The Lip of Forever

The forest floor was a place of eldritch quiet, a serene and eerie space where no living foot dared tread save the most intrepid, and those few mad souls that made it their home. It was among these most unfettered and unseemly folk, that Hju, for the first time stepping onto packed earth, now walked.

Before him, nude save for the filed bones that pierced her nipples, the clattering mask of ribs and phalanges, and the twirling woad that invoked in Hju some manner of xaeic terror, was a priestess. She led him, and the chanting procession that trailed them, between the ancient roots of the ur-trees, their branches where the swaying bridges of his people's tree-cities nearly shrank completely from Hju's anxious gaze. They cast no shadow here, for naught but the gray of twilight reached to this barren place.

That shaman, who was the eldest gydja of the Sisterhood of the Stomach, walked with a jagged gait of a deliberate kind, as if every step was traced out for her and she was merely matching them. It was only for Hju's bashful staring at any place but her plump, naked ass that he knew she wasn't. Though every body was nude here, even his, he felt it discourteous to ogle, even if the present company had no such reservations. The tingling heat of their gaze traced lines across his body like the paint on their own.

At each arch of gnarled and braided sticks, they halted. At every one, possessed by some trance of primal lust or dark hunger, a dancer circled him three times. She rolled her body from her shoulders to her hips, stopping at each revolution to stare through a hood of leather fringes into his jittering eyes. Her icy blues impaled him like needles and did not break from him, while with her tongue lolled out, she snapped the burning sticks she wielded across her own purple-stained breasts. Were he not carrying such a fear upon his shoulders, Hju's cock would have been tempted to rise.

It was only yesterday, the day of his twentieth birthday, that he was told of his fate. Just yesterday's sleepy, lazy morning, the Sisterhood of the Stomach was a distant prospect, a place to where the strangest of the village women would disappear and serve the god of meat. The rituals practiced among the sisters kept the fish on their lures and the goats fat, but they spoke not to the villages and the villages spoke not of them.

His father was the one who took him aside, and brought up his birthmark. Spots like sharp teeth ringed his cock, as if to bite it. It took him years to get over his fear of it, that it might be an omen of ill fortune, and then his father told him it marked him to be given over, to be handed off like a sacrifice to the strange women of the forest floor. Even this humble warning, this false goodbye, was forbidden to be uttered, for upon the very hour of his twentieth year, he was taboo to the village. From that hour, he belonged to the sisters. And still, he possessed his virginity.

When the sisters met him at the foot of his home tree, they knelt, and asked to see his cock. When he, slowly and trepidatiously, obliged them, they pressed their heads to the soil and greeted him as "satya." His father and mother, to whom he looked in hopes of an explanation, did not gaze back. Though it hurt him, nearly split his heart in two, filled him with an indignant fire, he knew by their misty eyes that they hurt just as much.

Comfort only came when the priestess took his hands in hers, and she whispered. "You have been carried here by the blessed, bleeding hands of the god of meat," she had told him. Something in her gaze felt true, a thing that slipped through her solemn voice, a tender sympathy that disarmed him. "You will not be harmed." Until that statement, the certainty with which he believed his fate was the platter, was unshakeable. Now, he wanted, prayed, that something different could be possible.

Even now, even as he entered into their camp, with drums beating and knives grinding in an uncanny polyrhythm, with dancers swinging fire about their bodies like glowing flies, with the red scent of leaking lifeblood floating there, he wanted to believe her. If only for his sanity's sake.

The thump of drums grew louder as closer they came, until they stood at the deafening center of their ritual site. Fires in bronze braziers drenched their site in merciless red that whirled like the dancers that now spun with greater force. Long tables lined with candlesticks and chalices ringed the center. A tree bearing a white fruit that bled thick slime onto the ground loomed behind a blackwood cross. The pounding of Hju's heart nearly silenced the drumming, and it did not slow when the drums played their final beat, and abandoned the cult into silence.

"Sisters of the tongue! Blessed daughters of Fjaug and eaters from the tree of flesh, no longer will we hunger in wait of the covenant!" the elder gydja declared, behind Hju so that her breasts caressed his back, and embracing his cheeks with cool hands. There was no avoiding it now; his cock was stiffening with excitement and fear. "The satya, the gift to us from our lord-upon-the-plate, has come of age and arrives here for us!"

