When the universe fucks itself into being
Disclaimer: (Sex scenes types. Warning - spoilers.) This story contains explicit gay sexual content at geological and planetary scale, including: volcanic eruption as sustained orgasm, ocean-scale penetration compared to fisting, mountain sculpting into phallic and body shapes, buttocks, and a naked lesbian into a valley, diamond formation as geological orgasm, nuclear detonation as pleasure, and atmospheric-scale cum feeding. All characters are adult men operating as consensual elemental beings. No underage since age doesn't exist. The scale is cosmological.
I took the fragment from my pocket and held it in my open palm.
It was cold. Always cold. The surface part smooth, part fractured. It drank the light wrong.
I was at full size that morning. Outside the nest. Sitting with the crew in the community space where we had slept. Joren was to my right, legs stretched out on the stone floor. Vesper and Garrick sat across from me. Lirael was to my left, his pouch in his lap. We had been talking — recovery talk, comparing what each of us had felt during the amber pulse the day before, going back over the smell of rot-and-growth that had come through the wall.
I had been thinking about the fragment the whole time. The pull had not stopped.
I looked down at it in my hand. The cold seeped into my skin. The smooth edge caught the light and the fractured edge did not. I did not understand how a thing could have two relationships to light at once. I had stopped trying.
I had been turning it over in my fingers. Slowly. Without thinking. My thumb ran along the smooth edge, then caught on the fractured edge, then ran back. I had done this many times. The motion was automatic now.
I noticed myself doing it. I stopped. I looked at the fragment again.
Gold was across from me. The colour of Gold's surface shifted when Gold breathed — slow, deep movement that was not quite breath.
"Your hand is empty," Gold said. "What are you holding."
I looked at Gold. I looked at the fragment. I moved my hand a small amount, to show what is in it.
"It is here," I said. "I am holding it. You cannot see it."
"We see nothing."
The crew had gone still around me. I felt Joren shift. Vesper turned his head. Garrick stopped what he was doing with his hands.
I looked at the fragment again. I looked at Gold. I looked at the other stone people who had gathered at the edges of the space — the salt being, the granite person with the lichen-coloured streak, the smaller darker mineral who had asked Lirael about love. None of them were looking at my hand. They were looking at me, and at the empty air where my hand was.
I lifted the fragment higher. I held it between my thumb and forefinger. I showed it to them.
Nothing changed. Gold did not track it. The smaller darker mineral did not turn. The salt being kept its attention on my face.
"You truly cannot see it," I said.
"Truly," Gold said.
"This is corruption," I said. "Material that has gone wrong. Material that is not there in a way that looks like crystal but is actually absence. I have been carrying it since before this journey began."
Gold did not respond immediately.
"Thorendale has many of these," I said. "Patches in walls. In streets. In stones. The plaza monument was one. Whole sections of our city are dotted with this. Material disappearing into something that looks crystalline but is hollow."
Gold's surface was still. The other stone people had moved closer.
"We have been feeling this," Gold said. "We have not seen it. We have felt it in our own material as wrongness — as places where the cycle stops, where transformation hardens in place. The patches we have been telling you about. We have not been able to see what is causing them. We have only felt the effect."
Lirael's hand went to his pouch. He did not open it. He placed his palm against it.
"It is the same thing," Vesper said, slowly. "The patches in Thorendale. The Watchers in the between-space. The wrongness here. It is all the same material."
I felt the bond go alive between all of us. The recognition arrived at the same moment for each of us.
The bond between Joren and me had been steady all morning. Now it sharpened. Joren had been paying full attention to what I was holding. He had been carrying the fragment in his awareness as long as I had been carrying it in my hand.
Joren spoke now.
"We brought you something," he said. "We almost forgot."
Joren sat forward. He looked at the stone people. He had let the rest of us do most of the talking for a long time. He took the floor now.
"At the end of our last journey," he said, "we went to a realm we call the Lesbian Realm. A place of women. They give birth to all beings in the realms — men, women, stone, all of it. Their fountain produces every new life in every realm. It is the source."
The stone people listened.
"Their fountain stopped," Joren said. "No new beings came out. Whatever was supposed to flow had stopped. They had been alone for a very long time. They did not know what was wrong. They called us. They asked us to help."
He looked at his hands. He flexed the carnelian toe inside his boot.
"While they tried to understand what was wrong, the fountain produced things. Not living beings. Shapes. Crystallised forms. They came out inert. Stable. Quiet. They stand at the edges of the realm now. Some facing inward. Some facing outward."
The smaller darker mineral made a small sound. Stone reacting to information.
"They discovered them recently," Joren said. "Women had been going to the edges and coming back changed. Emptied. Something cold had been living in them. Milianne, the queen, traced the pattern. She found the figures at the edges. That is how they learned the fountain was producing the wrong things."
He paused.
"Then the fountain produced a real birth," Joren said. "A baby stone. One. A return to function, for one instance. It was meant to come to your realm. But the channel was blocked. The corruption was in the way."
He paused again.
"So they gave the stone to us," he said. "By hand. They asked us to carry it across realms to where it should go. Milianne gave it to me directly. She said the normal route would not work and the baby needed to be brought by people."
The smaller darker mineral spoke now. "We did not receive a baby for many cycles. We had been wondering."
"You are receiving one now," Joren said. "It is in your community."
Lirael added the next piece. He looked at the smaller darker mineral when he spoke.
"In the between-space on the journey," Lirael said, "we passed entities we could not name. Jagged. Blue. Crystalline. Eyes like raw diamond chips. No faces. Bodies wrong at every joint. Most of them looked past us. They looked back toward the tower of Thorendale. One of them was larger and tracked us when we moved."
"We fought a ring of them," Vesper said. "Sacred fluid dissolved them. It took several attempts."
"Sacred fluid," Gold repeated. "What kind."
"Cum," Vesper said. "From the act. Specifically charged."
Gold received this. The stone people were quiet for a moment.
"One of them," I said, "before it dissolved — it fixed its attention on me. On what I carry. It bent toward the fragment. It did not strike. It watched me until the last shred of it was gone."
The community had gone completely still.
"It recognised what is in your hand," Gold said.
"Yes."
"They are connected to it."
"We think so," Vesper said.
Joren picked up the thread again.
