“Don’t be nervous, Janus. Here, look.” His soapy hand descended, wrapped about what used to be my cock. Tiny sparks darted upward from my groin. I looked away and he laughed. “You’ve seen one before. That night in my trailer. God, you made me horny then. Did you know?”
“I saw yours, not mine. It’s a little different. I’m rather attached to my dick the way it was. Pun intended.”
He chuckled. “This is even better. Look how beautiful you are!”
I cracked an eye and stared through the wavering water at what he had captured in his hand. It was strange and wonderful, long and lean, a feathered shaft, pulsing with colours, opalescent scarlet and gold.
“Oh,” I said softly.
“Yes, indeed. I want that deep inside me.” He climbed into my lap and gave me that dazzling smile that had first won my heart, although I’d been too stupid to realize it at the time. Then he bent forward, taking my mouth with his. My insides writhed and purred. We rubbed against each other, sloshing water all over the floor.
“I really hope the owners of the house don’t show up. This could be very awkward,” I said with a laugh.
“Silly,” Kithara replied between kisses. “Thiede owns this house.”
“Really? I’m not even surprised. I think my wonder-circuit has blown a fuse.”
“Mmm, yeah. He’s been buying places around the country. Safe houses for hara to gather. It’s a movement, Janus, and you’re part of it now.”
“What if I don’t want to be part of it? What if I just want to lie here and make love to you?”
“For now, I’ll accept that,” he said. “You’re so goddamned beautiful. I want to lick you all over.” And he proceeded to do just that.
“Mmm, you’re making me all tingly.”
“I’m going to do much more than make you tingly. Did you ever get so stoned that when you came, you thought your head would explode?”
“You are the biggest fucking tease. Please, Kithara, I...”
“Good. That’s the way I want you. Nice and desperate.” He stood with a rush of water, and climbed out of the tub. When I followed, he captured me in a towel, gently drying me, stopping to bite my neck, to kiss my chest. I clung to him, laughing.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I do.” He winked. “First some vocabulary. See that? I’m ouana right now. Strangely, so are you. You need to think differently from a human now, Janus. Embrace your female side, your soume side.” He pressed his hand against me, sliding a finger deep within, and hitting something that sent a pulse of pleasure through my loins. I shivered. Slowly he pumped the finger in and out, sparking more delights, while we shared breath, drinking each other’s souls, until I was shaking in anticipation. Then, he took me by the hand, led me to the bed and laid me down upon it. He climbed on top, hovering over me. “This is what it means to be Wraeththu,” he whispered, and pierced me with a sudden gentle violence that wracked my whole being in a shriek of joy.
“How does that feel?” He laughed.
“God!” was all I could manage.
“That’s about right,” he said. “It’s divine fire.” He began to move, each thrust triggering a higher level of pleasure. I began to gasp. He said, “I’m going to open you up like this for a while, until you’re sore and delirious, then we share breath, like this.” He bent down and exhaled into my mouth. His breath danced into me, turning into a whirlwind of scarlet and ivory blossoms. I returned the patter of a rainstorm, the beauty of a panther’s leap. He kept an unerring rhythm that slowly became more and more intense until I was screaming, writhing, and clawing at him. “This is what I wanted to do to you that night in my trailer,” he said.
“Oh god, please Kithara, it’s so, it’s so...” I moaned. He paused and I thought I would lose my mind. “If you stop, I’ll kill you.”
He laughed softly. “Now that we’ve scaled the heights, we dive off the cliff.”
“I’m on the brink,” I panted.
“Hold on, I’ve got you. We’ll take the plunge together.”
Deep within, I felt his lion-tamer’s whip snap at a nerve that sparked and exploded, the pieces flying outward like stars of sizzling crimson and gold. “Oh fuck, fuck,” I cried, overwhelmed, tumbling over and over in waves of pleasure. He continued moving, playing me out. The sparks drifted to earth, sinking with soft hisses into a vast lake.
