She weighed almost nothing. Gently, knowing she had far greater strength than humanity could encompass yet afraid for her fragility nonetheless, he held the rounded smoothness of her small hard buttocks, pushing his fingers into the crack between them, then scampering his touch up the cleft to the hollow of her spine’s base. In response she let one of her own hands fall from his shoulders and behind and under her, taking the bag of his balls into a clasp so slight that, because he could hardly feel its touch, he felt through every last shred of his body.
She made no attempt to ride up and down upon him, and he obediently kept his own hips still. But then he felt slow ripples deep inside her, flickering regularly along the length of him, squeezing him knowingly like hands in velvet gloves, each time moving on just before he’d fully sensed their presence. Sensing that at the coaxing of these unseen hands his time was approaching, he shifted his mouth to hers, wanting to kiss her, to put his tongue into her in imitation of his rigid shaft; but she pulled her face away almost waspishly and instead he watched over her shoulder as a deer trod into the clearing and paused there, ready at any instant to bolt, sombrely regarding their two entwined bodies motionless in the near-invisible sheath of her wings.
The pulses inside her were growing stronger and more urgent now, increasing in frequency and intensity and heat. He knew his hands on her back and her buttocks were losing their coordination, jerking from one place to another, all smoothness gone from their strokings; he was powerless to control them as his consciousness shrank until all there was in the world was the forceful moist waves of pressure on him.
Urgency built up around the base of his shaft – an urgency that could not long be resisted. Her grip firmed on his balls, which rolled in her hand, the sack tautening.
Now his hips did begin to move. A dam broke inside him. He threw back his head and yelled a bestial shout at the canopy of leaves as the surges forced their way ponderously up the length of him and broke free of him, great rolling waves breaking against the shore of her depths. Forever it lasted – pleasure, yes, delight, the joy of attainment, but there was pain there as well, the pain of so much being drawn out of him, as if what he was losing were not just his seed but all the juices of his body, sucked from him, stolen.
And, astonishingly, she screamed too, arching her back, throwing her hair behind her to carpet the turf, her loins at last beginning to jerk against him, her tightness pulling on him as if trying to draw still more out of him. As his awareness leached back into him he felt as if the swollen end of his penis were raw and bleeding and being rubbed bloodier. And still a further pulse forced its way up his rigid, unyielding shaft, oozing rather than flooding into her, its energy drained.
His body juddered one last time, and then his shoulders slumped. Drawing hoarse rasps of breath, Thomas stared despondently down the length of her dark, wing-draped back and her torrent of hair at the short grass of the glade, feeling the sting of tears at the rear of his eyes. She rested her shadow-light head in the crook of his shoulder, her nose and lips against the side of his neck, her eyelashes brushing his skin.
“What is your name?” he muttered hoarsely.
“You may not know that,” she hissed in his ear. “All you may know is that I am the Gate.”
At long, long last she peeled herself from him, removing herself with a surprising delicacy. Cloaking herself in her wings, she dropped to her knees in front of him to lick and suck the final remnants of their mixed juices from him.
Standing, she spoke once more in that strange sibilant voice of hers, that voice like an echo heard after it’s gone.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “The Gate to Her court is open, but you are not permitted to see anything of your entrance there.”
Thomas made to grab for his clothes, but she halted him with a fingertip. She did the same when he moved to cover his unflagging erection with his hands. “You may not shield your maleness from Her sight,” she sighed.
He gaped at her, but her face offered no explanation. Then he shut his eyes as she had told him to do, and she whirled her wings about them both like mist creeping close to a hillside, and when she said for him to open his eyes once more they were in the court of the Queen of Faery.
The throne upon which She sat was a great black bear, its jaws agape and its pink tongue lolling amid yellow teeth; around its neck was a ruffle of crimson. To either side of her stood or knelt half a score of winged men, their skins a spectrum; all were naked, some vastly priapic, others flaccid; all wore crowns of flowers knotted about their brows, while hair of many colours tumbled and looped to their shoulders; none had navels, for like all here except Thomas they had not been born. Other flowers grew in purples, blues, vermilions and veridians all over the floor of this great forest clearing, and swarmed up the boles and along the branches of the trees beside it, so that it was to Thomas as if he were standing in a huge womb of flowers. In front of the Queen and her frond-bearing male retinue stood a dozen winged women, their skins as diverse in colour as those of the men, their hair all waist-length or longer and varying from the blue-black of a cave’s deepest depths to the yellow of a bird’s beak, and each as strangely lovely to look upon as the woman who had been the Gate, who was now gone from Thomas’s side. The women, like the men, were naked, but some had vines growing out of and over them, so that it was as if they wore knotted serpents and bright flint arrowheads.
Yet Thomas saw little of Her retinue except for glances at the fringes of his vision. The Queen herself seized his gaze and fixed it upon her form.
She seemed both tall and tiny at the same time. Her hair was the colour of sunlight, and covered the ground around the throne upon which she held herself. Her eyes were the pink of coral, smouldering briefly to a deeper, more passionate yet somehow colder red when her interest was caught – as it was, just now and then, while she studied Thomas. Her skin was the silver-yellow of a young birch’s bark, like the wings of the Gate; her own wings shimmered in the gleaming cacophony of the inside of an oyster’s shell. Her eyebrows were cusped arches; her lips were like the curled succulent leaves of a rainforest plant. Under her wings she wore nothing, and Thomas could see enough through them to know that she was slender-waisted and smooth-bellied. Her breasts were full and yet not over-large, pale apples with the coral of her eyes at their tips. Between her legs was an intricate, tightly woven, perfectly symmetrical garland of daisies and cornflowers. The fingers of her hands were twice as long as mortal fingers, and twice as supple.
One of those hands was now outstretched toward Thomas.
“Come here to me, lost stranger,” she said in a voice shrouded in distance yet full of power, like an unseen waterfall.
Thomas’s legs moved without his command, so that in a moment he stood directly before her. He was acutely conscious of his manhood still prodding in front of his belly, its full tip licked shiny clean by the one who was the Gate.
She ran her hand around the curve of his cleanshaven cheek, and tucked his hair on one side behind his ear. He felt her sweetly peaty breath on his face. “You could almost be one of us, mortal,” she said. “Almost one of us.”
And then she slapped him across the mouth, hard, so that the world spun, blurred, bled brine.