by Quil Carter
Ben looked around and squinted his eyes as his hibrid night vision started to adjust to the darkness. It wasn’t nearly as good as his natural sight, just shades of fuzzy grey, but it was better than his human eyes by a hundred fold.
Nothing… there is nothing around here, Ben said to himself. He looked down at his green blanket, now steel-grey, and then further on to the fire that was now nothing but coals, as cold as the moss-covered rocks. Even though the blanket was thick he was still cold, wishing now more than ever that he had insisted that Malagant help him make their hammocks.
A sigh broke the heavy silence. Ben looked beside him and saw Malagant. He was asleep with his back to Ben, his raven-black hair shining in the darkness and a blade of grass waving back and forth with the elf’s light breathing.
He usually snores… Ben said to himself, then he drew his blanket up to his chin.
“BEN!”
A tremor of shock ran through Ben and immediately he jumped to his feet, the blanket falling to the ground.
That was Teal.
“BEN!” Teal shrieked, his voice shrill with terror. It was coming from deep inside of the woods, but what was Teal doing away from their camp? Had his night terrors turned into sleep walking?
Well, he wasn’t going to stand there trying to figure it out, Teal sounded like he was hurt or in peril. So Ben grabbed his scabbard and swung it over his back, then he ran into the woods towards the voice.
“Ben! Ben!” Teal continued to scream, his words carrying quickly over the dead night air. “Hurry!”
Ben jumped over a jagged grey rock. He opened his mouth to ask Teal what in Elron was happening to him when suddenly he heard another voice behind him.
“BEN!” Malagant suddenly shouted. “That’s not Teal! Get the hell back to camp. That’s not sheking Teal!”
Ben stopped on the spot, an eerie chill running down his back like cold water. He looked behind him but the camp was lost in the grey shadows of countless twisted trees, rocks, and brush.
“W-what?” Ben stammered back.
“BEN!” Teal screamed; he sounded like he was sobbing. “That’s not Malagant. I woke up and came down to sleep beside you – I saw him in Malagant’s bed and he chased me out of camp. Ben – Ben, that’s not Malagant.”
“Don’t listen to him! Teal’s safe in the hammock,” Malagant’s voice called. “Come back to the camp.”
Ben stared in the direction of the camp, petrified; his chest a percussion of racing heartbeats that seemed to compete with one another to see which could break his ribs first. His mind seemed iced in its place but in the same token was fluttering back and forth like a caged bird, desperately trying to find an exit that he knew didn’t exist.
“Ben…”
Ben jumped a mile high as Teal’s whimpering voice sounded right behind him. He quickly turned around and when he saw Teal – he screamed.
Teal was staring back at him, his head shaved and what looked like a hundred worms wiggling out of his scalp. He was looking at Ben with desperation, his body grey and gaunt like the parasites were sucking from him his very essence.
Ben stumbled back with another scream, and tripped over the jagged rock he had just jumped over. He landed on his backside and stumbled backwards as the monster that was his friend stared sadly at him, an odd slick of black putrid liquid dripping down his chin as the white worms wiggled around, half inside of his scalp, half out.
As Teal took a step towards him, his hand rose. To Ben’s horror, Teal grabbed one of the worms and pulled; the white creature stretching until it was a thin taut elastic, until it snapped out of his head.
Vomit filled Ben’s mouth when he realized the worm was over a foot long, its body almost fully inside of what he realized was Teal’s brain.
“Such interesting things you have in your mind, Ben Zahn,” Teal said in an unsettlingly singing voice. “A human? How… remarkable.”
Ben leapt from his bed and looked around the room wildly; his breathing was laboured and his chest aching as if he had been inhaling smoke the entire night.
That was some fucked up dream…
Everything looked the same at least; same rock band posters on his walls, same old dresser missing the upper left knob, same stale beer smell, same–
Wait a second.
Like someone was pressing on his chest, Ben’s heavy breathing stopped, filling the blue-painted bedroom with nothing but the sound of his fish tank’s filter running.
Something was wrong here – something was extremely wrong.
