Divine Lover

        The sun was white hot, bleaching the blue from the sky.  Broken stone from the temple glimmered in the heat and starkness of afternoon.

I was in Greece all right.

Before me lay one more scattering of the dried bones that were all that remained of the Hellenes.  Another wraith of what once was and never would be again.

I was in Arcadia in the southwestern corner of the land that gave birth to western civilisation.  Far from the crowds of fat, red-faced tourists and their unruly children, far from the hawkers who catered to them and pretended to know their country’s past.  Ancient Greece was still here in Arcadia, as serenely natural as it would have been when Socrates thought and Homer wrote.  I only needed imagination to feel it as they had.

I climbed the wide steps of the ruined building and crossed what had been a columned portico to enter the temple proper.  The walls and ceiling were gone, of course; I stood in but a reminder of Greece’s dead past.  A reminder bleached white as bone.

I smiled and the movement split the sheen of perspiration covering my face.  I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the sweat.  The brochure from the Greek Tourist Bureau I had picked up in London labelled this the last known temple built to Hades, the god of the underworld.  It stood on the bottom slopes of the mountain named in honour of a nymph that god had raped.  Minthe had become the mint plant and the world had come to love the herb she became, as much as Hades had once loved her body.  Mount Minthe and a living herb versus the ruined temple to Hades.  I suspected the nymph had got the better of the arrangement.

I was mildly surprised at the debris that littered the floor.  I had idly thought scavengers over the millennia would have stolen everything but the dust that covered the stones beneath my feet.  Curious, I moved towards what had been the rear of the temple, another scavenger seeking inspiration from a long dead civilisation and its gods.

I had come to Greece looking for a story.  Taking the journey I had promised myself each of the thirty-three years since I graduated university in Edinburgh.  Searching for the same inspiration this land once gave its most brilliant sons.  I knew the writer’s block that held me firmly in its grip.  I had known it far too long.  I needed another best-seller to regain confidence in myself and had come to the land whose legends gave birth to my first and only major success.

My name’s Iain Campbell. 

Right.  The chap who sold twenty million copies of BEASTS OF CHAOS in thirty languages.  The same Iain Campbell whose novel frightened more people than even that grocer’s daughter from Grantham who became Prime Minister.  The Iain Campbell the BBC labelled the Scottish voice of terror.  I had not written anything since “Beasts”.

My muse had deserted me after that success.  Five long, fruitless years of pretending to be a writer when I wasn’t.  Of living on past glory.  As Greece had done since freeing itself of Turkish rule more than a century ago.

I stopped before a small pile of rubbish and knelt to explore it.  And smiled.  I sensed, almost felt, I could find an escape from the writer’s block that held me so completely.  My fingers explored the small pile of chipped, broken stone fragments before me.   Almost immediately, they closed on a strangely shaped stone.  I lifted it to my face and blew the dust and grit away.

The stone was marble, perhaps an inch long, and fluted.  Perhaps an inch in diameter, the fragment came to a puckered point at one end.  The other end was jagged from where it must have broken off whatever it was attached to.  The thing looked oddly familiar.

I chuckled then.  The bloody fragment of rock looked more than a bit like the foreskin-covered tip of a penile helmet.  I snorted as the realisation came over me.  “It’s been much too long since you had a good shag, Iain, m’lad,” I told myself aloud and had a good laugh at myself.

I wrapped my fingers around the strangely shaped piece of stone and stood up.  My gaze moved around the floor of the temple again, attempting to imagine what had been here.  Near where I stood, the god’s statue would have towered above those who came to petition him.  Before that, his altar would have stood.  The stone warmed in my hand, absorbing my body heat as I began to move about.

Near the edge furthest from the mountain, I found what could have been the slab from a small altar, perhaps three feet long and of darker stone.  It lay shattered on the floor and should have felt out of place where it lay.  I had the strongest sense, however, that it was where it was supposed to be.

A strange thought struck me and I placed the stone in my hand onto the largest piece of the slab of rock.  The idea of offering up a piece of a god’s body to that god grew in that part of my mind that had not created a story for five years.  I was thinking more of the Egyptian Osiris than of a Greek god and wondered what horror such an act would create in the novel I knew was beginning to form in my mind.

The temple floor shuddered slightly beneath me as I released the stone on the slab of rock. The white hot sun above me seemed to blink for a moment.  I looked around me, imagining an earthquake but everything was still and as it had been the moment before.

I chuckled at my over-active imagination now that it was returned to earth, and moved to the steps.  I had some planning to do.  My muse had returned and I had a novel to write.  I wanted to get on with it.

* * *

I woke to fingertips gently skimming the hair of my long, thin legs and making it stand up in their wake.  Long and smooth, the fingers moved until they were above my knee.  They were getting close to my thick bush and the penis that nestled there while I had slept.

I was definitely and quickly climbing toward arousal.  Skin pulled back as my bell end grew wider and hardened.  My shaft wasn’t yet steely hard but it was already supporting my helmet.

I was in a bed in a small room above the one taverna in this part of Arcadia in southwestern Greece.  I didn’t have a lover, and I hadn’t brought anyone to my room with me.

I was supposed to be alone.

Fingertips nudged my thighs apart so that the palm of the hand behind them could cradle my bollocks.  I was totally hard, prepuce pulled tight behind the helmet’s collar.

