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When Adonis was found, his body was still warm.
Like sand cooling in the wake of dusk, remnants of the Sun still sleeping between whispering grains. The waters of the Ocean retrieved; now his sandstone coasts were peaceful.
He was as beautiful in death as he was in life, and when he died, it was as if the very nature that killed him waged a war on itself. For such a beauty, to reckon with his end so soon… Gods’ cruelty was, indeed, boundless, and, perhaps, the youth’s love was always fated to end in a tragedy.
Little anemones sprouted forth from the shadows where his body lay. Their petals were the colour of his hair, and the buds nestled in their centres glimmered like honey that dulled beneath his closed eyelids.
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When Adonis was found, his little body was coiled with newborn fear, head curled to his knees like a conch. The sunlit tree from which he fell from wept bitter resin, and shredded leaves stuck to his chubby cheeks.
It smelled of agarwood and scorched soil.
He didn’t cry, but he held his fists tight, clutching in them his infant sorrows.
He didn’t cry after an incense time, and after two incense, and after three. By the time it took five incense sticks to burn, his nose stung with tears, but, still, he didn’t cry. Even as the day fell into the Moon’s reign, and even as mists descended to whisper about a god’s coming, and even as a colony of bats swarmed around him, screeching and swatting their blade-sharp wings, Adonis didn’t cry.
When the bespoken god emerged from the shadows and cleared out the midnight skies, Adonis only sniffled.
“Now, now, you wicked spirits.” Rei waved off his bats like pesky flies and lowered on one knee beside the mortal babe. He pinched an end of his sash and tugged, and the black silk spun from his fingers like webs of a weaver-spider, bundling in mid-air like a stormcloud. He wrapped Adonis up in that bundle and cradled him in his arms, cooing at the doleful scrunch of his face.
“Seems that I have found you,” Rei murmured. “Found you two decades too early, my lovely boy.”
Rei carried the babe across his country, towards the border where the skies gloomed and the earth barrened, waters were fire and fires were wraiths. Ravenous howls greeted him as he entered the nether domain. There, hope despaired and joy desolated, and in that desolation lived and thrived one lupine god.
He sat on a throne of bones, in the desert of fear, and feasted on the flesh of his patrons.
When Rei buried his toes into the ashy shore, a lightning strike announced his name. Koga threw a disdainful glare at his impertinent brethren and almost choked on a wee piece of kidney when he saw what Rei brought to him.
“I would like to entrust this child to you, Koga,” Rei said, and his polite conduct rambled across the smoked skies with a clap of thunder. The babe wasn’t an offering. He was to be a promise – the kind of promise those loathsome mortals spit on. And in the moment Koga hauled himself off his throne to give the other god a beating, there was nothing he loathed more than Rei’s fragile heart.
So, to cool the nether god’s temper, Rei started the fateful story he’d heard from the Moon:
About the child who was born out of a curse, and the consequences of angering ungrateful gods, and the morale of mortal woes. And such woes befell upon this infant before he gulped for his first breath! To escape the pains of childbirth, his mother prayed for one dreadful thing – she wished to be expelled from the notion of Life, yet to never descend into the realm of Death. Heeding her wish, their friend of Nature turned her into a miraculous agarwood tree, and when her little offspring was due to sprout, the very Earth shattered as her wooden body split apart, and from that splitting wood this child came into the world.
The lullaby scattered into silence, rumpling the little one with unease. His eyes scrunched painfully before they opened, and they gleamed a sombre golden colour, like honey that mourned its parting from the beehive. It would’ve been sweet if that gold could find wonder under the sunlit skies.
Rei tickled the baby’s pudgy chin with a finger, and Adonis recoiled, bringing a fitful fist to his face.
“We, who dwell in the darkness, have made ourselves untouchable, haven’t we?” Rei mused. They, who dwelled in the darkness, were safe in the Netherworld like in their own home. “So, Koga,” Rei looked at the babe one last time and pursed his lips to mime a whistle. Something worried the folds of the black fabric. “Keep this child safe, will you?”
Like a bouquet of the rarest flowers reaped from Kaoru’s meadows, Rei gently handed the bundle to the other god. The bundle writhed, wriggled, jerked his head left and right, and, finally, the babe’s mouth opened with his first cry. Koga grimaced and started frantically bouncing the child in his arms.
Rei stepped away, an enigmatic quirk in the corners of his mouth, and said:
“Be a good boy, Adonis.”
Koga cursed, Koga growled, but all his voice met was a wisp of black smoke; not a sign that the god of Lunar Beauty was, indeed, in the forsaken Netherworld. Adonis cried, and the black silk he was bundled in, flourished with an ornament of blood-red roses.
Blood-red roses were the memories that led him to his fated love.
When Adonis found Rei, two decades later, he was broad-shouldered and the height of a mature hogweed.
Undesiring of Abyss, Adonis grew into a lover of the Sun and Nature. Must have been coddled by Kaoru, thought Koga to himself, that forsaken fox only prospered when humans did his bidding for him. Koga dwelled on that thought, nibbling sadly on the leg of a horned beast Adonis brought to him, and decided that he’d survive another century without feasts like these. He bid Adonis goodbye, spitting on the promise to meet him again as a burning soul, and hurtled the youth back into the mortal world.
The mortal world was brimming with wonder and beauty – and fun, too. He who fed with wolves and swam with sharks, would on par with the course find amusement in hunting. Palms rough with foraging prickles, chest steamed with sweat, nought but a cotton cloth around his hips, and the handsomest of faces to boot, Adonis, himself, was a god among men.
Grandmothers’ boy, sisters’ brother, children’s hero, he was a herald of good faith and fortune. And good fortune he brought, indeed, loved by the god of Summer as his own son – though Kaoru would rather he didn’t advert to his age in such a manner.
