The Warlord and the Bard

by Eric Alan Westfall

# Are you become a doubting Tomar, denying Me? # Her link-Voice carries the tiniest tinge of acid.

  My own link-voice is serious in these moments which are, I am sure, outside of time. # No. All that has happened has made him what he is just now, has brought him...us...to this moment. I would pray to You that you grant me the ability to make it all, all right, though I have no idea what that truly means. But if I were to pray that way, I suspect I would just hear those famous words.... #

  My link-voice and Hers say the words together, though Her Voice carries a note of humor to offset the dryness of mine. # The Goddess helps those who help themselves. #

  # I think it is time that I...that he and I...help ourselves toward whatever is to be. #

  # Indeed. #

  I wait, but Her presence remains. I am uncertain how to hint to a Goddess that it is time for Her to be gone.

  # Just say so, dear boy. #

  # Uh. Be gone, Goddess? #

  # In a moment, in a moment. I am, I think, entitled to admire My handiwork. My artistry, if you will. Or if you don’t. He has quite a remarkable cock, does he not? #

  # Goddess! # I am not hearing this, I am not.

  # But you are. So from your reaction you don’t want to hear that yours is even more impressive? Longer. Thicker. Leaks.... #

  # No. Definitely no. I am not having this discussion. Besides, I thought we had a pact. I said ‘be gone,’ and poof! or something, and You are gone. Did I not say it loud enough? Clearly enough? #

  # I heard. I always hear. Do what must be done, please. # She laughs, and then Her presence is gone.

  No time has passed in what is our current real world, as I am still just beginning to dip my fingers in the oil. Did it all happen in the time it took for the downward part of a blink?

  I finish the dip, hold my hand up so the oil runs down my fingers and not off, turn, and ease down onto my back. I spread my bent legs wide, plant my feet. He is still by the side of the bed, but he can hardly be unaware that my oiled fingers are now between my legs, and from the way the muscles of my right arm stretch and move, those fingers are doing something other than stroking my cock. Like stroking my hole, and pushing in.

  I look over at him, continue fucking my fingers inside myself, using my left hand to spread my own oil down and around my cock to make it equally slick. “Are you just going to watch and stroke, or fuck me?”

  He stiffens, and his expression becomes flat and cold. “You dishonor yourself, and me, by suggesting that. You won. I do what I promise I will do.”

  “Do you think you could move to the foot of the bed?”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting a crick in my neck looking over at you.” I lie so very well. “So if we’re going to talk instead of fuck, would you mind moving?”

  He does, and forces himself not to gulp again when he is looking directly between my sprawling legs, to where I am easily sliding two fingers in and out, and am just starting on a third. All the while my left hand is stroking my cock.

  “Was timing a part of the wager?”

  “Uh, what?” I like the fact he has to force himself to look away from where the action is and into my face.

  “Timing? Wager?”

  “No.”

  “So I have no honor-debt requiring me to immediately toss your ass on the bed and fuck you through it?”

  “No?”

  I let out the moan I’ve been stifling. I have only once before done this in front of an audience...an audience of one...and it was not one-tenth as arousing as this. He licks his lips and looks back to my cock and fingers and hole and all the shininess there.

  “Did we agree that if I won the bet, only you would get fucked?”

  His intent look isn’t at my face at all. “No.”

  He licks his lips, and without quite realizing it, strokes his own impressiveness. My turn to repress a gulp.

  “Then there’s nothing preventing you from getting on this bed and fucking me through the mattress other than your Goddess-damned lack of interest or your Goddess-damned stubbornness?”

  “You’re saying I’m stubborn?” He is smearing his own personal oils on his cock. I decide I won’t make him take the time to use the bowl beside the bed.

  “If the crown fits....”

  He smiles just a little and then gets on the end of the bed, resting on his knees, upright, Goddess-bless but he is a fine pillar of man. And then he drops to all fours and...stalks up the bed toward me. I tell myself I won’t whimper, but of course I do. He is so intent he moves like one of the great cats on Istar, enormous, graceful, powerful, as he moves in on his prey. His so very willing prey.