For a long time I lay stunned, floating in that lake while the air filled with sparkling crystals, thrumming in my ears like tiny gongs. It was better than any choi-induced hallucination and I wondered: had I really died last night lying on a bloody shower curtain and was I now in heaven, healed and whole, with the lover of my dreams? What price must I pay for this? His thoughts were mine, his warmth pervading the air all around me. Indeed your old self has died, he hummed, that is the price. You are reborn now, better, stronger. You are Wraeththu.
I am Wraeththu.
Kithara rolled off me, pressing against my side, purring like a cat. I finally found my voice. “I can’t imagine that sex as a human would have been anything close to that.”
“Trust me, it’s not,” Kithara said. He kissed my shoulder. “That was sizzling hot. You’re a natural talent. The first time is like going to the fair and taking a really scary wild ride. Nothing quite beats it, but I’ve found every time is unique and just as wonderful. Something to look forward to, huh?” He sat up, punched a pillow, and stuck it behind his head. “My shoulder still hurts and I really want a fuckin’ cigarette right now.”
“Are you unusually good at that? Aruna, I mean? Because it was just... wow.”
He grinned at me. “Yeah, I am. Lucky you.”
“What was Thiede saying about a massive ego?”
He hit me with the pillow. We laughed and wrestled for a while until I had him pinned and was staring into those electric blue eyes. He relaxed, unresisting, inviting, and began flexing his hips against mine. Looking at his just-tumbled beauty, lips kiss-swollen, a ruddy glow painting his cheeks, wild, platinum-coloured hair cascading about his shoulders, I wanted to pull him inside me and never let go. “Kithara, I need to ask you something.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“Did you mean it back in your trailer when you said you thought I was beautiful, even though I was burned? Or was that just part of Thiede’s master plan to turn me har?”
He reached up, stroked a finger along the scar on my cheek, the reminder of my past. “Yes and yes. When I first saw you, it was like seeing a glorious rose hit by an untimely blight. I could see your pain and your beauty; both called to me. I had the distinct feeling that we were destined to become lovers.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“Do you think you would have received the news well, at the time?” He chuckled. His finger drifted across my mouth.
I laughed. “Probably not, but when I met you, I also sensed that the cosmic dice were rolling.”
“I told you that you are gifted. Thiede knew it long ago,” he said.
“Now what, Kithara? Do we go back to Carmine City? I don’t know if I want to join a gang of mutants wrecking havoc everywhere.”
His hand moved down my arm, caressing. “Don’t think about it now. Give the transformation time. All we need to do right now is make love to each other. Speaking of which,” he slapped my rear playfully, “your turn to be ouana.”
“Ouana? So, how do I make it...?”
“That’s easy. Relax and it’ll happen.” He continued rocking his hips under me creating a gentle friction until the throbbing between my legs unfurled into a crimson sword.
“Payback time,” I said, and he laughed.
Fumbling at first, I found what I sought and thrust. He yelped, arching his back, eyes rolling upward. I paused a moment, wondering if I’d hurt him. Our eyes met and he chewed his lower lip, panting gently. “Take me,” he said.
Oh god! I took him hard, feeling a crackling storm of sensation throughout my bein
g, like nothing I’d ever felt before. A purging fire. We breathed in each other’s light, entangling our souls, which glowed and expanded to fill the universe.
In the end, he thoroughly converted me. If we are what we hate, we are what we love even more. In the shelter of his passion, I arose like a phoenix from the ashes of my former self and became beautiful and terrifying. I am Janus, god of doorways and beginnings, standing at the threshold of history, eying a painful past and a stormy future. Whatever comes, I am content, knowing that I had this perfect time with him in my arms. A week we stayed at Tranquility Base, drunk on aruna, until Thiede summoned us, and like good soldiers, we came.
Now, dressed in black leather, I ride, pressed behind Kithara on our bike, my arms wrapped about his waist, our hair mingling black and white in the wind of our speed – burning into the future.