And as opulent as their crops were with Kaoru’s blessing, Adonis was raised in the tradition of the Lunar calendar, and his affinity for cooler seasons was only natural. Long before Summer rolled up his sleeves and took his leave, Adonis dreamed of breezy nights of the green-leafed month. On those nights they gathered to observe the Moon in all his ample beauty, and every time Adonis munched on rice dumplings, he remembered a gentle coo that lulled him to sleep when he was a baby, and when he plucked silver grasses for the offering, he thought of pale hands that carried him away from the world’s harm, and when he hauled a basket of sweet potatoes onto his back, he wondered if that god had ever eaten anything beside root vegetables and chestnuts.
The silken bundle he slept in as an infant, was barely long enough to stretch around his waist now. He tied it around his forehead when he worked in the field. Black fabric, and wearing that under the Sun – what ridiculous sense! the village women always exclaimed. But Adonis was partial to his headscarf; it was good fabric, he justified, it let the skin breathe.
And then, after a prayer that evoked the most earnest longing, his Lunar patron showed Adonis a way to his secluded abode.
Rei he recognised by the roses – and membranous wings that span for six shaku each. Adonis asked, why was it that the Lunar god didn’t ask for such luscious flowers as an offering? And Rei coyly fluttered his billowing sleeve and hid the lower part of his face behind it, saying only this:
So that my beloved could find me when he was in full bloom with desire.
God who was a lover of all and loved by none, so beautiful at a distance that the thought of pulling him close appalled all that admired him – that god dwelled in solitude, and Adonis only wished to understand why he never came to visit him in the Netherworld.
After Adonis soaked in the Sun, he kept Rei company in the night, when the god was lonely and cold like snow on celestial mountaintops. He admired from afar – he never dared cross the boundary, like the dusk that retrieved when the Moon was rising for his nocturnal dominion. Adonis was fond of the Night. It was then when crops soaked in minerals, and children grew stronger, and cicadas crittered a tranquil song. It was then when Rei stood before his moonlit lake, his shadow smouldering like a paper consumed by a famished flame, and shed his robe, and looked over his shoulder. His languid eyes always spotted Adonis watching. And when he smiled demurely like that, the rubies in his irises bled an even deeper shade of red.
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The grass Adonis laid in was soft and moist. Green tendrils clung to his feet with dew, tempering the tension in his rigid calves after a hard day’s work.
He rolled onto his stomach, presenting the broadness of his back and the plumpness of his rear for the scalding Sun. Flirtatious flora reached out for the arch of his throat and the crooks of his elbows, unconcealing their intention to nuzzle into the dips of his collarbones and even into his armpits. Adonis smiled, tickled by their fancy for his body.
Flowers preened under his gaze, swayed and fluttered, showing off their delightful colours, their pouting stigmas. Adonis inhaled their sweet-sweet scent, and his exhale they absorbed into petals. He tickled their slender twining stems with the tip of his fingers; the flowers giggled and wobbled, unsteady on their roots like damsels on their feet.
“What a wonderful sight, indeed,” came a sweet voice from behind.
Adonis turned his head. Wrapped in black silk like a herald of bad omen, the god of the Moon and Beauty stood amidst the wild floral beds. He smiled at Adonis with a coquettish glimmer in his cheeks.
“You came, Rei,” Adonis greeted. “It is very good to see you at this time of day.”
Rei raised one cascading sleeve to his mouth and silently giggled, the bounce of shoulders substituting a melodious sound. His ruby eyes narrowed, somewhat mischievous, and he shook his head. As if caught in a breeze, wispy curls of hair fanned across his face.
“My, Adonis, seeing you splayed in the grass with so little clothing, I’m afraid coming is the least of what I intend to do.”
Adonis shifted onto his back again and propped himself up on his elbows. His abdomen rippled, his chest ampled. The cloth stretched over his hips was damp with dew, splotches of green muddying the white cotton. The youth cared little for such trivial matters, but he hoped the god wouldn’t think of him as uncouth.
“Would you like to lie down?” Adonis asked. Then his easy expression hardened, corners of his mouth whittling into a frown. “I’m afraid I’m not well-prepared to arrange you a sleeping nest. If I had known you were coming, I would’ve brought with me a quilt and a parasol.”
“Oh, Adonis, do not fret, my splendid disciple.” Rei tucked his hands into the endlessly streaming sleeves. And then, like a storm cloud floating across the land, or a swan gliding on the surface of a pond, he approached. “Nocturnal I may be, today I have garnered all of my strength to indulge myself in the sight of you.”
Adonis’s eyes brightened, though his brows were still crooked with worry. “Why have you strained yourself to come? I would not have minded to wait until midnight to keep you company in your moonlight swims.”
Stopping just a leap away from the youth, Rei shook off the sleeves so they shortened to a conventional length and raised a hand to brush an unruly curl behind his ear. “A naughty little birdie told me that, shall my desire to see Adonis in all his blazing glory prevail, I will seek him out at midday.”
Adonis watched attentively as Rei stepped closer, and closer, a black shadow fracturing the marine-blue sky, and toed the meaty side of the youth’s hip. “And now I found what I have sought for,” Rei said, and with those words lowered himself into the grass and mounted Adonis’s thighs. Adonis’s eyes widened – never had he the honour to hold the Lunar god so close to his body! – and, bewildered, he sat astraight as if strung to the Sun by the crown of his head.
Cold hands immediately found purchase on the hills of his shoulders and started softly kneading them, to even his nervousness, to soothe the heated tension in his muscles.
“Have I spooked you, Adonis?” Rei asked.
Adonis shook his head. “I am merely perplexed by the abruptness of your gesture. I believe I have never quite frisked with you so intimately.”
Oh, he was still so naive, Rei thought. The sincerity in Adonis’s words caused a far more destructive stirring in his loins than the Wind god’s tempest in the Ocean.
Overdosed on the scent of flowers, drowning in an aphrodisiac-like fugue, Rei momentarily surrendered to his feelings, and his careful hands cradled Adonis’s face. Tenderly, he thumbed his plum-round cheekbones, the shapely bow of his upper lip, the subtle dip on his chin. Chanting the same words on a stolen breath, “Adonis, Adonis, Adonis, my beloved,” Rei was restless with thorny growths in his chest. “What am I to do with you?”
