by Amber Jayne
“And you as the Weapon?”
Rune listened for mockery, heard none. He took a step toward Urna so that the two lithe males stood boot tips to boot tips. Feeling a tremble in his hands, Rune lifted the loose strip of fabric from around his neck, the swath that covered his eyes when he was working. “It’d be easier to picture it if you wore this…” His voice was suddenly hoarse.
Urna blinked those dark-blue eyes, set wide in a lean, elfin face. So many ways this might play out, Rune realized. So many times the two of them had teased and sniped and followed through or spurned the advances of the other. A constant dance, an endless, circular chase.
Finally, a sudden huskiness in his voice as well, Urna said, “Yeah. Put it on me.”
Rune paused to pull the rest of the fabric from his own head, feeling the chill air work through his long hair. His was a dense blue-black, almost the photonegative of Urna’s silvery locks. He laid the strip of black over Urna’s eyes. As he leaned forward to tie the knot at the back of Urna’s skull, his lips came near the other male’s mouth. He felt Urna’s breath. Then their lips did touch, just a grazing, a softness heavy with promises.
A shudder went through Rune so that his mouth quivered a moment atop Urna’s. Urna grinned, which broke the burgeoning kiss. He said, “Sixty degrees to your left. Here comes one!”
Rune jerked back a step and tried to smoothly draw his firearm from its holster. He got it out quickly, but not nearly as fast as Urna would’ve drawn his. Not fast enough to handle the Passenger. But he fired anyway at the imaginary target on his left. The discharge was loud and the kick of the gun surprised him, same as it had those two other times. But it felt good. He didn’t even care just now about wasting a bullet.
“Got him!” Urna crowed triumphantly. He could have said something biting, something casually cruel, but today he was being kind, it seemed. “My magnificent Weapon! My brave killer!” He continued grinning, standing there blindfolded.
Rune holstered the smoking firearm. He stepped up to Urna again and murmured, “My beautiful blind Shadowflash…” Then he took the male’s face in both his hands and crushed his mouth onto his. It was a violent, violating kiss. Rune’s tongue plunged through Urna’s lips. He tangled with Urna’s tongue. He poured his heated breath into Urna’s mouth.
His body pressed against the blindfolded man’s. Rune felt the hardness at Urna’s crotch and ground himself against it. Fire grew within. Blood was pumping hard in his veins, thumping on his eardrums. He kissed his companion (colleague, lover) all the more vehemently, fingers sliding into the silver hair, gripping it at the roots. His tongue slavered inside that mouth while Urna thrust his groin back against Rune’s.
After a moment Rune staggered back. His cock throbbed needfully. Urna was so beautiful. The Weapon lifted his hands as if helplessly searching for where his ravisher had gone—and that made him all the more desirable. Rune, his excitement a fever now, stepped toward him yet again, this time to strip the black clothing from Urna’s body. The blindfold-wearing Weapon neither helped nor hindered. He just stood there, head turning from side to side, as though he had never experienced a moment of sightlessness before in his life.
Rune threw aside the clothes and weapons, leaving Urna wearing only blindfold and boots. Right now the danger didn’t matter. Their excitement was more important. Besides, the Shadowflash would still hear any approaching Passengers.
His breath caught. Urna’s form was like sculpture, like pale stone. His musculature was lean but exquisitely defined. He was utterly hairless below the jaw, without even a whisper of pubic curls to distract from the luscious length of his engorged cock. Though Rune’s memories were as vague as he knew Urna’s to be, he did have one nebulous remembrance of their shared boyhood, their mutual pubescence. When Rune had started growing dark, wiry hairs, he’d thought himself superior to his comrade. More of a man. It had turned out to an untrue fancy of his, of course.
He didn’t even know Urna’s age, but whatever it was, Rune was that age as well. They both might be as young as twenty. Surely no older than twenty-five. But Rune was certain they had grown up in tandem. However murky and muddled their pasts were, he believed with absolute certainty that they had started their lives at a mutual, perhaps simultaneous, moment.
