THE MIST was cool on Shea's cheeks; sweet in each breath. He hanged the thin handle of his lunch basket by the nook of his folded elbow, and strolled along the unmarked-but-familiar path through the forest, toward the lake where he liked to sit. Its basin was open to the sky, a unique quality in that vast, dense wood. There, Shea could bask in the sun's warmth and light.

 

The bundle of sticks his mother had sent him to fetch was balanced across the brown-haired youth's pixieish shoulders. With his free hand, Shea explored the shapes and textures of the trunks and leaves that surrounded him. His body switched between hot and cold states as he strolled through sunspots and shadows.

 

It was a space and time in which the young human found it effortless to lose himself. Really, these were his favorite moments. Happy, alone.

 

An urge to sing struck Shea; he pursed his lips.

 

A gasp escaped him instead.

 

Another voice had burst into song. Deeper than Shea's, but with a soft inhuman grace. Hauntingly so.

 

It was an absolutely alien melody.

 

Shea did not understand the language in which the delightful voice sang. Yet its tune was beautiful in his ears all the same.

 

The ethereal call hooked Shea and tugged him along, toward the lake, and the edge of the shaded wood.

 

Shea crouched down as he drew nearer to the source of the siren song. His big brown eyes and small pink mouth were open, suspended: frozen excitement. There, sunken into the water up to its ribs, was a lithe figure with its back turned to the young man—who hid in the last, low barrier of bushes before the open ground of the lake's sunny shore.

 

Shea seldom espied others in the quiet pocket of the forest that he and his mother claimed as their home. Rarer still did he reveal himself to a stranger—and only then because his mother, Mia, needed some hard-to-procure essential.

 

Mia would certainly want to know about another body so close, Shea knew: with all haste.

 

Lip-between-teeth, Shea retreated from the bathing, singing, carefree visitor. He backtracked with slinking steps toward the cover of the towering trees and their heady pine tang, and entered the protective gloom under their canopies of moss, which draped between the branchless trunks like spiders' webs.

 

The youth glanced back at the lovely figure. And stared for several bars of its chorus. Roses bloomed just below the surface of Shea's pale cheeks. At once, it was impossible to take even one more step in the direction of the cabin where his mother waited—for him, and for the kindling he carried, to start their supper. It was his duty to warn Mia, and yet his legs would not allow it; so his brain floated there, helpless inside the stillness of his bodily confines.

 

Then—so abrupt that Shea flinched—the song ceased mid-note.

 

The stranger turned in Shea's direction; the youth clambered behind the bushline and nearly toppled his basket and bundle in the process.

 

An eerie silence settled across the lake in the absence of that indelible hymn, so quiet and still that Shea heard water that sluiced around limbs—the other person's wake. So quiet, that every breath of Shea's roared in his own ears.

 

Yet, scared as he was, trapped though he was, Shea could not resist peeking. He had glimpsed this visitor from behind, and now, mind full of wonder, he yearned to discover all of the rest of this mysterious form, for already he was smite-bitten.

 

Shea's greedy eyes mapped every little detail about the alluring form he beheld as the outsider emerged smoothly from the placid lake: the thin, vigorous face, hollow cheeked, sharp chinned; drenched blond-brown hair spilled overtop the prominent curves of the stranger's shoulders; a leanly muscled body with brilliantly colorful markings, like paint, ran up and down sun-kissed flesh. A man, Shea discovered, as the stranger's hips breached the liquid plane: his thick wet cock glinted in the sunlight where it hung. Shea blushed fiercely; he sank deeper into the sweet-smelling brush, which mostly obscured the oncomer from his view.

 

The tall, thin man drew ever closer, swaying like a willow while he walked. His bare feet hissed into the sandy scrub.

 

Worry pooled inside Shea with every violent tick of his heart. Would the man spot him?

 

Never before had Shea been caught flat-footed by an intruder in his own wood. Shea's mind raced to cobble together an excuse for his presence for when he was inevitably uncovered. It was a new and awful mode for Shea, and even in the homey stillness of his forest, reality galloped furiously by him—the world spun too fast.

 

Crush; crush; crush.