I forced myself to open my eyes just enough to see around me.  And remembered Stephen King’s story about a writer kidnapped by a deranged fan.  I sought to focus my eyes.  Had anyone recognised me?  Bloody hell!  Was Greek one of those thirty languages I had been translated into?  Did I have a mad Greek in my room with me?

I could make out a figure squatting beside the bed where my waist was.  Eyes twinkling with captured light from the window watched me speculatively.  I sensed more than saw his smile.

“You are awake,” a deep but melodious voice announced.

“Who are you?” I demanded, pulling myself up on the pillows so I faced him.

He chuckled softly.  No, the room around me chuckled softly.  Strangely, I grew even more erect.  “That is not really the question you want to ask right now, Iain.”

I stared at the silhouette that was the man whose hand rested on my knee.  He knew my name.  He also had a voice that belonged in the older brothers version of the Vienna Boys Choir.  And, though slight, there was a definite accent there, one not exactly like what I had heard in Athens or here. But recognisably lower Balkans.  I began to leak.

“How did you get in?” I demanded quietly, my voice sounding loud in the silence of the room.

That soft chuckle again.  As if the small room was breathing humour.  How in bloody hell did I capture the combination of desire and fear I was feeling?  How did I put them on paper?  It would be like combining the very best cinematic elements of “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist” to capture it fairly.  And capture it I must.  I would outdo myself with the book already well forming in my mind.

“I came to you, Iain, from - somewhere else.”

“What do you want?” I growled, remembering I was in a locked room above a Greek village taverna with some stranger touching me up.

“You finally asked the right question.”

I sensed his smile broaden across his face even as my room became uncomfortably silent.  “What do you want?” I asked again.

“You.”

I choked.  “I don’t do gratuitous sex,” I grumbled as I reached down and brushed his hand from my thigh.

The touch of skin on skin, of a wrist with a hand growing out of it reassured me.  Hair on the arm.  The guy could have been a ghost, an angel, or something.  But supernatural beings weren’t corporeal.  Church, mosque, and synagogue made them out to be spirits, not bodies. 

So, I had some Bedlam escapee who managed to get up a flight of steps inside an unsecured taverna in a village where crime was unheard of.  Now, all I had to do was get him out of my room without getting myself killed.

But it had been so long since I’d had a man.  Since I returned from my first book signing tour to find the man I loved moved out and me alone.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

That damned chuckle again.  It was spooky as bloody hell.  My continuing erection and the amount of precome dripping down onto my bush was even more spooky.  I ought to be scared shitless and I wasn’t.  I was hornier than I had ever been.

“I am called by many names,” the man at my waist answered.

“So, what do I call you?” I asked, fighting against my whole body wanting to get into sex now.  Every hair on my legs and chest was standing straight up.  My thatch would be too if it wasn’t so wet with precome.  My arsehole itched and I hadn’t done bottom in thirty years.  Fucking hell!  I didn’t even know what this guy looked like.

I sensed him shrug.  “I am from this land.”  He laughed then.  “You would label everything-”  He sighed good-naturedly.  “Call me Greek if you must have a name for me.”

“Okay, Greek.  Next order of business is to see what you look like-” I reached to the lamp.  And my hand stopped.  My fingertips couldn’t have been more than an inch from the lamp switch. But they weren’t moving any more.  It was like there was an invisible wall around the lamp. “What the fuck?” I growled.

“We do not need light to know each other, Iain.”

“Like fuck we don’t!  You could be a five hundred pound gorilla with human vocal chords for all I know.  I take a real close look at anybody I do anything with. Understand?”

Silence followed my outburst.  Yet, light began slowly to coalesce beside my bed, in small increments.  It took me more than a few seconds to realise what was happening around me.  Light came from the window and through the closed blinds, from the dark Greek night beyond, from nowhere and everywhere.  And stopped there about the Greek.  Like the room chuckling before - the kind of shit that just doesn’t happen.  I shivered in anticipation and hoped I was having a dream, my imagination was indeed finally working.  Overtime.

The Scottish voice of terror indeed!  The new book was going to scare anything that could read.  The human voice of terror was more like it.  No-one could match what my mind was coming up with.

Soon, it was as if the Greek held a torch to his face.  I hadn’t seen any more of him than that but I was already in love and wallowing in lust.

Ebony locks caught the light and concentrated it.  Curls formed a frame around the most beautiful face I had ever seen.  I would wager even Alexander the Great wasn’t as beautiful - regardless of what those old sycophants claimed.  Why did he want me?  He could have any man he wanted.  I grew harder.  And leaked steadily.

The Greek was beautiful.  Totally masculine.  High forehead, dark brows and long lashes.  High cheekbones, perky flared nose, wide lips and absolutely perfect alabaster skin.  He even had a damned cleft in his chin like those celluloid gods of yesteryear.  He looked to be in his late teens but I sensed he had seen aeons.

He watched me studying me, a little smile turning his full, sensual lips up at the corners.  I saw his eyes then, the light accenting them.  Black and as deep as space.  As distant as the farthest galaxy.  As knowing as the most experienced courtesan of any renaissance court.  I could fall into them and fall forever.

“I am not a five hundred pound gorilla, Iain,” he said finally and I had the sense that the light was going to return to wherever it came from.

“No!  I want to see all of you,” I groaned.  I didn’t care how the son of a bitch got into my room.  I’d worry about that after we had done the dirty deed.  After he had fucked my bum raw.  After I had held him and touched him and tasted him everywhere.  It might be my citisen’s duty to report a burglar or whatever to the local constabulary but, right now, I had more important things facing me.  All of which I was looking forward to - with my tongue lolling.