Were he a human, his heart would’ve seized and jumped to his throat.
Adonis pressed a palm to Rei’s icy knuckles, and an inexplicable urge to warm up his skin with kisses danced along his lips. Would it dull his god’s edges? he wondered. Out loud, he could only inquire with a worried gaze.
Fighting back anguish, Rei retreated his hands from Adonis’s face and brought them to the sash tied around his waist. “You’re a diligent boy,” he said, loosening the knot, “you never miss a day of worship, always treat me with utmost respect, and take care of my shrines. Your abundant offerings keep me full, sustain my Moon-reaped powers.” His fingers disappeared in the ornamented collar and slid lower. Adonis’s eyes followed his movement with reverent silence. “And I believe it’s finally time I offer myself in return.”
Rei parted the sides of his robe, revealing the pristine canvas of his body – his entire body, bare from the neck to the bend of his knees, with only a dark turf of hair covering his pubis. Adonis’s gaze ran down the god’s marbled torso with flushed curiosity, hooking on the small dots of pink nipples and caressing the curvature of his ribs and the delicate line in the middle of his abdomen. And upon his descent, he found himself most intrigued by that tuft beneath his navel, and the unexpected discovery that the god’s core is different from his own.
“Do not be so alarmed, my Adonis,” Rei crooned. “For a god’s body is transcendental and unpredictable like a change of season.”
And how transcendental he was, indeed! Whiter than snow, and smoother than persimmons, and softer than cotton. As lustrous in flesh as he was from a distance, though now Adonis hardly believed that even a god could survive on a diet of beans and taro.
“Your beauty is beyond what a human mind can comprehend,” Adonis said, having gulped down his astonishment. “May I touch you? To prove to myself you are real.”
“Please. Please do, my dear.”
Adonis pressed his sunwarm palms to Rei’s lonely waist, and he marvelled at its graceful curve, and how the translucence of his skin yielded to colour at the contact, like rice paper. Rei always felt so cold; though, perhaps, for the being that dwelled in the moonlight, there was no such thing as the cold. Still, Adonis relented, a strange desire to bleed his copper richness into moonstone. The Sun was outrageous in his reign, and Rei, for once, brooded into another god’s territory.
Only the black silk draped over his shoulders protected him from solar abrasion.
Adonis trailed the stature of Rei’s body and stopped at his pelvis. Compared to the sculpted grooves of Adonis’s abdomen, the iliac crests of Rei’s hips protruded with endearing romanticism, as if shaped specifically for one’s firm hands to keep them safe and secure. Adonis didn’t have the bravery to explore lower. Heat prickled his cheeks when he noticed the bottommost hair between Rei’s thighs glisten. Just below that dark tuft, the succulent lips of his pussy flushed a precious rosy.
Having understood the cause of Adonis’s hesitation, Rei spoke:
“My love for you takes the shape of a budding flower. And shall you accept me in your heart like I yearn for you inside me, then kiss me, Adonis.” As Rei whispered these sweet words, his forehead pressed against the youth’s forehead, arms shawled around his neck, knees squeezed around his hips. His lips parted, expecting a kiss with prophetic certainty.
But the prophecy had forsaken him in such a crucial moment, and the kiss never graced his lips, meeting only a warm puff of air instead.
“Is there a hidden meaning behind your actions as usual, Rei?” Adonis asked. His voice was low, each intimate syllable veiled Rei’s audition much like a god’s vengeful thunder would. And how this forceful distance felt so much like vengeance! Though, of course, it was none of Adonis’s fault. His perfection was pristine, and so, it must have been Rei whose intention wailed villainy.
“Oh, is that the kind of wicked impression I give?” Rei chuckled, though the sound that trickled had a hint of bitterness to it, like sap of a broken flower stem. “In my furtive chase for the right moment to profess my love for you, I completely disregarded the need for bold-tongued frankness.”
Adonis sighed, but he stalled before lowering his eyes in an expression of woe; he was careful not to leer too much.
But a sigh so dismayed was enough for Rei to understand. “I love you indeed, Adonis,” he continued. “Have been blessed with the curse to love you since the moment you spawned into this world like a firefly whose glow catered to my nocturnal vision. I dwell in the night, but you are a mortal, so, tell me, how, if not for the truest love, am I able to withstand your blinding light?”
Adonis closed his eyes in thought before answering. Long black lashes casted a dance of shadows upon his cheeks. “You pose truly the wisest questions that no mortal man like myself can answer.”
The youth’s boldness brought a quirk to Rei’s lips. Truthfully, he was only stalling, overtaken with subtle fear that his earnest boy would deny his affection. Was he so repulsive in his godhood that his body’s needs were incomprehensible? Was it the notorious legend of his beastly pedigree, and the multitudes of unlovable affairs that span across centuries and ended in raging wars and perfunctory revenge plots? Was Rei really so ill-reputed, even when he existed right there, under the foul Sun, with his robes undone and his walls demolished?
Still, he could only smile. Disgraced or elevated, his affection was the only thing he himself had faith in. “Then kiss me, Adonis, and feel how I yearn for you,” he whispered and leaned in closer and closer and closer.
And this time, Adonis complied with his weeping request. His soft lips were sweet with mulberries, and Rei’s lips they painted the colour of such, too. Rei drank the kiss like a man starved, and it filled his stomach with juice and nourished his cold body with comfort. Rei brushed his restless fingers through Adonis’s hair and tugged carefully, and a pleased exhale soughed into the kiss. The youth didn’t know what his body reacted to yet – not completely. But the tickle of Rei’s tongue against his amused him, and the rise of goosebumps on thighs aroused him, and the way this firm waist yielded to the clutch of his palms invoked an unfamiliar craze.
