“This city, this place, it was my first great victory.” She looked out at the city and the broken walls. Recalling things that had happened millennia before his birth, before he had even been a consideration for life.
“We fought hard, my servants and I, to achieve the destruction of this place and one of my great enemies.”
One of Her dainty white hands waved him closer, so he stepped up beside Her. She settled the other hand on the small of his back, touching him and gently stroking his skin with Her fingertips. Somehow, the mail shirt he had worn was gone, evaporated with but a single one of Her thoughts.
But he didn’t make any mention of it.
Her touch was slightly warm and utterly sensual. So new and yet so much of what he wanted that he did not break the moment.
“I have always remembered this achievement when I have made progress toward my goals, the greatest progress, truly laudable successes. I compare them with this battle, this place with its heavy toll. And I am always pleased with what I am doing, at my wins.”
He could only wonder at Her openness, but not for very long, because She turned to face him, Her hands coming up to trail over the sharp cut of his muscles on the chest and stomach of the body She had crafted and then trained. Her flowery scent overpowered the dust and old mold quite easily; heady and insistent it stole away his words.
“Until you.” She looked up and smiled. Strangely, She conveyed utter happiness, an innocent enjoyment so at odds with the being he knew She was. But no less real for the contrast.
“You are my latest and greatest achievement, Fenix. You are powerful and adept, with strength of magic, body, and mind. Your knowledge grows and with it so does your potential. I am so very well pleased with you, so far beyond what I had hoped for and so much earlier than my wildest designs projected.”
“I want to be with you now, for my own desire, and to give you more that links your magic to the strongest of emotions. To grow you more, enhance you, make you even more useful to me and also, at last, to express myself with you in a way you have long desired.”
She pushed him, for having a smaller build it was a strong push, insistent and undeniable. He moved backward and plopped into the throne, realizing that She had maneuvered it behind him or him in front of it at some point.
As he fell back into it, he barely recognized that it was wider and deeper than he would fit in easily. The kind of being who would sit comfortably in this chair was an idle thought that flew out of his head in the next moment.
She rose up over him where he reclined backward, and as She did so the light shift She perpetually wore evaporated from around Her delightful body. Small pink nipples in tender aureole tipped the pale breasts of Her humanoid form. Tiny freckles ran along shoulders beneath the red hair that swamped down as She moved above him, the small spots erratically patterned Her chest and arms all the way down Her flat stomach and legs.
She was indeed female, by the anatomy he could now see in all of its exquisite detail, and She fully intended to use it as well. A pale hand reached down to pull on him, now without any of his clothes as well, and She settled down on him to consummate this moment he had imagined for quite some time.
They made love, not just sex as it had been before, but a new kind of coming together, as equals.
They seemed to continue for weeks, but it may only have been days. With Her magic, She could bring them anything they desired in food or drink, there were sometimes silks and clothes to use on one another, but generally, they sported and exerted themselves in various ways all over the balcony.
She would bring him perilously close to falling at times, taking him on the balcony railing or pulling him over to a contrived act that required agility and balance while holding Her up along with himself. Significant acts of athleticism but shared with laughter and cries of joy.
The very deeds themselves were dangerous, the nature of them a higher level of passion than he had ever felt before.
She knew.
She understood the way to get his blood pumping and She exploited it in ever more creative ideas. There was no limit to the things they did together, and to his vast surprise, She enjoyed it too.
She spoke of it, of how much She had wanted an equal and for how long. Not another of Her kind or another from some other kind, but a true shaping that met Her every wish and desire.
Not just in schemes, not only for Her plans and ultimate agenda, although that was always the primary requisite for any of Her creations. But also that someday one of Her prizes would be able to surpass the limits of their own design, growing beyond the boundaries of fate and circumstance.
Do as She had done, and make their own way in the cosmos.
Not that he was complete; no, it would take him millennia to reach his full potential and maybe not even then. It should be a constant struggle to survive, to improve, and to dominate. But he exhibited those traits so well; so profoundly had he shown Her his worth that She decided to wait no longer and took him to Her bosom and shared Herself with him.
It was not a soppy love for the wretches who could only conceive of a century or two of short happiness together.
Nor was it ultimately about being happy with each other. It was about finding that depth of emotion that could be met only by another that understood, by one who would both serve and be served.
Aurelian.
That most enigmatic of powerful beings and one that surpassed any notion of normal wanted him to be Her mate and rule by her side.
And Fenix wholeheartedly committed himself to do so, that She knew he wanted to grow and evolve, to be his own person in the cosmos was accepted and required. That he would serve Her still while She taught him everything was the reward and continued his existence.
For despite the threat he could pose someday in the far-flung future, She wanted him. Beyond even that, She wanted him to serve by free will and not by subjugation as he had until now.
