Maewyn's Prophecy: Pilgrim Heart

by Emily Veinglory

  “They will love you,” Veleur said. “As I do.”

  It was the first time he had actually said it. Peter had been the first to use the L-word, in the dark of night several days ago. He felt the knot in his chest unfurl and release the tension throughout his body. He pulled Veleur close, holding his hand on the back of Veleur’s head, where his silver-blond hair fell slick and long. The elf smelt faintly of sandalwood. Peter closed his eyes and tried to hang on to how he felt -- like nothing else could shake him, like little else in the world existed.

  He felt Veleur’s hands slowly insinuate beneath his shirt, seeking contact with his skin. He bowed his head, savored the brush of Veleur’s wiry hair against his cheek, the softness of delicate skin against his lips. He felt Veleur’s fingers slide beneath the waistband of his trousers.

  With an impatient groan, he turned, lifting Veleur bodily onto the great expanse of the bed. Veleur lay across the width of the bed, with his knees dangling over. His hair splayed out around him, and his eyes sparked with anticipation. Peter grabbed the bottom of the elf’s close-fitting knitted top and peeled it up, revealing the long, pale expanse of his almost hairless torso. Peter restrained himself a little longer, drawing down Veleur’s trousers and slipping off his socks and soft brogues.

  Peter always felt like he was seeing Veleur’s naked body for the first time. There was something unique and endlessly surprising about the perfect symmetry of him, the whorls of almost invisible sparse hairs that trailed from the notch at the base of his neck in a ragged diamond to the base of his ribcage.

  Veleur reached up towards him, long fingers unfurling into a gesture of total welcome. Glints of uncanny magical flame rippled over Veleur’s skin and flowed from the tips of his fingers. Peter tore off his own clothing with undisguised haste, feeling answering crimson fire welling up from within him, yearning to mingle with its mate. He knelt on the floor to yank off his shoes and pants. Still kneeling, he leant over the bed and lapped his tongue over the discreet, in-turned whorl of Veleur’s belly button. He glanced upward to see Veleur watching him through lowered lashes, as implacable as an icon of the Madonna. Peter loved, more than anything else, to see the mask of indifference crack and reveal the passions stirring beneath.

  He wound the tip of his tongue down through the almost imperceptible burr of hair, to the base of Veleur’s lightly veined cock. The buzz of raw magical energies tasted of sherbet and sulphur. Peter wrapped the top of his tongue firmly over the base of the shaft and wrapped the tip around to the underside. He ran the rough surface of his tongue up and down the underside of Veleur’s cock, feeling it stiffen and rise. He traced down from there along the exquisitely sensitive seam of flesh that ran down to the crease of his lover’s buttocks.

  A thrill ran down his spine when he heard Veleur moan -- a deep and sonorous sound, like the purr of a tiger. His own penis strained upwards; his balls tensed. He traced the flesh slowly down to the puckered flesh of Veleur’s rear. He ran his tongue lightly over it, circling it and feeling the elf shiver and raise his legs to rest comfortably over Peter’s shoulders.

  Peter was still cautious in the more intimate gestures. He let the tip of his tongue touch that portal gently. Veleur’s body took on the absolute stillness that Peter had learnt meant that Veleur was concentrating entirely on what his body felt. Peter was not ready yet to go further than that. He moved languorously around the edge again and then travelled back upwards.

  Veleur’s cock lay up against his belly. Peter took the tip of it into his mouth. He pushed the foreskin gently back from the head, tasting the sweet-salt taste of the exposed flesh. His hands slid up each side of Veleur’s creamy flanks, to his waist. He took Veleur’s cock into his mouth halfway and ran his taut lips over the surface. Veleur arched his back, trembling under his attentions.

  Peter released him and slid his body further up. Veleur’s long, lithe legs stayed gripped over his shoulders. He felt Veleur’s eager cock against his chest, slick upon the sweat building on the skin in the hot envelope of the air between their bodies.

