the next. Each one held it. Each one saw. Each one went still the same way. Each one dropped his voice to the same register.
The eldest elder took the stone back. He looked at the wall one more time.
"We have been eating under it," he said. "Sleeping in this hall. And we have not seen it until you put a rock in our hands."
One of the younger elders, a lean elf with his hair bound at the nape, said, "The roots have been complaining. For weeks. We have felt something wrong under the hall. We did not know it was on the wall above our heads."
The eldest elder set the stone on the table. His hand stayed on it.
"If this is on our walls, how long has it been here."
Lirael took the stone back. He put it in the pouch.
"I do not know. The patches do not follow time the way we do."
The eldest elder looked at the wall again. He could not see it anymore. The stone was out of his hand. But he kept looking at the space where it had been.
"And if they spread while you are in the Stone realm."
"Then we fix the Stone realm before they spread."
The eldest elder did not answer. He put his cup down.
Vesper looked at Joren across the table. Joren looked back.
The amber light swept across the council's faces. Pisson was watching the limestone baby move from hand to hand. He did not reach for it. The new elven fingers in his lap stayed still.
The food came. Bread that was still warm. A clear broth with green herbs in it. Roasted root vegetables I did not know the names of. Wine that tasted of honey and flowers.
The conversation widened.
The council wanted the full account. Lirael gave it. What we had discovered. What the patches meant. What the Servant had said about needing many eyes. The elders listened without interrupting. The amber light moved across plates. The piss-channels in the walls hummed. I felt it in my back teeth. A low frequency. Constant.
The Stone realm crisis came out properly. The first time anyone outside the crew had heard the whole shape of it.
Lirael explained. The Stone realm ran on parallel time, slow and retrograde. The patches in the other realms were the Stone realm's sickness bleeding through. We had to enter the Stone realm to fix what was wrong there. The detection stones were tools for locating the wrongness. The limestone baby was for the same purpose, but at a different scale. He used his hands to show how the scales related. The elders nodded.
The oldest elder, the one with white at his temples, put down his cup.
"You will need cockrings," he said. "If you enter the Stone realm without them, the stone-flesh contact will take you. You will never leave."
Vesper sat up straighter. He had his small notebook out already. The pen ready.
The elder explained. The cockring had to be forged from yourself. He did not explain how. It would be obvious when the crew stood at the entrance of the Stone realm. A forging ritual that had to be performed at the moment of entry, not before. He demonstrated the shape with his hands. Vesper wrote. Garrick was watching the elder's hands and not his face. I saw Garrick's eyes track each movement. He would be able to make this object even if Vesper's notes went in a river.
The council agreed. The cockring knowledge would be given before we left. Vesper closed his notebook.
I voice-noted Joren. "Next time there is group sex, I should collect every man's cum in your underwear. The blessing holds fluids. The cloth could be a store for the Stone realm."
Joren did not stop chewing.
"You want to carry every man's cum in my underwear?" he said.
"I want a full pantry," I said. "A man should travel with provisions."
His mouth moved. It was the nearest thing to a laugh he would produce at this table. He ate another piece of bread. He did not say no.
The main course was cleared. The conversation still moved. Then the music began.
A flute from somewhere above. A low drum from below. The sound moved through the hall like water through roots. The piss-channels in the walls pulsed brighter with the drum.
The amber light from the crystals swept in a pattern, faster, then slower, then held at the centre of the table.
A section of the centre floor lowered. The stone path descended in steps. Light rose from below, warm gold through piss-crystal and pale amber of polished living wood.
The Table Servants came up.
They emerged in pairs, not single file. They criss-crossed as they climbed. Each pair crossed the other's path. Their bodies moved in opposite directions through the same narrow stair. They wore tunics of deep green, the colour of the realm's oldest leaves, belted at the waist with silver. Their faces were calm, composed, trained. They did not look at the guests above. They looked at the space between them. Each carried a silver bowl in one hand.
At the top, they broke formation. A spread. Each servant took a different path around the table, walking the full length before arriving at his position. The king's servant walked the entire outer edge of the slab before he came to rest behind the king. The youngest servant would attend me. He walked the full inner curve. Past every elder. Past the king. Past every guest. He knelt in the empty space beside my chair.