“All of me?”  His lips spread into a smile.  The room chuckled again.  I didn’t cringe but my bollocks tightened along the shaft of my dick.  “You would not want to feel me instead?”

“I want to feel you but let me see you, Greek.  All of you.  Please?”  I realised I was begging and didn’t care.  This guy was beautiful enough to be an angel, at least one of those Italian models the old masters used.  I’d be a fool not to want to look.

Light continued to come to a point beside me, beside my bed.  It coalesced around the Greek.  He stood up, still smiling as he looked down at me.  Wide shoulders appeared beneath a long, graceful neck.  Wide chest.  No hair.  And I was sure he didn’t have any in his armpits either.  Same alabaster skin as his face.  His aureolae were wide and chocolate looking.  Small, dark chocolate nubs pointed out at me.

My mouth watered.  My bollocks threatened to erupt.  I grabbed them and pulled.  The feeling passed.  It felt as if I was in a renaissance church with hidden, recessed lights focused on the statute of the dead rabbi, casting shadows everywhere.

My gaze found a deformity in the sculpted perfection unveiling before me.  A strange pucker above his left nub.  A wound of some sort.  Healed now but a disfigurement nonetheless.

My mind passed that puckered deformity, revelling in the beauty unfolded before me.  There were no shadows on the Greek’s body as it became exposed before me.  I could see every line of his neck up under his earlobes.  I had the sense I could walk around him and see each part of him as clearly as I saw his face and chest.  But only those parts where the light had already reached.  There was still impenetrable shadow below what had been exposed.

His waist was narrow.  Tight even.  On a teen-ager, he would have a swimmer’s build, smooth and tight.  His hips were pronounced, accenting his pelvic bones over his tight gut.  But he wasn’t skinny.  He was simply perfect.

I saw the first curls of his pubes and surrendered to every lustful thought I had ever had in the forty years since I entered puberty.  They were as dark as the hair on his head.  They were thick, a furry ebony mat.  My bollocks again strangled my dick and I didn’t even think of them.  I stared.  I just wanted to see what the next two inches of illumination brought.

I sensed substance centred between his legs even as the Greek sat on the bed to face me and spread his legs to give me an unimpeded view as he continued to become illuminated.  The light caressed him, staying one with him as he moved onto the bed.

I reached out to touch that pucker above his left breast, the only disfigurement to his body.  Stiff, hardened flesh greeted my finger.  I glanced questioning into the youth’s ebonite eyes.

He smiled.  Neither friendly nor unfriendly, just from a far distance.  “I have always competed against one of my brothers-” A smile touched his lips.  “He has what I would have and guards it jealously.  That time, he was rougher than usual in resisting me.”

“He could have killed you,” I mumbled as my fingertip explored the depression between the puckered walls of hardened skin.

He chuckled and sat up straight, dismissing further discussion of his family.

My gaze dropped to his groin then and I gasped.  There was real sise there, reaching for me, nothing fake or man-made about it.  No silicone implants for this Greek lad, his twelve inches were all his.  They were regal, even divine.

I studied his manhood as light dispelled the last of the darkness between his spread legs.  A pole planted firmly and accurately and perfectly in the centre of his pubic triangle, skin pulled back to bunch behind its collar.  Sticking straight out, no droop and no curve.  It was a perfect pole, long and thick.

His hand returned to my leg and settled half-way up my thigh, his long, slim fingers touching the hairs on the bottom of my tight scrotum.

|I want you, Iain,| the room breathed about me and the Greek’s eyes watched mine, beseeching me.

No fucking way!  That damned thing wasn’t going anywhere near my poor bum!  I might be a gay man but pain was not sexual for me.  I gave it up more than thirty years ago, after that German footballer fucked me dry and made me bleed.

In betrayal, my legs spread in silent invitation as my bollocks churned.

“Do you want me, Iain?” the Greek asked softly, his fingers beginning to encircle my dick.

“Fuck me!” I moaned and hated myself.  I wanted it.  Bad.  An itch had started deep in my arse I couldn’t reach.  I knew the Greek could.  And would.  His stout dagger would scratch that damned itch real good, just as soon as I got him between my legs.

His fist pulled my skin down onto my shaft and his lips touched my helmet with a butterfly kiss.  Every muscle in my body leapt into rigor mortis.  The fingers from the Greek’s other hand passed my navel and spread across my chest to jump-start my heart again.

His lips opened and my prick filled his mouth, his throat muscles clutching at the helmet all the way to bloody well near the root as he buried his face in my pubes.

I moaned.  My muscles locked up as I shoved myself even deeper into his throat.  I beat the bed with my fists.  I erupted like a first-time wanker.  It was my biggest orgasm in more than forty years of knowing what my manhood was about.

My heart pounded.  My ears buzzed and the Greek sucked me dry, my dick and my bollocks.  I didn’t have anything left when he was through.  My whole body began to shake until he finally let me go.  Then, I just collapsed.  I didn’t care.  I sank into myself.

He slipped further between my legs.  His shoulders and arms, his ribs, his stomach muscles.  His lips trailed up my body and pulled it into a new reality.  He was on his knees and lifting my long legs up over his smooth chest onto his perfect shoulders.  His tongue reached the little hollow between my neck and chest.  I was hard again.

