August/September 2004
He
drew the sharp thorn up the length of his left arm. A shudder,
cold but pleasurable. Blood beaded in spots over his skin; blood
he touched then tasted, sucked and licked from his tremulous fingers.
The chill never left him. The emptiness, utmost sorrow, the pain
emanating like harsh moonlight from his eyes, a few tears were all that remained.
Dorian wanted to cry, to turn over to that empty space beside him and lose himself in the silence of his heart.
A heart beating hollow drums, thundering to cloud each waking, tortured moment. Guilt saturated him—the conscious pain of knowing that it was his fault that Mick died the way he did—that wrong turn on slick pavement, too distracted, too intoxicated, too enraptured by Mick's hand kneading his crotch through the gray wool-blend of his trousers...
That autumn night: their fourth year anniversary.
Icy rain had poured to create crystal-like sculptures of street and cars and metal, the sparse trees sparkling at night, dripping in transparent frozen blood—Dorian's blood, that which still ran sluggishly through his veins, that beaded over arms and legs as the thorns tore into his epidermis. In the bleak hope of restoring a sensation of feeling, a tingle of tangible pain to supersede the bottled emotional self-hatred, rage and pain he could never unleash.
Dorian still couldn't face himself or the truth, not even after this stretch of meandering time.
He held that thorn necklace up to the candlelight. The last reminder of Mick's love. A family heirloom, that necklace, created a century before—that one materialistic icon that Mick Danvers never contemplated giving up. So philanthropic was he, so goddamn selfless, a nomad out of time. He was a giving man who held no ulterior motive, only to share his wealth with anyone until he bled himself dry.
But not this particular piece. Only Dorian had ever laid eyes upon the
petrified necklace.
It was exotic to say the least. The cord was made from an unbreakable catgut-like material, and it looked to Dorian to be the color of dried human flesh. Yet it smelled damp, like wet soil below a lilac tree. The ornamentations were petrified thorns: long, thick and jagged, almost in the shape of incisors, perhaps a wolf or a cobra's fangs. A cluster of ornate twigs, the shape in some kind of occult sigil, hung in the middle. The ends of the twigs were as sharp as the thorns.
In all the years that Dorian prepared to become an archaeologist, later to drastically change his mind and utilize his culinary skills, he had never seen anything remotely akin to it. It wasn't beautiful like diamonds or gold or silver, but a mysterious spectacle of nature: earthy and powerful, a magic talisman or fetish used to protect the wearer from harm or... death?
"Then the magic died," Dorian whispered. "It had to have faded with time, love, or else you'd still be here with me. Beside me. Holding me."
You'd rake these two thorns over my stomach, over my chest, down my thighs. Then you'd gently kiss the blood away, your tongue gliding across...
A scream.
His fists pounded the bed as a minuscule amount of sorrowful rage slipped through his entranced mind.
Dorian felt his heart beating wildly inside his chest, a rapid pulse in
his ears. Tears obscured his vision as he swore to have seen that thorn necklace throb with life—a gasp of inanimate lungs— as it rested on his bleeding stomach. A slight glow—warm, growing hotter, the thorns burrowing into his abdomen of their own accord.
He shuddered, winced, but not in pain, only in stark surprise, in
tantalizing pleasure. He reached out to touch this thing he believed was so innocuous and lifeless. That sigil of twigs now radiated in a deep blue nimbus of kinetic energy. Energy being drained, Dorian surmised, from his own life-giving blood which had all but vanished from his tremulous flesh.
It felt alive, beating like a heart, growing larger, taking a shape that
appeared human, but Dorian wasn't sure—for that nimbus scarred his vision like an after-flash from a camera. He only felt heated pleasure, a hollowness colliding with the kinetic heat, the emptiness of his yearning heart, the dread of his final decision.
He swooned until he felt a pair of cool, wet hands trail over his arms—until he heard a raspy inhalation sound between gasps of breath not his own.
Dorian moaned, reaching to touch this magical dream-man that now pressed against him, that kissed his nipples with sharp teeth, whose own erection slid up Dorian's tense thighs, whose feet clawed over his own. More blood was drawn.