"The Watchers," he said. "The patches in Thorendale. What is wrong in your realm. The figures at the edges of the Lesbian Realm. We think it is all the same thing. Different shapes of one corruption. The Watchers appear in spaces between realms. The patches appear in places where the cycle should move but stops. The fragment is a piece of it that has been broken off and that I have been carrying without understanding what it is."
He stopped. He looked at Gold directly.
"I do not know what is doing this," Joren said. "I do not know who or what is making the corruption. I only know that it is everywhere we have been, and now it is here too."
Gold took a long moment.
"You have brought us the answer to a question we have been asking for longer than you can hold as a number," Gold said.
A pause.
"Where is the stone."
Joren reached into the pack at his side. He took out the small wrapped bundle. He unfolded the cloth.
The baby stone sat in his palm. Pale limestone. Smooth, rounded, fitting his hand. The carved smile on its surface was clearer than ever. It had deepened during our time in the realm — become definitive, intentional. Whoever or whatever had been doing the carving had done it precisely.
Joren looked at the smile. He looked at the stone people. Then he looked at Cockper, who had been on my shoulder this whole time.
He held the baby stone out to Cockper.
Cockper went still. His face appeared and disappeared. He looked at the stone. Then he looked at Joren. Then at me. Then he reached out with both small copper hands.
Joren placed the baby stone in his hands carefully. Cockper took it. His fingers wrapped around it. The copper of his hands and the pale limestone of the baby stone touched.
Then the stone people saw the fragment.
I saw them see it. A quiet collective movement at the edges. Several of them leaned forward. The granite person tilted. The salt being drew closer. The smaller darker mineral looked directly at my hand for the first time.
Gold was silent for what felt like a long time.
"We have felt this for a very long time," Gold said. "We did not know what to look for."
Another pause.
"It is in many places."
"Yes," I said.
"It is in our deepest mountains. It is in the cores where we hold the cycle steady. It is in the patches the youngest of us have been crying over because they cannot resolve them. It is in the work that does not complete."
I did not say anything.
"We will keep the baby," Gold said. "We will give it a space. We will not place it yet. We will reflect on what you have given us, and on where it should sit. The placement will be the right one."
One of the minerals — a stout grey being I had not heard speak before — moved forward. Slow. Stone-pace. He took the baby stone from Cockper carefully. Both hands. He carried it into the cliff face structure behind Gold. He did not return to the community space. The baby was being held.
Cockper stayed in the centre. His face appeared and disappeared. He returned to my shoulder. His weight was small but warm.
I closed my hand around the fragment. The cold of it was the same.
Gold turned its attention back to the crew.
"Now," Gold said, "you understand what you have been asking us to fix. Now you also understand what you came here to do."
Gold explained what came next.
Each of us would be paired with one stone being. The cockring would be lifted. At the moment of lifting, we would transform into the material the entity represented. We would live our domain. When the experience was complete, the cockring would be replaced. The transformation back would happen then.
"You will be tended throughout," Gold said. "The entity that pairs with you will hold your form steady. They will hold your body steady. They will return you to yourselves when you are ready. There is no risk in this. We have done this with our own kind for longer than there has been a sky above us."
Gold named the pairings as the minerals approached.
A tall, glossy, black-surfaced being moved to Joren. The colour was so deep it pulled light into it. Sharp edges where the surface fractured. The being's form was angular — facets catching the dim light of the community, throwing back almost nothing.
"Obsidian," Gold said. "Volcanic glass. The solid form of cooled lava. He has waited a long time to do this work with someone."
Obsidian inclined toward Joren. Joren inclined back. They looked at each other. Obsidian was the rest-state of what Joren was about to become. He had been waiting in solid form for an active counterpart for, by his own pace, an immeasurable stretch of time.
A pale, blue-white being moved to Lirael. The surface looked dry but the air around it went cold. There was a haze where Lirael's warmth met the ice being's coldness — a thin mist constantly forming and dissolving in the boundary between them.
"Ice," Gold said. "Water that has chosen a form."
Lirael's hand went to his pouch. He nodded at the ice being. The ice being did not move quickly. It approached with the slow patience of something that had been still for centuries and was now ready to be paired with movement.
A flat slab of mineral moved to Garrick. The surface caught the light and the light split into bands of blue and green and gold. The colours shifted as the angle changed — Garrick moved his head slightly and the entire surface of the Labradorite shifted colour. The Labradorite seemed aware that this happened.
"Labradorite," Gold said. "Stable solid. Beautiful at angles."
Garrick studied the surface. He nodded. He had not seen anything quite like it. The Labradorite held still for him while he looked.
A dense, dark, slightly humming being moved to Vesper. The hum was not sound but pressure on the ears — Vesper felt it as a vibration in the bones of his head. The being was small but heavy, denser than anything around it. It had its own gravitational presence.
"Solidified radioactive uranium," Gold said. "Stable in form. Actively transforming through its own decay. The embodiment of transformation."
Vesper looked at it. His mouth moved. Not quite a smile. His face shifted when he had been given something he wanted but had not known he wanted.
"I see," he said.
The uranium being acknowledged Vesper. The hum between them adjusted — the frequencies between Vesper's body and the uranium's vibration syncing slightly.
A faint, almost translucent being moved to me. I could barely see it. It was the colour of nothing, but with a slight shimmer. It existed in solid form only because the temperature there was cold enough to hold it. Outside this realm it would dissipate immediately into gas.
"Cold-solidified helium," Gold said. "Solid only because the temperature here allows it to be. The gas that has taken form by being colder than anything around it."
The helium being and I looked at each other. I could almost see through it. Its presence was light, but with definition. I felt an affinity for it I had not expected — I was about to become gas, and this being was gas that had been frozen into form for the work of pairing with me. We were each other in opposite states.
We took our positions. The minerals led us to specific spots — each one chosen for the way the body would rest when the consciousness was gone. Joren was leaned back against a low formation, his head supported. Lirael against another. Garrick. Vesper. I was placed last, sitting cross-legged on a flat stone with a low rise behind me to lean against.
Each entity positioned itself directly behind its crew member. The entity's body was what would hold the crew member's body steady while the consciousness travelled.
Gold spoke the rules.
"You will be one mind," Gold said. "You will also be yourselves. This is not contradiction. It is the rest state of consciousness."
