by Talya Andor
Blaise licked Thaniel's lips and propped himself over him, smiling with his eyes intent and knowing.
"Pace yourself," Blaise told him, reaching between them to set a palm on Thaniel's hip. "We have however long we like."
"But, the ceremony …" Thaniel began.
"Can go for hours," Blaise said, voice going low and sultry.
Thaniel tipped his head back as Blaise moved atop him, rubbing against him in all the most interesting ways. His cock was already beginning to stir, and Thaniel hadn't known he was capable of rising so quickly.
"Like you?" he ventured, his grin echoing Blaise's when he caught sight of it.
"Like us," Blaise corrected, shifting his grip to Thaniel's cock and rubbing it up against his own belly.
Thaniel's eyes fluttered. He'd never enjoyed such pleasures and couldn't imagine anyone being better at it than Blaise.
"Have you …" His voice was hoarse when Blaise began to kiss his neck again. The hoarseness didn't surprise him; he was astonished he was able to speak the question. "Have you done this before, then?"
Blaise drew back to prop himself over Thaniel again. This time he was frowning.
"You're my only," he said, sounding insulted.
"O-oh," Thaniel faltered, and added to ease the injury. "But you're so good?"
That caused Blaise's stern expression to dissolve into mischief. "The gods are mighty voyeurs, Thaniel. You'll do well to remember that."
Thaniel's eyes widened, but he was swept up with another kiss as Blaise pressed close to him once more. He thought about that as he closed his eyes and opened his mouth to Blaise's searching tongue. This was new to both of them, but Blaise was a god. Of course he'd be better than Thaniel at something regardless of whether it was the first time he tried his hand at it or the fiftieth.
It explained more, in another sense, as Blaise had always been better than Thaniel no matter what the game or diversion with which they'd occupied themselves, over the past four years. Thaniel had always envied and sought to emulate the carefree way Blaise had seemed to live in the moment, seizing every bit of enjoyment to be had whether they were running from a scolding stall attendant or taking their ease watching fireworks bloom against the night for the last time.
Thaniel lifted his face into Blaise's kiss and stroked down his back.
"How … how do we …" he began, hesitant, as Blaise's hands ventured into new places, evoking equal parts embarrassment and the honest reaction of desire.
Blaise brought his lips near Thaniel's neck, kissing there, and whispered his blunt explanation into his ear. He kissed the hinge of his jaw, then, and trailed kisses toward his chin before looking down into his eyes, expectant.
"Will it hurt?" Thaniel inquired, remembering the question from a very different context the day before, as well as Anatole's evasive but well-meaning answer.
Blaise smiled down at him and touched his nose to Thaniel's in a brief, indirect kiss. "No," he replied. "Not if I do it right."
"And you get everything right your first try," Thaniel said, not wry or questioning or sour but in perfect faith. It was an observation based on his experience with Blaise over the past four years.
"Yes," Blaise said, his eyes glimmering with mischief and lust. He closed in again, lips whispering over Thaniel's. "But especially when it comes to you."
Thaniel wrapped his arms around Blaise and held him tight as they began to kiss again. He clung to Blaise as his anchor, ready to give him anything he asked. He was allowed now.
The proscriptions against Thaniel's body, his affections, only held true for mortals, and due to Thaniel's luck and Blaise's cunning, of course he'd fallen for the one person he could surrender to in every respect.
Thaniel turned his head as Blaise began to kiss downward from his jaw. The fire hovered in the background, ever present but distant as a sunset, color with no heat, a seething wall of flame that couldn't reach them with its restless outstretched fingers. He marveled that the air around them was temperate, if humid with the heat they created between their bare bodies.
"It can't touch you," Blaise said, reading his thought or perhaps attentive to the way Thaniel had turned to look at the flames. He lifted himself up over Thaniel and stroked his sternum.
"But in the end?" Thaniel wondered. To be the sacrifice, he knew, meant to be consumed.
"Nothing will hurt you," Blaise assured him. "You're with me now." His caressing hand wandered down to Thaniel's belly and lingered there. He fanned out his fingers and gazed down at Thaniel, one brow cocked as though to inquire whether he had license to continue.
Thaniel nodded, spreading his legs as Blaise settled down there. "I trust you," he replied, consciously echoing their interplay from the day before.
Blaise's smile was equal parts mischief and sultry promise. "With your life?" he parroted back Thaniel's response.
"And my death," Thaniel said, hoarse as his throat drew tight on that last word.
"Oh, Thaniel!" Blaise exclaimed. His voice was so full of emotion as he moved up in a flurry of limbs and swinging red hair to enclose Thaniel in his arms again that for a moment, he thought Blaise was crying. His eyes were bright, though, and a fierce smile was on his lips. "It's a beautiful thing, don't you see? We're bringing life. And you are not alone, understand? Of all your people who live and die, alone at the end, you're the one who goes hand in hand together with me."
"My god," Thaniel added, gazing up at the sincerity of Blaise's smiling face above him. It was impossible to doubt. "Why me?"
