City and Garden, Tower and Temple

It was so loud that it rattled whatever had been broken in his ear which now leaked into the roaring, smiting storm that crashed against the jungle highlands. The etchings of death still lingered, written on the rotting carcass of an ancient empire, now threatening to wash away in the runoff soil and be truly forgotten by time. The stone bones of that empire, those grand arches with faded carvings that once carried uncanny power, now stood shadowless against a vicious squall.

He was nearly blown sideways by it, nearly carried from his lithe feet by it; nearly scarred was his starlight skin by the rain's unerring violence. His shirt barely wrapped his ax against the elements, and his slight, bare chest was stricken with a burdening, conquering chill. His strength was flagging, but he now stared at a chance at salvation: a crumbling tower, silhouetted upon a flashing midnight sky.

When he had taken his second step beyond its threshold, he slumped into that umbral jacket which relieved him of the rain's bitter cold. He shook the water from his black hair and left it frizzed and tousled, and picked a plastered strand from between his purpling lips. He set his head and shoulders against the leaking stone wall, and hugged himself in his own arms to preserve his warmth.

In the blinks of searing lightning, he caught glimpses of the tower's mossy ground floor; rusted-over polearms had been eaten to hollow by roving beetles, and the torn shrapnel of barrel rings littered the floor. Beside them lay the clinking shards of glass, which may have once held magical, prophetic vapors, or the crushed leaves of fragrant herbs, or a wine sweet and treasured to the thirsty tongue of Qora, who had naught more than rainwater in his aching stomach.

After an hour, with no wavering in the strength of the storm, he had warmed enough for sleep to entice him, and his glacier-blue eyes began to flutter closed. Hovering black tendrils of hair enshrouding a pallid, naked body, loomed before him. In between somnolent blinks, he saw her, clear enough to start awake again, but distant enough to be forgotten. A thought of breasts, and the primitive tickle of a kiss on the ear, remained as the memory faded.

A taste like salt and a scent like skin and a sensation like hormones teased at the edge of Qora's perceptions, and in his wild cock stirred the beginnings of lust. His curious, adventurous impulses took him to his feet, for at the edges of hearing crackled the small flames of candles.

"Announce yourself!" he called to the top.

"A man? A pretty man, maybe? Someone come to lay me on my back and lift my ankles on high?" a voice, shaky, fertile, feminine, echoed back.

Her song was melodious and Qora's cock, that monster of unchallenged size, twinged with a teasing fire in response.

His dagger remained at his left side, ready in case of ambush, as he ascended the tower to meet the stranger. Anxiety followed him up those dark stairs, ever waiting to leap at him, until the first fitful glow of wind-tossed candles joined him in the ascent. "Are you there?"

"I am here, and I am blessed by a thousand whispering things to meet you, errant lover-slayer," she mumbled to herself, her voice only barely cresting the floor to reach Qora. "May I have the honor of seeing you with wanting eyes?"

A nervous curiosity bloomed in Qora; no others traveled this long-forgotten path, the stones of which had been grown through with roots and hidden away beneath the ravenous underbrush. An extrasensory horror throbbing in his id was carried away on the alluring, filling scent of pussy, that which engendered primal courage and a ravenous lust. "There will be a stiff price for trickery."

On a broken bed, strewn with red linens, sat a woman. Her frame was slight, and her boobs modest and perky. All of her was a sickly kind of pale, sprinkled with freckles and curtained in straight, damp locks the color of a northern autumn. She sat upright, legs crossed; her head was ever-slowly tilting to the left, approaching uncomfortable angles.

Black vine-flowers, illuminated by the candles' soft and inconsistent light, crept in through the tower's cracks, and the tatters of old tapestries were windswept across the floor. Through the roof an occasional sprinkle of stormwater splashed across Qora's face.

"What sort of visionary sculpted you, untamed one? Who so loved their own imaginations that they had no choice but to bring you to life in all such glory?" She rose to her feet, and approached the tense chest of Qora, admiring every contour; she slinked to her knees and held aloft each of his balls in her overfilled hands. Curious she was, not full of awe, as Qora was accustomed. "Whose oversized lust were such astounding blessings meant to satisfy?"

A feral avarice was stoked in him beyond even his own knowings and a smile creeped onto his lips. "Queens and cutwives; Kyn herself, and all the constellations," he boasted, as slender fingers caressed the bulge that traveled to his knees, and shocks of pleasure followed in their trails. "And you."