My hands reached behind him, fingernails digging into his sides as they slid over his perfect skin toward the mounds of his backside.  His lips nibbled at my chin and moved along the jaw to my ear.  I felt his perfect helmet line up against my wrinkled pucker, slightly pushing it aside as it took up its position at my entrance.

“I want you, Iain,” the Greek mumbled against my ear.

I stared down my body at him poised at my entrance.  At the perfect body illuminated by a light that knew no shadows.  The walls about me oozed assurance.  The air sang the chorus.  I looked at him, his face inches from mine.  At his reassuring smile.

I opened up.  For the first time in the thirty years since I decided I was a top man.  I opened like a blossom becoming a flower.  For the biggest slab of meat I had ever had in me.  Dry.  For this bloody Greek.

He entered me.  His wide head slipped into my bowel and my body knew not to resist.  The Greek gently sank down to meet my spread buttocks, his dick sliding into me.  No pain screamed through nerve endings to remind of why I gave up bottoming.  Forgotten sensations coursed through me, better than I ever imagined, and became reality.  My head pounded with exultation at having his dick buried inside me.

His eyes were shut as his lips moved unerringly toward mine.  I smelled mint as they touched mine.  His pubes scratched the bottom of my scrotum.  My mouth opened and his tongue entered it as he ground his hips against my bum.  My bollocks tightened around my hard shaft.

His body moved against mine as we kissed.  Mine moved against his.  I wanted him in me.  More than anything in my fifty-four years.  His dick.  It seemed to concentrate its attention on my love gland, though I knew he was far bigger than that.

I kissed him back, my tongue duelling his as we shagged across the bed above the taverna in Arcadia.  His meat spread my bowel just enough it to keep it clamped on his rod without me consciously doing it.  His dick continuously massaged my love gland, a constant prod.  His heavy knackers caressed my backside each time he bore into me.  My dick leaked even as my bollocks attempted to strangle it.  My fingers dug into his backside and I was raised to the deepest lust.

I ground up against him as he thrust into me.  Our lips remained locked together.  His fingers explored my chest and the sparse forest that spread across it.  They roamed down to grip my hips to give him better leverage.

I shot a load my bollocks didn’t have in them, spunk spreading across my stomach, as the Greek continued to shag me slowly.  He possessed me thoroughly.  And I gave myself to him completely.

I slowly came to realise a stutter had begun to develop in the perfect world of lust through which we rocked.  His thrusts came quicker - faster and shorter.  His groin pounded hard against my arsecheeks.  I gasped in ecstasy as I again exploded.

The Greek broke from our kiss, rising up on his knees above me.  He carried my arse with him and only my shoulders and head were on the mattress.  He pushed everything he had into me, stopped, and smiled down at me.  He wasn’t even breathing hard.  “Not this time, Iain,” he said as he lay me back onto the bed and withdrew from me.  I sat up and pulled myself to him.

I cuddled against him, my legs still against his chest, my backside against his groin.  I liked the feel of his erection in my cleft.  I liked his fingers playing in my chest hair.  I accepted the possession of me I had given him and wanted it never to end.  His smooth cheek nuzzled my shoulder.  “What may I give you, Iain?” he whispered, his lips playing at my ear.

I chuckled and wiggled my buttocks against him.  “You’ve given me enough.”

His fingers moved down onto my stomach muscles.  “I would give you more.”

“I have everything I ever needed now,” I mumbled and grinned, drifting along on a sea of complete satiation.

“May I come to you tomorrow?”

“You’re leaving?” I asked and forced myself back to the shore of that satiation.  My hand went to his backside, instinctively trying to hold him to me.

“I must.  But I shall return tomorrow evening.”

I smiled.  “You’d better,” I told him and was asleep.

* * *

I was instantly awake the moment my eyes opened the next morning.  I sat up and tore open my suitcase.  The box of condoms sat there unopened, silently accusing me.  I checked the floor and the rubbish bin.  Not a used slicker in sight.  I had let a fucking burglar between my legs.  There was no telling where he had put his damned dick before it went into my bowel.  I knew I was going to be one frightened woolie woofter the next two months before a test would tell me if I had made a fatal mistake.

The skin of my stomach glistened with a sheen of perspiration in the early morning of a Greek summer; the same with my chest.  I frowned.  Where was the come I had shot the night before and not cleaned?  Come from two orgasms.

Yet, something was dried and chaffing under my balls and between my arsecheeks.  I found the hand mirror I had put in the suitcase.  And laid back on the bed and hoisted my legs.  This was serious business, I hadn’t looked at my back entrance so closely in more than forty years.

I didn’t see anything that looked like dried come.  Not a single flake.  I appeared pretty tight down there too.  I wet my forefinger with my tongue and found a matted hair deep down the slope practically at my hole and pulled my wet finger over it to clean it.

I held my finger under my nose and sniffed closely.  It smelled like sweat.  I licked my finger and it tasted slightly salty, like sweat.  Not like come at all.

I hopped off the bed with more energy than I had felt in years and threw the duvet back.  I ran my hands across every inch of the bottom sheet looking for the dried come that should have been there.  If the guy shot a load up my bum, he’d still be leaking while he held me when I was falling asleep.  Jizz would have oozed out of my hole during the night.  And, even if he had pulled out without ejaculating, the Greek had still sucked me dry.  I had erupted again when he fucked me.  There had to be plenty of dried jizz splattered across the sheets.

There was nothing anywhere, not even a stray hair on the pillows.  Not even my spunk.  On the bed or on me.  Just my sweat.