  Veleur reached forward and grabbed a rough handful of Peter’s hair.

  “I want you in me now,” Veleur said without any restraint or refinement.

  Peter was not about to argue. Veleur devoured him with a wet, welcoming kiss. Peter’s tongue quested into the elf’s pink mouth, glancing over his sharp teeth. Their tongues duelled as their cocks rubbed, one against the other.

  With one hand Peter reached down and felt the dampened crease that strained towards him. He eased downwards until his cock lay butting against that smooth flesh. His cock felt as hard as iron as he smoothed spit over the head and pushed forwards into the tight embrace he was offered. There was no possible description for the sensation of entering into Veleur’s body. It was completion, redemption. It was love.

  He pushed on as Veleur clawed at his back, driving them savagely towards ecstasy. Each stroke trilled up his spine and sang in his head like pain and heady wine, like psalms and censer smoke. Veleur bucked beneath him, and his vision descended into red flame as he came.

  Chapter Two

  “In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”

  Romans 1:27

  Peter lay at ease and let the morning emerge to him in layers. The air was still, the sheets were soft, the bed was warm, and he was alone in it. There was a time when he would have woken easily at five in morning for his morning’s contemplation and made the early Mass in good time. In the absence of these structures, his day had slumped all too easily into reluctant waking and ever later hours.

  He opened his eyes experimentally. Veleur was standing at the bow window, turning towards him even at this slight movement. Outlined by the morning sun, Veleur glowed. He was wearing his black robe tied loosely at the waist, and he stood against the lit window like an icon upon its bed of gold. Could there be any man or woman who would not see beauty there? And the surface beauty was the smallest part of what he felt in seeing his lover.

  Peter felt chills run over his skin. He was uncomfortable with considering the thought that he might be as much in awe of Veleur as in love with him. Veleur had saved him when he was in deep despair, had offered a cause and a family. But this was an elf, a creature of magic and spirit, a creature from another world. The passion he felt for Veleur was great and engulfing -- and beginning to scare him. It lacked the firm basis of friendship and familiarity that should have reined in the emotional excess.

  Veleur’s great silver eyes glanced over and down to the small crucifix that lay at Peter’s throat, before sliding away. It was an old argument, but Veleur was not above resurrecting it even if only by pursing his lips and turning his face away. Peter pushed the covers aside and swung his legs out of the bed, feeling the deep carpet submit to the weight of his feet.

  “Veleur,” he said. “Don’t you ever think about it? It was a cross that brought us together. I was sent to that house were you lay imprisoned, carrying that old cruciform plaque.”

  Veleur’s eyes narrowed. “And it was a Villay Cross they told you to bring, Peter. It was meant to imprison me -- it would have led to my death if you had not cast it aside. I try to understand. I struggle to ...”

  Peter went over and stood behind Veleur, wrapping his arms around him. Peter did not yet know how to set faith and magic side by side, and he had thought on it long and hard. But he knew he would not give up God for Veleur, even as he doubted that he could give up Veleur for God.

  “My faith is a part of me,” Peter said. He waited patiently for any response, but none was forthcoming. He wondered whether similar doubts lurked in his lover’s heart. They reached for each other through a tangle of doubts and strands of things unsaid. He held on to Veleur, feeling the warmth of his body and knowing they were still too far apart. A gentle tap at the door made them both tur
n.

  “We will be down soon, Roman,” Veleur called as he stepped out of Peter’s grasp.

  Peter wanted to ask how Veleur had known who was at the door. It could be anything from magical sense to simple routine. He sighed and rested his palms upon the broad windowsill. The garden was empty; the dew was being driven by bright morning light streaming down from a turquoise sky.

  He turned to see Veleur pulling a loose tunic over his head. He turned towards Peter and raised one quizzical eyebrow. It seemed like Veleur always wore black; it had ecclesiastical overtones that made Peter uncomfortable.