They did not kneel at once. They stood a moment. Then every servant knelt together, as though one string pulled them. The silver bowls set on the floor beside them.
Above the table, the conversation continued. The same measured tone about cockring materials, about realm priorities, about which routes the crew should take into the Stone realm.
But the crew watched. We all watched. The entertainment had arrived. Below, the work was starting.
The king asked Joren about Thorendale's tower. Joren answered. He said the tower had had repairs to the upper stair. He said the cisterns were full from the spring rain. His voice did not change. His free hand lay flat on the table and did not move.
Below the table, an elven boy had Joren's cock in his mouth.
I said through the bond, "Your voice did not move. There is a boy on your cock and you are telling the king about a stair."
Joren said, "It is a stair. There is not much to tell."
I had grown to full size for the table. My own attendant knelt between my legs. I did not watch his technique. I felt it. The boy was his size, Joren's size, bearing that had meaning. At the table I was a guest. I was served.
Joren's hand went under the table. Not to stop the boy. To rest on the back of his head. A hand on the nape. Not guiding. Acknowledging.
I said through the bond, "I like him."
Joren said, "He knows what he is doing."
The conversation above continued. The elders asked Vesper about the Veil. Vesper answered, his voice dry and steady. Below, the young elf attending Vesper worked his thighs with both hands. Fingers pressed into the muscle above the knee. Mouth at Vesper's belt buckle.
I voice-noted Joren. "Vesper is explaining the Veil with a boy at his belt."
"He likes to do two things at once," Joren said.
"He would tell you it is one thing," I said. "The more the boy works him the drier he gets. By the buckle there was nothing left in his voice."
I shrank back down to small. I climbed down Joren's arm. I moved fast. I went under the edge of the table where the cloth met the wood. I dropped into the lower world.
Under the table the light was amber from the piss-crystals above. The space was low. The ceiling was the underside of the slab and the slab was alive and the amber came through it like light through a leaf held up to the sun. The smell was warm and thick. Sex and live wood and the soft sweat of young men working close together.
Above me the conversation had not stopped. The elders were still on the routes into the Stone realm, which pass was shorter, which was safer. I could hear it through the slab, the measured voices, while under the slab a dozen men were being worked toward release. Nobody above let on. That was the trick of the hall. You held the talk steady and you let the rest happen where the cloth met the wood.
I found the head servant. He was the oldest of the boys. Silver at his temples already, though he was not old. Methodical. Calm. He was overseeing the line. He saw me.
"Small one," he said.
He went to one knee. He was now at my height. Up close his eyes were the same silver as his hair. Silver without the shine of metal. Silver like water under cloud.
I told him. The blessing in the cloth. The store. Every drop of release, every edge of it. The fabric would be returned to me before dawn.
He nodded once. He looked down the line. He spoke low to the boy attending Joren.
Joren's boy stopped working. He sat back. He reached up and worked the fasten of Joren's trousers. He worked the boots. The trousers came off under the table. The underwear came off with them. Joren sat in his tunic with his cock bare against the chair, his thighs bare against the wood. He did not stop the boy. He did not look down. He took a sip of his wine.
He voice-noted me.
"What are you doing?"
"I am stocking the pantry."
His hand stayed on the table, wrapped around the cup. He did not ask further. He trusted. The boy folded the cloth once, tucked it into his own belt, and continued working Joren's cock with his mouth against bare skin.
I was under the table. Small. Moving between the servants. The head servant passed the cloth down the line. Each attendant took his turn. The first one caught his guest's release in his mouth, turned his head, and spat it into the folded cloth in the next boy's hand. The mouth-to-cloth stream was warm and white, and I watched it soak in. The blessing held everything.
A second attendant, working deep on an elder, held the throat-lock and came up with his mouth full. He did not swallow. He opened his mouth over the cloth and let the cum fall into the fold. A bead of it caught on his lower lip and he wiped it with his thumb and put his thumb in his mouth. Nothing wasted.
I voice-noted Joren. "The king is up there asking about cisterns. He does not know his boy is about to take him inside and carry it off in a cloth."
Joren said, "He will miss the cloth before he misses the rest."