Perhaps it was just a dream.

I allowed myself to hope that as I made my way down the hallway to the bathroom.  After all, my options were that last night was a dream or I was ready for a long rest at Bedlam.

Or, perhaps, my imagination had created a scene for the new novel beginning to develop in my mind.  It was a possibility now that my writer’s block was gone.

Perhaps.  But I didn’t remember anything as intense as last night had been playing out in my head as I wrote my best seller.

I pondered my options as I squirted toothpaste on the toothbrush.  Something grew on me as I went through my automatic preparations.  Something terribly wrong that I wasn’t catching.  “Iain, you’re psyching yourself up with this bloody mess,” I told myself and pulled myself back from the precipice to which my imagination had led me.  I stepped up to the lavatory and lifted the brush to my teeth.

I had almost decided the young, blond guy gazing at me with a toothbrush against his teeth was a damned good-looking lad when I realised where I was and who I was looking at.

I was staring into a mirror, after all.  That was supposed to be me there.  But it was me when I was in my early twenties.  Thirty years ago.

I was blond and there wasn’t a grey hair in sight.  The sagging cheeks and crows feet of middle-age were gone.  The delicate bone structure that had so characterised my middle-age was again hidden beneath fleshed out skin.  Blue eyes gazed back at me and showed their surprise.  My skin had become tight and elastic once again.

I stepped back to view more of myself.  My chest was again covered by a light sparse forest from my collar bone to the bottom of my rib cage.  There was no gut to suck in.  There were no protruding hip bones, either.  I stared at the slim, well-built, good-looking young man in the mirror in total disbelief.  The near-ravished sense I had given off the past decade was gone, covered by tight skin over hard but understated muscle.

I dropped the toothbrush in the basin and marched quick-time back to my room and the bed that awaited me there.

Even through the thick walls of this taverna, the morning sun of a Greek summer made the room hot; but I lay in my bed with the duvet drawn up to my chin and shivered.

“Iain,” I told myself forcefully, “this simply will not do, old lad.”  I looked about the room slowly as rivulets of sweat ran down my cheeks into my sideburns and onto my neck.  “You’re a fucking writer - think it out, mate.  Damn it all!  Plot it out.  Nothing happens without a bloody reason.”

That pulled me from the embrace of the shock that held me - treating my experience of the night before as a knot in a story I had to unravel by plotting it out.  Perspiration still covered me as I again pushed myself from the bed, but I was no longer chilled.

I made my way back along the hallway to have a bath and shave quickly.  Downstairs in the taverna, I ate a late lunch without tasting my food.  Outside in the heat of the day, I made my way down to the beach and contemplated the recent plot change in my life that did not make sense.

I noticed the appraising glance of more than one of the youths I passed along the way.  I even nodded to one or two of the cutest of them.  They were still lads, however, and the Greek was ... What in bloody hell was he?

Last night had been a dream, an insane delusion - or it had been real.  Those were my choices.  The reality of what I had found in the mirror this morning seemed to negate the possibility of either a dream or delusion.  That left me with the greatest sex I could remember and the loss of thirty years as reality.  An impossible reality, but reality nonetheless.

If reality, then who was the Greek who had loved me so well?  Who had given me my youth again?

A god? a voice from deep within the recesses of my mind suggested quietly.

Not bloody likely!

As Sherlock Holmes had once suggested to Dr. Watson however, when one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains - however improbable - must be the truth.  I was not about to suggest that making love and sculpting thirty years off my body was a crime but Sir Arthur’s logic was nonetheless irrefutable to me.

I leaned against a boulder facing out on the Mediterranean as I finally reached this conclusion.  The sun was near to setting and purple streamers began to spread across the darkening sky.

A god?

One of those many Greeks adored and elevated to divinity so long ago?  Could such be possible?  Could that whole pantheon be real?  Even one of them?

And, if so, why me?

Later, as night spread across southern Greece, I sat in the growing darkness of my room.  I was naked in anticipation of my lover’s promised return.  I didn’t know what to think.  But part of me was willing to believe.  At least, it was willing to hope.

On a most esoteric level, I was in a quandary.  A fifty-four year old man simply did not wake up one morning on holiday looking twenty-four.  He definitely didn’t look like he had had a whole body-tuck.  If he didn’t but I did, the only difference between me and my hypothetical gent. was the Greek’s arrival in my life.  Which would make last night’s lover supernatural but real.

If the Greek of last night was really real however, I was confronted with him being not exactly human.  No one had unlatched the door and entered my room last night, especially not the Greek.  And no human could ever be so damned beautiful (well, okay - that one Australian lad on the cover of the March 1996 Outrage - but one human being out of seven billion?)

If the Greek wasn’t exactly human, then what was he?

I already had the answer to that.  He was a god.  One of the pantheon of gods who once lived and ruled in this land.  But I was not especially happy with that answer.  It wasn’t exactly reasonable in a day and age where reason had replaced superstition in enlightened societies.

I didn’t like it, but I was damned close to admitting the Greek fell into the supernatural category.  I didn’t know how I felt about that.

I had to accept that there were heroes, demi-gods, and gods, there were gods of more power than other gods.  One small pebble of improbability became an avalanche of ignorant superstition.  Yet, it was the only explanation that fit from all directions.  If it was true however, I was going to have to uproot nearly everything that governed my life and start anew.  I definitely was not fond of that probability.