It made him want to grip harder. And, elated, Rei spread his knees wider, sinking deeper into the sopping grass, and grazed his needy core against the damp fabric covering Adonis’s crotch.
Drool gathered on his tongue at the feel of it, and he had to part away from that berry-sweet mouth to swallow it down, to steady his breath, to cool his heart. Usually powdery like snow – and transient like it too – now he was melting like wax beneath the flame.
“Show me, my dear, your burgeoned desire for me,” Rei panted.
Adonis didn’t immediately understand how such an abstract thing as desire could be shown. But he realised, then, that all that yearning for the god’s body and soul gathered in the core of his being, there beneath Rei’s weight on his lap. He lifted the cloth off his hips, and a silent surprise painted his features when he saw what had become of him – that he grew in size without stimulation, that he reddened like pomegranates when they ripened, that his scent sombred, like fragrant grass that bowed to the earth after the rain.
“Oh, you’re exquisite, my dear.”
The words came out in a cloyingly sweet exhale, such that Adonis felt them stick to his lips, and when he licked them off, a peculiar craving stung his tongue. Bared now under the god’s amorous gaze, he braved. He leaned in to kiss Rei, and Rei, zealous in his reciprocation, fluttered and twitched, like a butterfly caught in the net. Unable to quiet the chilling arousal, Rei pulled away from Adonis’s loving mouth to beg for the end of this loathsome torture.
”Adonis,” Rei moaned every syllable of his name, drowning in his own lustful malaise, “feel me, fill me,” he curled down to whisper into the youth’s ear, “fuck me. This pulsating yearning will rip me to shreds.”
Adonis, to his own juvenile surprise, resonated with the expression of pain, though fear crawled into his ear with Rei’s voice. He nodded, and nodded, and, anxious that his god might, indeed, poof into a black rain cloud, dropped one hand from Rei’s hip and brought it between his legs. Hovering it right under his cunt, he could almost catch the heat it exuded – and the chestnutty aroma that was heavy like balsam.
Adonis touched the very tips of his fingers to the plump lips peeking beneath the bush, and a breath hitched in his throat when that touch responded with a wet smack.
Rei lowered his head, just as taken by surprise at the state of his being as the youth was. “Ah, Adonis. You must forgive me, for I have spent these forlorn hours leading up to our reunion with the thoughts of you. I did not mean to blaspheme, but it seems the midday delight is getting to my head. Perhaps, it is the flowers.”
His hips subtly swayed forward, sliding along the length of Adonis’s fingers so the tips of them found refuge between his slick folds. And what a sound they made! No freshwater stream babbled like that, and no cotton, when wrung out after a wash, dribbled like that. The fingers were nought but a pillow, connection compromised by such a thick layer of natural lube.
Feeling the youth’s fingers so stiff and unsure between them, Rei swayed his hips again, and again, so by the virtue of friction his folds parted, easing the access to the lonely, vacant hole.
And it was in that moment, when his fingertips almost dipped inside, that Adonis retrieved his hand. He left the god squirming around a reverie, inflating Rei’s ever-present chagrin, though Adonis by no means intended to afflict him with ire. He spread his fingers apart, and the limpid slick that clung to his knuckles stretched between them, liquid diamonds shimmering in the sunlight.
“It’s like nectar,” Adonis exhaled. He raised that hand to his mouth and sucked two fingers in. His eyes closed as he pondered the taste, and how it lingered on his tongue with treacly heaviness, and how it smeared on his bottom lip as he released the digits. “And sweet like it too.”
Rei sagged in his lap with a wistful whine, and so wistful was that whine that it settled on his lashes like tears and parched his throat of pleas for a touch. Oh, how many things he could say to spur his beloved on, and how pitiful they would all sound! What of his godly pride? He ought to have retained some of it if he wanted Adonis to treat him with dignity. And so, he could only be patient, allowing the youth to go at his own pace, study his body’s miracle of desire until he was ready to plunge into it.
“Will you tell me where you feel good, Rei?” Adonis inquired.
Rei took Adonis’s hand into his and turned it over, palm facing the sky. He shepherded it between his legs so that, at first, Adonis merely cupped his chubby pussy as if he was holding an overripe peach. Warm, so warm was his palm that Rei shivered. Or perhaps he was too tender, every ounce of pressure from another's touch squeezed more of—what did he call it?
—nectar. All of Rei’s sex seeping into his skin.
Then Rei guided that hand upward, until the heel of Adonis’s palm pressed into his pubis and the pads of his fingers laid over his swollen clit, and Rei bolted upright as if stung by a merciless wasp. Oh! Just there, just where all of his yearning had coalesced into viscid poison, his lovesick sore finally soothed with a drop of antidote.
Rei aligned his own fingers atop of Adonis’s and directed them into a shallow circular motion, mimicking how he would do the same to himself on lonely-lonely nights. Drawing salacious fantasies in the midnight skies, his pleasure spanning as vast as the Moon above, and every star twinkling in tune to his stealthy gasps – this was the solitude of the lovestruck god of Lunar Beauty. He hailed tsunami as he reached his solitary peak, and rampaged coastal settlements with his waters, and even as his winged children fed and quelled their bloodthirst, nothing could quench his desire.
And that antidote, made physical with Adonis’s fingers, at first pacified the orgasmic current, only to rouse it tenfold. His flickering quickened, now Adonis was hard at work, gathering momentum, and Rei’s hand atop of his was useless, yet refusing to separate. The deluge in his core stirred fast, enraged, capsizing his body until he was nothing but wreckage.
“Oh, Adonis,” Rei choked on his words, “my beloved, I’m going to come.”
“Please, Rei,” Adonis caught his breath into his mouth and passed him his own, a fuller one, a hotter one, “I will hold you close as you unravel.”
Rei arched his back with a terrible cry, and the robe that was slung over his shoulders, slid to the bend of his elbows. Though the air was still and sizzling, the silk fluttered, as if wings of a stalking bat mid-fly, and what did Adonis know – Rei was soaring, bouncing from one cloud to another, ascending far beyond the peak of the Crimson Mount.