He knew Blaise would understand. He wanted to know why Blaise had chosen him, Thaniel, over all the other twelve-year-old boys who had lined up at their temples that day.
"We all have our own reasons," Blaise began, touching Thaniel's cheek. His expression turned from doting to thoughtful. "You knew what it was like to lose something, Thaniel, and how important it was to make sure no others lost what you did."
Thaniel nodded, swallowing against the burn of threatened tears. One escaped each eye anyway, and Blaise leaned down and gathered them from his cheeks with a loving tongue.
"You know," Blaise whispered, and Thaniel nodded, reaching up to hook Blaise's neck and lure him into a kiss, and another, then more for good measure. At last Blaise pulled away, propped over him again and closing out everything beyond the two of them with the spill of his red hair. "Besides, as newest god to the court, of course I want the best and prettiest there is."
Thaniel stared up at him a moment, mouth open, as he realized Blaise was talking about him. He would have squawked with outrage but Blaise covered his mouth again, flicking his tongue inside.
Whatever arguments Thaniel might have marshaled were unraveled under the application of that talented mouth.
Once Blaise began to move against him with intent, Thaniel found all his fears and questions had fallen away. He was in the arms of someone who wanted him above all others, someone who wanted him for who he was, and exacted the same manner of affection. He didn't mind Blaise's deception and let go of any pique he might have held after the fact at not being told he had been tested, in a sense, for years. He had gotten the opportunity to grow up with his god from the moment he'd been chosen and, as a result, had fallen in love.
He could ask for nothing more.
"I love you," Thaniel whispered, as Blaise's lips began to travel from his mouth on that southward path once more.
Blaise's head lifted to give Thaniel a smile more blinding than the dawn. Its brilliance far outstripped the roaring fires that circled them.
"Your love gives me divinity," Blaise whispered in response, and the look on his face was overwhelming. Thaniel couldn't withstand such focused, loving regard.
His awareness of the light and sound, the lack of heat, faded as Blaise coaxed sensation from his body again. He could only focus on Blaise, his lips and hands and the brush of finely shaped fingers, tickle of long hair sweeping over his skin, and what all those disparate parts did to Thaniel, coaxing resp
onse.
Little cries left Thaniel's lips; his hips arched and his fingers clung to the parts of Blaise that he could reach as his response rose in more ways than the obvious. He needed to touch, be touched in turn, and his desire shaped the ways he showed that to Blaise. His legs laced over Blaise's waist. He bit his lips but that couldn't stop the groans that pleasure wrung from them. His grasping fingers found and traced Blaise's temples, tugged at his hair, stroked the hinge of his jaw.
They came together in a way that astounded Thaniel, their bodies overcoming the natural resistance Thaniel's defenses had to offer. If it was fire that surrounded them, their bodies moved together, merged and became one like the water the ceremony was meant to invoke. Thaniel didn't know where he ended and Blaise began, only that it was glorious and he never wanted it to end. Blaise's beloved lips and hands and fingers coaxed every last bit of pleasure from Thaniel as they joined, and there was no pain, only the restless drive of desire, each of them spurring the other to its keenest height.
When they came together in that selfless burst of pleasure, each seeking to give one another more and more, Thaniel forgot everything but the glad cries on his lips and the beloved body against his. Nothing else mattered.
Blaise shuddered and came to rest against him after emitting soft, hoarse cries that reminded Thaniel of his circling cardinal.
"It was you, all along," Thaniel accused, stroking his shoulder.
"Hmm?" Blaise murmured, propping his chin on Thaniel's chest and gazing at him with half-lidded eyes.
"You, the cardinal," Thaniel said. "And you, the friend who always showed up when I needed him."
Blaise's lips curved in a satisfied smile. "Wasn't going to show myself to you as a firebird, now was I?"
Thaniel smiled, his satisfaction reflecting Blaise's. "I guess not," he conceded. "Yet you were there all along the way."
"I needed to see you," Blaise told him, curling up against his side. "So I showed myself to you in another form." They lay together in silence for a while.
Thaniel shifted, making himself comfortable against Blaise, and gazed beyond him at the flames that were still at bay, all crackle but none of the heat he associated with fire.
"Is this a dream?" he inquired, sudden and sharp. "Is this my dream before death? I'm already in the fire, yet this is like some last fantasy."
Blaise's hand caressed his face, moved along his jaw and past it, taking hold of a twisted lock of hair and tweaking it. "If it's a dream, does it make it any less real?" he asked.
Thaniel considered this. Blaise was solid in his arms, and Thaniel's body accepted the pleasure that had flowed back and forth between them. Did he want to question it, and maybe puncture the illusion, if it wasn't?
"I suppose not," Thaniel said, slow to reply. It pained him to think Blaise might not truly be embracing him. If it were a last flight of fancy, though, the light that his brain conjured for him on his way from mortal existence, then it was a good one.
"Then it's good," Blaise said, and kissed Thaniel's cheek. "I'm glad you chose me, Thaniel."