He was home… he was back in his world.
“What the…?” Ben ran out of his bedroom and into the dingy living room that he had called home for the past several years. It was exactly how he remembered it, all the way down to the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke. It still had its crooked pictures hung on the wall, the mismatched, cat-scratched furniture, and–
Ben walked up to the coffee table. It was still full of garbage and the crescent rings of old beer cans, there was even a bottle of morphine pills resting beside an overfilling ashtray.
“Babe, you okay?” a voice asked behind him; a voice that made Ben’s heart automatically clench and fill. It belonged to a man that Ben didn’t know if he would ever see again, someone who still had his slight fingers wrapped around Ben’s heart.
“Tav?” Ben whispered. He closed his eyes tight as his friend’s face appeared in his mind, an image that at one point in time had become distorted and blurry.
There was a part of him that didn’t want to open his eyes and turn around, because Ben knew that this wasn’t real, and he knew that seeing Tav with his own eyes would only infect those healing wounds.
But in the end Ben wasn’t that strong.
Slowly he opened his eyes and turned around, and in his vision he saw the boy he realized he had been slowly falling in love with.
Tav was standing in front of him, almost face-to-face with Ben. The young man was giving him a kind yet worried smile.
“You look kinda stoned… are you tripping, Benji?” Tav asked. He held up a hand and gently rested it on Ben’s forehead, making Ben’s body immediately relax under the familiar touch.
I think I might love you… but no, this can’t be real. As Ben said these words he felt his head tilt towards Tav’s touch. The boy, with his chestnut-coloured hair and chocolate brown eyes, furrowed his brow.
“You’re kind of warm…” Tav said slowly, then he shifted his hand down to Ben’s neck and rubbed it. “Why don’t we lay down in bed together? Just you and me.”
Just… you – you and me? Ben stared at him, going over every line of the boy’s face and committing it to memory. Did he really mean that? He’d never offered it before. Tav–
Suddenly Tav’s hand wrapped behind Ben neck and before he could even put together another lucid thought Tav kissed him.
A thousand feelings boiled inside of Ben in that moment, so intertwined with one another he wasn’t sure which one he truly felt. A large part of his brain was screaming at him everything that was wrong with this situation but the lust and love that the kiss was drawing out of his heart was quickly pushing that loud voice back into the muted corners of his mind.
In the end the love won out. When Tav grabbed Ben’s hand and pulled him into the bedroom he went willingly, and when Tav pushed him onto the bed and straddled him, locking their lips together once again, he gave himself fully into lust.
He grabbed Tav’s backside and pulled him closer, their mouths open and their tongues weaving in and out of their mouths. An inferno was rushing through his body like his blood was scalding water and his veins broken pipes, it was pooling to all the right places and drawing out an intense heat.
Ben groaned when Tav pressed his groin against his, two hard mounds grinding into each other, with only two thin pieces of cloth separating them. It felt good and it had been a long time since Ben had been taken care of – or even had taken care of himself. He didn’t get that much privacy.
“Take them off, little human,” Tav whispered into his ear as he roughly ground his hips into Ben’s groin. They were both stiff. “Show me just how humans fuck.”
Little human…
Ben’s eyes snapped open. With a gasp he shoved Tav off of him and scrambled to his feet. Tav fell to the ground with a heavy thud.
As soon as Tav hit the floor he jumped back to standing. He grinned at Ben and took a step towards him. Ben matched his advance with a quick step backwards.
“Come here, godless one.” Tav’s voice started to change, dropping in tone and becoming dry like it had been dragged through rough paper. “Let me give you what you want.”
“W-where am I?” Ben stammered. He took another rapid step backwards until his back hit the door frame. He glanced behind his shoulder, and when he saw a clear view of the stained white door to outside, he turned and bolted, not even waiting for the creature taking Tav’s form to answer.
Quickly, Ben ran across the living room and pulled the door open. The biting cold air stabbed him like he’d run into an iron maiden as he ran down the stairs and into the snow-covered parking lot. He was only dressed in his blue boxer shorts, and even if this world was some sort of false reality it was obvious that it was realistic enough for him to feel the frigid chill of winter.