He gripped Adonis’s wrist and forced it off of him. Hips still swaying in the afterflood of his climax, Rei had to sail through it alone, too weak to handle so much steering on his oversensitive clit. He squeezed around nothing, and for now he could only lament that nothingness, waiting until his melted core hardened.
Come dribbled from his slit, creamy and viscous, and landed on Adonis’s organ that seemed to be startled out of its state of determined repose. So caught up in the sight of his god’s pleasure, Adonis had to put aside his own, and now that he was at the forefront of both of their attention again, he could no longer wash away the craving for a touch.
He would have been completely and utterly happy with his own fist – and a memory of Rei’s cunt smooth and squishy against his fingers, and the pitiful twist of his expression in the throes of passion, more picturesque than the seaside landscape at dusk, and raw like he was holding all of humanity in his humane heart.
But Rei was not human. He was the mystery of nature as it changed and unfolded. And Adonis often had to ground himself with that fact whenever he pleased himself in secret, with an image of Rei behind his eyelids – a demure smile on his face and pale lines of his buttocks that rounded and flattened with every step he took into his lake. Adonis always saw him off until, eventually, he merged with its silver reflection.
“Now, let me take you inside,” Rei pleaded, grasping the base of Adonis’s cock with urgency. Adonis shuddered, his abdomen tensing, the sensation from the touch springing right up to his chest.
“But you must be tired—”
Rei didn’t let the youth protest any further. “Adonis, I am a god. I am a creature of cosmic enigmas – every thread of my existence is woven from the power you cannot even fathom. Though it’s true my godhood is as good as relinquished under the Sun, my body will never stop producing miracles. I will come for as long as you find nourishment at the sight of me, and until my wretched face becomes a stale treat for your eyes.”
Adonis laid a hand on the side of Rei’s face. “It’s impossible. I could never avert from the sight of you.”
Rei turned his head to kiss his palm. “Then I will never leave my peak for as long as I’m alive.”
And alive, to him, was longer than the spinning yarn of Eternity herself.
Rei gave Adonis a long stroke from the tip to the base, smearing the amalgam of their lube over his length. And he swelled right in his palm, already unpeeled and luscious, flesh matured in the Sun and sheathed in manhood. Rei shuffled up Adonis’s thighs, the grass squelching under his knees, and lined himself with his standing cock.
Adonis gulped; he garnered patience, all the resistance concentrating in the furrow between his brows, and he watched, with gleaming eyes, as Rei teased the head of his cock between his folds, softly smacked it against his reddish lips, and grinded his bloated clit on it ever so slightly. Adonis felt his heartbeat in the ring of Rei’s fingers. And it sped up as Rei finally took him in.
And it sped up, and it sped up, and it sped up the deeper his cock penetrated, and Rei’s face opened and contorted around a drawn-out moan. His thighs, soiled with his own slick, connected with Adonis’s hips. And in one swing Adonis was entirely engulfed in the drenched silken tightness. He felt a new kind of heat – the kind of heat that could rival the deserts of yonder and nether.
Adonis stretched his arms behind him to hold himself upright as, chasing his own heartbeat, he thrusted upward, and the grass beneath him softened and splashed, sticking with nectar and dew to his bare skin. He couldn’t know which inner spot ignited the most pleasure, and he followed the guidance of Rei’s features as they knitted a canvas of bliss.
“My love, my love,” Rei heaved. His fingers dug into the flesh of his thighs, claw marks imprinting around the flex of his muscles. Like the Moon reflecting on the surface of the Sea, Rei kindled to reflect Adonis’s movements, and he raised his hips and slammed them down, and it seemed like Adonis drove deeper and deeper into him each time.
And each time it resonated with a wet slap that was both thick and hollow. Oh, how obscene that sound was! Flesh on flesh, Rei’s slick lips dragging over Adonis’s loins with a sway of his hips as he bottomed out, and there the smacks were thick with their bodies oiled in their own releases, but inside Rei, it was hollow – splosh, splosh, splosh. Like he was expanding around the organ inside, making space, his womb wailing for more of Adonis, for all of Adonis.
And he wailed alright – with delighted cries and spasms of pleasure – again and again, delight and pleasure, so overflowing his body could no longer hold it inside.
So he let it go.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” Rei blabbered as another peak in his delirium probed right through him. His blood in his eyes thinned out with the premonition of tears, and Adonis opened his mouth helplessly, nothing but reactive gasps tumbling out of his throat.
“Ah, it’s about to burst,” cried Rei, and no longer could Adonis keep his hands wallow in the treacly grass. Impelled by instincts only, he caught Rei’s hips in a tight grip and pressed his palms into the globes of his rear.
Rei held onto Adonis’s face to ground himself in place, though, truthfully, he was far beyond the realm of the material world. His body seized with the storm of his new climax, and he cried, and he cried, raining tears on Adonis’s cheeks, while tributaries of lucid desire streamed down his thighs.
Asked to be unrelenting, Adonis heeded and acted on the promise. He plunged into the god’s insides until rivers broke the dam, and waters drowned his length, his lap, the grass beneath. Rei’s whole body quaked, a flower in the ruthless gust of wind, and his mouth was frozen open in an endless, wordless plea. Despite the startled gasp at such a reaction, Adonis kept fucking into Rei, pounding into his aching core that could only pour all arousal down, in hopes for relief.
And how could there be so much! More than Adonis could gather in the cup of his hands. Enough to water a flowerbed of radiant roses. And now Adonis was washed in Rei’s ambrosial fluid and healing tears, as if baptised with a blessing of longevity and health.
As long as Rei was close to him like that, Adonis was certain he was due for a long and healthy life.
Rei’s hands fell from the youth’s face and swatted to the front of his hips, right over his pubis, and his skin resounded with a bright wet kiss. “Ah, Adonis, Adonis,” Rei sang in a bird-high voice, “there is so much. Forgive me, for there is so much.”