  He is up on his knees again, touching the backs of my thighs. He lifts my legs with his hands under my knees, the muscles in his arms and chest bunching, but not straining at all. My ass rises off the bed.

  “Pillow.”

  I reluctantly pull my fingers out and then my right hand awkward flails about until I grab one of the large pillows. Bracing myself on my neck and shoulders, since I have no control over my legs, I manage to get the pillow under my ass. I am certain that if I don’t get it placed right, he isn’t going to take the time to do it for me.

  When I stop wriggling and start to stroke my cock again, this time with my oily right hand he just tells me, “Don’t.” And I don’t.

  He looks down at me. “I’ve decided to give you a choice.”

  Arrogant bastard. I let my expression ask him what in the Hells he is talking about.

  “The first time, you get to decide: fast or slow. The next fuck, the one against the wall, and the one after that over that chair—” he tilts his head to indicate which one— “it’s my choice.”

  “A fast fuck. A power fuck.”

  He looks down at me as you look at a none-too-bright man who has just demonstrated his none-too-brightness. “You’re never going to control the speed of the fuck, or anything about it. Just the first entry.” The “you idiot, don’t you understand anything at all?” is unspoken.

  My expression doesn’t really change, but I know he knows I’ve just decided that when he is under me, he won’t even have that choice. As he does, so will he be done.

  “Well-oiled and fast.”

  It is his turn to twist and stretch to the bowl, but he doesn’t brace himself with his right hand on the bed, turning and reaching with his left, as I expected. He just shifts his knees a little wider, spreading me even wider, and then with his left hand on my greasy, upright cock, as if he was grasping one of the poles the headboard is made of, he fluidly arcs over, dips four fingers in...arrogant crappinz!...and then shows off his superb balance and muscle control by slowly, slowly...arrogant crappinz!...returning upright.

  He fists his cock right-handed, making it slicker. Reaches between my legs and with three triangled fingers thrusts his way inside. I gasp, and then moan as he flicks-strokes his fingertips over my gland in quick succession, before pulling them out. Before my hole completely closes he moves his hips forward and I can feel part of his knob inside me. Not much at all, but enough to know he is there.

  “Shoulders.” Obviously, my DarkFire is not a very conversational fuck. Direct. To the point. I move my legs as instructed.

  He looks at our...connection, then up to me. “Warning or no warning?”

  I am tempted to say, “As you do, so shall you be done,” but resist. I only have the barest first sound of “no” out before he breaches me in a single stroke. Balls-deep. Well-oiled and fast. Just as I stupidly asked, assuming that merely because I have been fucked and fucked well before, numerous times in my life, though not so numerous as to qualify me as a slut, I could take a cock of that size inside me all at once. I howl at a slice of pain that moves like an unimaginably sharp blade from my hole to my head.

  He does me the honor of honoring my decision, not trying to take away the consequences of my choice, by asking if I was all right, by pausing, by fucking me in any way other than the way I requested. Fast. Powerful. />
  He pulls all the way out, but then plunges in again without giving my ass a chance to close up. Several strokes exactly the same way, then a series of rapid ones, only his knob inside on the out-stroke, then a slow, hip-twisting, cock-twirling stroke that stretches the walls of my channel as they have never before been stretched. A series of medium-paced strokes, halfway out and back in again. And finally he gives me what he promised. Hard. Fast. Harder. Faster. Faster still until I am thrashing my head back and forth, my fingers gripping the bunched-up sheet.

  “Fuck your hand!”

  “No!” I manage three rapid, short breaths that give me no air at all. “No...no need. Fuck. Just fuck me.”

  He does, impossibly accelerating yet again. “Come for me, Jerril,” he manages to gasp, looking down at my cock, at where we are joined. “Come now!”

  And I do. Gloriously so. The first spurt narrowly misses my eye, the rest leave seven, eight, nine long strands of seed running down my body and ending in my navel. He stops moving as I start seeding, perhaps because my ass has clamped so tight he cannot move, but when my hole finally relaxes, he grins wickedly at me, with great satisfaction, too, and then pounds my ass three, four, five times and spews his own seed far inside me.

