It’s one night in Emon, Orym decides. It’s his first night, and likely his last before he leaves for the petrified forest of the Fire Ashari, and it happens to coincide with the city adorned for festivities. At least part of her reasons for sending him here was to experience the world beyond Zephrah, although Orym hadn’t asked to do so.
Hadn’t asked, but also hadn’t argued. And now he’s here, so why not?
There are strings of sweetly fragrant flowers and enchanted lanterns flickering like candlelight strung across the square around an enormous effigy of the sun. Upbeat dancing music plays somewhere near the center, obscured by the enormous throngs of masked revelers that seem to move as a group in a circle. Among them are dancers, alone and in pairs, following the music in a complex but apparently well-known dance. Occasionally, Orym sees a few peel away from the crowd, in pairs or more, with laughter and anticipation hanging around them as they seek the shadows at the edges of the crowd and disappear.
There are fertility festivals in Zephrah, but they feel provincial and charming in comparison to this one. The woman at the bar in the tavern he’s taken a room at looked him over when he said he planned to experience the festival for himself and offered him a tankard of mead.
“To bear you up,” she’d said, evidently deciding that Orym was going to need something to keep him from being overwhelmed. “The girls out there are going to fucking lap you up.”
He accepted the drink, but hadn’t been sure whether she was warning him about something or suggesting something more lurid by that.
Looking out at the festivities, holding the mask he bought from a vendor along the way in one hand, Orym still isn’t sure which the barkeep meant. The Voice of the Tempest had said many things about Emon over the years, and he isn’t sure what version of it he’s seeing.
It’s a festival, he reminds himself sharply when he steps to the side to let a group pass him on their way into the square. A human woman waves at him coquettishly, adjusting her mask and ducking her head to giggle with her friend, who grabs her arm and pulls her along toward Orym.
“Do you want to come with us?” asks her friend, ignoring as the woman swats at her shoulder with an obvious blush. “Can you dance?”
“Yes,” he answers, allowing her to clasp his hand with her painted ones and draw him along. A dwarf with small, golden bells braided into their long hair takes the mask from his hand and adjusts it over his face.
“You’ll be glad for that in the morning,” they tell him with an encouraging half-smile that makes Orym wonder if absolutely everyone can tell he’s never gone far from Zephrah. Certainly never so far as he has now, figuratively and literally.
“I’ve never been with a halfling,” the human woman whispers breathily over the pointed shell of his ear, bent forward so that only he can hear her.
“I’ve never been with a woman,” he answers just as quietly, hoping he hasn’t embarrassed her.
Her response is a delighted laugh as she grasps him by the hand, pulling him along with her into the outer coils of people. “But you dance, right?”
Orym does and he has stayed back to observe long enough that it takes him only a moment before he falls in with the rest of them, passing between each of them before he’s returned to the human woman, and she drops a circlet of flowers over his hair.
“Come,” she beckons, but rather than pulling him away, she pulls him deeper into the crowd, her deep brown skin gleaming in the light. “You have to see.”
“How do you know I’m a traveler?” he asks, looking around the crowds. No two people look alike in clothing or features. There are halflings and gnomes, an orc man who stops them to bestow flowers on Orym’s companion.
“You seem fascinating, and you were amazed,” she answers him, emerging into a clearing at the center of the square. “I thought perhaps I could amaze this fascinating person a little more.”
From here, the shape of the crowd finally begins to resemble the sun: a circular chain and spokes like sunbeams coiled around the open area before him.
“I'm no one of any consequence, but consider me amazed,” he tells her, turning in place to watch as the dance continues, untethered from the actions of the individual dancers joining and departing the larger whole.
“A price,” says the human woman, bending to his height, but Orym doesn’t think she wants coin, or even the thing the barkeep warned him she might want.
“Let’s see if I can still do this.”