Adonis pulled the god closer, his movements slowing as he shifted. “No, if one must ask for forgiveness, it would be me,” he said, and one of his hands skimmed to Rei’s front, wading through come and fluid to finger his perky clit. Rei shuddered like a willow struck by lightning, and fell into Adonis, wiry hair twining with his, spit-slick lips imprinting mindless pecks over his face. Adonis continued a low-low whisper in Rei’s jaw: “For I don’t believe I could ever get enough.”
Rei whined. His insides squeezed around Adonis, evoking an ocean-deep moan from the youth. Their mirrored rippling had come to a halt; now Rei kept the weight of Adonis’s cock still and snug, no stimulation beside the wringing aftershocks of his climax.
“But you’re yet to finish, my dear. How can I hog all the pleasure to myself? The wretched being that I am.”
His laments were cut off by a pained cry that strained against his throat, grinding all sounds into a harsh, pitchy croak. Adonis’s fingers pressed just right, a touch so heated it penetrated through him like a burned rod through candle wax.
“But watching you yield to pleasure only further ignites my desire,” Adonis said.
“Ah, too soon, Adonis, not here,” Rei took Adonis by the wrist and guided his hand away from his pussy. Instead he glided it up his torso, leaving a trail of slick on his stomach up to his chest. “Here,” Rei sighed and manoeuvred the eager hand to flit over one of his nipples, “if you touch here, gentle like this, you may find that my pleasure is boundless.” He placed two fingers on either side of the hard bud and pressed them together. “And if you find it fuels you beyond your limit,” Rei bit on his bottom lip, curved his brows towards the middle, and raised his chin, looking down at Adonis with eyes of fevered Inferno, “fuck that fire into me.”
The tears he shed left streaks in their descent, and the blush on his cheeks was fractured in odd pieces like stained glass. An icon to be revered. A carving to adorn a carefully curated altar. A face of consecrated beauty, and so sacred was that beauty that it filled mortals with visceral horror before they could even dream of touching it.
And Adonis was no less devoted than they were, so he appraised his devotion with a careful pinch of the nipple and wondered if he was doing enough to harvest the blessings.
Rei’s fingers twirled mindlessly around Adonis’s wrist, as if anxious that he would let go, that he would grow bored of his little buds that wouldn’t fatten unless he was due to bear. He was a wise god, he was an experienced god, but this sentimentality made him stupid to a detriment.
His other nipple weeped tearlessly, stiff and dry, doleful with love given to another, and so Adonis gave it love – kissed it with love, licked it until it swelled up and reddened. Swirled the tip of his tongue around the areolas and then prodded into the string-thin opening in the nub.
Rei’s brought Adonis’s closer, closer, so his elegant hooked nose flattened against his chest, and he raked his fingers through those thread-soft hair, tangling them, knotting them in his pleasured delirium. What hollowness was in his womb post-orgasm, now, again, soaked Adonis’s length in its juices.
And the youth sucked so long it started tasting sweet – a different kind of sweet to Rei’s lube, less sticky and sour, more milky and mellow. And Adonis took such a liking to that taste that he found it hard to part with Rei’s breast, tongue set to exercise its lapping. Only when something warm trickled down his hand, did he pull away.
His tongue was heavy with sugary daze. Never had he thought gods could be so generous. Such small nipples, yet working so hard to sustain beasts and mortal men alike. He looked up and, before he spoke again, kissed the plane of Rei’s jaw, swiping a stubborn teardrop with his lips. “Wouldn’t this drain you of your strength, Rei? I am no cub to drink from you, nor a juvenile.”
Rei sniffed. “Am I not to your taste?”
“You are. Please, do not disparage yourself. I merely feel as if this isn’t for me to take.”
“This body is for anyone to take,” Rei murmured, and his pouted lips trembled. “Only, no one desires to take me anymore.” His throat clogged up, the weight of dolour overwhelming all wordful fits. He squished what little flesh he had on his left breast, and coaxed a wee bit of milk to drip from the nipple. “I am so lonely,” he croaked, and a gracious breeze picked up his words and scattered them across the meadow.
And little else could Adonis do apart from leaving an apologetic kiss on Rei’s breastbone and licking up the escaped streak to not waste a drop of the god’s treat. “Please, do not say that,” he said softly, “I am here.”
His tongue offered solace to the weeping nipple he hadn’t yet tasted.
Ah, thank you, my friend of Summer, for hearing my laments! Rei wanted to shout, for it was true that Kaoru often humoured him in his solitary hibernation, collecting his whispers and spreading them like pollen over his meadows – raising flowers for humans to harvest, and for gods to frolic around in opioid frenzy. But it never healed his loneliness like Adonis’s eager mouth did; like his hands did, now slowly crawling towards his rear again. With a cursory knead on his cheeks, he then gripped them to help lift Rei’s hips up his length and sit him down. With the movement stirring inside him anew, Rei shuddered. He was ready. And Adonis, his poor Adonis, was still neglectfully erect.
“Please, my beloved,” Rei carded his fingers through Adonis’s hair, untangling the knots he imposed earlier. “It is time—for you to reach your peak— with me.”
His nipples were sore now, lapped to painful tenderness like a bronze figurine that turned gold after it was rubbed for good luck a thousand times. Adonis let go, looked up at him with heartfelt eyes. And nodded, assured and determined.
“Then I believe it will be better if you lie down,” he said.
Oh, how naive he still was, with a romantic inclination to roll in the grass in each other’s embrace like young lovers, dutiless and carefree! But Rei, in experience, fancied a mean treat. A filthy treat. And he was all too accustomed to dents in his knees as his admirers were to his eclipsed view.
He kissed Adonis on the mouth as a distraction while he lifted himself off his cock. A breath caught in Adonis’s throat when his organ plopped soundly onto his stomach, and panic widened his eyes.