The king's attendant had worked him through the entire meal. He had the king hard, the long elven shaft slick with spit, and when the king began to tighten for release, the attendant did not take him in his mouth. He turned. He braced his hands on the table edge. He guided the king's cock to his own ass and sank onto it in one motion. His spine arched. His jaw opened. He took the king's cum inside himself, held it, then pulled off and pushed it out into the cloth in the head servant's waiting hand. The cum came out warm and thin, mixed with his own, and it soaked into the fabric.
I reached Garrick's place at the table. His attendant was as large as Garrick himself, shoulders wide, hands thick at the knuckle. The two of them had their mouths in the same line. Neither had touched the other yet. The attendant saw me watching. He unlaced his own trousers. He pulled out his underwear, worn grey cloth that had been under him all night, and pressed it into Garrick's hand. Garrick took it. He lifted it to his face. He breathed in. The attendant's smell, the sweat and pre-cum of a long night's work, soaked into the cloth he had worn against his own skin. Garrick held it like a piece of bread he was deciding to eat. The attendant watched Garrick's nostrils flare and began to thumb his own cock through his trouser front, slow, hard against the fabric, making the shape of himself visible.
The cloth passed from hand to hand. Piss too. A boy who had taken his guest's piss in his mouth stood and let it dribble from his lips into the cloth. Precum from fingers wiped across the fold. The head servant's hand was the last stop for each pass. He folded the cloth in a new crease each time, so the wet spread inward, contained.
I watched it all. The smell rose under the table. Warm and layered. Joren's base musk, the scent I knew best. Then the others. The plant-sweetness of elven release. The mineral bite of cum held in a mouth and then released. The thin grass-smell of piss that had passed through a body. The heat built under the slab, the piss-crystals glowing amber above us, the work continuing.
I voice-noted Joren.
"Your boy is good."
"He is."
"Are you going to come for him?"
"I am going to come for him."
The amber swept across the table. The boys worked. The night went on.
The banquet thinned. The elders began to leave. The Table Servants filed back up through the lowered floor. The king's attendant was the last. He carried Joren's underwear folded in his hand. He did not bring it to me. He brought it to Joren. He knelt. He helped Joren step back into the cloth. The fabric pressed against Joren's skin, warm from the night's work.
Joren looked down at his own crotch. He did not feel the weight. He knew it was there. He looked at me.
I was full-sized again. He met my eyes.
"Sixty-seven men," I said through the bond. "Every guest. Every attendant."
"Sixty-seven," he repeated.
The blessing held.
He said nothing. He stood. The cloth was against his skin the same way it had always been, soft and warm and weightless. The blessing did not register the load. Only I would know what was in it. Only I could call it out.
We were led to the chambers. Up a stair grown from the wall, along a corridor where the piss-channels ran brighter in the night dark, into a set of rooms set aside for guests. The walls were woven living branches. The piss-light glowed soft from channels carved into the wood. There was a common sitting room and four private chambers off it. The air smelled of warm night through the woven windows.
Vesper sat heavily on a low bed in the sitting room. His writing hand was shaking very slightly. I saw it because I was small on Joren's shoulder and the sight is the same from any height. He saw me see it. He put the hand in his lap. He covered it with the other one.
Garrick stood at the threshold. He was looking out through the window-weave at the Elven realm under stars. His shoulders were the shape they are when he is at the end of a working day.
Lirael and Pisson were at the door of one of the private chambers. They had not spoken since the banquet. Lirael's hand was on the small of Pisson's back. Pisson was still looking at his own elven fingers. They went in. The door closed behind them. Lirael did not push him to talk.
Joren went into our chamber. I followed on his shoulder.
He sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled off his boots. He pulled off his tunic. He kept the trousers on.
I grew to full size and sat in his lap. The space between us closed. His hands came to my thighs. I put my forehead against his chest. The bond hummed there, low, under his breastbone.
"Banquets are longer when you are not part of the conversation," Joren said.
"I was part of the conversation," I said. "I just did not have to speak out loud."
His hand went into my hair. He held it there for a count. Then he let go.
I climbed down his chest. Down the front of his trousers. I found the waistband. I shrank as I went, down to home size, and slipped inside. Down into the nest. The cock-right-side. The familiar wall of his shaft against my back. The sac warm behind my legs.