A howl like a wolf on the hunt, or a tree-lion in heat, cascaded through the assembly and echoed for many seconds into the woods. The gydja's hands left Hju's face and reached back into another's hands to grasp a circlet made of twisted bones. "The Eaten Crown, as it has always been, will be his signet, and we shall feed ourselves fat on his essence!" The crown settled on Hju's shivering head, and he bit his quivering lip, only stopping short of bleeding when the gydja's hands settled to his shoulders and squeezed.

She didn't release him when she marched forward, forcing him with her to avoid spilling over. The cross, the only thing he could focus on, inched closer, its midnight grains streaked with the juice of the fruit that hung above it. There was no mistaking it, he was destined for the cross, and they would eat of him.

"This feast is one of forever, a step in an infinite journey of faith, a renewal of the covenant with which we bring bounty to ourselves and our brothers on the surface," she spoke to the audience, whose whispered chants grew to a clamor as they were kept waiting for their meal.

Hju had resigned; his cock was still solid as iron and he had offered himself up to the sacrifice, unwitting and foolish. He only hoped that his doom would bring Fjaug's favor to his family. They lashed him with ropes to the cross, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

He didn't expect a kiss.

"You are our feast, your essence will feed this holy conclave," she said to him, her lips still brushing against his with every gentle consonant. "For this we thank you, and you have my promise again that you will not be harmed." His sight could not pierce his clenched eyelids, but he felt the feathery touch of her lips against his neck, then his collar. "You are Fjaug's divine gift to us, and we to you." As if again tracing steps that had already been made, she rendered more kisses down his body; with her care she made sections along him, as if to butcher his flesh.

Hju's stomach sucked in a gulp of rushing air, as the chill from the gydja's fingers shocked through every aching nerve in his hard cock. A fearsome anticipation shook through him, spasming through his sinews and setting his heart alight with a most uncanny, rumbling ecstasy. No one before had touched him like this.

"Relax and give yourself over to pleasure, dear," she cooed to him. "This is but one meal of many."

A warm fluid dropped onto the head of his dick, and curiosity winched his eyes open. On her knees, eyes blinking through her veil of bones sucked clean, the gydja met his gaze and grinned a grin of equal parts joy and hunger. From her bottom lip hung a strand of glistening spit that connected the two of them. With her hand she broke that tether and began to stroke around the crown of his cock, slickening his shaft with a barrier of temperate saliva that shut out the forest's cold.

When the gydja's open mouth began to inch forward, Hju again grimaced and shrank away from her, an instinct that he now was attempting to silence if only to ease the impending pain. But then he felt another cold kiss touch his balls. "You still worry, sweet berry," she whispered. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to suck your cock."

Within a broken second of a mumbled "okay," his length was enveloped in her chilly blowjob before he could know it. The relief of feeling a tongue and not teeth wrapping his flesh, the remnant fear of deception, and a longing for home crashed into his psyche all at once and pummeled tears out and over his blushing cheeks. As tears carved rivers on his face, he stared into the abyssal canopy of the forest, those barky trails into midnight, and whined out: "Fuck..."

Relentless were her lips which made a tender seal around him, and merciless was her tongue that ringed the head of his cock. Hju's muscles spasmed and clenched as under her mercy he fell, his fingers clutching at the ropes that held him fast. "Breathe, berry, and let me lead you to the cliffs of orgasm," she said, kissing her words onto his shaft, and with a hungry moan she sucked him up.

Her cheeks, warming slowly from his body heat, massaged and squeezed him, tighter around him with every stroke she took him through. Deeper did she follow her fist down his length with every passing minute, her throat producing lurid and shameful gulps as his cock thumped at her throat. Blazing within his balls was a glow beyond his virginal ken, that pulsed inside and pumped out thick precum onto the gydja's slobbering tongue.

"Your essence tastes better than any meat, great satya," she said with her mouth stuffed full of cock. The taste awakened something in her, for when the bones fell away from her eyes they were shining with want, and her efforts redoubled. "By the Godknife, I will make you cum every last bit."