Building Immanion
Martina Luise Pachali
Things are bright now, mostly, and we look hopefully into the future. Stories have happy endings, and the lost come home at last. But my home is lost forever now, and I can never go back there. Never. Because it’s called Immanion these days.
You didn’t think they put Immanion on top of some rundown human tourist resort, did you? Or on an empty promontory with no meaning? No, they built it on the site of one of humanity’s old holy places, where one religion had replaced the other for millennia. The very rocks were steeped in aeons of belief.
And I’m one of the last humans ever to live and pray there, one of the very few yet young enough to be incepted into Wraeththu when they came and took over. I’m Yannis, which is the name my mother called me by. I had so many mystical and meaningful names given to me at the mystical and meaningful changes imposed on me throughout my life, I didn’t really know who I was any more at some stage, so that’s why I went back to my oldest, shortest and least holy name. I’ve had it with holiness.
My people were farmers and fishermen on the coast of what now is Almagabra, and I grew up with my siblings and cousins in the wild surf, helping with the boats and the harvest when called upon, but otherwise left to our own devices, as the children of our family had been since time out of mind. You see, my mother and her sisters were among the few women still fertile after all the evil things that had been done to the sea and the earth by humanity. They fairly revelled in pregnancies: the world must be peopled, and if necessary, by them alone, so it seemed.
But when one more of the endless tidal waves of war and catastrophe swept towards us, my mother and her sisters decided to send her youngest sons to safety to live with our uncles and cousins who were monks on the holy mountain.
You know, my family had always been very fertile, and in addition to our farms and fishing boats, we had always had that little monastery in the holy place where the younger sons that were a bit bookish and didn’t stand to inherit much were encouraged to go. Seven of us, brothers and cousins, were sent there when the new wave of aeroplanes came and took pot-shots at our boats. I was nine at the time.
It was a long, arduous trek through a war-torn, maddened country that finally brought us there, under the guidance of my third-eldest brother who’d have been old enough to fight, but whose eyesight was so poor he’d be a danger to his own side in any fight without his bottle-bottom glasses. When we came to the holy place, there weren’t many holy men left, either. In old monasteries built for hundreds, a few dozen old men were rattling about. In glorious churches decked with gold the falling leaves of every year were piling up, nobody being left to clear them away, or even to care.
Our uncles and cousins, however, were busier than ever before, being forced to provide for themselves entirely now no more pilgrims came. Even the much-disputed logging expeditions into the virgin forests of the holy wilderness were a thing of the past now, as nobody was left in the outside world to buy the wood. So, we were welcomed, we were made novices, given new names and put to work.
I didn’t mind, really. I didn’t mind baking and fetching and sweeping, getting up early and praying for hours, mixing the paint for those of my uncles who still painted holy pictures although they would be bought by no-one. This was safety, my mother had said. This was the holy place. No evil could touch us here. This place belonged to our god and his saints since time out of mind, and our god and his saints would protect us. No evil did come, but never would we have thought that we’d be swept away by the good, the holy of another flavour than ours had been.
You see, there had been rumours of a new and dangerous cult, utterly heathen, that took the young men in the lands to the west of the ocean and made them into less or more than men – depending on where you stood. And then there had been panicked whispers that the cult was coming over into our own lands, to the old places that had thought themselves immune to such folly as was spawned over there from time to time – really, at first Wraeththu was to us just one more of the many idiocies from over the sea. But of course, we, being firm in the practice of our faith, wouldn’t succumb to such silly new beliefs.
While I grew up, news of the outside world grew scarcer and scarcer. We went through the year as always, we suffered through each Lent and celebrated each Easter, while outside humans were dying, and we didn’t know. We were looking out at a sea that was always the same. And then, after a few years, my uncles and cousins thought I was old enough to be made a full monk, and the one who was a priest did a ceremony for me, and I was given yet another new name, and everyone started using it right away, only I wasn’t sure who I was any more.