"What is the word that your maker sang to shape you? What name do lesser men curse under their breath?" He met her reddish gaze that peeked between messy strands of brunette, and the tingles of her touch followed her as she rose to stand.

"I'm called Qora."

"A name to be written in the stars," she said, with all the melody of a song but all the confidence of a whisper. "Shed those chafing clothes and be naked with me. Fuck me; let me be a word in your legend."

Qora eased his weary muscles, though in some quiet part of him he suspected he shouldn't, and allowed the woman's fingers to untie his drawstring. The still-dripping linen trousers squelched, overburdened, to the floor, and his majesty, that titan cock which conjured blush in xaeic cheeks and summoned every wandering eye to undress him, fell free.

"Might, wisdom, salvation-- a composite thing of these and primordial, xaeic elements, a thing the name of which is forgotten and unpronounceable, swells within your balls, Qora." Her warm arms slinked around him and sapped every chilly ache away; here no thunder nor rain could reach him. Her brown nipples tickled at his chest, her chin nestled in that intimate valley between his head and his shoulders. Her mystic mannerisms fascinated him; he grew ever more convinced that an acute madness had driven her to this wilderness. "Magnificent Qora, unrivaled Qora-- he whose soul is gravity and whose countenance is the color of the universe."

She pleased every impulse in him which, in some dusty instinct leftover from a primeval past, hungered for all her praises. He returned her touch, embracing her close; the heat from her pussy burned into his cock which was likewise embraced between her thighs. His cheek was dampened again by her hair and his neck tingled at the proximity of her kiss. "Who are you?"

"What I am has only exonyms, my name would take all your soul to spell it out; I have been called many things, but no lovers' nicknames. All I have are the strange syllables of a word that may never be invented, but it lingers on my lips nonetheless. Schizophrenia."

She draped her fingers about the back of his neck and guided him toward her bed, swishing hips following her. Her scent became ever more potent, such that it twinged upon Qora's tongue, saccharine and savory; a drop of moisture fell from her vulva. "If I fuck you, you will never have anything like it again," he warned her, knowing well that it would not shake her intentions.

"Nothings like 'never' hold no significance for me, and for you if you learn to ignore them. Bang me, sweet wildling and I will be forever content."

When she turned back to face him, she met his kiss with her kiss. Qora's passionate tongue starved for her, her taste like crushed lilies, her scent like the first rise of sunshine. Her moans caught in his mouth and fluttered like butterflies, and every next one infused him with a brighter need. He nearly tackled her onto her bed.

Her pallid legs were immediately about him, quivering in plea; her fingers were stretching, preparing to clutch at his slender back, and her plump whiteish lips dribbled out whispered words. "Qora, wellspring of virility, despot of my pussy..."

"Are you ready, bitch?"

"Kiss me. Fuck me."

Firstly, he obliged her more modest request as he prepared to slide every coveted inch of his manhood into her. Their lips met, cool by the midnight air, and sweetly embraced in a way that may have been timid, or savoring. Though their kiss did not grow stronger, it grew deeper, and cock and vulva and finger began to twitch in primal anticipation. It was ever teasing at a full surrender; only barely did they keep themselves above mindless humping long enough for Qora to press himself to her labia.

"By-- fuck!" she moaned as her folds spread wider and his shaft glistened wetter, and deeper into her. "Big! There is no-- fuck! Magnificent! Colossal! No word fitting for the size of your cock!"

He kissed her once for every inch that filled her, slowly, and torturously for them both. Though he longed, anguished, to feel the bump of her cervix, she could not endure without this easing process. By the eleventh kiss she moaned loud enough to muffle the thunder in his ear; by the eighteenth her voice had given out entirely.

"So deep; deeper inside me than I am," she whispered.

Tied to her now by his cock in her pussy, and by a string of spit that linked their panting lips, he started to draw himself back from her, but he was overcome with a curious phenomenon. The farther he pulled out, the deeper he felt as though he was entering. The body of his sensation was separated from his chest, and his eyes grew heavy and drifted closed. "Damn it..."