* * *

My room became dark as night unrelentingly possessed Arcadia.  My dick was hard and drooled in anticipation at the Greek’s promised return.  Somewhere near on the nine inch mark the inside of my gut itched fiercely.  And my pucker was exercising its new and improved stretch and grip routine in preparation of another work out.

Light began imperceptibly to coalesce in the centre of the darkened room.  It took me long moments to realise it was there, expanding and growing stronger.  My head snapped to face it as I forgot my hard dick.  As I forgot all the questions that had plagued me throughout the day.

He was back.

I hadn’t been dreaming.  I wasn’t a delusional maniac.  The Greek was real.  Even if he was some sort of god.

The light continued to expand and grow in the centre of the room before me.  The night pressed against it, resisting its growth but also moulding it into the shape of a passage.  A corridor that extended into even deeper night.

“Iain, may I enter?”

The words came at me from all sides of the room around me.  From the air that touched me.  From deep within the corridor that stretched from the light into nothingness.

There was no-one in the bedroom with me.  Just me and the room.  I stared into the night at the depth of the corridor.  My dick belched out a serving of precome in greeting.  My sphincter joyously spread wide enough to take the whole mattress.

“Please!” I mewled, ready for a bacchanal that would make me forget all my thoughts and doubts and fears from the day now behind me.

I heard footsteps ring on stone.  The sound of them was as distant as the stars, yet as close as the other side of the room.  They came toward me.  I shivered in anticipation.  A dollop of pre-come belched from my prick and slid down my shaft into my pubes to ooze onto my bollocks and between my thighs, wetting me.

My lover was returning to me.  A god who wanted me.  My divine lover.

A gate creaked open near to me.  One the light did not illuminate for me.  The walls chuckled as my lover took in my anticipation and understood it.

The Greek stood at the foot of my bed.  Nude.  Beautiful.  Hard.  Perfect.  He pulled the light from the hallway to him, eclipsing everything else in the room but him.  He studied me for a moment before he nodded.  “Yes, Iain, you do look better younger.  It pleases me that I thought of it for you.”

He climbed onto the bed and crawled toward me.

“How-?” I began and forgot my confusion of the day just past.  I lay back and my legs spread in welcome as I watched me near me.  A day’s worth of questions lay forgotten in the depths of my mind.  I just wanted him in me.  My arsering winked at him, my dick oozed.

He skirted my legs even as his fingers found my knee and moved up toward my bollocks. He lay beside me.  “I thought of you,” he said, his face inches from mine.

God, demi-god, or hero - whatever the Greek was - I wanted him.  I reached for his face with both hands and pulled his lips to mine even as I rolled us over.  He fell back and smiled up at me as I straddled his thighs with my knees and bent to taste his lips.  His fingers spread across my back as our tongues met and mine immediately acknowledged his supremacy.  His hands slipped their way to my buttocks and gripped them, pulling me against him.  Between us, his prick duelled mine and there wasn’t even a contest.

My hands explored from his ebony curls and long, slim neck to his wide shoulders.  My fingers found again the pucker of skin above his left nipple and played with it.  It was the only imperfection on my Greek’s body.

My hands moved from his smooth chest to his perfect abdomen - to his perfect manhood.  I was past lust and was into adoration.  My bollocks rode my dick as I ground my backside against him, capturing his manhood within my cleft.  I wanted him in me.  I wanted to ride him as if I were some Walkyrie riding out of Valhalla.  Forever.

Only, his slab of meat wasn’t getting any closer to my arsehole where I wanted it.  It took a while but I finally realised the Greek wasn’t ready to shag me.  He wanted something else for now.  The scent of freshly crushed mint filled the room.

I sat up and grinned down at his hard dick pushing its way out from beneath my bollocks.  I took in the perfect body lying beneath me and looked into the most beautiful face I had ever seen and was almost overwhelmed by the rush of lust and desire.  For sex.  For him.  For his perfection.

“Will you go with me, Iain?  That I might show you something of me?”

My face grew blank as I tried to leap from lust to intelligent conversation.  “Where?”

He smiled up at me.  “To my bed.  To my home - my palace.  In Tartarus.”

“Where?”  I frowned.

Tartarus?  I had heard the word.  Knew it.  From somewhere.  One of the mythological lands ruled by one of the principal gods of classical Greece.  I wracked my brain to dredge it up from amongst those many Greek legends I had wielded into my last novel.  It eluded me and I was surprised at how sluggish my thoughts were.

I was caught for a moment between instinct and intelligence - both out of hand’s reach.  Suspended between both.  His fingers touched my brow and I forfeited my search for references to Tartarus.  To this god who had chosen me.  I had my divine lover and he was all I would ever need.  I relaxed and settled down against him, his arms moving to my back to hold me to him.  I was home as long as I had him with me.

He rose from the bed and I with him.  Levitating.  My arms went about his chest and gripped him tightly.

We moved parallel to the bed until the floor was beneath us.  We tilted then and my lover was perpendicular to the planked floor beneath us.  He walked to the centre of the darkened room, his arms around me as mine were around him, his prick between the cleft of my buttocks.

Air shimmered about us in southwestern Greece as we returned to the portal through which he had entered, pulling light into itself.  The soft movement of air over our naked bodies quickly became screaming gusts as we hurdled through what I had thought of as a corridor.  My room above the taverna disappeared and we sped faster than I had imagined possible between walls of shimmering grey nothingness.