 

In the chaos of that moment, another whisper: he should sneak away before the lovely man was completely on top of him.

 

Shea was born in that forest. He knew its many amorphous paths as well as another person might the rigid halls of their life-long abode. For that was what Shea considered the timberland—not just the modest shack his mother had built, before his birth—but for as far out as he could explore, the forest itself was his home. His and his mother's alone. They were a part of that biome, as much as any of its beasts.

 

The footsteps halted as Shea's mind raced on; the spectral insides of his skull continued to whirl so, that Shea did not notice the quiet, at first.

 

Any aural evidence that there was, in fact, anyone beyond the bushline faded after a short final shuffle of movement.

 

As Shea stooped in the shade, the lake returned fully to its familiar and natural ambience. Birds called, and bugs chirped, and the wind stirred the water, and the disturbed water lapped noisily at the lip of the shore. In all that peace especially, the terminally curious human had a hard time staying down and sitting still. He was no longer aware of where the stranger was, or what he did. That unknowing was a real discomfort.

 

Could Shea leave?

 

Could he peek, one last time?

 

The young man chewed his lip. His hands moved. Before his eager eyes, his fingertips parted the obfuscating leaves. Slow. Steady.

 

There was the handsome visitor, splayed out, totally nude as he basked on the lake bank like a happy lizard. He was stomach-down on top of a kind of handwoven blanket, garishly pigmented; his long, straight legs were aimed in Shea's direction, slim and firm. At their apex, beneath arched cheeks, the thick trunk of the stranger's manhood rested under his hefty, marvelously rounded sack.

 

Shea's eyes lingered, cheeks lit. . .

 

His gaze dipped toward the stranger's feet—a rote movement—and his breath caught in his throat; he snared his lower lip between his teeth and held onto the soft flesh as he examined the other man's lengthy, slender soles. The skin there was a few shades lighter than the rest of him, gold brushed with pink. At the sight of those naked feet Shea spun deeper still along a spiral of bewitchment with no apparent end.

 

For Shea, soles were the most attractive parts of a body. He always took note of them. Just a glance over the bottoms of someone's feet induced pleasurable waves that tingled up and down his spine, and back again—soles launched his imagination careening into voids and dreamscapes.

 

And this man's soles were absolute, unearthly perfection. The sloped skin had a smooth appearance, and ended in long, wonderfully sculpted toes. Shea was mesmerized anew by each individual feature he appraised. He strove to memorize every distinct wrinkle and whorl—every curve of every toe—so in the future he could return to such heavenly topography even after this singular being moved on.

 

The human's heart beat in his chest so tremendously that he wondered if the organ might drum its way out of its cavity, smash through bone, bore flesh.

 

But the lithe figure continued to simply lie, and the way Shea's heart pounded slowed, if only by degrees. His mind wandered, lost to fantasy. His eyes roamed in the unchallenged stillness. The stretched-out body was right at home amid the calm wood; the man was as inert as a log on the bank, save for the steady, graceful movements of how he subtly breathed.

 

Behind Shea was the forest, and its density of trunks: impossibly long and straight poles that rose from the earth and into the heavens, made skinny only by their skyscraping heights. Their distant, leafy canopy formed a false sky—lines of light pierced through holes in the shifting layer; rays danced to currents far beyond the boy. Candied mist lingered from that morning's rain, and the spray cooled the exposed flesh of Shea's face and neck, and his arms and legs; droplets in the haze twinkled like stars as they drifted down. The shaded wood called to the young human: safety, shelter, cover—yet still his body was pinned there at the border of the sun-filled basin by the gravity of this golden man.

 

With the most careful movements of his short life, Shea put his basket down—for even the smallest noise might give him away—and he lowered the bundle of sticks from across his shoulders. Then, led not by conscious decision but erotic automation, Shea's body crept out of the bushes and into the open air of the bank.

 

The sun's rays kissed Shea's flesh directly, with no canopy to bar or filter its warmth. Up above, he could see her, his conspiratorial star, though she was too bright to stare at directly: a brilliant white orb—very faintly red, if he regarded her from the corners of his eyes.