"So deep..." he heard her whisper, just before his hearing was lost to him. Soon all his senses were lost save for the places where his body met hers: his cock, buried deep in her pussy, his balls, throbbing between her thighs, his arms which still held her sweating body near. That euphoria of touch was all that existed of him. Her vagina clamped down on him, and that terrible rapture melted into her.

Deeper he went, until what remained of the hollowed Qora dissolved into her body, and he was no more.

***

A candle's viridian glow bounced through an axblade of shimmering ruby, brandished on a long gold haft held by two white hands. Golden mail adorned its wielder, who was strewn with locks of shiny rosen hair. Her sharp cerulean eyes flitted between two targets, bodies slender as hers was, hair long and straight like hers was, and faces freckled and soft as hers was. "Surrender, you pathetic sluts! I am the one beautiful and whole-minded enough to lead us, so bend the fucking knee!"

"Your mind is clouded by the glimmers of gems and base pleasures, Mania," said the solemn-faced one, known to the warrior as Melancholy. Her legs were crossed and she sat above the floor. "Only I am clear of thought enough to heal us."

"How dare you!" Mania shouted, swelling with a bubbling rage. "You think only of sadness and disappointment; I have vision, you damnable bitch!"

Another, wild-eyed face appeared only inches from Mania's own, streaked in leaf-green hair; it took form from the sickly light that scattered across the endless bookshelves that filled the Archimedium. Mania attempted to clap the frightful specter about the ears, but it became only weird light once again, and reappeared behind her.

"You speak of vision, Mania, but you cannot see any of the threats we face, you cannot feel the lingering things that I feel; you are indeed insensate for all the hot air inside your skull," said Psychosis.

"You have one more word to soothe me or my every frustration will be visited on you, skank."

"No."

Mania loosed a sireny screech of luster and war, and swept her ax at Psychosis's shoulder; the bit found no blood or bone, only black miasma, as that teleported rival drew her bow from a claimed position atop a creaking, rotting bookcase. Before she could loose, though, a shadowy grasp caught upon her ankle and toppled her from her perch; the spectral creatures of Melancholy's dread imagination manifested on this new arena, grappling for control of their enemies' weapons.

The warrior of golden mail wrenched her sanguine ax from the clutches of the shade combatants; with superior and terrible strength she cleft both in misty, hissing twain. Too much had she committed to the attack, though. When her ax met no flesh resistance, it carried her with it and unseated her feet from the ground.

By the time she was steady on her feet again, an obsidian arrow was lancing past her lavender-speckled face and splintering the book behind her. Viciously, she locked eyes with Psychosis and charged her with ax shouldered, combat's bloody wassail flooding her body. Psychosis's emerald eyes alit through the shroud of her frazzled strands and she held up the secret symbol, blinking again behind Mania; this time there would be no escape. The gleaming mail fist of the pink-haired avenger clinched her at the collar and cast her, flailing and helpless, into the crumbling bookcase.

From a shelf above a tome fell and splayed open, to a page of akashic sigils and illustrations. Psychosis did not move even as the book crashed to her lap, and even Melancholy's scourge warriors dissipated as their mistress halted in curiosity. The butt of the ruby ax stood on the cracked stone floor. Where once was the shriek of battle, now an uneasy, wondering peace came over them, for the peculiar, unknown and sexy image of a hale young man with a cock of mythic size, had captured their attentions.

The word came first to Melancholy, who by instinct or epigenetic memory could read the script long lost to mortal ken. A whisper dribbled from her lips, and it crescendoed into flesh; first, a naked form more violet wave than mass but containing both, and then a breathing body of such sexual khi that it quivered through her bottom lip.

"What is it?" asked Melancholy.

Mania replied, all idolatry. "A thing, a kyn-kind, whose manhood is shining with azoth and might. What a cruel injustice that it is not accompanied by worshiping concubines."

"It is death-misery in the clothes of baltima," Psychosis warbled. "Here to wreak catastrophe on our poor, dissolving mind."

"We are worthy of no such righteousness; woe, as Psychosis said, in the weird clutches of this stranger form."

Mania curled a plump and rosy lip. "We are worthy, only by my doing; this virile bull of sunrise may hold our salvation in his balls."

When the final detail, the final contour of that lithe, statuesque form which so enraptured the three, was drawn, the body took motion and corvid hair and a sky-blue gaze trembled from the cold of waking. "She has ensorcelled me," he said. "Nymphic witchery has drowned me in uncanny dreams."