My knees gripped the Greek as they would a runaway stallion.  I pressed against him and clutched my hands together in the centre of his back to hold onto him.   As I put my head down beneath his chin, my stomach did flip-flops and my hard dick belched a glob of precome onto his perfect belly.  The only thing that could make my ride with him into wherever any better would be his dick buried deep inside me, where I wanted it.

* * *

We erupted from the corridor into a large stone room.  My Greek held me to him as we came to an abrupt halt in the centre of the room.  He wasn’t even breathing hard.  Over his shoulder, I watched in horror as the corridor we had come through blinked out of existence.

“Where are we?” I groaned, unsure whether I wanted an answer.

He chuckled and kissed the top of my head.  “My palace in Tartarus, Iain.”

“Tartarus?”  I released my legs’ hold on the small of his back and slid them over his hips.  My hands moved to hold his arms.  His prick still jutted between my legs and mine pressed against his stomach.  I looked into the Greek’s face and saw a distant resoluteness I had not seen there before.

I looked again at the room in which we stood, studying it in an effort to gain my bearings.  A grey light was upon us, surrounding us in the centre of what I saw now was a great circular hall.  An ornate hall vaguely like one in the greatest of our castles, but strangely different at the same time.  Above us I could not see the ceiling, there was only darkness above the light illuminating us.  Around us, at the extreme reach of the light, I could make out the stone railings along the walkway of the second storey.  Beneath us lay a mosaic that stretched the length and breadth of the floor.  I saw no source for the light.

“The-” He paused, seeming to search for the correct word.  “The novel that gave you your fame, Iain Campbell - what is its title?”

“Beasts Of Chaos,” I mumbled suspiciously.

He smiled at me watching his face.  “An interesting tale - and far too accurate for the world in which you live, Iain.  Where did you find your information?”

“The ancient Greek poets mostly, and in the depths of classic Greek mythology-”

His eyelids closed to slits but I knew he still looked at me.  “A strange word, mythology is.  It feels stranger still when one is considered a myth.”  He shook his head slowly.  Almost sadly, I thought.  “Beneath you is the picture of Chaos, Iain.”

I looked over my shoulder at the mosaic spread across the floor.  Though lighted, I could not make out more than a jumble of colours.

“It’s impossible for a mortal mind to comprehend it standing this close,” he told me.  “When you can do so of your own will, you may view it from the ceiling, Iain.  You can see how close you came to capturing what my father contained and my brothers and I destroyed.”

“You and your brothers destroyed-?” I mumbled, my mind grappling with the impossibility of what was happening to me, of who this man - being - could be.  The only brothers I remember from any mythology eliminating Chaos were Zeus, Poseidon, Thanatos, and Hades.  He nodded and I knew he had read my thoughts.  I took a deep breath and, reassured, knew this god before me was not Poseidon - at least, not unless I had suddenly learned to breathe water.  Nor was he the old and wrinkled reaper of souls.  That left Zeus and Hades from whom to choose.

My gaze found the puckered scar over his left nipple then.  Over his heart.  My eyes widened in a combination of disbelief and fear as realisation spread across me.  “You’re Hades!” I gasped finally.

He nodded and I felt my heart slide toward my gut.  My erection was lost as it succumbed to my growing acceptance of where I stood and who my lover was.  I wasn’t sure my heart still beat.

“Am I dead then?” I managed somehow to ask.

He studied me, his face unsmiling and his eyes blank to me.  “I am not Death!  I shelter the shades of mortals, but I do not reap them.  You returned to youth, Iain.  If you give yourself again to me as you did last night, you gain immortality when I give you my seed to nourish your body.  It is yours if you decide to accept it - and me.”

“If I don’t accept?” I asked, watching his face as I pushed against his waist.  I slid out along his engorged manhood, its helmet an inch closer to my entrance.

He shrugged.  “I return you to Gaia and you live out whatever life remains to you.”

“Then I die and return here,” I grumbled and pushed off him completely.  This was not a discussion to have with a dick poised at one’s backdoor.

“To Tartarus - but not to this palace, exactly.  To the underworld I rule.  You would be but one more shade populating the land between the five rivers.  Judged by the three Kings and guarded by Cerebus so that you do not attempt to escape.”

“And if I accept?”  I took a step back from him so that I could see him better.

“You live with me for eternity,” he answered simply.  Far too simply.  What did a god’s fucktoy do with himself when not being buggered?

Hades chuckled as he read my thoughts.  His long, perfect finger reached out and touched my cheek before beginning to trace my jaw.  “Our sort has never been especially monogamous, Iain.  Most often, we live for the moment, accepting whatever pleasure we find.  If you live with me, you may go anywhere and do anything you choose to do - as long as you come back to me after you’ve done it.”

I studied the god Hades watching me as he awaited my answer.  The offer of immortality sounded too good to be true.  I remembered then that the Olympians were considered more than a bit fickle by the mortals who once worshipped them.  “I can go anywhere and do anything I wish?” I asked and hoped to pin him by his words.

He looked me in the eyes and said: “I swear it on the Styx itself, Iain.  That’s the strongest oath I can give you.  On my word, you shall live forever, you may go wherever you will, and do whatever you choose.  I cannot hinder you.  If your action doesn’t include me willingly, you may still do it and no harm shall befall you.  And I shall welcome you back upon your return.”

I studied him a moment more and asked: “Where’s the catch, Lord Hades?”

His lips twitched.  “Only that which you would pursue alone is yours alone to undertake.”