  I slide my legs off his shoulders, down his arms until he lifts them up and away and my knees are around his waist, ankles crossed behind his back. He slumps down, still buried deep, resting his weight on his forearms beside my head. We breathe each other’s air before he kisses me again, devouring my mouth, but gently so.

  We recover what equilibrium we can find and he slowly slides out. I loosen my legs and he rolls to his right, ending on his back next to me once we are untangled. He sighs. Ostentatiously. “A man who has been that well-fucked ought to clean the cock that fucked him so well, don’t you agree?”

  Of course I did. I repositioned myself so I was leaning over his mostly erect prick. As I lowered my head, just before swallowing him, I murmur, “As you do....”

  He somehow turns that into an insult to his cocksucking abilities, telling me indignantly that he has, indeed, sucked cock before and sucked them well.

  However, he either knew where that remark would lead, or has just forgotten. From the look of chagrin on his face as I lift my head when I am done, it was the latter.

  I could hardly do anything other than sing to him, sitting on my haunches, with the kind of volume I might use to reach the farthest person in a large room filled with noisy people. “Anyone you can suck, I can suck better. I can suck anyone, better than you.”

  He surprisingly breaks into laughter, and then with his closest approximation to the right musical notes—roughly as far away from rightness as the outermost planet in the Empire is to the Throne World—“sings” back at me, “Yes, you can, yes, you can.”

  A High Bard of the mighty Kingdom and Empire, talented beyond mortal measure, who has just been well and truly power-fucked through the mattress of a mysterious bed in a mysterious place, by the magnificent cock of the genuine crappinz of that same Kingdom and Empire, does not giggle like a little boy. And then flop on his side while the giggles become laughter, until that self-same crappinz joins in.

  When we finally stop, I gather myself and sit up. I pat his very muscular right thigh, splendidly resisting the urge to stroke it and then slide my hand up and over and down between his thighs. “Stay here.”

  “Hey! Who’s the crappinz around here anyway? The highest rank in the room gives orders, you know.”

  By the time he is up on his elbows, I am out of the bed, padding naked to the door we know leads to the outside of wherever the Hells we are. “I’ll be right back,” I tell him as I open it, and step through. A right turn, several strides to reach the corner, another step and I am past the edge of the house. A right turn again, and I am looking at the wall, the long, smooth, solid external wall, on the other side of which are the chairs, the table, the chillers.

  And a door.

  I go back inside and stand in front of the door. “This has to be a bathing room. Nothing else makes sense. But there’s no room outside, joined to this...house...or whatever it is. How?”

  I look over my shoulder at him. “There’s no Power here. So no spells, no magic. So how?”

  He is sitting up now, cross-legged. He shrugs. “Why ask me? You’re the one who believes in the Goddess. Ask Her for an explanation. Or, you know, you could just say, ‘Fuck explanations,” and just open the door.”

  Oh.

  So I do. Or try to. The handle turns, but no matter how hard I pull, the door itself doesn’t open. I am on the verge of losing my temper when there is a kind laugh-hastily-turned-to-a-cough sound behind me. I turn on him, and he is still sitting there, but now he is indeed fighting a laugh. And as he fights, he manages to say, “P-p-push, perhaps?” before finally succumbing.

  While the maniac crap prince who will one day be my King-Emperor laughs behind me, I turn the handle again and push. The door opens, and it is a bathing room. A rather opulent one, which is, in a way, depressing, because it’s the kind of opulence that goes with a nice, long stay.

  The water is the right hotness, the soap scent is pleasant. I clean myself, and then carry a ewer, two cloths and soap back to the bed. I set it on the table beside what is suddenly “my” side of the bed. Will we actually have a future in which we each have a “side” of a bed?

  “Kind of silly doing this, isn’t it?” he asks. “When you’re just going to get messy again, the next time. Against the wall, wasn’t it? Saving the chair bend and bare for last.”

  He looks down at his cock, which is just beginning to lengthen again as I ignore his sarcasm, and clean him. “The wall is looking like it will be ready for us any moment now.”