Urna’s chest rose and fell. The chilly air had sharpened his nipples to tiny points. Not questioning the urge, Rune reached out and took one of these buds between his thumb and forefinger. The Weapon jumped at the contact.
He couldn’t perceive as Rune perceived, he told himself with some satisfaction. Blindfolded, Urna was merely blind. His other senses didn’t awaken like Rune’s did.
But Rune didn’t possess this man’s reflexes, his skills with weaponry. That thought, moving through Rune’s overheating mind, translated somehow as an increasing pressure on Urna’s nipple. The silver-haired male sucked in a sharp breath, then released it as a soft, pained moan. The sound excited a darker thrill inside Rune. An uncharacteristic grin cut his own lean features.
He twisted the nipple harder, breathing, “My sweet, helpless Weapon.”
Urna could end it at any instant if he wanted. Rune knew this. In half a heartbeat Urna could whip off the blindfold and wrench Rune’s arm into a hammerlock, or strike him a blow across the face, or do even worse violence. But instead, Urna was submitting, plainly enjoying himself. So many games the two of them had played over the years.
Rune’s other hand took hold of Urna’s cock. The shaft felt warm in his grasp. He tightened that grip, applying an almost uncomfortable pressure. Urna moaned piteously again, his trimly muscular body starting to squirm. Rune dipped his head and licked a trail up the other male’s throat, from the hollow above his sternum, on a curving, ascending course across his carotid to the lobe of his left ear. Here Rune’s teeth caught him.
The Weapon cried out. The sound echoed away from the rooftop, out into the wasteland of the ancient city.
Rune’s teeth released the earlobe. “I will fuck you!” he declared with a formal pomposity that didn’t, somehow, feel false to him. He let go of Urna’s cock and nipple, then grappled him violently to the cool stone of the roof. Urna’s boots scraped the surface. He was on hands and knees. The blindfold remained in place. Strands of silver were caught in the knot at the back of his head, Rune saw now as he moved in behind him. Urna’s ass was as finely molded as the rest of his body, taut, a gorgeous inviting shape.
Hastily, Rune wet two fingers then smeared them around and over and just inside the waiting hole. Urna gasped at the touch. Fumbling now, eagerness becoming a headlong urgency, Rune at last freed his cock from his loose trousers, not even bothering to strip off the rest of his black garb. His organ throbbed mightily, poised above Urna’s vulnerability. Already a thin drizzle dangled from the tip of his cock, the glistening gossamer string alighting on a globe of Urna’s perfect ass.
Rune set the swollen cock head against his lover’s hole and slid himself inside.
He was not slow about it. He wasn’t gentle. Urna, he felt with that same total certainty, didn’t want gentleness now. Rune gripped his hips, marveling as he always did at how male bodies seemed designed by nature for just this act. He thrust himself deep into his lover. He felt and heard the slap of his balls against the tight hemispheres of Urna’s ass.
Urna’s channel gripped him fiercely. Rune felt the internal heat all along his veined shaft. He looked down to see his cock disappearing again and again, with each speeding lunge, into the sweet, grasping hole. Urna bucked beneath him. He cried out repeatedly. His head whipped from side to side. Rune watched his backbone undulate and the muscles tighten between his finely honed shoulder blades.
Beautiful, so beautiful…
Rune fucked him all the harder. He felt the impacts of their smacking bodies. Orgasmic bliss was racing toward him, as implacable a mass and force as the Black Ship hovering above them in the twilight. Sweat stinging his eyes, Rune found his head falling back, found himself looking up
at the impossibly vast shape that hung above ninety-five percent of this planet. What was it? Was the Ship alive? Overhead, it slowly writhed, formless and undeniable.
He didn’t care. Not now. Not as he savaged his lover’s ass, pounding him, his cock a weapon as powerful as anything Urna wielded, or so it felt to him just now. Urna, fingers clawing and boots scratching the stone, was apparently thundering toward a come of his own. Amazing. Without even any direct contact with his own cock. It was only Rune’s thrusts sending him toward his ecstasy.