A pause.
"Time does not function here. The experience could feel like a moment or like millennia. Both are correct."
Another pause.
"Let it be. There is nothing you need to do. The domain will receive you. Spark — you understand the shape of this because Cockper is part of you."
Joren reached over and touched my hand. Briefly. His knuckles brushed my knuckles.
"Stay close," he said through the bond.
"I will."
The five entities positioned themselves over us. Obsidian over Joren. Ice over Lirael. Labradorite over Garrick. Uranium over Vesper. Helium over me. They reached down at the same moment.
The cockrings lifted in synchronicity.
I was gone from my body before the ring was fully clear of me.
We were in our domains.
The transition was not disorienting. Everything was immediately legible. I knew what I was. I knew what to do. There was no learning curve. None of us was afraid. None of us was panicking. Vesper noted this through the collective mind and Joren responded.
"We are not panicking," Vesper said.
"Why would we?" Joren said.
"This is what the stone people are," Lirael said.
"Yes," I said.
I could feel every domain at once. Because I was air. Air is in every gap, in every breath, in every reaction. I was also still myself, sitting cross-legged on the stone floor in the community space — I felt that too, distantly, like a previous life I had stepped out of.
Joren first.
Joren was the heat under everything. He was the magma column. He was the mantle moving slow under continents. The first thing he did was breathe — and breathing was movement at scale, the slow rise and fall of the planetary mantle by several centimetres over what would have been a season in his old life.
He was at home. He was not surprised. He had been waiting for this without knowing it. I could feel through the bond what he felt — the weight of being the planet's heat was right for him. The scale fit. He had always been heavier and warmer than the rest of us and now he was heavier and warmer at planetary scale and the proportion was correct.
Lirael was water in every form. Ocean. River. Groundwater. Vapour. The rain that had not fallen yet. He was at the bottom of the deepest trench at crushing pressure. He was in a glacier that had been moving for a hundred thousand years across a continent. He was in every drop of dew on every leaf in every forest. He was the snow falling on a mountain none of us would ever see. He was in every cell of every plant. He was in every animal that drank. He was in the sweat of every man working in a field anywhere on the planet.
He noticed something. Through the bond he said it.
"I can taste different bio-life through the water in them. The animals are sweeter. The humans have a salt edge. The plants are flat and clean."
"You are tasting every creature on the planet through their water," Vesper said.
"Yes."
"You are enjoying it."
"Yes."
Garrick was the rock. The plates. The mountains and the things that would be mountains. He was the iron in the core. He shared some of that with Joren — they overlapped, mineral and heat together — and they liked the overlap. Garrick was sediment that had been settling for so long it had become its own thing. He was also the rock walls of every cave on the planet. He was the cobblestones in cities we had not visited. He was the bones of every animal — calcium is mineral and bones are mineral and Garrick was in every bone of every creature that had ever lived and died.
He noticed this. He kept moving.
Vesper was what carbon becomes when pressure and heat meet it correctly. He was what sediment becomes under its own weight. He was uranium decaying. He was the change, not the mineral. He felt every transformation in the planet happening simultaneously and he understood them. The complexity did not overwhelm him. It clarified him. He was in every chemical reaction occurring anywhere — every rust forming, every leaf decomposing, every protein folding in every cell of every organism. He was also in the slow transformation of stone to soil. He was in the fossilisation of every dead creature. He was in the formation of every mineral vein in every mountain.
I was the air. I was in every gap. I was in the lungs of every creature that breathed — every fish, every bird, every burrowing animal. I was in the breath the planet made through its volcanoes. I was the helium escaping the upper atmosphere into space. I had access to everything that had gas in it. I could taste the difference between the air over a forest and the air over a desert. I could taste the difference between the air at the equator and the air at the poles. I was in every conversation that had ever been spoken, because every spoken word is air moving through a mouth, and I was the air.
The collective mind was immediately functional. We could feel each other. Joren felt Lirael. Lirael felt Garrick. Vesper felt everyone. I felt everything because everything had gas moving through it.
It was logical. It was right.
We began.
Joren rose through the crust. He found a vent. The vent had been waiting for him. It was wet with magma already in it — narrow at the throat, wider at the chamber, the geometry exact for what he was about to do.
The vent was older than anything Joren had ever entered. The walls were smooth from millennia of magma passage. They had been shaped by repeated rising and falling. They remembered the shape of what filled them. Joren felt the memory in the rock — the previous magma that had come up this same channel, the previous eruptions, the previous coolings. The vent had had many lovers. It was happy to have another.
He filled it from below. The friction was heat. The friction was also pain — the first resistance of the rock against his rising column, a tightness that demanded he push. He pushed. The walls squeezed him. He resisted the squeeze, pressing harder, and the resistance itself became the friction that built his heat. He felt every micrometre of the contact between his column and the rock around it. The walls were at a different temperature than he was. He heated them. They softened. The resistance eased. He relaxed into the easing, letting the column rise further. He kept moving. He was at the throat now. The narrowing was tight. Friction increased. Heat increased. The rock at the throat softened further. He passed through. He was in the upper chamber.
The upper chamber was vast. He filled it. The pressure built. He felt his own pressure as growing, accumulating — the equivalent of several thousand years of edging if it were a body. He had never had this much sustained pressure in his life. He surrendered to it, letting the pressure have him, letting it build until he could not hold it.
He broke.
The eruption was the climax. He pumped the molten material up the column in waves and each wave was a thrust and the pressure that had been building released as lava arcing up through the throat of the volcano and out across the surface. The release was not one moment — it was a long sustained ejaculation that lasted what would have been days in the upper world but felt right at his scale. He was coming for a long time. Lava reached the surface through three different vents at once because the pressure was that strong. He spread — wide, fast at this scale, the spread of it across a landscape his climax. The volcano produced a new cone. The new cone produced lava fields. Joren kept pulsing. Smaller eruptions following the big one — the way a man keeps twitching for a while after he has come. The lava fields cooled over what felt like a long deep breath and became the foundations of a new landmass.
He had made an island. He had come into the planet to make it.
I felt his satisfaction through the bond. The whole crew did. He was sated and warm and pleased with himself. Lirael grinned through the collective mind.
"That is the first one," Lirael said. "I will give you somewhere to put the next."