Theirs would never be the lowly love of ballads and fairy tales, but it was a love that transcended the epic tales and would likely never be understood, except by those who dealt in the same stakes, those few who always pushed ahead.
Fenix was wholly at peace with and committed to Her with every fiber of his being.
Day 127…
Aside from wondering what the moth creature was going to become, Fenix’s travels were also spent thinking on his past and what he had learned so far.
It was quite the plethora of strange things, several weeks’ worth of experiences and recalled memories filling in what had been his life before and now during the time at the Prison. And yet it seemed to have been planned somehow—by him?
He didn’t really know, but many of the pieces fit together, that Convenient had been there when he arrived, apparently waiting for all arrivals and helping those he deemed worthy or some such nonsense. It was a ruse, a ploy to hide the fact that while assisting random convicts he was, in fact, waiting to help Fenix when he arrived.
He had convinced Convenient to do this somehow when he had apparently been in the Prison before?
An audacious plan, if he had, in fact, put it in motion.
He also had to carefully consider what Old Man Page had said: that the blue creature expected something was clear. Knowing what Convenient had described, it also made sense that it too knew to wait for Fenix to return. But with what, some sort of information?
He wasn’t going to get the answers to these questions by sitting around and thinking; the adventure with the moth had galvanized him to continue. Skirting the northernmost rim of the land masses joined above the back of the creature afforded him a perfect view down across what must have been its back.
The further north his travels curved along the plateau the more he felt drawn to get down there somehow.
To the northwest, he could see the broken archipelagos of a bulky land mass that rose up beside the arrivals.
That might even be a release from the Prison, and some would consider it a good o
ne.
Heavy clouds shrouded details of the creature’s back from easy view; massive hair follicles reached up from the pervasive cloudbank, some as high as the land mass he was now on. But none of them close enough to reach, and they looked smooth, so even if he did reach them, a quick trip down one would require a means of controlling the fall.
They were wide enough to be buildings in their own right.
Some of the closest land masses seemed to be joined to the hairs, with many of the shafts poking up into the rocky undersides from what he could see. Three of the land masses were situated in a kind of collar just behind the furry neck of the massive creature, clearly visible floating above the clouds but without any link or join between them, that he could see.
He discounted them as the possible locations for the lost plateau; the moth had described a land mass further east toward the sun, and these were angled along the back of the Prison creature with craggy mountains covering the entire surface. If anything did live there, it was probably left well enough alone.
The land mass to the north of the savannah, with straw-colored grass and baobab trees, was an arid landscape of broken clay-like soil. Streams cut through the surface, creating a squalid mud and soil smell that he could pick out easily. Small green plants grew in tufts while grasses and larger bushes clumped around the various sources of water. Overall, it made for a weird landscape, the terrain alternately hard and dry or soppy and wet for miles at a time.
He was a few days along the breadth of the plateau and looking forward to finding these ruins.
The Forlor considered himself to be quite knowledgeable when it came to material beings, and it included the biological, mechanical, and technological alike in that statement. The Forlor was an immaterial race, often termed to be ghosts or phantoms by those superstitious material races who managed to see or summon them.
The Forlor had quite a connection with magical energies, being unattached to any of the major elements that made up the material cosmos.
After all, only an insubstantial being could both dwell within and without anything material at the same time. The energy and bonds that made up solid matter were of no consequence to a Forlor. He would be the first to admit it was likely his insatiable curiosity that got him into trouble, undoubtedly the source of his misfortune.
Even the fact that he thought of himself as male came from being curious to define things and a lot of definition could only come from experimentation.
Among his kind, it took two to procreate, as it did among most mammals and other humanoids and the more fabulous set of living material beings. With his drive and vigor, he assumed that he was of the male gender in the equation.
Usually, very few Forlor ever took an interest in gender; there was very little need to segment their population in such a way. They drifted through space, between realms and planes, exploring and learning, as they liked.
When two of his kind did get together, they would share the experiences they had gathered, and then a new Forlor would be born with a little energy and a whole dearth of platonic knowledge, just waiting to be analyzed. In some ways, they were like living computers, gathering, processing, and spitting out better and more improved versions of themselves.
But he was different; he didn’t want to be like the rest of his kind.
Even now he was much enjoying the scene unfolding around the humanoid he had decided to follow a day or so back. There were many opportunities in this place to find and kill things, and he so enjoyed working out how the different beings worked, it was just so complicated while they were still alive.
All the moving parts, the processes taking place, the exchange of gases and chemicals, so messy and needless for his examinations.
Like now, the gray-skinned humanoid had lurched to one side along with one of the attacking creatures and beaten its head against a nearby rock. The spray of internal fluid and bits of its head organ would be much easier to examine now that they didn’t have to work. In their convalescent state, inanimate, they were easy to understand and catalog.