“Malagant!? Teal?” Ben yelled. He looked around wildly and saw his beater Civic parked under a lamp in the parking lot, but it was as useless as an ornament – he didn’t have his keys on him.
Confusion and overwhelming panic danced together as Ben’s eyes swept the parking lot and the white-draped park that was across the empty street. Everything was the same, and yet, he had never felt so out of place and lost.
“What the shek is going on here!?” Ben yelled. He turned around to face his apartment door, when to his horror he became face-to-face with Tav.
Tav grinned at him, a cigarette still dangling from his lips.
“I gave you a present, Benjamin Zahn,” Tav said, his grin widened. “I made this for you. Is this not everything you ever wanted? You’re back home with your little love.” He took the cigarette from his lips and flicked it away, before blowing the rest of the smoke out of his nostrils.
Ben could smell the cigarette aroma; he could feel the cold winter air sting and burn his body like frozen fire. There was nothing around Ben to tell him this was some false reality, nothing but the strange creature standing in front of him.
“You made this for me?” Ben asked, not hiding the confusion in his voice. “I… I don’t understand what you’re saying. Who are you?”
Tav laid a hand on Ben’s neck; Ben made a motion to jerk away from him but he found himself unable to move. He was forced to let the false Tav gently caress his neck before his finger trailed down to Ben’s stiff nipple.
The creature smirked and gently started to rub the hard bud, his fingers becoming warm. “I’m Tav,” he said simply; he leaned in and gently kissed Ben’s lips, “and I want us to be together.”
There were no words for the self-derision Ben felt when his heart betrayed him with a flutter, but it was what it was. Even in this confusing madness the touch, mixed in with the words, and, worst of all, Tav’s caring face in front of him, made him pull towards this false man.
“Tell me who you are,” Ben rasped.
Tav’s hand trailed lower, before slipping down Ben’s boxers, and when the creature grabbed Ben’s penis and started to rub it, a moan slipped through Ben’s dry lips.
Tav rubbed it and stroked the head with the tip of his thumb. “Yes, get hard for me, little thing. Would you like me to taste it?”
“Yeah…”
What are you doing?
What the shek is wrong with you?
Ben – stop.
BEN!
“NO!” Ben bellowed. With a pull of will he snapped out of the creature’s hold on his physical body and pulled his hand out of his boxers. He took a step back, his chest heaving and his brow glistening with sweat. “No… no, I can’t–”
The creature jumped on Ben, throwing him backwards and right into the snow. He stayed on Ben’s body and with a taunting, sickening laugh he grabbed Ben’s boxers and ripped them off of him.
“I’ll make you like it, you godless maggot,” the creature in Tav’s body hissed. He grabbed Ben’s testicles in his hand and squeezed them, making Ben scream in pain.
“Oh, music to my ears, you’ll be singing a different song soon,” Tav taunted. “A beautiful chorus of high pitch screams until they’ll turn into begging moans. I’ll make you want me one way or another, human. I’m going to keep you here until my master and I uncover every secret in that mind. Every – delectable – secret.”
Ben howled. Tav’s grip on his testicles tightened, the pain so intense he was sure he was going to pass out. His mind scrambled to try and find words to get this thing inside of Tav to stop but he produced nothing but another agonizing scream.
Then the creature paused. Ben saw Tav’s eyes narrow, before the reason for his surprise was apparent: a crashing sound in the distance, and–
Malagant’s voice?
“Master?” Tav looked towards the sound and stood up, releasing Ben’s testicles from his grasp. Ben groaned and grabbed them, his teeth clenched as they throbbed like they had their own heartbeat.
Tav looked around and Ben saw his eyes widen in shock. “Master!” Then, in a flash of blinding blue light, Tav disappeared and where he was standing was an elf Ben’s age with wavy black hair, a sharp face, and prominent, almost buggy purple eyes. He was dressed in a white mage’s robe embroidered with dark blue thread, and he had a golden circlet around his forehead.
