Fiction Vignette: Faces of God
A new character, deep background. This is my Celestial Chorus mage, at a key turning-point in his life. He is not yet Awakened at this point. Unlike some of my pieces, it's actually fairly straightforward; no blood or dark weirdness, I promise. It is, however, pretty much porno (or, if you happen to think it classy enough, erotica). Proceed at your own risk and on your own recognizance.
Faces of God
The drums pulsed.
They echoed in the forest clearing, the campfire's flames throwing ragged orange dancing shadows everywhere. Mike looks around the Circle, his body moving unconsciously with the complex, interweaving beats. The Priest and Priestess are chanting, invoking strings of deities by name and attributes, calling the quarters to witness. The divinity student's been to more than one of these; he lets his eyes rest for a long moment on his classmate, across the campfire, who introduced him to this primal form of connection to the Divine.
Her name is Molly, though she goes by Rowan. It's her 'craft name,' apparently, or part of it. He's perfectly happy to call her whatever she likes. The rings in her eyebrow glint in the firelight as she sways, eyes closed, giving voice to a wordless chant that counterpoints around the drums and the quarter-calling. Mike tries not to think of what Father Rich would say if he knew his prize student were attending a witches' coven ... even though Wicca is far from the spiteful curses described in biblical sources, or Dominican reports.
He finds something about it strangely compelling. These people ... they believe as intensely as almost any he's met in church, and far more than most. They believe in an immediacy of the Divine that pulls at him, at the hunger for God he's always felt, ever since he was a small boy. Truth be told, that's been missing, some, in his seminarian training, lost somewhere behind the centuries of doctrines and papal proclamations. He wonders, sometimes, alone in his dorm room at night, whether half his teachers even believe God exists.
Here, there's no question. They intercede directly with their gods and goddesses for aid, and in return observe and respect the turning of the seasons of the earth and the moon, honoring all life and its power and responsibility. He feels meaning here, and so he keeps coming, though he hasn't yet told his teachers about his crisis of faith. He finds himself moving with the beat again, shoulders shifting, eyes rolling back slightly in his head. He goes with it this time, lets himself feel the pulse in his blood, in the very woods tonight, it seems.
The Priest and Priestess end their chants sharply, together, standing to one side of the central fire, hands clasped. He's missed some of the wording, but the Circle feels poised. All eyes are on them. "We assemble here for the Midsummer Fire," the Priestess says in a clear voice, as if reciting, but also, somehow, improvised, new, fresh, true. "It is the feast of Beltane!" A chorus of yips, claps, and shouts of acclamation burst from the assembled coven in answer, and the Priestess smiles at them. The Priest picks it up. "The year turns!" he calls. "The God, born in spring, is grown to manhood, and courts his lady mother." More catcalls, these more sexual in nature, and Mike finds himself hoping the strange light of the fire is hiding his blush.
"Now, we dance!" the Holy Couple call out, and the three drummers start in again with a will. The pair begin to dance, putting themselves into it with an unselfconscious abandon Mike finds himself envying. It isn't choreographed; it comes completely from the spirit. Now another witch stands, smiles, beckons to his partner; they are joined by another couple, and another, until almost everyone but the drummers are dancing. The Handmaiden begins to make a circuit through the dancers, her own feet moving to the rhythm, stamping, the bells on her ankles chiming as she moves, offering the Sacred Drink (in reality, the Priest's best summer fruit wine, brewed from his own berries) from a wineskin. The party, it seems, is just getting started.
Mike watches, enjoying the music, and their motions; but he feels excluded, somehow. Maybe, he thinks, if he'd grown up a Southern Baptist instead of a Catholic, he'd feel more at home here. This Dionysian communion is somehow strange to him, like the rituals of a New Guinea tribe, though the drums pull at his very blood. The Handmaiden approaches, and smiles, and he feels his lips answer even as his cheeks flush (and another area, rather lower, also fills with blood, throbbing). "Blessed Beltaine," she says, offering the wineskin, and somehow it never occurs to him to refuse. The sweetness, like summer sunshine distilled to its essence and drenched in honey, explodes across his palate as he slakes his thirst, drinking deep. He doesn't realize how strong it is, or how much he's drunk, until she's moved on and the aftertaste hits.