But that panic quickly subdued by the god’s finger against his lips. “Shush,” Rei quieted him. “I believe it’s even better if you kneel for me.”
Showcasing not a single sign of struggle or ache, Rei rolled off Adonis’s lap and swiftly planted himself on his hands and knees. And then lowered his face into the grass, nearly prostrating himself like a humble worshipper.
His robe rolled to the base of his nape, laying bare his spine for the scalding Sun, and the twin dips on his lower back, and the hooks of his shoulder blades that tensed and rose as he held himself up on his elbow. Rei pushed back his hips, unwrapping the sight of his pink pucker to the heavens above. The Sun was neither his sovereign nor his surrogate, and under the weight of her rays he’d much rather joyfully arch his back and open himself up for the sunstones of Adonis’s eyes.
Adonis was quick to read his intention and scrambled to fulfil his god’s wish. And he kneeled behind him, groin aligned perfectly with Rei’s buttock, and wrapped a hand around his shaft, and searched for air within his lungs, stunned breathless by the brazen sight.
Discarded, the hip cloth soaked in the grass, white cotton now irreparably green.
He had no wits left for teasing – neither wits nor heart – as Rei’s folds were flushed red as if with fever, and his gaping hole was miserably vacant, still leaking with an overflow of his own arousal. Adonis instinctually guided a finger around his slit, gathering some of that syrupy slick to smother his length with, though there was no need for that. Rei spasmed, a harsh reaction that wobbled his flesh like rice cakes in a pot.
“Adonis,” Rei mewled. A shy flower blossomed to maturity at the sound of his voice.
Adonis slid inside and, having not expected such easy entrance from the new angle, nearly lurched forward. He steadied himself with hands on the shallows of Rei’s hips and—oh! Oh, Rei was right. A wise god, an experienced god. Adonis reached deep, deeper than before, prodding right into the god’s stomach where all his insides encase him like one of theirs, and he was so welcomed there, in Rei’s womb, and yet so secure in its tightness.
At every drive of Adonis’s hips, Rei’s cheeks jiggled and spread, and they, too, were now shimmering in midday iridescence. Deprived of shame, Rei opened himself up wider.
So far apart were his knees that the tallest flowers their weight hadn’t trampled, reached up to tickle his breasts, his navel, his upper thighs. Buds to buds, petals licking his tart essence off his skin only to swathe him in their flowery nectar in return. Unrelenting, Adonis fucked him into helplessness, uselessness, docility. His mouth was rendered open, drool foaming on his lolled-out tongue. Only his fingers dug into the soil with voraciousness, groping innocent roots for his dear being.
“Rei,” Adonis moaned. His plea was received with a slap of skin.
Pleasure tangled along the veins of his cock and tightened in his nuts, and it sprouted into full bloom without warning, as if under a magic spell, and then, as the fruits of desire burst inside him, Adonis, at last, drank up his climax. His release was abundant, thick and sticky, searing Rei’s tender insides like oil on fire.
To Rei, it was a blessing like no other. Adonis, though, didn’t yet consider it as such and couldn’t succumb to his bliss so soon.
In a manner that seemed almost trained, Adonis cradled Rei’s cunt again and pressed two fingers to his clit. He rubbed with a measured pace, but Rei screamed at him internally: he should be brave, he should be reckless – he should grate that orgasm out of him like nettle, dye his flesh red with rash from friction, or bruise it purple from impact of his thrusts. He should do it all, and yet his touch was one with the flower petals, and they lapped at his folds with callow desperation.
Rei climaxed with a guttural cry and a violent convulsion, clenching with such labour that he almost pushed Adonis out of his hole. Still, he was full and warm as his body whittled again, scrunched around his core that only continued to pulse with delight. And delighted he was, at the command of Adonis’s hand.
This was how he wanted love proven to him. With a warm, intimate touch that wasn’t afraid.
Adonis slipped out with an obscene sound. The force of the orgasm weighed him down, and, momentarily stripped of resolve, he sat on his heels and steadied his breath.
Rei was not in a hurry to change his position. Their blended seeds leaked out of his hole, some streaming down his thighs, some dribbling directly onto the pacified grass beneath him. The flowers waited with baited stamens for the god’s nectar. It would rejuvenate them, pollinate them, give them fragrance.
Adonis couldn’t look away. He only distantly thought how he’d love to, one day, put his mouth on Rei’s cunt and feed on it, too. His body was not everyone’s to take. His body was for Adonis to love, and Adonis loved so fiercely he momentarily grew jealous of flowers, and water, and Night. And Eternity – for that Adonis didn’t have.
When Rei faced him again, he trapped him in the endless sheet of his robe and pulled him in. They fell into the grass, embraced like young lovers, dutiless and carefree.
༺☽𖤓☾༻
When Rei found Adonis, he was already cold. He stumbled through the swarm of bats, ankles twisting as his sandals chipped on stone and slipped off his feet. The wicked creatures shrieked, louder than blizzards, higher than lightning. Rei tried to blow them away with a gust of wind, but they persisted, a torrent gaining mass, forming a screaming curtain around them.
And there he was.
The chrysalis of his love that broke into a flight before its wings could grow.
Would he have ever said? if the cocoon of Rei’s arms was too tight for him; he loved the wilderness, and Rei loved him. He was a mortal hunter, and Rei was the kind of immortal that cared little for the mysticism of nature. And now that very nature killed him.
Killed his beloved! And Adonis—murdered mercilessly, impaled by tusks of a beast! Adonis, Adonis!
Rei fell to his knees and crawled, uncaring of the hard rocky earth that scraped his skin, or his black silk tearing at the seams and whittling into smoke – to the Netherworld with that silk! Naked he may have been – nothing mattered! Cold, he couldn’t warm up the body that was colder. Hungry, he couldn’t share fruits with his beloved.
He reached for a shoulder and flinched away, scalded by the chill. Adonis! Adonis!