 

Shea probed for twigs underfoot before he put his weight down, and walked in rhythm with the wind to mask the hushed crush of scruff and sand. Immediately Shea was flooded with fear and regret, but the sensations melted away more and more with each step.

 

Soon Shea passed over an invisible line. A division between realms. No longer did his magnetism pull him back toward the cabin home he had lived in his whole life, his mother, and all that he knew. The magnitude of this man compelled him forward. Shea dangled on strings, and they carried him forth.

 

As he drew near the lying man, it was as if Shea was enfolded by a pleasant dream. The visitor's beauty was inhuman; to simply gaze upon his form was an ecstatic act. Long of body and limb, slender but strong, with a vigorous countenance more narrow and angular than Shea was used to—yet all the more graceful for it.

 

Eyes closed, the outsider's gold-tan face appeared serene; his long blond lashes were lit like hot irons by the sun, and his pale hair stirred where the breeze captured its locks.

 

His ears, too, were unlike the ears of others, in Shea's limited experience: carved by the hand of an aesthete god into shapes like elongated teardrops, with rounded bottoms that swept upward into remarkable points. The recumbent being wore a small smile frozen in time, as if his mind was caught on some pleasant groove. And Shea—he swallowed the saliva that had pooled in his mouth while he took in all the other fine, elegantly etched details of the stranger's features. Oh, those cheekbones!

 

Shea walked his vision down the serpentine landscape of the body before him—followed along the vibrantly tattooed blue-and-orange shapes and patterns—over the precise curves of this man's lower cheeks, like two eggshells nestled side by side, and across long legs that were as straight as the forest's trees. When Shea's eyes snagged on the rounded crests of the stranger's heels, his gaze dallied—even just these heels, taken alone, were so very pleasing to study.

 

The short but harrowing journey from his bushy hideaway was immediately well worth it.

 

Shea imbibed on all the new details he sought: shapes, colors, textures; the specific webwork of shallow furrows printed on these inimitable soles. How the rosy flesh found on the queer man's teardrop heels, the smooth balls of his feet, and the undersides of his shapely toes blended into the innermost regions of his pale-gold arches to create hues delicate and wonderous. Shea's eyes traveled these lines with care, like an explorer who charted vestal pathways. The man's feet glistened with still-drying lake water; to Shea, these soles glittered like precious jewels.

 

At that moment, the stranger's toes curled. The flexing motion deepened the network of wrinkles that had enthralled Shea, robbed him of the breath he held inside. He was lost in those fine valleys engraved in the skin, as surely as a tiny ant would have been in that maze. The young human once again had to swallow, lest drool splash onto these gold-and-pink feet.

 

When all of those toes relaxed, Shea squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture the soles as they were just an instant before. He wanted to remember everything about the sequence he had witnessed with as much clarity as he could muster—until an urgent nag reminded him not to waste even a bit of this transient window.

 

The thought was enough to knock Shea out of his trance. He checked, sheepish, if the stranger slept still.

 

All of the ember-tipped spears were arrayed gently against the golden man's cheeks.

 

Shea's vision caught on something else, out of the corner of his gaze: a nearby pile of folded garments, upon which was a pair of unembellished, simple moccasins. The shoes were long and slender in a telltale fashion. With his eyes, Shea traced the darkened imprints left by the stranger's soles; examined craters molded by heels and toes.

 

Shea imagined that those perfect feet pressed their shapes into him.

 

The young man was seized by drunkenness for the very first time, without any spirit within him—he was inebriated by fresh reality. Even the air was more agreeable: Shea pulled in the honeyed spice radiated by this other man's body. And as Shea ogled the shoes, he craved to know their perfume, as well. With specificity.

 

Warm salty substance gushed across Shea's tongue as his teeth clipped the lip he only dimly remembered was snared.

 

He exhaled a gasped breath between parted, bloody lips.

 

A stir—and moan—from the stranger drew the human's attention, and focused Shea.

 

The wheels of time never stood still.