He's swaying a bit more, now, between the drums and the drink; truth be told, it might have something more than alcohol in it, not that poor square Mike has any chance of recognizing that. He's shifting in his seat rhythmically, eyes closed, arms wrapped around himself, when suddenly hands run down his sides from behind, and embrace him against a pair of soft breasts. "Hey there," Rowan murmurs in his ear. His initial uneasy stiffening fades as he recognizes her voice; he smiles, swaying with her now to the complex interweaving drumbeats. "Hi," he says, eyes still closed. "Come dance," she says, taking his hand and pulling him to his feet, and somehow his tongue's too thick to form coherent objections, like 'But I can't dance,' or, 'I'll look stupid!' Clearly, nobody else is watching anyway.
She pulls him a little away from the fire, under the trees at the edge of the clearing, and wraps her arms around him, guiding him in a syncopated sway. She's sure touching him an awful lot ... after a timeless interval, he finally demurs, pushing her a little bit away from him, and says, "I'd better stop." "Whatever for?" she asks, looking up at him, her cat-green eyes glinting and leaping in the firelight. It takes him long moments to find an answer, trapped in her eyes as he is, but finally he stammers, "I, I don't dance very well." She smiles, sliding her hands along his sides again, tracing his muscles, cupping his hips. "I thought you were doing fine," she says, guiding him to begin again. He stumbles, swaying towards her, and recoils again, disturbed by the intensely sexual urges chasing themselves around his mind.
He's never really touched a woman 'like that.' Aside from a few ill-starred fumbles in high school, girls are just another form of guy to him: people to talk to, have lunch with, nothing more. He's been on the road to the priesthood his entire life; somehow, he just never figured sex would be important to him. Why get used to something, after all, if you're only going to give it up? And so here he is, a 22-year-old virgin, dancing drunkenly around a campfire with a very pretty girl, whom he likes very much. And who, he now muzzily notices, is not, in fact, wearing much in the way of clothing. He's pretty sure she was clothed before, when everyone was seated, but now she wears a long shawl or sarong tied over her hips like a skirt, and a string bikini top. Which does very, very little to disguise her decided femininity. He looks away, confused, and puts a hand on a tree to keep from staggering too much. He's had too much to drink, that's it, he'll find somewhere to sit down ... away from the drums. He's just about decided to do so when a skillful hand shockingly snakes down inside his pants and seizes his erection in a cool, assured grip.
"Rowan!" he gasps, shocked, and she melds herself to his back again, her voice amused in his ear. "Join us," she whispers huskily. "Tonight, we honor the Goddess, we enact the Holy Marriage. You are my God. Worship me." Meanwhile, the singleminded squeezes and strokings in his shorts are making it very, very hard for Mike to put two thoughts together coherently, though he's fairly sure there's a shocking sacrilege in *something* she just said. "N-no," he stammers, even as she undoes his pants and pulls them down with a jerk. He falls back a little against a tree for balance, watching in disbelief as she undresses him. It's just as well; his hands probably wouldn't be up to it.
He blinks, fascinated, at his own firelit erection, throbbing and giving little jerks in time to the drums, but then Rowan is there again, pressed against his chest, hands stroking his skin, mouth devouring his with a primal hunger. His objections are nowhere near strong enough to withstand an onslaught like this, and he fumblingly attempts to copy her, dizzied anew by the feel of her flesh beneath his hands, her rounded, muscular buttocks, the barely-confined jiggling mass of breasts. And then they're not confined at all, as her bikini top disappears between one heartbeat and the next, and he finds himself burying his face between them, rubbing them all over his face, suckling at a nipple. The moans that are his reward are the single sexiest sound he's *ever* heard in his life, and he groans himself, nearly shooting off right there.
Rowan laughs, enfolding his face in her hands and bringing it back up to her own as she draws his attention, helping him last. Finally, she steps back a little, her slim form limned in dancing orange glow, and the hunger in his eyes is answer enough for her. She unties her wrapped skirt, holding it behind her like a cape, and says, low and inviting, "Come to me, Cerunnos. Come to me, God of the Forest!" She spreads the fabric behind her, forming a thin blanket of sorts, and sinks to sit with her knees spread, the scent of sex filling the clearing and Mike's head.