The cloth was not the cloth I had left in the morning. It held the night now. I lay in it and read it layer under layer. Joren's musk on top, the salt-bread baseline, the thing I knew first. Under that the elven release, plant-sweet, sixty-odd men of it, each one a little different and all of them green at the root. Under that the thin grass-smell of piss passed through a mouth. Under that the spit of the boys, gone warm and sour in the folds. Under that the king, who sat at the bottom because he had come last and deepest, his scent thick and mixed with his attendant's. I pressed my face into the crease where the head servant had laid the final fold and I breathed it in and held it. The whole night was in there. The pantry was stocked. I lay in the middle of my stores with the shaft warm at my back and I named every man at that table by the print he had left in the cloth.
He voice-noted me.
"You are not full-sized."
"I am home-sized."
His hand came to his bulge. Fingers pressing through the cloth to find the shape of me. His palm covered the whole of my back. He did not move.
Through the wall I heard Vesper say something dry to Garrick. Garrick answered low. Through another wall I heard Lirael's voice, low, saying something to Pisson that I did not catch.
The bond hummed under all of it. Joren's hand on me. The cloth around me. The cock through the fabric above. The walls hummed with the piss-light. The amber swept once more and held.
The next morning the light was pale through the woven walls.
I was small in the nest. Joren sat up and the shaft rolled and dropped a fold of cloth over my head. "Move it," I said. I shoved it off myself before he could. I climbed out. Up his chest. To the shoulder as he dressed. I stayed there while he pulled on his tunic, his trousers, the boots. The cloth was inside his trousers now, weightless against his skin, the night's work pressed into it.
The crew gathered in the common room. The king's steward appeared in the doorway. He was older. Formal. He bowed.
"Pisson," he said.
Pisson looked at Lirael when he heard the name.
"The king requests his presence," the steward said. "For instruction. The duties of the High Priest. The realm's history. The nature of piss as divine element. The king will teach the first day himself. The councillors after."
Pisson looked at Lirael.
"Should I?" Pisson said.
Lirael was still. He waited one beat. Two.
"This is your work," he said. "Not mine."
Pisson held his gaze. Something passed between them I could not follow. I did not voice-note it.
"I will go," Pisson said. "I need to understand what is happening to me. I do not even know what it means to be a High Priest of the Piss." He looked at his own hands again, the long fingers, the tapered ends. "I do not know what I am turning into. My body did things yesterday that I did not tell it to do. The sky did things. If there is anyone who can teach me what I am, they are here. I would rather learn it than be afraid of it."
The steward waited in the doorway.
Lirael did not move while Pisson spoke. His jaw was still. His hands were in his sleeves. His back was straight. He watched Pisson and he did not say anything.
Pisson stood. He walked to Lirael and pressed his forehead against Lirael's shoulder for a long moment. It was the thing Lirael did when something was too big for words and he would not say it. Pisson had taken it from him without being taught. He held it there, forehead to shoulder, and then he pulled back.
He followed the steward out.
Lirael watched him go. He did not speak. He did not move until Pisson was out of sight at the end of the corridor.
"He is going to be good at it," Garrick said.
"He is good at everything," Vesper said. "It is exhausting."
"We should be proud of him," Joren said.
Lirael did not answer. He turned away from the door. His face was calm, formal, composed. His hands were in his sleeves. They were pressed against his own arms.
The crew packed.
The chamber was quiet. The piss-light was paler in the morning, almost gone. Vesper was tying the pouch with the detection stones. His hand stopped mid-knot.
He held up his right thumb.
"What does a crystallised digit look like?" he said.
He turned his hand so the light caught it. The thumb was pale. A translucent sheen over the skin. He pressed the index finger of his other hand against it. The index finger passed through the surface.
"I cannot feel it," he said.
Garrick crossed the room in one stride. Took Vesper's wrist. Held the thumb in his own hand. Looked at it close. Ran his own thumb over the surface.
"It is hard," Garrick said. "Like stone."
"It does not hurt," Vesper said. "It just is not there anymore."
The room went still.