Magic never came easily to him. It seemed to require something he lacked, and so he hadn’t bothered trying to work to force something when so many other things came more naturally to him and could be mastered with his work. For this woman, though, Orym holds out his right hand and delicate mountain flowers bloom out of the center of his palm, butter yellow with a touch of red in the center. She emits a soft gasp and beams when he tucks these behind her ear and presses a kiss to the center of her forehead.
“For that,” she breathes out, fingers touching the edges of the flowers he made for her before she takes him by the shoulders and turns him to face a quarter turn to the left. She breathes into his ear: “That way. You’ll know what you’ve found.”
Then she pushes up and disappears into the swirling dancers.
It’s as likely that it’s nonsense – strange nonsense, perhaps – as it is that she meant to send him that way for a reason, even if that reason was that she was finished with him. Orym slips unnoticed past the others in the center of the festival, his eyes scanning the area around him with obvious curiosity until he sees another figure doing much the same, his head tipped back to look at the lanterns and flowers, flowers cascading through the hair spilling down his back. Unlike the other revelers around him, he’s not wearing a mask.
He’s an air genasi, Orym realizes with surprise, although his clothes are far too ornate for him to be from Zephrah. He realizes he’s staring and starts to turn back toward the dancers when the genasi man looks down and then directly at him. Through him, more likely, until a dazzling smile splits his face and Orym realizes that he’s extraordinarily handsome and approaching him.
“Do we know each other?”
No, certainly not from Zephrah with that refined diction. Orym looks him from his boots to his eyes, purposefully not lingering at any of the places his attention wanders to: the thick, well-formed musculature of his legs, or the wide expanse of his chest, or–
It’s possible. How many days of his life has he spent silent against the wall behind the Voice of the Tempest, listening because he couldn’t help hearing as she met with delegations from around the world? Envoys that could just as easily include an eloquent, wealthy, handsome young man.
"You must be mistaken," he answers politely, because what difference would it make? No more than a coincidence that he might recognize a guard from Zephrah, if that scenario is even true. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m rarely mistaken on matters such as this,” he continues with a charming flourish, a half-bow in Orym’s direction.
Oh. Is he flirting?
Orym is so unused to the experience that he simply blinks a few times. Everyone in Zephrah knows his history, and this is perhaps the first time in a very long time that he’s felt the answering twinge of–
He stops to examine the feeling with brutal intent: turning it around and feeling its shape to be sure he recognizes what it is, casting his mind around for the word he’d use to describe the warmth spreading down from the points of his ears as his blood howls like a gale on the mountain, pooling in his core and hurrying on.
Lust.
After all this time?
But Orym isn’t in Zephrah anymore. This is Emon during a lavish festival of things that are alive and will be alive and no one, not even this handsome stranger, knows who he is. He hears the answer echoing somewhere in his chest: why not?
“What is your name, stranger?” he asks before the man straightens, and he catches the snag in his charming, well-constructed persona as he pauses a moment, then recovers.
“Dorian Storm,” he answers with a toss of his magnificent hair, drawing one of the flowers from it and offering it to Orym. “Isn’t that one of the things they do during this festival? Exchange flowers for a glimpse of the future?”
Not for the first time, Orym finds himself wishing someone had given him a primer on life in Emon. A guide to the small details like growing flowers for a seer and beautiful men flirting with him, something to tell him what it means.
“Are you offering me a look into my future, Dorian Storm?” He accepts the flower before the answer, tucking its long stem into the knot of his sash. After a moment, he chooses one of the small blooms from the crown of flowers, a confection of ruffled, pink petals, and offers it to him. “I already know yours.”
“Do you?” Dorian looks surprised, like he’s taken a gamble he didn’t expect to work, but he takes the flower with apparent delight, and weaves it into the loose braid on his neck. “Tell me.”
“I’d rather show you.”
Dorian laughs, a bright thing that nearly covers the nervous energy he emanates. The noise of it curls through the air like the perfumed smoke hovering over the mass of people, settling on Orym’s skin like a caress. “I feel like I should know your name first.”
“It’s Orym.” For a moment, Orym thinks he’ll ask for the rest, but declaring himself as he has for his entire adult life, by his association to his people foremost, seems inappropriate for something that is entirely for himself.