It was that realization, perhaps, that tripped the final response from Rune. His balls tightened and his impaling cock spasmed, and the carnal rapture took hold of him. He loosed his fiery jets deep inside Urna’s clutching canal, even as he felt the writhing finale of Urna’s own orgasm. The two almost disengaged from each other, their mutually timed comes were so turbulent.
But Rune was held by Urna’s cinching hole and he poured the full measure of his pearly juices into the other male’s body. Urna’s seed spattered the roof’s surface.
After a moment Rune reached down and gently loosened the knot of the blindfold. It was the only ceremonial moment between the two men. Following that, Urna dressed and Rune neatened himself. Neither Shadowflash nor Weapon spoke a word. They merely strapped on their wings and flew away.
Chapter Two
“This concludes the eighty-third conclave of the 182nd Year of the Order of Lux.” And with the dispersing tendrils of incense and a great rustling of ornamental costumes, the gathering did, at long last, end.
Aphael Chav, Toplux, felt relief streaming through his aged, though still wiry, body. He’d had enough of this pomp and pomposity. The endless rituals, the recitations, the chanting—oh, the awful chanting. It was necessary, he knew, though not for the reasons most of the conclave’s attendees believed. Those haughty decorative beings milled about the broad marble-floored chamber, still abuzz with the ceremonial ecstasy of the past hours. They thought what they did important, crucial. They were wrong. The conclaves were busywork, numbing rituals for lesser minds meant to celebrate the significance of all who attended, a self-congratulatory exercise steeped in the mystique of arcane liturgies and grave decorum.
All who were gathered today in this pillared, ornate chamber would call the conclave a success, a reaffirmation of the principles of the Order of Lux.
The truth was, however, that none of these fops with their supercilious titles and proud airs had any idea what the Lux stood for. Aphael Chav knew. He understood it all perfectly. That was why he was ruling the Safe, why he was Toplux. Because he knew the truth of things.
It was necessary also to mingle a bit afterward, and Aphael did this.
“A marvelous conclave,” one dandy said.
“The grandest in my memory,” said another.
The Toplux contributed as well, saying, “A fine assertion of our principles.”
Blather. All of it.
It was perhaps most annoying to him that most of these creatures had inherited their positions of power. They were complacent, smug, self-satisfied, though they’d done little with their lives. They owned industries and held valuable property. But it was their predecessors who had achieved the original accomplishments.
The Order of Lux, long ago, had been the first major power to assert itself in the chaotic wake of the Black Ship’s arrival on Elyria. All had been uproar and panic then, history said. The Ship had settled over this world, blocking out all but a fraction of the sunlight, and the Passengers had poured out to slaughter untold millions.
Only the Safe was spared. And only the Lux had risen to the occasion, providing stability and authority when all other forms of governance fractured and failed. The first Order of Lux had been a consortium of industrialists and engineers, those with the technological knowledge to adapt to the new conditions. They had seen that the Safe’s unique access to the sun could supply all the power the survivors needed.
Thus this centermost city of the Safe had been born, the seat of the Lux, the point of ultimate command and power. Literal power. The solar arrays that the original engineering chiefs had constructed gave power to the inhabitants. Electricity flowed. The people had lights again, after the Ship’s arrival and ensuing chaos had wrecked all the former power systems.
Technology had saved everything. It had restored civilization when the Safe, the final remaining place of human dominion, might instead have plunged into permanent barbarity. It had also given the Lux a position of absolute, immutable control.
Aphael Chav socialized a brief while longer with the effete descendants of those original technicians, who had been men and women of true intelligence and foresight, active people, achievers. Little had they known that they would spawn a society of wealthy, lazy degenerates.
Finally, with the pleasantries done, the bailiffs finished herding the last of the council out through the broad double doors. Aphael at last stood alone, relishing the solitude a moment, stretching out his arms, turning his white-haired head until his neck gave a satisfying pop. He started shedding the elaborate outer garments he’d had to wear for today’s interminable function. His was a strong face, with heavy jaw and piercing eyes. But he was capable of disarming smiles, of seemingly sympathetic expressions.