He was so happy to seep into the soon to be corpse and feel through the ebbing energies that he forgot what came next.
The Prison worked its insidious magic, draining the body of specific energies while at the same time transforming all of the rest into that lump of stone called Vitae.
Every time!
It was so frustrating, it meant that he had to actually enter the body while it was active to learn anything, and usually, that only worked when they were sleeping, at least if he wanted to keep up with everything.
Only in sleep did it slow down enough for him to follow, that’s why he preferred them dead. He watched the gray-skinned specimen catch the claws of another pale, long-limbed thing and flip it over with impressive motor skills and use of leverage.
His interest in killing the material beings was not why it was sent here; no, sadly, it had been sheer stupidity on his part. There was no proof when he killed a non-immaterial being; it always looked like some kind of natural cause after all.
He always avoided those in the know or situations where he could be found out or detected through other means. It was easy enough since nothing physical was an actual barrier, and most magic wasn’t either.
No, sadly, it was for the murder of his own kind, and he shouldn’t have done it.
Watching the gray skin slip out a knife, and yes he knew weapons too, and then fillet up two more of the things that jumped down from above reminded him of the experiences on the outside he had lost because of his actions.
Likely part of the material justification of punishment, but never having experienced it how could he have known to avoid it?
He had happened upon another of his kind, they had merged and shared and birthed a new Forlor into the multiverse. The other of his kind had then remarked that something was wrong with the young one, strangely it exhibited a retarded behavior, lacking certain morals and ethics.
He had observed and agreed, then taken the opportunity to end the young one’s life and examine the intangible body. This had apparently driven the other of his kind into a distraught frame of mind, in the ensuing argument he had killed her too.
He thought of her as a female because he was male, and he did know that he would not be attracted to another like him, so he was not homosexual. Not that he had anything against that; every being’s choice was their own. No, he was upset by the reaction of his people once they finally ran him down.
An immaterial being could run very, very far after all.
The first occurrence of murder of one Forlor of another, he thought he would be famous, but instead, they judged him deficient.
The next thing he knew, there was sentencing, and he was sent to this prison; a lamentable turn of events. It curtailed his experimentation and analysis considerably and forced him to learn other ways of doing things.
Really inconsiderate of an organization meant to simply confine one to a set region of space and time. Why did the Prison also have to remove his ability to enjoy himself, but then he supposed that was a big part of the punishment ideal as well.
He was able to observe some fascinating biological interactions with the number of these creatures his specimen killed. It was certainly new to catalog the various reactions internal chemistry had with bile, acid, and other fluids.
He could not quite achieve the same effect using the body of a material being, although it gave him some ideas to try out when he could if he ever got out of this place.
Hemorrhages, broken bones, contusions, all of these he had found while his victims were in the throes of death. The various contortions inevitably led to some kind of damage, material beings were so frail compared to their environment.
Most of the time sharp edges, round edges and all sorts of angled surfaces could cause a lot of damage. Why the material beings insisted on surrounding themselves with highly resilient objects and structures he had yet to fathom.
This one though, the gray-s
kinned one, it was remarkably resilient, he hoped it would last long enough for significant study when he tired of observing it.
That happened about two cycles of the prison’s sun later, there had been no further encounters with random humanoids, animals or other creatures for a few hours and he was bored. Honestly, the regular interaction of moving over a material landscape in one’s very physical feet and exerting actual effort to do so, it was only unique for so long. He could fly around the Prison at will, just not get out of it; that planar dimensional barrier was reinforced with complex energies.
The things he could tell the various sentient beings, if only they could communicate at the higher level he did.
Ah well.
The observation was done, he had cataloged much about this being, and now he wanted to study its insides. It could take the biped far too many cycles to experience every environment of the Prison, as exciting as those interactions might be, so he wanted to analyze as much as he could now and move on.
With no concept of biological needs, imperatives or other matters of consequence, he simply floated inside the body of the creature and started.
First, he linked the energy matrix of his existence with the multi-dimensional lattice of the creature. Every physical being had their energy self that went beyond the material and tied the energies that made them up with the dimensions beyond.
This creature seemed to be particularly enervated, operating at a high level of interconnected pathways and with a visibly dominant one too.
Fascinating.
He then merged through those elements as catalysts to his energy and the physical makeup of the being, as expected it was a carbon-based lifeform. Nerves, cells, and other microscopic entities built up, the play of biology made up of so many moving parts. He killed a few to observe how they operated and confirmed the general biology and enhanced neurology of the specimen.
It was in excellent condition for a convict.
He could exist like this within a host for quite some time, the range of observations, however, were limited, the variability not too high in the humanoid organics of this type, when healthy. So he proceeded to the next phase and interacted with the more significant organisms, the organs, muscles, bones and so on that were the macro entities.
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