Lirael was in the deepest trench he could find. He was at crushing pressure. The weight on him was itself what he wanted — deep, immense, total, the mass of an entire ocean column above. He moved into the trench. The walls tightened around him. He pushed deeper. The pressure bit into him first — a sharp, all-encompassing pain that made his substance ache. He resisted it, pushing back against the squeeze, his body clenching against the weight. Then he let the resistance go, relaxing into the press, and the pain softened into a deep, steady pressure. He surrendered to it, letting the ocean have him completely. The pleasure came as a slow, spreading warmth, the satisfaction of being held so completely.
The trench at its deepest point was eleven kilometres down. The pressure at the bottom was over a thousand times atmospheric. Lirael felt every metre of it pressing inward on what he was. He liked this. He had always liked it deep. He had always liked the weight. Now he was the water that bore it. He was the substance the trench was filled with. He was also pushing himself further into the rock at the bottom — the place where the seafloor began to crack into the planet's mantle.
He found cracks. Garrick had been making them. They were fresh, narrow, perfect for being filled. Lirael pushed water into them. The cracks accepted him. They tightened. He pushed harder. He fitted himself into each crack at the molecular level — water filling every space available. The water filled every crack in the seafloor of an entire region. He was in places no water had been before.
The cracks were tight. He liked the tightness. He filled them anyway. The pressure of his own filling pushed the rock outward a small amount. He widened the cracks by being in them. He kept pushing. The cracks became channels. The channels became passages. He was, slowly, opening the seafloor.
He noted through the bond that this felt like fisting at planetary scale.
"It is fisting at planetary scale," he said. "I am inside the planet's deepest holes. They are tight. I am opening them."
"Have a good time," Vesper said.
"I am."
He poured water over Joren's lava field where the new island was forming. Steam rose. The lava hissed and the steam exploded upward and Vesper, in his domain, processed the change instantly — water and lava becoming steam — and Vesper had a small climax from the transformation itself. The change was his nature. Every shift in matter was his pleasure.
"You did that on purpose," Vesper said to Lirael.
"I am giving us all gifts," Lirael said.
He continued to fill trenches. The great northern ridge. The southern trench. The smaller fissure systems no creature had ever charted. Every deep place in every ocean. He was at every bottom at once. The pressure was everywhere on him. He was being pressed from all sides at depths that would have crushed any other body.
He kept going.
Garrick was sculpting.
I was in the air above his work. I saw what he was doing. He was shaping mountains. Specific ones. The first one he sculpted was a long ridge curving up into a peak that was — undeniably — the shape of a man's bulge. The curve right. The base wide. The peak rounded. He worked on it slowly. He liked the shape. He smoothed the slopes. He adjusted the proportions.
He spent what felt like a millennium on the shaft of the bulge alone. He shaped it carefully. He thickened it in the middle. He tapered it at the top. He made the angle natural — not pointing straight up but leaning slightly to one side, a real bulge leans inside trousers. He was doing accurate work. He had been studying bulges his whole life and he knew exactly what they looked like.
Then he made another. This one was two rounded peaks side by side — a butt at landscape scale. He put the cleft in. He shaped the curve where the cheeks met. He spent another millenium on the cleft alone. He worked on the muscle structure. The hollow at the side where the hip bone was. The slight dimple where the back became the cheek. He got all of it.
Then a thigh. Then another. Then the inside of a thigh. Then the muscle of an arm. Then the curve of a calf with the muscle defined. He was sculpting muscle groups across continents.
"He is making bodies," Vesper said through the bond.
"He is," Joren said.
"Garrick," Lirael said, "are you sculpting the planet as a love letter to bodies you have known."
"Yes," Garrick said.
"Continue," Lirael said.
Garrick continued. He sculpted another bulge — longer than the first, fatter at the base. He gave this one a slight curve to the left. He sculpted a chest with the curve of the pectoral muscle right at the slope. He carved the nipple as a small rock formation — a single boulder at the apex of the curve. He carved the line of hair down the centre as a darker streak of mineral. He sculpted a calf. He sculpted hands gripping into mountains. He shaped a cock and balls into a coastline that would, on a future timeline, form the southern edge of a continent. The cock was to scale — proportional to the body it would have belonged to if the whole body had been carved out of the landmass. The balls hung at the right angle.
He sculpted a back. The trapezius muscle. The latissimus. The dimples above the buttocks. The vertical line of the spine.
He sculpted an armpit. The hollow of it deep enough to catch shadow. The fold of skin where the arm met the torso.
Then he moved past just bulges. He started on whole bodies.
He sculpted a man lying on his back, the full body shaped into a valley floor with hills as the muscles. Pectoral hills. Thigh ridges. The cock formation rising at the centre. The whole thing visible from above if you knew what you were looking at.
Then, surprising me, he sculpted a woman.
A naked lesbian. Specifically. He carved her lying on her back as well — same orientation as the man — but with her breasts shaped as two perfect mountains side by side. Each one with a peak at the right place. The areolas were circular formations of darker mineral around each peak. Her belly was a wide soft valley. Her thighs were open. Her cleft became a deep canyon.
"I did not know you could do that," Vesper said through the bond.
"Neither did I," Garrick said.
"It is very accurate."
"I have been paying attention."
"To lesbians."
"To everyone."
Lirael added, through the bond: "She is beautiful."
"Thank you," Garrick said.
He kept going. He shaped a couple — two men together — across a series of foothills, their bodies intertwined in a way that would read as geography but was also clearly two men holding each other.
Then he did something I did not expect.
He moved his attention to Thorendale. The land that would be Thorendale. He went underneath the spot where the city would eventually be built. He worked on the soil and the rock under what would be the fields near the cum-and-piss fountain — the fields where the brewers would, one day, grow their grain.
He shaped the mineral content of the soil. He worked for a long time on the specific composition. He added layers. He adjusted the pH. He balanced the trace elements.
"What are you doing," Lirael asked.
"Making the dirt taste of cock," Garrick said.
The bond went silent for a moment.
"You are."
"Yes."
"On purpose."
"The brewers will get water that has run through this soil. The grain will get this soil. The beer will be brewed with both. The flavour comes through."
"You are giving future Thorendale a stronger cock flavour in its beer."
"Yes."