Rei held his precious head – oh, it must have been so hard to rest it against this wretched earth – here, on his lap, it was tender. But Adonis didn’t nuzzle into his thighs like he would have. His heavy head rolled to the side, mauvish hair splaying in a disarray.
Rei righted it, pressed his hands to the cold cheeks and turned his face to the grey skies above. Adonis’s eyes that had always been warm like honey in a teacup, were dull. Mulberry-sweet lips no longer had remnants of fruit on them. Shrunken and wrinkled, frozen with the last word he never got to say.
What would it have been? A plea for help? A curse at the heavens? Or just a pained scream that shook the earth, the woods, the rivers?
No, Adonis never asked for help, never cursed, never cried. Maybe it was a call of Rei’s name.
Rei cried, washing Adonis’s dusty cheeks with his tears, and he cried, and he cried, and little anemones around him shivered to the tune of his mourning song. Oh, loathsome flowers! How dare their petals be brighter than Adonis’s hair? How dare they gaze at Rei with the honey they stole from his eyes? How dare they smell sweet like his breath did?
How dare they be resilient in life when Adonis’s body succumbed to death?
None of his questions were answered. None of his questions were even heard.
Rei brushed withered strands out of that darkened face, to touch his lips to the cold forehead. His lips were still, listening to the silence of his beloved’s mind. How boisterous the thoughts inside that precious noggin used to be, how profound, how passionate. Poetry unwritten, songs unsung, arts unlearned. What mysticism Rei possessed, never compared to the mystery behind those autumnal eyes as they pondered him.
He must have been, to mortal men, as transient as the Lunar Beauty imposed on him was. He belonged in the fleeting, floating world, in paintings and in scrolls. But Adonis,
oh, Adonis,
was raised in Abyss and nurtured by Darkness, fed with Wolves and worshipped no one except Love themself. Rei was made out of Love, though they never loved him. They ripped a nail out of Night’s ring finger and hurled it at the sky. What an ugly origin story, all the other gods thought. They scorned him so much they killed his fated love. They killed his fated love!
Rei kissed the lobe of the quiet mind and threw his head back to glare at his native bed, and in that moment he loathed his parents, and all their lovers, and all his siblings, and all their children, and his own children too, and he was a god of no one but despair, and
that despaired god cursed at the very Moon that birthed him:
Listen to me, you wretched thing. Come out of hiding, show your wraithful face, and cast your eyes upon the being you created. Foolishly, you bound me to the ground to do your bidding, thinking I am spineless like you, thinking I am arrogant like you. No, what I am in likeness with you, is I am vengeful.
I will freeze the greedy Sun and shatter her docile skies, and I will swallow every star in your vicinity one by one until you starve in isolation, and then I will grind you to dust to dilute you into paint.
I will scorch the Earth and all these ghastly flowers with her, and I’ll stomp on her barren belly and laugh as she quakes in pain.
I will boil the Ocean and all his whales in it, and I will build a sling out of their jaws and shoot frightful octopi into your pallid face.
I will skin the Snake of the Lotus Valley and arrange his scales into a mosaic of myself. I will shoot down the flock of Imperial Doves and crack their wings between my teeth like sunflower seeds. I will behead every Ogre and make toothpicks out of their horns, so no leftover bird bones decay in my gums.
I will rip the tails of every Fox and poison them with their own sweet aphrodisiacs, so they dance their undignified roundelay and find themselves deprived, depraved and undesired.
I will carve out a heart of every Love Rabbit and I will quarter every Warrior Cat, noble or stray, I will not discriminate, and I will toss their carcasses into a stew and feed it to the ghosts of every worshipper you’ve ever betrayed.
And if you care so little for other beings, then I will pilgrim every Lunar shrine and plague your offerings with maggots, and I will starve myself until you shrink to the size of salmon roe.
For Eternity I upheld your silver solitude, and this is how you repay me?
The swarm of bats echoed him with a shriek. Oh, how could he strike a deal when his ruthless children were making a mockery out of his mourning?
Rei wiped his tears and sharply swayed his hand, and each teardrop that landed on the beasts’ flesh sizzled and burned, and, at last, the squall of bats smouldered away. Grey fog briefly embraced him and then cleared out, and his audience with the heavens continued.
He acquiesced and spoke softly:
I beseech you, only this one selfish request. Do not send my Adonis to the Netherworld. Bring him back to me. Am I not worthy of love? Am I not good enough for simple earthly endeavours? Is it my curse to be shackled to your servitude until the end of times? I do not wish to dwell in Darkness anymore. Please, look at me, kneeling beneath you, begging for your mercy.
Take away my godhood. Turn my bats into mindless creatures of the Earth. Tear my silk to shreds, leave me naked and cold and hungry. If I have Adonis by my side, I will not ask for more. And when I die in my due time, grey and pallid as you are, I will consecrate my blood and give it to you, and you will do with my soul whatever your capricious Duchess pleases.
Twin teardrops rolled down his cheeks. How many more until Adonis is awashed in his sorrow like a lily in a deluge? Rei caressed the square of his jaw, the dip on his chin, the curve of his dry lips. His long black lashes still casted shadows on his plum-round cheeks – only now they no longer fluttered.
Rei closed his eyes.
“If you refuse to give me his soul, then at least return his soul to his body. Let him live a dozen decades. I will not interfere with the flow of mortal life. I will uphold your domain like I always have, a solitary matriarch of the Night. But know that even if you tie me up and coddle me with your tides, I will patiently wait for the day Adonis will snatch the Sun and make a home for me in the world that never extended a loving hand.”
Rei slipped the remaining rags of his robe off his shoulders and shrouded Adonis in his black silk. A breeze struck a chill down his body, raising goosebumps on his arms and back. Rei braced himself, unfamiliar with the feeling of cold, and found that snuggling to Adonis’s side made him feel safer, even as his body coiled miserably for the heavens’ leer. Something worried the folds of the shroud, though that he couldn’t see, having succumbed to mournful slumber.
And on that shroud, flourished an ornament of blood-red roses.