Lightheadedness enraptured his spirit as he cried out a familiar name: "Micky!"
That warm, electric mouth ceased its actions, the long thorns slowing
withdrawing in sharp waves of twisting pain, and the magic man replied: "You've brought me back, my love." A sad inflection. "But only for this one night. Love me now, and it'll be forever, Dorian."
"I want to be with you—don't leave me, don't..."
"Hush, sweetness. You'll break the spell, this charm of blood. Just
stare at that pattern, the blue light of life inside. It's an angel... Then
you'll see me, a bit blurred, I am... yet I lie beyond it. But I am real, flesh and strength... yours."
"I...I think I see. Oh God, oh God—Micky, you are real! So
beautiful, so pale blue..."
"Hush now."
Dorian acquiesced, staring ahead, letting the sensations of Mick's undead, bony fingers and talon-like feet, his cool bark-like flesh, petrified, scraped away so many years of icy bitterness, of gouging pain. Kisses. Mick turned his head down to Dorian's skin, teased the flesh, thorns digging deep, blood and sweat mixing to sting as the creature's tongue lapped at Dorian's desire.
Dorian had always been the dominant one before, always the one to seize the night, to take his lover as Zeus took Ganymede. He didn't care anymore. He was contemplating killing himself this night anyway. What difference could it make that Mick was alive again, by magical means no less, looking like some Druid nightmare from before the days of Jesus Christ? Mick was still gorgeous, his features harder now, that brownish color of petrified thorns didn't matter. In fact, Dorian devoured the way that his own flesh quaked under Mick's clawing embrace, as the pain of the entity's bark embossed skin rubbed his chest raw.
Yet it was the trail of cool lichen that teased his senses, that sweet aroma of newly blossoming greens saturating his mind with thoughts of spring, of brilliant sunlight bathing his mind, rushing though his blood.
Dorian silently prayed for penetration, to infuse this intense love with
ecstatic pain. Excruciating, this pain, as Mick bit into his arms, siphoning off his blood, moving over to the other—then to just behind his knees, ecstatic kisses, he swooned.
He reached over to touch Mick, to feel that skin now warm with life; skin so thick and hard. Skin that bled ever so slightly through minuscule pores.
The blue light in his brain throbbed and spiked in waves, but Dorian
ignored it as the ritual continued. Thorns raked deeper, steady streams of excised blood, Dorian's shouting howls of pleasure achieved, his heart beating faster and faster, to slow, growing shallow, cold sweat and chills replacing the heat of exertion, of feverish pain stroking his every sinew. A kiss, then, on Dorian's thick lips.
A dream seized Dorian's fleeting mind as that sigil of occult drama
pulsed. He dreamed of the night Mick died. Of the joy and smiles they'd shared, of hands kneading and teasing his groin, of his own shuddering gasps, of tears, icy and frozen, raining down, windshield shattering, impaling....
He stared ahead with weary eyes now; tired half-lids that blurred, but still he saw this visage of Mick's delicate features: of that lank hair of auburn lust, a smile of mirth, now brown and smooth, streaks of darkness obscuring a kiss good-bye. The cast of transparent ice encasing his dying breath, good-night.
The sound of a thorn pulled harshly over cold death, frozen emotions,
nails across marble. Mick lay at Dorian's side, holding his lover in passionate decay, whispering in the man's ear. "It was my fault that we died. I had crossed the limits, giving too much at the wrong time. But now we're together again, frozen in time, like my own tears."
Mick drained the last of Dorian's heart, his pain, the blood that had
suffered to boil in closeted rage.
Dorian smiled before he died, before his flesh dried and shrunk, lost in a final embrace, smothered by time.
Mick Danvers rose from the bed and placed a new thorn on his string of dried flesh.
When the blue nimbus faded from his mind, Mick's skin was that of
Dorian's, their features melded together. A composite of pain, of another love embraced.
He sadly smiled to himself, resting his fingers on the talisman of twigs. Mick allowed himself to hear his lover's heartbeat one last song before taking the fetish off.
"I'll never part with you. I swear."