Thaniel was about to reply, But didn't you choose me? when the fire, held at bay until now, closed in on them in a sudden rush. Heat descended and the air was dry and painful, lashing at every exposed part of him.
"This is the moment," Blaise told him, his arms a fiery ring around Thaniel's neck, his voice a throaty purr in his ear. There was an urgency now that hadn't been there before. "This is where you have to decide, Thaniel."
Thaniel wasn't sure if his eyes were squeezed shut or wide open to the inferno; either way, fire eclipsed his vision. Red-orange was all he could see, and he wondered, strangely detached, if that was because he was now dead or dying. "Decide what?" his voice answered Blaise, a crackle above the flames.
"You can come with me," Blaise told him, the branding-hot touch of a hand stroking down Thaniel's back. "Or you can stay here, your role fulfilled."
Thaniel started, lifting his head and trying to find Blaise's eyes. "I … can stay?" he uttered, amazed. "But I thought I was dead. Dying. I'm the sacrifice."
"You are; you did well, so well," Blaise crooned and kissed his cheek again. That touch, too, was a firebrand. "You sacrificed yourself to me and did it so beautifully. You were the best."
Jealousy clawed the pit of Thaniel's stomach. "Of all the others?" he guessed.
Blaise's laugh was golden and joyous in his ears. "You're the only one for me," he assured Thaniel. "It's a two-way sacrifice, Thaniel. Your humans give us a virgin, and my court gives you the newest young phoenix ready to enter the deities' court. I have to die here to live in the heavens, of course."
Thaniel was dazed, struggling to absorb this information along with the reality of the fire lapping around their twined bodies. He was lying in the heart of it with Blaise, but he wasn't dead. "I don't understand … you want me to stay?"
"You can stay," Blaise corrected, drawing back far enough so that Thaniel could gaze into his incandescent eyes. "If you want. You can live, Thaniel, live the life you always thought you'd be denied."
A swell of hopefulness gripped him. "I can live, or …?" he trailed off, wanting to know the alternative.
"Or you can come with me," Blaise concluded. His mouth curved faintly. His eyes were molten gold now, a stark contrast from the amber brown they'd been before when he'd presented himself to Thaniel as human. The hair that flowed over his shoulder, formerly auburn so dark it had been nearly brown, was a bright red, more vivid than any mortal hue.
"I can come with you, to the court?" Thaniel said, staggered by the implications.
"You can rise with me," Blaise confirmed. "It's your right of sacrifice, Thaniel. You can take a place beside me, immortalized by the power we've kindled together."
Thaniel remained mute, clinging to Blaise's shoulders. There was so much he didn't understand.
He did, however, grasp the essential fact of what Blaise was telling him: he could return to his human life, alone.
Or he could rise to a new life with Blaise.
It took barely a moment's thought, only as long as it took Thaniel to grasp the two paths being offered him. In a way, he'd decided when he realized it was Blaise who was the phoenix, Blaise who'd come to culminate the rite and possess him.
"I want to be with you," Thaniel said.
Blaise held him tighter, gazing deeply into his eyes. "Are you sure?" he questioned. "This is for good, Thaniel. You can't go back, if you choose me." His hand cupped Thaniel's cheek.
Thaniel smiled in response, already at peace with shedding the life he'd known. Hadn't he been prepared for that very fact, these past four years?
"It was always you," Thaniel replied, wondering and humbled by that truth. He had always been meant for Blaise, and it had been Blaise all along who'd been his only solace, and his ultimate reward. "Now it's you and me."
The flash of Blaise's answering smile was brighter than the sun.
"That's your choice," Blaise's voice confirmed, smoky and somehow more resonant, reaching beyond Thaniel, beyond sound somehow.
He didn't even have time to nod before the two of them were engulfed in the flames that had surrounded them, held off until now by some unearthly power.
Blaise's power, Thaniel knew now, and he was the catalyst that made it possible for him to rise to its full potential.
Thaniel's body remained behind, in the heart of the flames.
Two phoenixes sprang up from the altar, rising on a draft of air in a tight, intertwined spiral. Their joyous cries pealed on the air before a beam of sunlight speared through them. They shimmered and were gone.
*~*~*
The next day the skies clouded over, and the sunbaked land was bathed in the blessed rain of the gods. Priests across the nation gave thanks and attributed the fall to the gods' tears at the youthful passing of such a bright life.
In the court of the heavens, Thaniel held his lover close and declared the rain to be tears of joy. He'd been granted a new life,
one that would last forever with his Blaise, and the fire that bound them together would never go out.
About the Author
Talya lives in the Pacific Northwest with her girlfriend, two cats, and is constantly balancing a busy slate of boylove stories to write with her day job, hobbies to upkeep, and nail polishes to collect. She has been writing fiction since elementary school and progressed to guy on guy erotica during college, honing her chops on fan fiction until original fiction lured her with its siren call. She loves writing and reading, routinely geeks out over gaming and movies, and watches far too many cooking shows.