“Orym,” he repeats slowly, as though he’s tasting the sounds of it. “I think I’ll like how that sounds when you fuck me.”
The unsummoned image of that hits him like a mace to the back of the skull: Dorian’s fists gripping the sheets of his bed so tightly that his knuckles go bloodless, the sheen of sweat gleaming on his bare neck in the lamplight from the street, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as his mouth forms the shape of Orym’s name. He’s instantly hard, the force of his want powerful enough to wind him.
“I thought I was the one who was supposed to tell your future.”
The sharp inhale Dorian takes is more felt than heard, and Orym is nowhere as level as he seems when he takes Dorian by the hand to lead him through the crowd of dancers. No one gives them more than a passing glance as they duck under arms and press between bodies, although he feels the pull of Dorian’s hand as he turns to look around him with obvious awe.
Night’s presence is more powerfully felt the moment they pass from the outer spokes of the dancers, shadows dark as pitch against the brightness of the lights, and it’s into these that Orym leads Dorian.
He feels reckless and impulsive, the river rush of his blood in his ears almost as it is when he’s in a fight. Above him, Dorian looks more vulnerable and anxious. Orym turns his hand palm up in his own, closes his eyes and presses his lips into the heart crease.
“I’ve never done anything like this.”
“You still don’t have to if you don’t want.” Orym passes his hand back to him, tosses his mask to the side, and sees the slight widening of Dorian’s eyes when they search his face. “I can tell you a future you might have. You choose.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” Dorian spears the gracefully long fingers of one hand through Orym’s shorn hair. “But I’ll tell you if I don’t want what you offer. How would that be?”
“You say the word.”
Orym has the dim sense that whomever Dorian is, whatever his life outside Emon might be, he’s very used to dazzling artifice and no one looking all that closely at him. But Orym is looking now, locking eyes with him for even the smallest sign of discomfort when he unwinds the ornate sash at Dorian’s waist.
His mouth parts with surprise, his tongue flickering out to leave a shimmer of moisture on his lips. Orym is unsurprised to find him hard beneath the layers of his clothing, his cock jumping against his palm when he wraps his dominant hand around and gives a light, test stroke. Dorian has a beautiful cock: long and curved slightly upward, not so thick as to be intimidating, but he’s easily bigger than anyone Orym has been with.
“We’re–” A giddy laugh shivers out of Dorian, who bucks his hips forward into Orym’s hand. “There are hundreds of people right there.”
“Then make sure they don’t notice.”
“What?” Disbelief and amazement shake along his answering laugh, the same that Orym feels when he brushes aside his pants, leans forward, and seals his lips around the head of Dorian’s cock.
That musical laugh chokes into a sharp cry that Orym feels vibrating in the air around him, then pulled back toward them suddenly, echoing near his ears like a close-kept secret. He opens his eyes in time to see afterimages of magic dispersing along the surface of Dorian’s hands when they’re clasped around the sides of his head, head tilted back to rest on the wall behind him. He pulls the bottom of his lip between his teeth, obviously laboring to keep quiet.
Orym slams his eyes shut to focus on relaxing his jaw enough to work more of him past his lips, but it’s been a long time since he’s sucked cock and that dizzy feeling hasn’t passed yet. Something that reminds him of petrichor and the crackle of ozone, what is apparently a smell that belongs entirely to Dorian, supplants the sensory crush of the festival. Orym pulls in a deep, slow breath through his nose and manages another inch, his lips smoothing along the silken shaft. He won’t manage it all, Orym knows that before Dorian’s cockhead bumps into the back of his throat and he swallows around it, but he’s sure it won’t matter. He can feel the throb of his pulse against his soft palate and holds there for a moment, pushing the air from his lungs with deliberate control.
“Oh, fuck, that’s good.”