“Master?” the elf said again, before, to Ben’s surprise, he looked accusingly at Ben. “No one can outmatch my master. What did you do, human?”
Then another crash. This time Ben saw a flash of the same light blue, shooting high up into the air like a firework, before it came crashing down out of sight. It was followed by a thunderous, ground-shaking boom that had on its heels the sound of shattering glass and twisted metal, like the object had crashed into a car.
“Nyte!” the elf cried. He grabbed his robes and started running towards the fallen blue blur, and because he had heard Malagant’s voice, Ben rose and, as best he could cold, naked, and in intense pain, he ran after the strange elf-mage.
His breath was frozen plumes in front of him and his chest burned, though it was nothing compared to the cold air that was attacking his body. It felt like the frigid chill was slicing his skin from his muscle with small knives. It was zapping his energy but still Ben pushed on, following the elf-mage to where he knew Malagant was.
The two of them crossed the street, Ben almost falling several times from his feet going numb. By the time they reached the road where they had both seen the blue flare, there had been several more crashes and now, as they got closer, the sound of angry voices.
“Master!” the elf called. Ben looked down the street and saw nothing but destruction: cars reduced to crumpled metal balls; street lamps bent like they had been pushed down by an invisible hand; and several houses that had holes so big you could see the furniture inside.
Then Ben saw the blue flare again. He looked just in time to see it rise up in the air like it was on an invisible string, before it was flung backwards into a row of townhouses. It crashed through it, glass shattering all around, then it was pulled out, tossed up in the air again, before slamming down to the ground.
Why was that blue light…? Ben looked closer, and he realized it wasn’t just a blue light, it was a glowing elf from the looks of it. But why was he being flung around like a cat torturing a–
Ben’s mouth dropped open when a figure stepped out from behind a crumpled up car. A figure wearing a black jerkin and a flowing cape, with pale white skin and raven-coloured hair…
…who was holding in his hand a green gemstone.
It was Malagant, and he had a grin on his face so wide Ben could see ea
ch individual tooth, even at the distance.
The elf-mage screamed beside Ben before running towards Malagant. As he ran he held his hand out and with a shimmer of disrupted air, like the heat waves off of metal, a long staff appeared in his hand that suddenly glowed the same brilliant blue light that the other elf was surrounded with.
Malagant looked over at the elf-mage and laughed; it didn’t look like he’d seen Ben but since Ben was bare ass naked and probably pale as the snow, there was no question why.
“Oh, Nikken, lovely for you to join us,” Malagant said in a taunting voice. He held up the jewel, and as his hand raised, the elf-mage rose as well.
The mage named Nikken screamed, before grabbing his throat; his feet flailing in the air and his whole body writhing. Then, with a flick of Malagant’s hand, the jewel gave a pulse of green light and the elf flew into the row of townhouses his master had just crashed into.
What the hell was going on? Ben could only stare at Malagant in stunned confusion, so much of what he was seeing didn’t make sense. It went against every grain of reality he had been able to grasp onto; he didn’t know whether to go insane, curl up into a ball and cry, or run and help Malagant.
Who am I kidding? Malagant’s having the time of his life.
“Benny!” Malagant suddenly exclaimed; then there was another strained whine of twisting metal. Ben looked up to see one of the cars rise in the air, and at the same time, the elf-mage Nikken and the glowing elf rose as well. With another flick of Malagant’s hands, they careened into each other before the car contorted itself around the two, bending to Malagant’s will like the metal had the consistency of plaster. When Malagant was done the two elves were trapped inside, Nikken screaming but the glowing one remained silent.
“What the fuck is going on!?” Ben didn’t mean to scream it but he did. He was freezing cold, shivering, confused, and bewildered. If there was an end to this rope of madness Ben knew he had finally reached it. He needed answers and he needed them now.
Malagant, still grinning, jogged up to him, the jewel illuminating his face in a green brilliance making his blue eyes shimmer like jewels. Though when he got close enough to see Ben, he laughed. “You’re buck-naked, my friend. I hope it’s the cold air doing that, or else it’s no wonder humans were said to always be angry.”