Hju, in the unflinching grip of stimulus, managed a timid squeak as the salt of his own tears started to drip to his panting, drooling tongue. Though he had ceased his crying, and given himself over to the orgasmic fate which Fjaug had tattooed upon his cock, the streaks, the tingle in his eyes, and the paint of blush across his cheek remained. "Please. Please don't stop."

"Then I won't."

She obliged her promise; she loosened the vise grip her lips had on him as she slid them to his base, and then, as she drew them back, cinched them closed again. This vicious suction churned his orgasm inside him and brought him achingly, starvingly close. He whined again. "Please, I'm almost--"

A damnable chill enveloped him as she let him free, and he swore, "fuck!" as her mouth left from him with a pop. In a needy frustration that he didn't quite understand, he glared down at her; she met his gaze therefrom, tongue lolling and mouth ajar, and stroking him with vigor and deliberation. "Cum, berry. Cum inside my mouth."

His hips, without a conscious command, reciprocated her movements; his nerves blazed with orgasmic fury, reaching desperately for the edge of the cliffs of release.

"All of it inside my mouth, satya."

With one final thrust, he spilled over, and came.

Though it was still a newer feeling, it did not strike him as bizarre. The warmth rushing through his shaft and out from him like floodwaters, felt as natural to Hju as storms to the island. His head spun and throbbed with euphoric rush and he saw double for but a moment.

What did awe Hju was the volume of his own seed, a flowing tide of white that speared from his shaft; with but one pump, his semen had filled her mouth and spilled over her lips. Her eyelids snapped open from their ecstatic haze as she hurriedly gulped it down in just time for another to take its place. She did not make it in time for the next. With a stammered swear, Hju thrust again, and jizz spread from the gydja's mouth over her chin, and flowed to her breasts to mingle with the woad there.

When Hju was left in a panting, dripping, glorious mess, eyes crossed and lip trembling, the mire of arousal evaporated from the priestess and she, panicked as though in divine presence, began spooning her meal from her body to her mouth. "Heilaug!" she exalted him, standing and holding his semen to the sky. "Our blessed feast begins! Eat, my sisters! Let your stomach grumble no longer!"

A new howl erupted from the cult, and they rushed like white water to the cross, nearly spilling over one another as they shrieked their praise to Fjaug and the satya. The orgasm had only just cleared from his brain like the lifting of a fog, to see his dumb smile turned to dread at the charge of the lustful, starving horde. Some ran so fast as to overshoot him, scraping to a halt on their heels behind the cross. Others were pushed from their spot after but one kiss or two upon his meat-god's mark. His lust was again stirred by licks and nibbles upon his hips and shoulders, and his cock, just as ready, just as needy as he was the first time, swelled and stiffened.

Eventually the churning of bodies, which saw each that settled into their spot uprooted soon after, slowed as clear minds won out over starved instinct. His balls were sucked between drooling lips and teased with tooth and tongue, the sensitive crown of his dick trapped inside an impassioned kiss between two acolytes. With every heavy second they drank of his salty flesh, their gasping arousal grew hotter.

Barely was he able to snatch a glimpse between clicking bones and the river of flowing, obtrusive hair to see the two acolytes who had laid claim to his shaft. One had hair of night black, the other of a ghostly white, and they ran their tongues along him in opposite directions, each licking the other every time they crossed. This sight was from him quickly stolen, another adventuring worshiper occupying his vision, and his mouth, with kisses.

In the spots where each sensuous touch met his body, an anxious and horny static sparked there, and lingered in his nerves, and explored farther into his core. No stronger was this pleasure storm raging than in his cock which twitched so forcefully as to briefly tear itself away from the mouths of its disciples, only to be wrangled in again. Precum drizzled from his tip onto waiting cheeks like a steaming river, drunk up with a needy and diligent haste.

It was only by the comfort of warm bodies and the intrepid touch of soft hands that he let himself go, and kissed back the lips that grasped his lips. Into his bound left hand, another hand slipped and intertwined its fingers; in his right hand a breast, firm and filling, where a nipple danced between two fingers.

A break in the tide of bodies gave another picture downward, where the black-haired acolyte was fingering her white-haired accomplice, while having her dick stroked by the same. Each hand was carelessly spilling the other's arousal onto the dusty ground, wasting that savor in want of a fuller meal. Their feast approached quicker now, as Hju stumbled toward the edge of orgasm.