He would adopt one of those expressions for his next audience, he’d already decided. Conclave or not, he had a full working day scheduled, refusing to lose ground to the meaningless rituals of the Order. The council was a part of his power structure. The people—most of them, anyway—saw the council as a check against the foreboding might of the Toplux. Without that august panel of fancily dressed ministers Aphael might seize total control of the Safe, rule it with totalitarian cruelty.
What people—again, most people—didn’t understand was that he already had absolute sway over these lands of the Lux. His word was law. The Order could do nothing whatsoever to restrict any of his ambitions. He could do as he liked.
But he was no fool. He was smart, he knew. And therefore the council got to enact its rituals, and the conclaves were convened regularly so that they could espouse the same old tired precepts. Technology was good! Magic was evil! It wasn’t too much more complicated than that, which was as it should be. Give the people simplicities to believe in. Whip up a few slogans, incite a few causes. Provide them the distraction of the Shadowflash and Weapon raids into the Unsafe to butcher Passengers. Make them believe that a war was underway against the creatures and that it was somehow winnable. He was a master at this game, had played it for many years now without a serious loss.
“Bring me something cool to drink,” Aphael Chav called, having stripped himself down to a practical outfit of black trousers and ivory waistcoat. He didn’t wholly abide by the strictly black color code of most of the Lux. “And send her in, in a few more moments.”
His next audience. He’d ordered her brought in to the Citadel at the start of the conclave this morning and kept her waiting all this time. The ploy was purposeful, meant to inconvenience her and demonstrate that her time was his to waste. But there was, perhaps, also a certain puerile element to it—if he had to squander all those hours, he wanted her to suffer the same.
Servants had already swept through the chamber, removing the braziers and the extra furniture and all the cluttering accoutrements of the conclave. Aphael walked its length, listening to the steady fall of his boot heels, letting the sound calm him, pushing away all the accumulated annoyance of the past hours. He felt his mind regaining its natural, fierce focus. He drained the brass cup that had been brought to him. The liquid refreshed him. Even the final traces of that horrid incense were all but gone.
The Toplux strode to his throne-like seat at the head of the room and sat. Above was a circular skylight, the panes clear, allowing in the spill of the sun. It was a bright day in the Safe. Aphael appreciated the beauty, as well as the power, of that sunlight.
Taking a long, cleansing breath, he gestured. The doors were opened once more, this time
to usher in the woman who had been waiting on his pleasure for several hours now.
Virge Temple entered and immediately Aphael felt a twinge of disappointment. The sturdy, attractive chemist showed no obvious signs of aggravation over her long, tedious wait. Well, the Toplux thought as he put on an expression of geniality, he could falsify his apparent feelings as well.
The bailiff started to announce her but Aphael waved that off from his high, ornate seat. “Virge,” he said, the chamber’s acoustics carrying his voice easily. “How nice to have you at the Citadel once again. It’s been some while.”
Her hair was that color where pale brown is fading to blond or blondish darkening toward dun. The shade made a contrast to the darker hue of her skin. She had an abundance of hair draping about her shoulders. Even from the far end of the chamber, her dark-brown eyes sparkled with the intensity of volcanic rock. She wore red leggings that displayed her finely molded calves and thighs. Her simple shirt hung loose on her, revealing enough of her bosom to confirm that her breasts were still quite firm. She was roughly half of Aphael Chav’s sixty years but she could exude the antic energy of an adolescent when she had a mind to.
At the moment she offered a smile and a somewhat shallow bow, acknowledging the Toplux’s pleasantry.
“You may approach,” Aphael said after a pause that was just long enough to punctuate the moment, let her know she could move only on his command.
Virge’s stride toward the throne-chair was similar to Aphael’s own, a confident gait, heels beating a slow, crisp tempo across the pink marble. Her nicely arranged features betrayed no fear, not even a hint of anxiety. But that nervousness had to be there, inside her, the Toplux promised himself. She had to know why she’d been summoned. If she didn’t she was a fool. And Virge Temple, an eminent chemist whose work benefited the Lux, was no fool.
Aphael leaned out a little from the high vantage of his sun-bathed chair. The light was a reminder—to him, to others—that the sun represented unadulterated power. It fell upon the Safe and nowhere else on Elyria.