"Beautiful monster," Psychosis whispered.

"We have read you into existence-- whatever incubine creature you are," Melancholy mused as she again folded her legs and took to the air. "We-- she-- has imagined you and now you join us."

"Imagined me?" the man replied. "Schizophrenia enchanted me somehow and I am somewhere else?"

Mania sashayed, overcome with a simmering lust and a flirtatious bent. "And now you can put these sluts to more silent work sucking your cock," she cooed as she rubbed her mailled shoulder against his. "And I can take the bejeweled crown of this inner world and heal it. Would you like to be my king, oh handsome youth?"

Her shoulder was bucked by his, and she saddened. "No, I must escape. I will not give up and die here!" he spat, scrambling steps back from the crowd, clenching into a guarding stance. "You will tell me how I may leave, or I will consider you an enemy."

"Precious stone, envy of all eyes, you are not an enemy to me," Mania said with an indignant whine.

"You, beautiful monster, are trapped within the very fibers of this place; you are an engram, a figment of the vast imagination of the dreamer, and only by her dreaming, may you be reunited with what you left behind."

"And there is no hope of such mercies while egregores rampage through this mind of many schisms."

"None?" the shaken man said with a growing resolve. He scraped a half-rusted longsaber from the broken floor and shoved between them with a grin of savage determination now setting on his lips. "Then my only regret will be having to leave such fine bitches behind while I escape on my own."

"Qora is what he is called," said Psychosis, plucking his name from some hallucinated haruspex. "And we should not abandon him to the shrieking monsters of this place."

"You surprise me, Psychosis," huffed the rosy maiden as she yoked her ax. "The womb-mind must be satisfied, and now a way has appeared to us, a blessing from our ego."

"And which of us will be the one?" Melancholy interjected.

"Perhaps Qora would be a good judge," Mania mused. "It is his jizz which will impregnate our ego and reunite one of us with her. It is only right that he choose, I think."

"And I'm sure you will tempt him with the sway of your boobs."

"Maybe he isn't so easy to tempt, then it will be a tasty challenge. Maybe he will be enamored by your shiny and sunny affect."

"And maybe by your wit."

***

In a weird paradox, at the same time as it was looming like a murderer in the night, it was distant like a foggy mountain peak over a hundred foothilled miles. Sickly braziered fires lined the tiered temple steps and at the apex lay a mystery sacrifice chained between two spires. It was upside-down; whatever poor soul stood upon its altar held its colossal weight on its hands.

While Qora witnessed it, he too was witnessed; though their faces were the same, their ogling, cutting and immodest and tracing hot lines over him, was unique to each. That xaeic awe which all who laid eyes on him felt was long familiar. Few could comprehend the impossibility of his cock, and those who did not envy, without exception they burned with desire for him.

"Hers is the womb which blossoms perspective into gnosis, fragments into completeness," explained Psychosis as Qora surveyed that far-off citadel. "It is only by her that one of us may take root in her mind, and nail all of us back together in their vision."

"And it is my cum that can vessel your personalities into her," Qora replied, nonplussed and unflagging in his long study, toward that purple horizon where the sun started to stir.

"Only then may she dream you back into the place you knew."

"Or," Mania waxed, a wistful finger on her chin.. "She may keep you here, and shower you in joy and privilege."

"There is an elysian place of which I dream," he explained, his stare affixng to the garden of gnarled, choking, pruning, flowervines that lay in front of their feet. "Where countless worshiping sluts bow before my cock. There is a spot for you all there, as there is for everyone. This place, though, is not that place." Wordlessly, he slid the short ravine, and trod to the open, rusted gates.

"His words say he likes us, but his manner says he hates us," came a Melancholic sigh. "We should not hope."

"Please. I will make him like us," Mania huffed, and followed the outsider to the garden.

A humid net entrapped them, making lethargic their steps even as their hands hovered at the grip of their weapons. Qora's forest ken forced his eyes to every corner where he swore things scuttled and changed. His breath chattered like teeth in the cold.

"The Gardens of Relapse," Psychosis explained, gently touching the graying, head-sized bloom of a bellflower. "Here all things grow vibrant and bloom with violent possibility at dawn, only to wilt, as they do now, upon their next sunset.

"I suppose that's why I tingle with alarm," Qora remarked with the rusted sword at his lowguard.