  “Come along,” Veleur said. “Now we shall see.”

  Peter had some idea what to expect. Veleur had taught him a little, how to see some sort of magical energy or feel it with his fingertips. The elf had explained some of the talents magic-workers had. Some peculiar to elves or to humans, some common to both, some common to most practitioners, and some so rare that generations might come and go before they reappeared. He knew that Veleur was a worker of physical magics, a phenomenon he thought of as psychokinesis, although he barely understood it.

  He had seen with his own eyes how Veleur could make himself unbelievably swift or strong, or move so lightly that he did not even bend the grass he walked on. Veleur saw himself as some kind of pagan knight in the service of the seelie elves and their partners, in the cause of protecting any magic-worker or other kin from persecution. Now that he had found his partner, Veleur should become far more powerful and capable of even greater feats.

  Now it was Peter’s time to be tested, to discover the nature of the talents that lay dormant within him. He did not hurry in dressing, not entirely sure that he was ready to know. This was surely a fateful moment in his life, and great changes were rarely without their pains. That was just part of the nature of redemption.

  Peter recalled walking up to be ordained, his father by his side. He’d felt as if a great, golden door had opened up before him and all he had to do was walk through it. He thought he’d turned his back on his parents’ many disappointed looks, on shameful fantasies about what bolder men did in dark woods and his own even darker nights of the soul. He thought that was all behind him through the divine intervention of his true calling -- through good works, chastity, and obedience he aimed to expunge all of his many sins. But the things you think will never end can surprise you just as much as the things you think will never last.

  He had barely seen his father again, and had discovered that he’d been adopted -- more out of Christian duty than personal desire. Having handed him over to the church, his father had no real wish to see him again, and his mother gave mute compliance to her husband’s wishes regardless of her own. It should hardly have surprised him given the indifferent nature of their efforts as parents. The Catholic school had been a greater boon, the library, sports fields, and church becoming the underlying trinity of his life. So much so that he had sought something similar in his adult life -- the seminary and the church -- albeit for only a few years before he realised that calling was an illusion, that role an insult to those who truly felt it in their hearts.

  So what proved inconveniently constant? An incorrigible pilgrim heart looking for love in all the wrong places when love of God should have been enough.

  Peter felt his mouth twitch in a crooked smile. Look where his heart had got him now. He tied the laces of his shoes and found himself out of excuses. Veleur waited, leaning against the inside of the door frame. The look in his eyes was comment enough.

  “Alright,” Peter said. “Let’s go.”

  There was a trinity of sorts in the big downstairs room. Giffen was on his chair, and a new man sat on the facing sofa. He had long black hair and a very current suit in charcoal grey and a crisp, collarless shirt. That, together with his long face decorated with tidy rimless spectacles, gave him a look of a fashionable lawyer or advertising man. This, apparently, was Roman. Bear made an appearance at the kitchen doorway but did not get directly involved.

  “Well,” Giffen said, leaning forwards, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Roman gestured for Peter to sit opposite him, just where he had the previous night. Veleur was fading away into the background; Peter turned to see him heading for the door. He made to say something, but Veleur silenced him with a quick shake of the head.

  “He’d distract you,” Roman said. He had a sort of deep, warm voice that would do well in the confessional. It evoked trust and hardly matched his prim appearance at all. Peter held himself back from that response. He took a deep breath and sat down.

  “What exactly does this involve?”

  “It is simple enough,” Roman said. “The talent is born in a person, but so long as they are untrained, it rarely has any effect on the world. Even so, if you try to use it, someone with the sight, like Giffen here, can see it. And if we can see it, we can develop it. So, essentially we will work our way through the talents, starting with those most common. Then we shall see, as Giffen so pithily stated, what we have.”

  “You just have to try,” Giffen said. “You don’t even have to know how; the will and the talent together will be enough for me to see.”

  Roman gave Giffen an odd look, but then turned his attention back to the matter at hand.