"Carry on," Lirael said.
Garrick carried on. He was in bliss. The shaping was his pleasure. He was making the world into the shapes of men and women he had known and wanted and into the flavours of what men produced.
Then he reached one mountain that was half-done. He approached it. He started to shape it. He worked on it for a long time at his scale.
He realised something.
He stopped.
"Wait," Garrick said through the bond.
The crew turned its attention toward him. I saw what he saw.
The mountain he was sculpting was the entrance to the Stone realm. The mountain we had seen — the bulge mountain that had opened to let us in. He was making it. He had not realised. He had been shaping it across geological time and now it was almost done.
He kept working. He finished the curve at the top. He shaped the base. He put the entrance opening exactly where he remembered it being.
The mountain was done.
It was the mountain we had entered. He had made it. In the deep past. Without knowing he was doing it.
The crew was quiet through the bond.
"That is a strange thing," Vesper said. "I made the mountain we walked into."
"You made the mountain we walked into," Joren said. "And now we are inside it making it."
"Or we are inside it now and we have always been inside it," Lirael said.
"Both," I said.
Garrick looked at the mountain he had made. He put his hand on its peak. The contact was the contact of a sculptor with his finished work. He moved on to the next sculpture.
Vesper sat in transformation.
He was the change of every mineral shifting. He was in everything becoming something else. The complexity should have overwhelmed him. It did not. He liked it. He was at home in the simultaneity. He felt every transformation in the planet, every chemical reaction, every shift of state — and he understood it. He was inside the change rather than watching from outside.
Garrick directed him.
"I have moved a deposit," Garrick said. "Carbon. A massive one. I have pushed it to a specific spot. Come look."
Vesper went. The deposit was enormous. Carbon in its purest form, pressed together by Garrick over what would have been many lifetimes. The deposit was the size of a small continent. It sat in a chamber deep in the crust, surrounded on all sides by stable rock. It was ready.
Vesper settled into the carbon.
He became the transformation of it.
Garrick began to press. He pressed on the deposit from one side first — a hand pressing the prostate from outside but at planetary scale. The carbon resisted. The pressure increased. The pressure increased more. The carbon yielded a small amount. Garrick pressed harder. The carbon compressed. The atoms came closer to each other. Vesper felt the closeness inside himself — atoms that had been the same distance apart for millennia now being pushed into proximity.
"More," Vesper said.
"I am bringing the other three sides now."
Garrick pressed on the other three sides. The carbon was held from four directions at once. The compression was total. Vesper felt every face of himself being pushed inward. He felt the centre of the deposit becoming denser. The carbon at the core was more compressed than the carbon at the edges. The gradient of pressure created a gradient of sensation. Vesper felt every part of it.
Joren arrived from below. He brought lava up under the deposit. The lava was at a specific temperature — Joren had calibrated it. He did not bring it to full eruption heat. He brought it to the exact temperature needed for the next stage. The temperature began to climb in the deposit. Vesper felt heat. He felt the pressure and the heat together. He felt the exact conditions for what he was about to become.
But not yet. The crew was holding him at the edge.
"Wait," Lirael said.
"I know," Vesper said. His sentences were slower already.
Lirael added water. Just a small amount, fed through Garrick's solid into a layer near the carbon. The water turned to steam and the steam added pressure from inside. The total pressure increased. The heat climbed. Vesper was being edged across geological time.
I was the air around him. I felt his held edge through the gas in the area. The atmosphere itself was taut. The gases in the crust around the deposit were vibrating at a frequency I had not heard before. I could feel Vesper through them.
He was held at the edge for what felt like a thousand years. Then ten thousand. Then more. The pressure was at the exact point where transformation should have happened but it did not happen, because the crew was keeping him there.
Garrick adjusted his pressure. He pulsed it — added one degree more, held, added one degree more, held. Vesper felt the pulses through the carbon. Each pulse was a stroke. Each held moment after was the edging itself.
"You hate stopping," I said to him, through the collective mind.
"I study the peak," Vesper said, slowly.
"I know."
We held him there.
Joren adjusted the heat. He pulsed it the same way. Up one degree. Held. Up another. Held. Vesper was being approached from two directions at once — pressure and heat — both pulsing slowly, both at the edge.
Lirael added another thread of water. The steam pressure jumped. The internal pressure of the deposit became equal to the external pressure and then slightly exceeded it.
I narrowed my air around the deposit. The atmosphere itself became a constraint. Vesper felt the air pressing in from outside the rock that contained him.
All five of us were holding him at the edge.
Garrick pressed, one degree more.
Joren added heat, one degree more.
Lirael added one more thread of water.
The pressure and the heat reached the exact point.
The carbon transformed.
It happened in what would have been an instant at our normal scale but was a long sustained release at this scale. The carbon — under pressure on four sides, with heat from below, with steam pressure from inside, with the air pressing from outside the chamber — became diamond.
The atoms reorganised. They locked into the new lattice. The transformation was the orgasm. Vesper felt every atom moving into its new position simultaneously. The release was geological.
Every crew member felt it through the collective mind. I felt it as a wave through the atmosphere — the gases around the formation site shook with the energy of it. Joren felt it in the heat under his control rebalancing. Garrick felt it in the solid around him resettling. Lirael felt it in the water nearby vibrating.
Vesper held the release for a long time. The diamond settled into its new structure. The pressure equalised around it. The heat dissipated. He stayed inside the new diamond for what felt like a long time after.
The diamond was formed. It was buried in the rock. It would be found, on a future timeline, by Thorendale miners — and they would marvel at its size and quality without ever knowing how it had been made.
Vesper was quiet for a long moment through the bond.
"That," he said finally, "was better than the carbon-Cockper night."
"Yes," Garrick said.
I fed on the byproducts. Water-on-lava had produced vapour and I had taken it. Joren's eruption had released gas particles and I had taken them. Garrick's mountain-friction had created dust and I had taken it. The smells of sulphur, the particles of every transformation, the breath of every chemical change — I fed.
I was in bliss. I was accumulating. I felt the universe beyond the planet — the solar wind, the gas in space, the breath of stars I had no name for. I felt myself extending past what I should have reached.
"Spark," Joren said through the bond. "Don't filter. Just take."
"I am."
I took.