He steps forwards and then sinks to his knees, rubbing his face all over her belly, her thighs, rutting like a boar after truffles, head spinning, his heart throbbing louder than the drums in his ears, and just as fast. The woman ... the Goddess ... before him smiles down with lust in her eyes and reaches between them to guide him home. His consciousness narrows to a single red-hot shaft, quenched and enflamed all at once by the wet, tight warmth in which he finds himself. Calves hook behind his thighs, seconding the urge of instinct to thrust, pull out, thrust, groans wrenched from, it seems, his very soul. Something is building, building, unlike anything he's felt before, even in his furtive lone explorations. He feels overshadowed by the God, antlers heavy on his forehead, as he snorts and bucks and thrusts, leaning forward, her breasts, Her breasts, pressed against the skin of his chest, bountiful and strong and soft all at once. He smells sex; he smells woman; he smells fertile earth. The drums weave through his blood, urging him on even as do Her moans of pleasure. She leans up to capture his earlobe and suck, bite; suddenly it's all too much for him and racking spasms of ecstasy twist his body, arching his spine, as his mind seems almost thrown out of his flesh.
He comes to himself, a little, breathing hard, lying atop Rowan. They're both drenched in sweat; the fire has died down. It is strangely quiet. He is still deep within her, though no longer hard, and she is smiling, her fingers running over and around his back in arcane arabesques. He swallows, and suddenly realizes he's even still wearing his glasses, though sweat is running down his forehead and dripping onto the lenses to pool there. He shifts his weight a little uneasily, fragmented memories of the last -- how long? -- beginning to congeal. When he would roll off of her, Rowan holds him close with legs and hands, her smile growing wry. "Oh, no you don't," she says. "It took me eight months to get you here and I'm going to enjoy it, darn you." Mike blinks, feeling a flush run up his face again. "But we ... but I ..." he says, and cranes his neck towards the fire circle.
They are not the only spent couple lying on the summer grass; in fact, not all the couples (or moresomes) are spent yet. They fuck as they danced, un-selfconsciously and with an almost innocent pleasure. Reflexive shame makes him turn away; but all there is to look at is Rowan's gloriously happy exhaustion, as she watches him. She seems amused. "Thou art God," she murmurs, fervently. "And I am Goddess, and we are the earth, the sun, the stars." He feels the holy power behind her words; feels the year turning, the moans and grunts and occasional scream blending with the nighttime sounds of the woods themselves. Somehow, he thinks it'll be a very long time before he tells Father Rich about this.
Faces of God
The drums pulsed.
They echoed in the forest clearing, the campfire's flames throwing ragged orange dancing shadows everywhere. Mike looks around the Circle, his body moving unconsciously with the complex, interweaving beats. The Priest and Priestess are chanting, invoking strings of deities by name and attributes, calling the quarters to witness. The divinity student's been to more than one of these; he lets his eyes rest for a long moment on his classmate, across the campfire, who introduced him to this primal form of connection to the Divine.
Her name is Molly, though she goes by Rowan. It's her 'craft name,' apparently, or part of it. He's perfectly happy to call her whatever she likes. The rings in her eyebrow glint in the firelight as she sways, eyes closed, giving voice to a wordless chant that counterpoints around the drums and the quarter-calling. Mike tries not to think of what Father Rich would say if he knew his prize student were attending a witches' coven ... even though Wicca is far from the spiteful curses described in biblical sources, or Dominican reports.
He finds something about it strangely compelling. These people ... they believe as intensely as almost any he's met in church, and far more than most. They believe in an immediacy of the Divine that pulls at him, at the hunger for God he's always felt, ever since he was a small boy. Truth be told, that's been missing, some, in his seminarian training, lost somewhere behind the centuries of doctrines and papal proclamations. He wonders, sometimes, alone in his dorm room at night, whether half his teachers even believe God exists.
Here, there's no question. They intercede directly with their gods and goddesses for aid, and in return observe and respect the turning of the seasons of the earth and the moon, honoring all life and its power and responsibility. He feels meaning here, and so he keeps coming, though he hasn't yet told his teachers about his crisis of faith. He finds himself moving with the beat again, shoulders shifting, eyes rolling back slightly in his head. He goes with it this time, lets himself feel the pulse in his blood, in the very woods tonight, it seems.