This time, it felt righteous; the searing lust that wracked his body and grasped him like the fist of Xaea was not of the anxious kind, but the ecstatic, and he was content and high on his impending satisfaction. His heartbeat, though faster and faster as the more excitable he became, was lost amid the sweating heartbeats of his assembled proselytes.

"Cum for us, satya."

"Let your blessed essence flow."

"We need it, we hunger so."

Hju could not bear to keep them waiting any longer; he grit his teeth, and squeezed his eyes, and sent himself flying headlong over cum's edge. The world melted into a spinning soup, with streaks of white mixing into the tapestry as he plummeted. Fire and satisfaction struck through his shaft like cliffside lightning and he screamed into an echoing void like thunder in the night. A forest lit with fire was now a clay ocean; his lips were damp with the water of a thousand kisses, the voices of Fjaug's daughters arguing for a chance at his gift to them devolving to a primordial tongue between their mouths and his ears. Darkness bit at pieces of his boggling vision until he had sank, twirling and drunk, into the chilly embrace of unconsciousness.

When he emerged, gulping air like wine, he found himself standing. The body through which he saw, though it shared his naked features, felt very little like himself. It was as though he was watching someone else operate his body. He was in a sprawling village, much bigger than his home, nestled comfortably in the canopy of the conifer wood, while twilight hid all but sunlight's violet traces from the bridges. He stared down a wooden street to a longhouse, shields arrayed on its walls bearing every sigil he knew of and many he did not; the doors were ajar, and creaking back and forth at the coastal breeze's teasing.

He approached the door and felt from between its boards a warmth like that of the home's gentle hearth, heard the sizzle of meat on the spit, and smelled a potent scent he could not place. There was an inkling of something in his extremities, a thing he might have called curiosity, or yearning, or invitation, that animated his hand to grasp the handle and his feet to carry him inside.

Before him was a feasting hall, candle sconces illuminating the lingering smoke inside and turning it into an orange miasma that clung to the ceiling; stretching out unto forever, as if to hold infinitely many seats, was the great table, and at the far end, seated at the head, was someone.

A cloak of a pallid kind of leather concealed a byrnie that nonetheless glimmered under the candlelight. A spectacled helm sat atop its head, winged by great antlers upon which hung bleeding meats that dripped onto the shoulders below. One of its hands which held a drinking horn dipped it into a fall of thick cream from a barrel above that collected forever, with newfound flecks of red, in a bowl on the floor. The cup filled, the figure drank, and then spoke.

"The feast is not for some time yet. You are welcome to stay nonetheless, and we will visit."

The host gestured to a seat next to itself, and Hju silently, ponderingly, took it. From the table he took a mug, without first seeing it there as if the act of grabbing brought it into existence. The familiar sting of kvenhagi, that sweet-and-salty ale drink which his people made, slipped between his lips and down his throat.

"From where do you come, friend?"

Hju tapped the mug and felt a weight hang from his brain. "I hail from the village of Gunthjara, though they have turned me out."

"You are welcome here nonetheless. Why did they turn you out?"

"I was marked by my god," Hju explained, picking at a seared slab of meat with a fork. "On my twentieth birthday, I was taboo to them. They turned me over to the women of the deep forest, to feed them, or somesuch."

"And what then?"

Continuing through the chewing of steak, Hju mused. A lonely tear caught in his eyelashes. "I thought they were going to eat me. Though after all, they just wanted my..." Blush replaced the end of the sentence.

"Your semen?"

"Yes."

"How does it make you feel?"

"I feel many ways. I miss my parents, and I know they miss me too. But the one who is marked must always be given over to the gydjas; this is what my father told me."

"Do you wish they had told you sooner?"

Hju's mind caught up to his mouth, and he looked from his plate to the unblinking gaze of his host. "Who are you?"

"It is impolite to interrogate your dinner host."

"Are you a god?"

"Is that what you think I am?"

Hju stopped. He had no answer. "I don't know if I wish they had told me sooner. I can only imagine I'd be consumed by dread; I nearly fainted when the ritual began."

"And now, after you have experienced it? Do you wish you could go back?"