The magic was sealed with a kiss, until the day he would die again while his lover stared into his azure eyes of time, lost. When the tears froze into images of a thorny soul, the magic man's blood art would again be seen by only one...
The chill never left him. The emptiness, utmost sorrow, the pain
emanating like harsh moonlight from his eyes, a few tears were all that remained.
Dorian wanted to cry, to turn over to that empty space beside him and lose himself in the silence of his heart.
A heart beating hollow drums, thundering to cloud each waking, tortured moment. Guilt saturated him—the conscious pain of knowing that it was his fault that Mick died the way he did—that wrong turn on slick pavement, too distracted, too intoxicated, too enraptured by Mick's hand kneading his crotch through the gray wool-blend of his trousers...
That autumn night: their fourth year anniversary.
Icy rain had poured to create crystal-like sculptures of street and cars and metal, the sparse trees sparkling at night, dripping in transparent frozen blood—Dorian's blood, that which still ran sluggishly through his veins, that beaded over arms and legs as the thorns tore into his epidermis. In the bleak hope of restoring a sensation of feeling, a tingle of tangible pain to supersede the bottled emotional self-hatred, rage and pain he could never unleash.
Dorian still couldn't face himself or the truth, not even after this stretch of meandering time.
He held that thorn necklace up to the candlelight. The last reminder of Mick's love. A family heirloom, that necklace, created a century before—that one materialistic icon that Mick Danvers never contemplated giving up. So philanthropic was he, so goddamn selfless, a nomad out of time. He was a giving man who held no ulterior motive, only to share his wealth with anyone until he bled himself dry.
But not this particular piece. Only Dorian had ever laid eyes upon the
petrified necklace.
It was exotic to say the least. The cord was made from an unbreakable catgut-like material, and it looked to Dorian to be the color of dried human flesh. Yet it smelled damp, like wet soil below a lilac tree. The ornamentations were petrified thorns: long, thick and jagged, almost in the shape of incisors, perhaps a wolf or a cobra's fangs. A cluster of ornate twigs, the shape in some kind of occult sigil, hung in the middle. The ends of the twigs were as sharp as the thorns.
In all the years that Dorian prepared to become an archaeologist, later to drastically change his mind and utilize his culinary skills, he had never seen anything remotely akin to it. It wasn't beautiful like diamonds or gold or silver, but a mysterious spectacle of nature: earthy and powerful, a magic talisman or fetish used to protect the wearer from harm or... death?
"Then the magic died," Dorian whispered. "It had to have faded with time, love, or else you'd still be here with me. Beside me. Holding me."
You'd rake these two thorns over my stomach, over my chest, down my thighs. Then you'd gently kiss the blood away, your tongue gliding across...
A scream.
His fists pounded the bed as a minuscule amount of sorrowful rage slipped through his entranced mind.
Dorian felt his heart beating wildly inside his chest, a rapid pulse in
his ears. Tears obscured his vision as he swore to have seen that thorn necklace throb with life—a gasp of inanimate lungs— as it rested on his bleeding stomach. A slight glow—warm, growing hotter, the thorns burrowing into his abdomen of their own accord.
He shuddered, winced, but not in pain, only in stark surprise, in
tantalizing pleasure. He reached out to touch this thing he believed was so innocuous and lifeless. That sigil of twigs now radiated in a deep blue nimbus of kinetic energy. Energy being drained, Dorian surmised, from his own life-giving blood which had all but vanished from his tremulous flesh.
It felt alive, beating like a heart, growing larger, taking a shape that
appeared human, but Dorian wasn't sure—for that nimbus scarred his vision like an after-flash from a camera. He only felt heated pleasure, a hollowness colliding with the kinetic heat, the emptiness of his yearning heart, the dread of his final decision.
He swooned until he felt a pair of cool, wet hands trail over his arms—until he heard a raspy inhalation sound between gasps of breath not his own.
Dorian moaned, reaching to touch this magical dream-man that now pressed against him, that kissed his nipples with sharp teeth, whose own erection slid up Dorian's tense thighs, whose feet clawed over his own. More blood was drawn.
Lightheadedness enraptured his spirit as he cried out a familiar name: "Micky!"