I extended further. I was in the atmosphere of the next planet over. I tasted the gas there — different. Acidic. Heavier. Not what I was made for. I took it anyway. I extended further. I was at the edge of the system. I tasted solar wind. I tasted the breath of the sun. I tasted hydrogen and helium and the trace gases the sun released. I extended further. I was in the gas between stars. I tasted the cold dust of the interstellar medium. Some of it tasted faintly metallic. Some of it had the flavour of carbon — which Vesper had just transformed and which I now recognised.
I was everywhere there was gas. I was also still in the lungs of every creature that breathed. I was also still at the community floor where my body was. I could hold all of these at once.
I was happy. I fed.
We had been playing.
Now we encountered the problem.
Garrick noticed first. He had been pressing on a section of crust where he wanted to add a fault line. The crust did not respond. He pressed again. Nothing yielded. He pressed harder. Still nothing. He noted it through the bond.
"There is a section here that will not move."
He moved to a nearby section. That section responded normally. He went back to the first section. Still nothing. He tried from a different angle. The rock refused him from every angle.
"It is not normal rock," he said. "It will not yield to pressure."
Joren tried to push lava into a region near it. The lava found a zone it could not enter. The lava slid around it. He tried again, with more force. The lava went around. He tried a third time, pushing the column of lava directly at the zone. The lava deflected.
"There is a cold spot here," Joren said. "Where there should not be."
"How cold?" Vesper asked through the bond.
"It is not cold like ice. It is cold like there is no temperature there at all. The temperature is not low. It is absent."
I moved through the area. The air did not behave for me. I passed everywhere — except those spots. The air thinned around them. I was pulled around them, not through them. I could not fill them. The air at the boundary of one of them was at lower pressure than the surrounding air, as if the spot was pulling air away rather than receiving it.
"I cannot breathe through them," I said.
Lirael, in the water in the deepest trench under that region, felt something else. He felt eyes on him from inside the rock. No eyes visible. The feeling was exact — the same feeling we had had in the between-space between Thorendale and the Lesbian Realm. The watcher feeling.
"I am being watched from inside the planet," Lirael said.
"Same," Vesper said.
"I feel it too," Joren said. "From below where the cold spots are."
We compared through the shared mind. We found the same spots from four different directions. Garrick's failed pressure. Joren's cold zones. My thinned air. Lirael's watched feeling. All of them coincided. They mapped the same locations.
The patches. The Watchers. Embedded in the planet. The corruption we had been carrying — the fragment in my hand on the community floor far above us — was the same material that was here in the rock.
We mapped them across the planet. There were many. Scattered. Some regions concentrated, others sparse. The mineral knowledge we now had let us see them clearly once we knew what to look for.
I counted them. Hundreds. Possibly thousands. Some were the size of a room. Some were the size of mountain ranges. The largest one was under the continent that would, much later, host Thorendale itself.
"They are everywhere," Garrick said.
"And under home," Joren said.
"Yes."
Vesper said it through the bond.
"Let us try to fix one."
We picked a small patch. A single crystallised area in the rock not far from where the diamond had formed. We approached it together. Through the shared mind we worked out the approach as we went.
Lirael pushed water into the region. The water arrived at the patch and stopped at the edge. The patch did not absorb it. The water pooled around the boundary.
"It will not take water."
Joren brought lava up beneath. The lava arrived and met the patch from below. The lava also stopped. The patch did not absorb heat. The lava pooled beneath without entering.
"It will not take heat."
Garrick pressed from outside. The patch did not yield.
"Will not take pressure."
Vesper engaged the transformation from inside. He found the edge of the patch from the transformation side — where mineral should have been becoming other mineral but was not. He pushed the transformation forward. The patch did not transform.
"Will not change."
I tried to breathe through. I had not been able to before, but I tried again now. The patch would not take air either.
We were at five different refusals.
Vesper spoke first through the bond.
"All five at once. Synchronised."
"Yes," Joren said.
We did it together. Lirael pushed water. Joren brought lava. Garrick pressed. Vesper engaged the transformation. I pushed air.
All at the same instant. All from different directions. All at the boundary of the patch.
For a long moment nothing happened. The patch resisted all five.
Then — slowly — it yielded.
I found a small thread of air that could pass. I pushed the air through. The thread widened. The patch began to absorb the water pooling at its edge. The lava entered from below. Garrick's pressure shaped the rock around it. Vesper's transformation engaged and the crystallised material became ordinary mineral.
The patch dissolved.
The crystal became ordinary rock. The corruption was gone. The rock responded normally — Garrick's pressure shaped it, Joren's lava entered it, my air breathed through it, Lirael's water filled its cracks.
We had done it together. None of us alone could have. All five domains had to coordinate at the same moment.
"Now the rest," Joren said.
We started to work.
The work was slow at planetary scale and instantaneous at stone-time. We moved from patch to patch. We coordinated each time. The mechanic got faster as we learned it.
We developed a rhythm. Lirael identified the next patch — he had the broadest sensing through the water. He called out the location through the shared mind. We converged on it. Five domains arrived at once. We engaged. The patch dissolved.
We did this dozens of times. Then hundreds. Then we moved so fast I could barely count.
We swept regions. We mapped the patches we had fixed and the ones still remaining. The ones still remaining shrank as we worked. The ones we had fixed did not come back.
We worked for what felt like a very long time. We did not get tired. The collective mind shared the effort. Each of us did one domain's worth of work but felt all five.
We reached the largest patch — the one under what would be Thorendale. This one took longer. We coordinated carefully. We engaged. The patch was enormous and the resistance was enormous. We pushed harder. We held the synchronicity longer. The patch yielded slowly.
It took what felt like a million years of effort for this one. But it dissolved. The corruption under what would be our city was gone. The foundation of Thorendale was clean.
I felt something I did not name. The crew felt it too — through the bond, all of us aware that we had just done something that would matter to people we had not been born to yet.
We finished.
We swept every region we could sense. There were no more patches.
We kept sensing.
The Watchers were not gone. We could feel them still, at distance, like a low hum below hearing. Beyond where we could reach. The patches had been the manifestation. The source was somewhere else. We had not addressed the source.
But the planet was much better now. The patches were dissolved. The cycles could complete. The stuck transformations could move again.
We had done the work.