  “No.”

  He doesn’t look up, just tilts his head back, eyes closed, enjoying my touch. “Well, then, the chair. I have no problem which change the sequence.”

  “Bed next.”

  He opens his eyes and looks into mine. “I thought we agreed. Bed. Wall. Ch.... Oh.” He looks down at my cock. My very, very hard cock.

  Oh, indeed.

  DarkFire

  Oh, indeed.

  If I believed, I would ask a Goddess-blessing on the naked man kneeling beside me. Over all the years since then, whenever I have had a choice between bedding a man whose hair is a definite shade of red, not merely a hint of it, and a man of some other color, no matter how magnificent he might be by comparison, I always chose the redhead. Have I been preparing myself for Jerril? Or searching for him?

  No one has fucked me since then. No one has touched my ass for longer than it takes to tell the man “no” or to wrap my fingers around his wrist and grind his flesh with sufficient strength to ensure he understands that “no” means “don’t fucking touch me there.”

  I could so easily have avoided this, just by avoiding the arrogance of believing that merely because no man I have ever met, seen or had sex with has ever had a cock as large as mine, there could not possibly be such a man somewhere in the Kingdom and Empire, and then bet on that arrogance.

  I can still avoid it. He likes being fucked by me. If I wagered with him, for the most modest of stakes, that I can give him a climax unlike any he has ever before, better than any other even with that damnable song that won’t stop running through my head, I would win. And I, for a reason I either do not know, or am simply unwilling to admit, told him all the truth of that day. Knowing what he knows, all I have to do is tell him that I cannot get past what was done to me that day. Not the first time; not the rest of the times.

  Not this time.

  He will understand. He will release me.

  And he won’t brand me a coward. Aloud or in his head.

  But I would.

  So I won’t.

  I turn over on my belly, reach under to adjust my cock so that if by some chance I do get hard from being fucked, which is not at all likely, the friction of the sheets might do some good. I wrap my arms around one of th
e fat pillows, turn my head to the side and let it drop.

  “Fuck me.” My voice is a growl, and not as strong as I would prefer, but no one can accuse me of whining. Of backing out.

  There is a loud sigh from above and to my left. I raise my head, twist my neck to look. Yes, that is a long-suffering-sigh expression on his face. I recognize it from the countless ones directed at me when I was the young, crippled Prince who had no Gifts, and was invisible to Power.

  Although this one is slightly different. There is a hint of a glint or a twinkle in his eyes. “Just...get it the fuck over with?”

  “Yes.” And my own sigh is long-suffering, and somewhat pathetic. So be it.

  “No way you’re going to enjoy being fucked, is there?”

  I know where this is going. But this time he’ll be wrong. “No.”

  “Just like you didn’t enjoy being kissed.”

  Damn him. I still won’t look at him. “Fine. I enjoyed the kissing.”

  “So you admit you were wrong.”

  I manage not to grind my teeth loudly enough to be heard. “Yes. I was fucking wrong. But I’m not wrong about this. So can we please just fucking get this one done?”

  “Shove a couple of oiled fingers up inside you, fuck you with them a couple of strokes, slap some oil on my cock, and then just shove that in, balls deep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck you then? Into the mattress? Through the mattress and onto the floor?”

  “Yes, Goddess damn it!”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I have a better idea.”

  “You’re not going to sing at me again, are you?”

  I hear the slight laugh beneath the words. “Not right now, at least.”

  “Fine.” My voice is surly, I know, but it’s the way I feel. “Go with your alternate plan.”

  “Spread your legs. No. Wider. That’s right. Or, ‘fine,’ as some Royally Imperial, occasionally arrogant ass might say.”

  The bed moves as he does, and he winds up between my legs, but further down than he should be for fucking me.

  His hands touch my ass cheeks, first just his fingertips, circling, caressing, then his full hands, doing the same. If he’s trying to lull me into a state of something so that his cock will be more of a surprise, I don’t tell him it won’t work. He can learn that on his own. But still, his touch is...nice.