The Priest and Priestess end their chants sharply, together, standing to one side of the central fire, hands clasped. He's missed some of the wording, but the Circle feels poised. All eyes are on them. "We assemble here for the Midsummer Fire," the Priestess says in a clear voice, as if reciting, but also, somehow, improvised, new, fresh, true. "It is the feast of Beltane!" A chorus of yips, claps, and shouts of acclamation burst from the assembled coven in answer, and the Priestess smiles at them. The Priest picks it up. "The year turns!" he calls. "The God, born in spring, is grown to manhood, and courts his lady mother." More catcalls, these more sexual in nature, and Mike finds himself hoping the strange light of the fire is hiding his blush.
"Now, we dance!" the Holy Couple call out, and the three drummers start in again with a will. The pair begin to dance, putting themselves into it with an unselfconscious abandon Mike finds himself envying. It isn't choreographed; it comes completely from the spirit. Now another witch stands, smiles, beckons to his partner; they are joined by another couple, and another, until almost everyone but the drummers are dancing. The Handmaiden begins to make a circuit through the dancers, her own feet moving to the rhythm, stamping, the bells on her ankles chiming as she moves, offering the Sacred Drink (in reality, the Priest's best summer fruit wine, brewed from his own berries) from a wineskin. The party, it seems, is just getting started.
Mike watches, enjoying the music, and their motions; but he feels excluded, somehow. Maybe, he thinks, if he'd grown up a Southern Baptist instead of a Catholic, he'd feel more at home here. This Dionysian communion is somehow strange to him, like the rituals of a New Guinea tribe, though the drums pull at his very blood. The Handmaiden approaches, and smiles, and he feels his lips answer even as his cheeks flush (and another area, rather lower, also fills with blood, throbbing). "Blessed Beltaine," she says, offering the wineskin, and somehow it never occurs to him to refuse. The sweetness, like summer sunshine distilled to its essence and drenched in honey, explodes across his palate as he slakes his thirst, drinking deep. He doesn't realize how strong it is, or how much he's drunk, until she's moved on and the aftertaste hits.
He's swaying a bit more, now, between the drums and the drink; truth be told, it might have something more than alcohol in it, not that poor square Mike has any chance of recognizing that. He's shifting in his seat rhythmically, eyes closed, arms wrapped around himself, when suddenly hands run down his sides from behind, and embrace him against a pair of soft breasts. "Hey there," Rowan murmurs in his ear. His initial uneasy stiffening fades as he recognizes her voice; he smiles, swaying with her now to the complex interweaving drumbeats. "Hi," he says, eyes still closed. "Come dance," she says, taking his hand and pulling him to his feet, and somehow his tongue's too thick to form coherent objections, like 'But I can't dance,' or, 'I'll look stupid!' Clearly, nobody else is watching anyway.
She pulls him a little away from the fire, under the trees at the edge of the clearing, and wraps her arms around him, guiding him in a syncopated sway. She's sure touching him an awful lot ... after a timeless interval, he finally demurs, pushing her a little bit away from him, and says, "I'd better stop." "Whatever for?" she asks, looking up at him, her cat-green eyes glinting and leaping in the firelight. It takes him long moments to find an answer, trapped in her eyes as he is, but finally he stammers, "I, I don't dance very well." She smiles, sliding her hands along his sides again, tracing his muscles, cupping his hips. "I thought you were doing fine," she says, guiding him to begin again. He stumbles, swaying towards her, and recoils again, disturbed by the intensely sexual urges chasing themselves around his mind.
He's never really touched a woman 'like that.' Aside from a few ill-starred fumbles in high school, girls are just another form of guy to him: people to talk to, have lunch with, nothing more. He's been on the road to the priesthood his entire life; somehow, he just never figured sex would be important to him. Why get used to something, after all, if you're only going to give it up? And so here he is, a 22-year-old virgin, dancing drunkenly around a campfire with a very pretty girl, whom he likes very much. And who, he now muzzily notices, is not, in fact, wearing much in the way of clothing. He's pretty sure she was clothed before, when everyone was seated, but now she wears a long shawl or sarong tied over her hips like a skirt, and a string bikini top. Which does very, very little to disguise her decided femininity. He looks away, confused, and puts a hand on a tree to keep from staggering too much. He's had too much to drink, that's it, he'll find somewhere to sit down ... away from the drums. He's just about decided to do so when a skillful hand shockingly snakes down inside his pants and seizes his erection in a cool, assured grip.