The soft whimper feels like a blow and Orym loses all his breath control, air whooshing out all at once. His knees feel like a tree in a gale and he thrusts out one hand to catch Dorian at his hip to keep from swaying off his feet. Dorian drops one hand to his shoulder, circling his knuckles into the twitching muscle in Orym’s jaw.
“You don’t have to push it,” he pants out, a spare whisper that Orym feels like the caress of a breeze into his ear. “Take it slow.”
Orym can’t remember backing off from a challenge, which this now is, but he pulls back to regroup, dragging the seam of his lips along Dorian’s length and leaving a gleaming slick on the cobalt flushed shaft. There’s a soft pop when he pulls back with the head resting on his open mouth, turns his gaze upward and finds Dorian staring back with wide, stunned eyes burning blue in the dark.
The flash of smell like lightning forking between them returns, but Orym only feels Dorian’s thumb brushing a bead of precome away from the corner of his mouth. He chases it, tracing the calloused pad of his thumb with the flat of his tongue and drinking in the immediacy of Dorian’s full-body reaction. His cock leaps against his cheek, leaving a new smear across the high bones beneath his eye, and Orym laughs.
This is one night, his only night in Emon, and Dorian is a stranger he’ll never see again. There’s no harm in it.
He curls the tip of his tongue around the thick, blood-dark head, splitting his mouth open to wet it for what he intends next. Keeping his eyes locked on Dorian’s, Orym wraps his hand around the base of his cock and swallows him in a single, swift motion, then pulls back slow. He builds a relentless push-pull tempo, his hand barely fitting around the base, all with his eyes locked on Dorian’s face, his body attuned to his smallest reactions. If this tips past his comfort, Orym is ready to stop instantly.
Instead he sees the fuse light on a chain reaction: Dorian’s eyes fly open and lock on his steady gaze, his mouth moving in the soundless shape of Orym’s name while tremors move from his muscled thighs through his spine, and then finally–
“Orym, I’m going to–”
Which he already knows, but he doesn’t know how else to assure Dorian it’s fine to let go except to take him deeper – deeper than he had before, until he feels his throat constricting, protesting the years since he’s last done this. And then Dorian doubles over him, hands closing over Orym’s ears and coming in jets, cries breaking over him.
There are a few softer pulses accompanied by smaller aftershocks through Dorian’s body. He doesn’t straighten yet, and Orym is almost sure that he’s holding him up, although Dorian weighs far less than he seems like he should. A quirk of his people, he remembers fleetingly between the pulse of his cock in his own pants.
Dorian drops to his knee in front of him, his hands still holding Orym’s head still when he kisses him hard. He tastes of bright, sweet mead and smoke against the lingering salt from his spend, and his clever tongue finds Orym’s, coiling around and drawing him in deeper. He kisses too earnestly for a man who’s any more used to this than Orym is, and it’s that, somehow, which convinces Orym to pull back. Dorian steals a last kiss and looks back at him with an undeniably wistful expression.
This could be it, he realizes. All that the two of them will ever have, and Orym would still be glad for that. But there could be more, too. There is still night ahead of him, and Orym would rather spend it like this than settling into an unfamiliar bed and wondering what the morning will be.
“I took a room not far from here,” he says without breaking eye contact, gently tying Dorian’s sash in the same pattern as the one he undid. “And if you like, I’d like you to fuck me.”
“Who are you?” Dorian laughs a little hoarsely, the question evidently rhetorical. “Are you going to rob me?”
“This is a strange approach to banditry,” says Orym, stepping back and beckoning him to follow back to the tavern. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Dorian may not answer, but he doesn’t disagree, either. This seems like the sort of moment that Orym could get his head straight again, shake off the intoxicating, heady feeling in the night air, and go back to his rooms to see to himself before sleeping. He could.
He doesn’t, though.
The cool night air still feels alive, urging Orym to this next phase of the evening. The walk to the festival had seemed far longer than his return, hand loosely caging Dorian’s. A few doors from the tavern, close enough that the lantern light casts shadows on their skin, Dorian bends to kiss him again, and Orym is the one who pulls him the rest of the way through the door, up the creaking staircase, and down the hall to his room.