We paused together. The collective mind held us in a moment of rest.
Joren spoke first through the bond. "We have been everything. Heat. Water. Rock. Air. Change. We have been in every part of the planet. But we have not understood what is living in it."
He was right. We had shaped mountains. We had filled oceans. We had created diamonds. We had breathed through every gap. We had been in the water of fish and the air of lungs and the carbon of trees and the calcium of bones.
We had understood none of it.
"Try again," Vesper said. "Pay attention this time. Not to the minerals. To what is using them."
We did.
Lirael went into the water inside a fish. He had been there before—had been the water in its cells, the fluid in its veins, the moisture in its gills. He had felt the temperature. He had felt the pressure. He had felt the mineral content.
He had not felt the fish.
He tried now. He pushed his awareness into the water and tried to read what the water was doing. The water was moving. It was carrying things. It was part of a system. He could feel the system. He could feel the flow. He could not feel what the system was for.
"It is like reading a language I do not know," he said. "I am in the letters. I am the ink on the page. I can feel the shape of every mark. I cannot read the sentence."
Garrick was in the calcium of a creature's skeleton. He had been the calcium. He had felt its structure. He had felt its mineral form. He had felt its crystalline arrangement. He was the calcium.
He was not the creature.
"I can feel the mineral," he said. "I know every atom. I know how they are arranged. I know how they grew. I do not know what they are doing. I cannot hear the bone's function. I can only hear its form."
Vesper was in the carbon of a living tree. He was the carbon atoms. He had been carbon atoms before. He knew their positions. He knew their bonds. He was in every molecule of the wood.
He could not feel the tree.
"I am inside its body," he said. "I am in every part of it. I can trace every reaction. I can trace every transformation. I cannot tell you what any of it is for. The purpose is invisible to me. The life is invisible to me."
Joren was in the heat of a creature's body. He was the warmth. He had been heat before. He had been the heat of lava and the heat of pressure and the heat of the planet's core. He was heat.
He was not the creature's life.
"I am in its warmth," he said. "I am the warmth. I can feel every degree of it. I can feel it rise and fall. I can feel the patterns. I do not know what the patterns mean. The warmth has a rhythm. The rhythm is alien to me."
I was in the breath of every creature that breathed. I was the air in their lungs. I was the oxygen crossing into their blood. I was the carbon dioxide leaving. I was the movement. I was the exchange.
I did not know what I was exchanging for.
"I am at the membrane," I said. "I cross it. I go in. I come out. I am in the blood on the other side. I am in the lungs. I am in the air. I am everywhere the air goes. I do not know what the air is doing. I am the air. I am doing it. I do not understand the doing."
We were quiet through the bond.
Lirael spoke again. He was in the water of a shallow pool where creatures came to drink. He had been in that water before. He had felt the mineral content. He had felt the temperature. He had felt the pressure.
He had not felt the creatures.
He tried now. He pushed his awareness into the water they had left behind. The water that had been inside them and then released. The water that was not quite water anymore.
He could feel it. He could feel the salts. He could feel the nitrogen. He could feel the trace elements. He could feel the chemistry.
He could not feel what the chemistry meant.
"This is how I know where they are," he said. "I cannot feel them. I can only feel what they leave behind. The piss is not the creature. The piss is the trace of the creature. I can follow the trace. I cannot follow the creature itself."
He paused.
"The piss is a signal," he said. "It tells me something was here. It tells me something is near. It does not tell me what the something is. I can read the signal. I cannot read the thing that made the signal."
We all felt the truth of it. We had been in the living things. We had been their water and their carbon and their heat and their air. We had been their minerals. We had been their chemistry. We had been inside their bodies at the molecular level.
We had not understood a single thing about them.
The organic was not separate from us. We could touch it. We could enter it. We could inhabit it. We were in it all the time. It was everywhere. We could not translate it. We could not decode it. We could not feel what it was doing or why. The life in the water, the life in the carbon, the life in the breath, the life in the heat—it was a language we did not speak.
We were the medium. We were not the message.
"Good," Vesper said through the bond. "Now we know what we are. Now we know what we cannot know. That is also knowledge."
"Yes," Garrick said.
We held the knowledge together. It was not disappointment. It was clarity. We had expanded as far as we could. The expansion had a shape. The shape had an edge. The edge was where understanding stopped.
We could touch life. We could not comprehend it.
I felt something in the membrane I could not cross. Something that was not mineral and not gas and not water. Something that was alive in a way I could touch but could not read. It was familiar. I did not know from where.
I held the feeling. I did not name it.
"That is what we cannot know," Joren said.
"Yes," I said.
We moved on.
Vesper made a sound through the bond.
"I have found something."
He was in a uranium deposit. He had been processing the decay—the slow, ongoing radioactive transformation. He had done this all along, as part of his domain.
He had just realised something else was possible.
"I can make it go faster," he said.
He demonstrated. He pushed the decay of a section forward, fast. The decay accelerated. The atoms split faster. The chain began. A small section reached critical mass.
A nuclear explosion went off underground.
The release was enormous. Vesper felt it through every part of him. Energy on a scale he had not touched before. The atoms releasing energy in a chain reaction meant the transformation propagated through the material faster than transformation had ever propagated in this realm. He was at the centre. He was the transformation accelerating itself.
He went quiet. Then he did it again.
He detonated a second section. Larger. The release was larger. He felt the energy passing through him. He had never felt anything that fast and that total.
"Vesper," I said through the bond.
"I cannot stop."
"I am not asking you to stop."
He detonated a third. Then a fourth. Each one larger than the last. He was going berserk. The pleasure of nuclear release was unlike anything in his domain. It was the most complete transformation he could produce — the most total release of energy in the smallest moment.
He detonated a fifth. The fifth was in a region that had bio-life nearby.
Lirael spoke up through the bond.
"Vesper. Where you are detonating — there is bio-life nearby. I can sense it."
"How can you sense it?"
"Piss," Lirael said. I tried to become piss and I coudn't. Somehow, piss is produced by bilogical processes. "When I sense piss, it means there is bio-life. In the soil. In the animals. In the sea. In every gap. Even in the air — there is a small trace in vapour. I sense in the logic of what I am that the stone people also understand it this way. They feel where piss is, and they know where life is."
"I had not noticed."