Joren put down his pack. Crossed the room to where they stood. Looked at Vesper's thumb. He stood a moment. Then he turned. He sat on the bench by the bed. He pulled off his left boot. He pulled off the sock. He put his foot on the bench.
The crew watched.
The little toe on his left foot was crystalline. The same sheen. The same pale translucence.
"It happened after the river," Joren said. "I did not say anything because it did not matter."
The silence was the whole room.
Through the bond we both remembered the wrong-cold flicker at the river. I felt it then. I let it go. I had work to do. He had work to do. I told myself it was a passing thing. I knew it was not.
"So when you said it did not matter," Vesper said. "You had one too."
"I had one," Joren said. "I still have one. It has not spread."
He put the sock back on. Pulled the boot on. Stood.
"Whatever this is," Joren said to the crew, "we fix it in the Stone realm. We leave tomorrow."
He did not look at me when he said it. I did not look at him.
The pack went onto the bed. The pouch closed. The morning continued.
We assembled at the gate.
The two living trees were quiet in the morning light. The branches woven above us. The pulse of the glow slower in the day than it was at dusk.
Pisson was there. The king had sent him to see us off. He was wearing the elven robes that fit him now. Pale green at the shoulders, deeper green at the hem. His ears were still long. He would grow into them. The puppy face had survived in elven proportion.
Lirael and Pisson stood apart from the rest of us. Neither spoke. Then Lirael took Pisson's face in both his hands. Held it there. His palms covered Pisson's cheeks and his thumbs rested on the cheekbones.
"You will not forget what you are," Lirael said. "It does not matter how far you go into this."
"I know," Pisson said.
They stood like that, Lirael's palms on his face, the morning around them.
"How long," Pisson said. "You will come back for me."
"We go into the Stone realm and we come out," Lirael said. "I do not think it takes more than a few weeks. You will know more by then than I will. You will have to teach me."
"A few weeks," Pisson said.
"A few weeks," Lirael said. He did not promise it. It was the closest thing he had to a number. They both took it and held on to it.
They did not kiss. The hold was enough. Lirael's hands on Pisson's face. Pisson's eyes closing under them.
Lirael let go.
Pisson turned to the rest of us. Joren stepped forward. He put a hand on Pisson's shoulder. One squeeze. He and Pisson had never been close. Joren is the crew marker. If he acknowledges, the crew has acknowledged.
"Good work, Pisson," Joren said.
Vesper said something dry. He started the sentence and the voice cracked in the middle. He stopped. He cleared his throat. He did not try again.
Garrick put a hand on Vesper's shoulder. Said nothing.
"Stop touching me," Vesper said.
"No," Garrick said. He did not move the hand.
"My right hand does all the work," Vesper muttered.
"I am ambidextrous," Garrick said.
"Do you want a medal."
"I want you to stop whining."
Pisson laughed once. It was small. It was enough.
We did not say more. Pisson was not part of the crew. But when we walked to the gate it took a minute longer than it should. Lirael was the last through. He did not look back.
The walk away from the gate. The air thinning behind us as the Elven realm gave us up. The woven arch above the path faded into ordinary branches. The silver leaves were behind us. The pale grass was behind us. Lirael walked at the front of the line, hands in his sleeves, back straight. Garrick at the rear. Vesper between them, his right thumb in his other hand, holding the thumb. Joren in the middle. I was back in his underwear, small, riding the cock-right-side. The cloth was full now. The store was in it. The road ahead. The gate closing behind. Lirael's hands, in his sleeves.
The sun climbed.
The Elven realm was behind us. The air thickened for a moment as we crossed the boundary the other way, then nothing, then just the road ahead.
The Elven realm is behind us. The air thickens for a moment as we cross the boundary the other way, then nothing, then just the road ahead.
I scale up small to the shoulder. The morning is warm. The trees on this road are ordinary trees. Green leaves. Brown trunks. No glow.
Through the bond, I run the tally.
The store is full. The toe is stone. The thumb is stone. Pisson is behind us. Lirael's hands are in his sleeves.
"He is going to be good at pissing," I say aloud.
Joren does not need the name.
"He is."
We both chuckle. A small sound. We let it die.
"And we are going to be fine," Joren says.
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