"Rowan!" he gasps, shocked, and she melds herself to his back again, her voice amused in his ear. "Join us," she whispers huskily. "Tonight, we honor the Goddess, we enact the Holy Marriage. You are my God. Worship me." Meanwhile, the singleminded squeezes and strokings in his shorts are making it very, very hard for Mike to put two thoughts together coherently, though he's fairly sure there's a shocking sacrilege in *something* she just said. "N-no," he stammers, even as she undoes his pants and pulls them down with a jerk. He falls back a little against a tree for balance, watching in disbelief as she undresses him. It's just as well; his hands probably wouldn't be up to it.
He blinks, fascinated, at his own firelit erection, throbbing and giving little jerks in time to the drums, but then Rowan is there again, pressed against his chest, hands stroking his skin, mouth devouring his with a primal hunger. His objections are nowhere near strong enough to withstand an onslaught like this, and he fumblingly attempts to copy her, dizzied anew by the feel of her flesh beneath his hands, her rounded, muscular buttocks, the barely-confined jiggling mass of breasts. And then they're not confined at all, as her bikini top disappears between one heartbeat and the next, and he finds himself burying his face between them, rubbing them all over his face, suckling at a nipple. The moans that are his reward are the single sexiest sound he's *ever* heard in his life, and he groans himself, nearly shooting off right there.
Rowan laughs, enfolding his face in her hands and bringing it back up to her own as she draws his attention, helping him last. Finally, she steps back a little, her slim form limned in dancing orange glow, and the hunger in his eyes is answer enough for her. She unties her wrapped skirt, holding it behind her like a cape, and says, low and inviting, "Come to me, Cerunnos. Come to me, God of the Forest!" She spreads the fabric behind her, forming a thin blanket of sorts, and sinks to sit with her knees spread, the scent of sex filling the clearing and Mike's head.
He steps forwards and then sinks to his knees, rubbing his face all over her belly, her thighs, rutting like a boar after truffles, head spinning, his heart throbbing louder than the drums in his ears, and just as fast. The woman ... the Goddess ... before him smiles down with lust in her eyes and reaches between them to guide him home. His consciousness narrows to a single red-hot shaft, quenched and enflamed all at once by the wet, tight warmth in which he finds himself. Calves hook behind his thighs, seconding the urge of instinct to thrust, pull out, thrust, groans wrenched from, it seems, his very soul. Something is building, building, unlike anything he's felt before, even in his furtive lone explorations. He feels overshadowed by the God, antlers heavy on his forehead, as he snorts and bucks and thrusts, leaning forward, her breasts, Her breasts, pressed against the skin of his chest, bountiful and strong and soft all at once. He smells sex; he smells woman; he smells fertile earth. The drums weave through his blood, urging him on even as do Her moans of pleasure. She leans up to capture his earlobe and suck, bite; suddenly it's all too much for him and racking spasms of ecstasy twist his body, arching his spine, as his mind seems almost thrown out of his flesh.
He comes to himself, a little, breathing hard, lying atop Rowan. They're both drenched in sweat; the fire has died down. It is strangely quiet. He is still deep within her, though no longer hard, and she is smiling, her fingers running over and around his back in arcane arabesques. He swallows, and suddenly realizes he's even still wearing his glasses, though sweat is running down his forehead and dripping onto the lenses to pool there. He shifts his weight a little uneasily, fragmented memories of the last -- how long? -- beginning to congeal. When he would roll off of her, Rowan holds him close with legs and hands, her smile growing wry. "Oh, no you don't," she says. "It took me eight months to get you here and I'm going to enjoy it, darn you." Mike blinks, feeling a flush run up his face again. "But we ... but I ..." he says, and cranes his neck towards the fire circle.
They are not the only spent couple lying on the summer grass; in fact, not all the couples (or moresomes) are spent yet. They fuck as they danced, un-selfconsciously and with an almost innocent pleasure. Reflexive shame makes him turn away; but all there is to look at is Rowan's gloriously happy exhaustion, as she watches him. She seems amused. "Thou art God," she murmurs, fervently. "And I am Goddess, and we are the earth, the sun, the stars." He feels the holy power behind her words; feels the year turning, the moans and grunts and occasional scream blending with the nighttime sounds of the woods themselves. Somehow, he thinks it'll be a very long time before he tells Father Rich about this.