That warm, electric mouth ceased its actions, the long thorns slowing
withdrawing in sharp waves of twisting pain, and the magic man replied: "You've brought me back, my love." A sad inflection. "But only for this one night. Love me now, and it'll be forever, Dorian."
"I want to be with you—don't leave me, don't..."
"Hush, sweetness. You'll break the spell, this charm of blood. Just
stare at that pattern, the blue light of life inside. It's an angel... Then
you'll see me, a bit blurred, I am... yet I lie beyond it. But I am real, flesh and strength... yours."
"I...I think I see. Oh God, oh God—Micky, you are real! So
beautiful, so pale blue..."
"Hush now."
Dorian acquiesced, staring ahead, letting the sensations of Mick's undead, bony fingers and talon-like feet, his cool bark-like flesh, petrified, scraped away so many years of icy bitterness, of gouging pain. Kisses. Mick turned his head down to Dorian's skin, teased the flesh, thorns digging deep, blood and sweat mixing to sting as the creature's tongue lapped at Dorian's desire.
Dorian had always been the dominant one before, always the one to seize the night, to take his lover as Zeus took Ganymede. He didn't care anymore. He was contemplating killing himself this night anyway. What difference could it make that Mick was alive again, by magical means no less, looking like some Druid nightmare from before the days of Jesus Christ? Mick was still gorgeous, his features harder now, that brownish color of petrified thorns didn't matter. In fact, Dorian devoured the way that his own flesh quaked under Mick's clawing embrace, as the pain of the entity's bark embossed skin rubbed his chest raw.
Yet it was the trail of cool lichen that teased his senses, that sweet aroma of newly blossoming greens saturating his mind with thoughts of spring, of brilliant sunlight bathing his mind, rushing though his blood.
Dorian silently prayed for penetration, to infuse this intense love with
ecstatic pain. Excruciating, this pain, as Mick bit into his arms, siphoning off his blood, moving over to the other—then to just behind his knees, ecstatic kisses, he swooned.
He reached over to touch Mick, to feel that skin now warm with life; skin so thick and hard. Skin that bled ever so slightly through minuscule pores.
The blue light in his brain throbbed and spiked in waves, but Dorian
ignored it as the ritual continued. Thorns raked deeper, steady streams of excised blood, Dorian's shouting howls of pleasure achieved, his heart beating faster and faster, to slow, growing shallow, cold sweat and chills replacing the heat of exertion, of feverish pain stroking his every sinew. A kiss, then, on Dorian's thick lips.
A dream seized Dorian's fleeting mind as that sigil of occult drama
pulsed. He dreamed of the night Mick died. Of the joy and smiles they'd shared, of hands kneading and teasing his groin, of his own shuddering gasps, of tears, icy and frozen, raining down, windshield shattering, impaling....
He stared ahead with weary eyes now; tired half-lids that blurred, but still he saw this visage of Mick's delicate features: of that lank hair of auburn lust, a smile of mirth, now brown and smooth, streaks of darkness obscuring a kiss good-bye. The cast of transparent ice encasing his dying breath, good-night.
The sound of a thorn pulled harshly over cold death, frozen emotions,
nails across marble. Mick lay at Dorian's side, holding his lover in passionate decay, whispering in the man's ear. "It was my fault that we died. I had crossed the limits, giving too much at the wrong time. But now we're together again, frozen in time, like my own tears."
Mick drained the last of Dorian's heart, his pain, the blood that had
suffered to boil in closeted rage.
Dorian smiled before he died, before his flesh dried and shrunk, lost in a final embrace, smothered by time.
Mick Danvers rose from the bed and placed a new thorn on his string of dried flesh.
When the blue nimbus faded from his mind, Mick's skin was that of
Dorian's, their features melded together. A composite of pain, of another love embraced.
He sadly smiled to himself, resting his fingers on the talisman of twigs. Mick allowed himself to hear his lover's heartbeat one last song before taking the fetish off.
"I'll never part with you. I swear."
The magic was sealed with a kiss, until the day he would die again while his lover stared into his azure eyes of time, lost. When the tears froze into images of a thorny soul, the magic man's blood art would again be seen by only one...