  “Fire is an element almost all of us can influence to some extent. Most of us can bend it a little if we have to.”

  Roman reached under the coffee table and into a battered cardboard box. He brought out a plastic lighter and a candle in a simple brass holder. He lit the taper and set the candle in the middle of the table.

  “This may seem a little silly,” he said. “Just try and influence the flame, make it burn a little taller.”

  Peter looked at both men and the candle. He took a deep breath and leaned forward with his elbows resting upon his knees. He looked at the dancing flame and did his very best to imagine it roaring upward. He thought of a hand fanning it. He tried to will it up. He did feel like an utter fool, but he tried with all his might. He kept at it until he heard Roman speak again.

  “Well, it’s not unheard of to not have the touch with fire. Giffen here hasn’t even got native flame.”

  Peter had no idea what he meant by that and had no chance to ask.

  “The other elements next,” Roman said as he snuffed the flame without even touching it.

  * * * * *

  Hours later Peter buried his face in his hands, fighting back frustration. The table was littered with every kind of object from decks of cards and moss-covered rocks to a pile of pocket calculators. Giffen was pushed back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table. He seemed to find it important to appear indifferent the more he became concerned. Roman’s lips made a flat, grim line as he contemplated Peter -- no such pretense with him.

  “It just isn’t possible,” Roman said with annoyance and almost accusation. “Not possible that you have none of the measurable potentials. It is utterly impossible, unless ...”

  Peter felt his face falling flat as a mask. “Unless?”

  Roman steepled his fingers, but it was Giffen who laid it out so that Peter could understand their consternation. “The obvious options are that you aren’t trying, or you aren’t actually Veleur’s partner. It is easy to forget, however, that life is rarely that simple.”

  That comment was obviously directed at Roman. Peter frowned. There was a lot going on between these people, and he had no idea what. Damn Veleur for that; the elf could have told him a bit more about it all in advance. With jagged personalities like these, he felt like a blindfolded man in a room full of rat traps.

  “There must be something,” Roman insisted with a glare towards Giffen.

  “I do not read him well,” Giffen said with a shrug. “But if there was anything, I would have felt it anyway. Less clearly maybe, but nothing stirred. Nothing.”

  Peter deliberately unclenched his teeth. “I have done what you asked,” he said. “And I have no doubt as to the other.”

 
Giffen stood. “Then we seem to be at an impasse, at least for the moment. I suggest we take some time out. Peter has arrived with barely more than the clothes he has on. So we will go to the mall while wiser heads mull it over.” Giffen spoke with some irony. He stood. “Come along, Peter.”

  Lacking a better option, Peter followed along behind. Giffen was not the sort of man he would trust on sight. He had a bit of a rough, counterculture look to him. His pewter-coloured hair was gelled in soft spikes, and he wore a torn suit jacket over a Bauhaus T-shirt. He kind of looked like a soft-core punk left over from the ’70s, but there was a hardness to his features that meant he carried it off, more or less. All the same, Peter had to concede that Giffen had been welcoming enough so far.

  Peter found his overcoat hanging by the door, although he had certainly not left it there. Veleur must have brought it from the car and set it there on the peg before coming up to the room, assuming it belonged there. Peter pulled it on, settling into the embrace of thick, satin-lined wool, and stepped out into the chill air. He remembered the man who had given him the coat, a previous fateful encounter and one he would rather forget.

  Giffen strode down the side of the house, and Peter ran a few paces to catch up. “What’s with the looks that Roman was giving you?”

  Giffen hunched his shoulders inside his own rather inadequate blazer. “I’m not usually the sociable sort. He doesn’t understand why I am making an effort with you. After all, I can’t read you.”

  “You what?”

  “I have few gifts, and being unpartnered, they are not strong. My only strong talent is sight; it is one of the most uncertain and sporadic of abilities. I see glimpses, as the Fates will it, of the future -- of men’s choices and their consequences. Some more mutable than others.”