"I will find you somewhere with no piss."
Lirael swept the planet. He moved his attention across continents. He mapped the piss-zones. Where there were dense piss signals there were dense populations. Where there were sparse piss signals there were sparse populations. Where there was no piss at all there was no bio-life.
He found a region — vast, empty — where there was no piss anywhere. A region with no bio-life. He located it. It was on a southern continent, an interior desert hundreds of miles from any populated coast.
"Vesper. I have found you a place with no piss."
"Where?"
"Far. Empty. Nothing biological for thousands of miles."
"Yes."
Vesper went to the empty region. He kept detonating. The detonations were larger there. The releases were more total. He was in bliss.
Lirael, having found the region for Vesper, found something else.
He started to follow the piss-pattern more carefully. He moved his attention across the bio-zones. He had been water everywhere on the planet — in every ocean, every river, every body of bio-life — and now he paid specific attention to where the bio-life was concentrated. He mapped the patterns. He found civilisations he had not known existed. He found species the crew had not encountered.
He found the elven realm. He recognised it through the specific colour of the piss-signal there — the elves had a distinct biology, and Lirael could feel it through the water under their cities. Their specific worship of the piss and the making of piss crystal made the signal even stronger. The elven realm was a bright spot in the piss-pattern. It was a beacon.
He moved his attention into the elven realm. He found the water under it. He found the fountains in the elven cities. He found the rivers.
He was the water of the elven realm. He understood this without surprise.
Then he found — somewhere in the centre — a strong concentration of piss-signal. Stronger than anywhere else. Specific. A point. The piss-signal there was several orders of magnitude higher than the surrounding signals. It was not a population. It was one being.
He focused on it.
Pisson was there. Pisson was the strongest piss-concentration in any realm. Lirael was the water under him. The water in the fountains around him. The water in the rivers flowing past him.
Lirael felt the piss-signal of Pisson directly.
He wanted Pisson to know it was him and not just any water-feeling. He pulled the water from one of the fountains in the chamber where Pisson was sitting. He shaped it.
He made a flower.
A specific one — three petals folded outward, a stem rising, a small bud at the centre, all of it standing in the air above the fountain in defiance of how water normally behaves. Water does not hold a shape against gravity. It did now. Lirael held it. The flower was precise. The petals were translucent. The bud caught the light of the elven chamber and bent it through itself.
It rose higher. The flower floated up to Pisson's eye level. It hung there.
Pisson looked at it. His face changed.
I was in the air above them and saw what happened next. Pisson turned to whoever was near him — an elven elder, several attendants. He had been in the middle of a meeting. He stopped it. He stood up. His mouth opened. His eyes widened.
He spoke.
"Everyone get your dicks out. All of you. Piss now."
The elders looked at him. The attendants looked at him. Pisson was High Priest. They did as he said. Cocks came out. They pissed. Five elves at once.
Pisson pissed too. Six streams. All at once. Onto the floor of whatever chamber they were in. Pisson was the centre. The piss flowed toward him.
Lirael, in the water under the elven city, received the piss. The bio-mineral signal flowed into him. Lirael lit up through the collective mind. He had confirmation through the signals that Pisson was alive, well, and present. Pisson had responded with the most direct gesture available to him.
The flower of water still floated in the chamber. Lirael held it the entire time the piss was happening. It was his greeting. He did not let it go.
When the pissing finished Lirael let the flower dissolve. The water returned to the fountain. Pisson watched it return. He put his hand on the rim of the fountain.
The crew felt Lirael's joy through the bond. He had been worried about another person for weeks and had just received proof that the other person was fine. The warmth of it sat simple and complete in him.
"That is how he sensed me through the rock," Lirael said. "It was piss the whole time. Piss is the channel."
"It was" I said.
"You knew."
"It is logical."
Lirael did not respond further. He was quiet with the warmth of the contact. I left him to it.
We had done the work.
The patches were fixed. The cycles could resume. The Watchers were still distant but not addressable from here. Vesper was detonating in his empty region for fun.
We could have gone back.
We did not.
I noticed through the collective mind: nobody wanted to leave.
The pleasure of this was beyond anything we had known. There was no urgency. There was no time. We were mineral. We were one mind. We could stay as long as we wanted.
We stayed.
The domains held us in constant sex. Joren’s heat moved through the mantle like a thick cock grinding slow and deep into a tight, yielding hole — continents shifting under the steady thrust of his pressure, every plate-edge a slow, deliberate stroke that built unbearable heat until it crested in long, rolling waves of release that cracked new crust and left him shuddering with aftershocks for what felt like centuries.
Lirael’s water slipped into every crack and fissure like fingers working deeper, probing, stretching, then flooding in thick pulses that filled and overflowed, the endless cycle of rising and falling like swallowing load after load while being bred from both ends at once, each wave another orgasm that left him open and dripping and wanting more.
Garrick shaped bulges into the rock. He made big curves and swells. He watched them form. He looked from above. He looked from inside too. He saw how the heavy shapes hung. He saw how they pressed on the rock around them. Warmth came up from the stone. He stayed near the curves. He smelled the deep scent. He kept his eyes on the swell. He kept his eyes on the seam. He kept his eyes on the weight. He felt pleasure. It was a helpless release. He got off on the sight of the bulge. He got off on its presence. This was at a huge scale. His love for the bulge became part of the rock. He kept making it new and enjoying it as if we wasn't the creator.
Vesper’s transformations edged and released without pause — every molecular shift a slow build of pressure, every decay a sudden, shattering climax that left the material changed and him buzzing, the chain reactions a relentless series of orgasms that never quite let him come down before the next one started.
I moved through every space like breath forced deep into a throat, tasting, filling, being taken in and held, the constant movement a continuous deep-throat rhythm, every gas particle another load swallowed, every expansion another cock pushing in until I was full and leaking and still reaching for more.
The collective mind was calm. No anxiety. No urgency. The bodies we had left behind were tended. The cockrings would be replaced when we were ready.
We were not ready.
“We could stay here forever,” Vesper said through the bond.
“We are,” Garrick said.
“Yes,” Lirael said.
“Until we are done,” Joren said.
“We are not done yet,” I said.
We continued.
Just a personal note... I think of everything I've ever written, this chapter is what surprised me the most. I'd love a comment ;)
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