When the door swings closed and Orym turns again, Dorian looks more nervous than before. Orym understands. There’s getting caught up in the moment, and then there’s this.
He catches Dorian’s hand as he passes, eyes set on the window overlooking the street. “Do you want to do this?”
“Yes,” comes his immediate answer, looking over Orym like he’s seeing him clearly for the first time in the warmer light of his room. “I’ve just never done this before. With a stranger, I mean.”
“Neither have I.”
“Really?” Dorian laughs, watching unmoving as Orym unlaces his boots and sets them next to his pack in the corner. His shirt goes next, folded smartly and tucked under the flap.
Orym unfolds and faces him with his hands at the knot of his sash. “I don’t know what your business is in Emon, or where you intend to go next, but I plan to leave in the morning. I expect we’ll never see each other again. Is that going to be okay?”
“Yes.” Dorian’s eyes snap up from Orym’s chest, tracing the lines tattooed along his arm up to his face, and he reaches hurriedly for the buckles of his own boots. When he’s stripped down as much as Orym has, he sits onto the edge of the bed with wide eyes.
Even if he’s not young, per se, Orym has the instant knowledge that Dorian isn’t a man who’s seen much of the world. Not yet, at least. What he can do is make sure that his first introduction to it is good.
After all, this is the first time Orym is seeing the world, too.
He climbs astride his lap and slots his mouth over Dorian’s, pleased to feel him open to him immediately. Long, graceful fingers spread over the base of Orym’s back and when he breaks the kiss first, it’s to leave a burning line of kisses down Orym’s neck. At the first break in Orym’s breathing, Dorian stops immediately to suck hard enough to bruise, even when Orym shudders along his entire spine.
“Do you think you’ll be able to fuck me?” Orym pants, lifting Dorian’s face back up to his own when the shivery sensations fork through his stomach and deep in his balls. “I mean, can you–”
“Get hard again?” Dorian guides Orym’s hand into his lap and rolls his refreshed erection against his palm with a hiss of pleasure. His eyes fall on Orym’s tattoos with obvious curiosity, and for a moment Orym is sure he recognizes them for what they are, but he plainly suppresses it when he shrugs and says, “Second wind comes easy to me.”
Orym makes short work of his own sash, unwinding the waist of his pants and dropping them to the side, his cock bobbing up against his belly when he leans back to give Dorian space to do the same.
"Do you think you can take it?" Dorian nods between the two of them, meaning his own cock, but he blinks rapidly a few times when he sees Orym’s cock next to his own.
Orym has never had any reason to feel any particular way or another about his cock. It’s his, and that’s all there is. Like so many things in life, he’s never felt any concern about what else it might have been. Dorian’s is longer, of course, and it’s the sort of beautiful that suits the rest of him. But Orym’s is perhaps a bit thicker, with the head emerging from the hood proudly, and his length isn’t that far off. It certainly holds up to scrutiny from a stranger in a strange city.
“You had a difficult time with it before,” Dorian says when he finally looks away, the points of his ears darkening to something approaching the night sky, as though he’s suddenly bashful with what he wants.
“Don’t overthink it,” Orym suggests and tests the firmness of his own erection, swiping his thumb over the tip. “I’m not worried.”
“Here.” Reaching into the folds of his pants, Dorian pulls out a small vial and uncaps it with the flush spreading to his chest. “I thought I’d–”
“Come more prepared than I did?” Orym makes space for this as Dorian slicks his forefinger and circles his opening. Like out on the street, Orym expends some effort to control his breathing and as before, fails entirely the moment Dorian lowers his mouth to his and begins working his finger in.
It’s been some time and so it takes time. Dorian works thoroughly and patiently to open him, but when he adds the second finger, Orym rests his forehead against his pectoral and breathes through the stretch. The first time his chest shudders from the sting, Dorian slows down and whispers something against his hair, and it eases immediately.