“And you swear this on the river Styx?” I asked quickly.  He nodded.  I remembered that Persephone was bound to six months of every year to the underworld because she had eaten six pomergranite seeds.  “I’m still alive,” I mumbled as suspicion again flooded over me.  “I’ve got to eat and drink.  You aren’t going to bind me to this place through what I eat, are you?”

Hades laughed, his eyes twinkling as he met my gaze.  “I make that too part of my oath to you, Iain.”

“I’ll be like you and the other Olympians?” I asked, still hesitant to believe what Hades offered me.

He dark eyes became distant.  “More like my brother’s child flame.”  He nodded.  “Yes, like Ganymede.  You are as free as you make yourself be, Iain.  It is mine to make you immortal and young forever.  The rest is yours to create.”

I smiled finally.  My fingers moved between us and found him as erect as he had been in the hallway.  They wrapped around his manhood. I peered about the great hall.   “Where is your bed then, my Lord?” I asked.

* * *

Gooseflesh crawled down my back and into the cleft of my backside.  His fingers touched my hips and moved to possess my buttocks as we climbed the stairs to the second storey of his palace.  His fingers trailed up my back and we both knew I was his - no matter how we had come to be together.

Warmth enveloped me and I gazed into those ebony eyes watching me so closely.  As we reached the landing, I moved closer and brushed his cheek with my lips.  My erection returned at the nearness of our coupling.  My fears had been banished with Hades’ assurances.  He lifted me and my knees went around his waist, my heels crossing over his buttocks.  His prick again possessed my cleft.  “I’m yours, m’Lord,” I whispered at his ear.  And meant it with every fibre of my being.

He laid me on the bed that occupied the centre of the room we entered.  I watched as Hades climbed onto the bed at my feet and pulled his knees under him.  “Let me ride you - please?”

He gazed at me for a moment and I wondered what his thoughts were.  Then he lay back and his thick twelve inched pole stood proudly from his smoothly muscled abdomen as if the Union Jack flew from it.  Its cowl was pulled back and settled beneath the collar of his helmet.

My dick oozed precome as I climbed over his stomach and rose to my knees so that I could put his dick where it belonged.  And moaned my pleasure as I impaled myself on that wide-bodied slab of meat.

My guts rippled and gripped at the sides of his pole as I pushed myself up along him.  I dribbled precome on his perfect chest even as my bollocks crawled up against my dick.

“Come with me, Lord,” I groaned when I knew I couldn’t hold it any longer.  My bollocks strangled my dick.  My helmet was filled to its limit with blood.  I ground against his thatch with all of him in me.

I lost it.  I blew.  A rope hit him on the forehead, another slid down his shoulder and sizzled against the sheet.  “Give it to me!” I howled and my voice echoed through the palace of Hades as my arsemuscles clinched at his dick.

I felt it then.  As my load of jizz became a meek dribble.  The head of his dick spread my bowel wider than it had ever been before.  I gasped as he gushered deep into me, hot sperm spreading up my gut into the rest of me.  Throughout all of me, claiming me.  For him.  For eternity.

* * *

Naked, I moved slowly along the great hall, my hand trailing along the stone wall.  A nude Hades sat on the landing above me and watched me.  He chuckled and I turned to look back at him.

“You’re my first male, Iain - since man first walked the face of Gaia.”

“Are you ashamed of yourself then, m’Lord?”

“No!   Definite not that.  I’m quite surprised I didn’t try it before.  That there weren’t others before you.  Through the aeons, Zeus certainly had enough boys - men too.”  He sniggered.  “I emulated him quite nicely when you turned my head-”

“How’s that?”

“He was so infatuated with Ganymede that he made him immortal.  I’m so smitten by you that I’ve done the same.”

I had continued moving as we chatted.  My fingers had continued to trace the wall.  I was near onto an eighth of the way around the great hall from where I had started.  I began to realise that I had felt no seams in the stone.  I turned and studied the wall before me closely, suspicion rising like bile in my throat.

“Where are the openings?” I demanded as fear washed up over me.

“Openings?”

“The many gates this palace is supposed to have.”  I turned to stare up the stairs at him, sensing my entrapment closing about me.  “The corridors like that one we came through.”

“I think you may have read too many Greek poets, Iain.”  He rose and began to descend the stairs.

“Where are they?” I howled, turning back to the blank stone wall of the great hall.

“You make them yourself, Iain.  With your mind.”  I heard his steps on the stone stairs growing closer but I did not turn.  I couldn’t.  I was frozen as I stared at the wall before me.

“The corridors like the one we travelled are paths through the planes of existence.  You can only enter them through your mind.”

“I don’t know how to do that!” I wailed.

“Then you shall stay here until you learn how.  You shall remain at my beckoning call.  Or go with me where I choose to go.”

I turned back to face him as he crossed the mosaic in the centre of the floor.  “You lied!” I screamed.  “You’re already breaking your oath-”

“No!” he growled and halted his approach.  His eyes grew darker as he sneered at me.  “I committed to honour your freedom when you exercised it.  You must exercise it, not me.”  His anger was permeable between us.

Clothing began to wrap itself about his body.  “I’m going to visit Zeus,” he told me, his voice barely under control.  “The servants will feed you while I’m gone.”  He smiled and I knew it was unfriendly.  “They are all shades, horror writer.  You won’t be able to satisfy yourself with them.”

I watched as he took a step away from me and disappeared.  My jaw dropped in shock as I realised I was alone in the worst of all possible worlds.

I screamed.