You know, I was in a difficult age anyway, and what with sex being utterly forbidden on account of us being monks, and all I ever got to see being scruffy uncles and cousins and brothers anyway, and a general application of lots of very cold spring water, I was very much at a loss about what to do with myself at that time. It was spring, shortly after Easter, and we were all nervous in the spring each year in any case, and now being called by another name didn’t help at all. The cold water didn’t help either, and I was very dissatisfied with myself and the world around me. The familiarity of the place and the unchanging sameness of the rituals we did and the pictures we painted (I was allowed to paint now as well, but I was never very good at it) were the only things that helped.
Then one day, a fellow monk arrived from a neighbouring monastery to exchange olives for our bread. He said that the wall had been torn down and some very strange strangers had come and were doing things to places. They’d made themselves at home in one of the largest and most abandoned holy settlements, and there they practised the most heathen and utterly unholy rites. There were even women among them, the monk whispered, although with them you could never tell if they were men or women. By the Holy Mother, our visitor concluded, you couldn’t even tell if they had souls at all. We were well off here on our coast, what with them being far away and certainly not interested in this rocky wilderness.
Three days later, they came.
There was a large group of them, improbably on horseback, sauntering along paths that even our mules refused to negotiate. They were unarmed, and in a brisk, working mood. They came with notepads and pencils and measuring tape and pendulums and looked at our monastery as if they would buy it.
You really couldn’t tell whether they were men, women, or human at all, as the old monk had said. They were clad in shiny metal and gleaming leathers, their long hair was mostly bleached to shimmering paleness, even if some of their faces were dark, and they had no beards at all. Their horses where lithe and more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen.
They stopped in front of our home, and we huddled inside, just me and one of my cousins peering out through the windows. Their ranks opened, and some of them fanned out with their measuring implements, ordered by those in the centre. As they spread out, these leaders came to view: deathly beautiful both of them, one of them with an abundance of tawny hair, the other one with a flaming red mane. They were discussing the lay of the land with those around them. I heard one of them calling: “S
ee if you can get a clear view from the boathouse to the peak, Vadriel!” And I realised by the clear voice that shouted that this must be a woman.
I was enraged. Before I could even think, I threw open our door and pelted down the path towards them. My uncles and cousins and brothers called for me to stop but I didn’t react – in my anger, I didn’t recognise the name they shouted as my own, new monastic name. It didn’t touch me the way your own name always does.
“Women are strictly forbidden!”, I shrieked at them, slithering to a halt before their mighty horses on the loose, dry earth.
The red-headed one smiled at me with condescension. “Exactly what I’m always saying, little monklet”, he drawled at me.
“Remember him, Orien”, he said to his companion. “That one is young enough to incept. Now, what if we build the stairs to the right of that boulder, and have a ramp coming down the middle instead?”
I stood there, forgotten, my fate decided for me once more, although I didn’t have the slightest idea at the time.
They went away eventually, and I was severely scolded. And then, nothing happened for quite some time, apart from some monkish neighbours coming by and telling us how the Gelaming had started building all over the place. These strangers, it seemed, called themselves Wraeththu and Hara and Gelaming, and we didn’t really comprehend what all those names were supposed to mean. But then, among us names were variable and manifold, so we didn’t really bother with what those strangers were calling themselves from one day to the other. We prayed at night, we worked all day. We were content and safe – yet.
At the height of the summer, on a day that was so unbearable that we were all hiding inside, wearing as little as possible (within the monkishly decent, of course), one of the strangers came back. It was the one called Vadriel, the one who had been down at the boathouse the last time. I recognised him by the pale blue streaks he’d dyed into his silvery hair. His hair was living moonlight, and I felt very ugly, scruffy and doltish when I went out to greet him with a tray of coffee, water, and sweets. You see, the general consensus among us remaining monks by now was to treat the strangers as neighbours or pilgrims and hope they’d leave us in peace.
Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu Page 16