“You don’t need to use magic,” he gasps out, pushing himself down onto his long fingers and feeling as Dorian’s cock twitches against his belly. “I told you I’m not worried.”
“I want you to feel good,” Dorian insists gallantly.
“I’m ready,” says Orym before he can go further than that. He pushes off his hand so his mouth can brush against the delicate silver chain earring at Dorian’s hear when he whispers, “I can handle it a little rougher than that.”
Then he grasps Dorian’s cock by the base and watches as his mouth drops open when Orym slowly lowers himself onto it. It does burn, probably more than it would have if Orym had been even a little more patient, waited for a third finger or let Dorian soothe the ache with magic.
It’s also fucking incredible.
Dorian wraps one of those shapely hands around his cock, dragging the abundant precome down along his shaft, and then pulling his foreskin up and over his head. It’s not at all unlike the way Orym prefers to jerk himself off.
“A little tighter,” he instructs, using one shaking hand to adjust Dorian’s grip on him. His focus frays immediately when he finds the exact pressure, but when he looks down to where Dorian’s thighs are shaking under, it seems like it’s not–
No, he decides sharply, rolling his hips slowly curiously. Dorian answers with a shallow jerk of his hips and a long groan that Orym feels straight up into his core. He has a surge of triumph as he sinks down a little further – then again, again, again.
“You’re unbelievable,” Dorian mutters when Orym feels his thighs settle firmly beneath him, his whole body splitting with the effort to accomodate the intrusion, but he bends down and pulls Orym’s face in for a hard kiss with his free hand.
“Fuck me,” says Orym firmly, but he feels like he’s coming apart even before he lifts himself and Dorian thrusts up into him and he sees points of light explode across his vision. “Fuck, fuck me.”
It’s been so long, this is so unlikely to ever happen again and Dorian is fucking him with the same timing and intensity as his strokes along Orym’s cock. He feels lightheaded again, detached from everything but the sparkling pleasure spreading like brushfire. Still, his orgasm catches him off guard, unfurling somewhere in the center of his chest, surely somewhere near the point Dorian can reach with his absurdly long cock.
“Oh, fuck. Orym.” Dorian sounds stunned at first, his grip slackening, then tightening when the first rope of come lands like faintly pearlescent clouds against his stomach. “Orym.”
Each subsequent pulse of his cock feels like it has to be the last, like he’s going to break apart and there won’t be anything left. Then he feels the pulse of Dorian coming, dragging Orym against his chest and pushing a barely restrained sob into the top of his head.
Neither of them move. Orym’s hands find the outline of Dorian’s head and he scrapes his fingertips through his hair. Petals fall like rain over him, from the flowers in Dorian’s hair, from the crumbled flower crown he’d completely forgotten about, and he catches one between his fingers.
Orym tries to remember what Dorian had said about flowers and the future. He thinks of the human woman who took the flower he made for her and sent him toward Dorian. For a wild, foolish instant, he wishes his future was different than he knows it is.
He’s never done this, but he knows what the coming minutes will be like. They’ll disentangle from one another and he’ll try to help Dorian clean up the best he can before he disappears into the night. Orym will take a bath and sleep, and in the morning he’ll leave. They’ll never see each other again, except maybe in moments when they each revisit a single night in Emon and whatever it will come to mean.
“Thank you,” he says at last, peeling himself away and kissing Dorian one last time. He doesn’t even need to imagine that Dorian leans back into Orym’s hands, or the knowing look in his eyes.
“I’m sorry I told you a future that wasn’t true,” Dorian says warmly, and his magic feels like a warm bath as it washes over him, leaving the both of them clean. It sounds like the wish for a different future. “I said you were going to fuck me.”
Standing by the door to his room in his pants and bare feet when Dorian is dressed again, Orym reaches again for his paltry magic and produces a crown of cornflowers nearly the same shade as Dorian’s skin, holds it out to him with a smile he hopes doesn’t seem too sentimental or longing.
“We don’t know what the future is,” he says in parting, but he’s certain he does know.