 

To linger was to risk discovery, and as much as that concept appealed to Shea in theory, his love for this man's form and feet made the prospect of actually speaking with the visitor far too overwhelming. What if the man was angry at Shea's intrusion? The mere notion was enough to inspire real terror inside the youth. It might ruin everything to know that the subject of his raw, cascading affection rejected compulsions that Shea was entirely helpless to.

 

So: it was time to leave. Past time.

 

But Shea kneeled still, even as the birds all around tracked how his hesitation stretched with their chirped conversation.

 

Those well-worn shoes offered the young human a remedy of a kind to ease his parting sorrow, and to cure his paralysis. How dread crippled the boy when he considered moving even an inch out of his current orbit. This close to the sun, Shea's flight response only grew with each moment. And yet he gloried in the warmth.

 

With one last rueful look at the exquisite soles within an arm's reach—oh, how he wanted to touch them!—Shea shuffled by the reclined figure, and hovered over the pile of the man's possessions.

 

Shea frowned, confused by the bits and pieces he studied. There was a small bag of nuts and fruits that Shea knew were from his forest. A curiously elongated flute that appeared to be made from a single cylinder of wood. And, of course, the shoes. But that was all. The homey kit was nothing that would sustain someone for the lengthy journey required to traverse through the dense wood.

 

Shea scooped up one of the shoes. He cradled it with care as if it were a long-lost artifact. It was light in his hand. Flexible. Supple.

 

He brought the footwear up to his nose and breathed in. A cloying salty-sweet musk filled Shea's nostrils, hidden amidst the tang of leather. Greedily he huffed.

 

Shea's captivated nose clung to the tart aroma. He worked to keep that distinct air constantly in his pathways; pupils exploded darkly, pale eyelids slid together over glazed irises brown as dirt. Actuality dimmed, save for the visitor's scent.

 

Flesh. Sweat. Earth and water. Well-worn leather. It was divine chemistry.

 

The stranger murmured happily, and Shea's eyes darted, startled. Shea spotted how the man's toes curled once more, as if in pleasure. His fear gone in a blink, Shea barely suppressed another excited gasp at the wrinkled flesh; his ever-warming blush hot again.

 

But what if his eyes open, Shea's drowned rational center screamed in askance at the rest of him.

 

The youth squatted, alert, awkward, as if he might burrow into the earth should the sleeper before him awaken. Shea glanced between those feet and the curious being's closed eyes—and hoped those lids would not open.

 

The boy cast a forlorn look at the shoe cradled in his hands.

 

His arms rebelled, but Shea managed to place the moccasin next to its mirrored twin. He so dearly wanted to bring the shoe to his face another time, and take in its oddly pleasant bouquet before he left this singular creature once and for all.

 

As the youth rose, his eyes refused to gaze anywhere other than those flawless soles. Only the turning of his body as he did so ultimately ripped the pinkish flesh from his view. Then his bastard legs carried him from the stranger, and as if he had suddenly awoken there—as if none of it really happened—Shea again hid behind the bushline, where he gathered his basket and bundle.

 

It was real: he walked away.

 

Shea's heart drooped inside of his chest, as weighty as a laden pouch that had soaked through.

 

He experienced conflicting emotions; he straddled dimensions: in one, he shook with joy, for he had lived a beautiful dream so keenly. Shea's soul still lingered there and knelt over the beautiful man. Yet in another parallel universe, Shea was this broken wretch, no longer capable of true happiness; a flower that could only remember the sun, for thereafter the sun rose nevermore.

 

Shea wondered if that path through the wood would ever be as gay. Or would he remember it always as it was at that moment: no longer a stroll, but a retreat. Slow and painful.

 

He left a piece of himself with the stranger by the lake.

 

To Shea's mind, he would never get that piece back. There would always be a hole.

 

When he stepped through the door to his mother's hut, Mia was as she usually appeared: hair pulled up into a bun, held with twine, frazzled by the day's labor; in a simple frock speckled with dirt, just like her hands; bare feet. Her face clearly communicated her surprise at Shea's atypical entrance. Then, it told of her worry.

 

The woman could sense a deviant energy in Shea; he detected that she did.

 

Shea perceived himself differently. He was changed by that day—by the presence of the golden man. But how could he explain this metamorphosis to Mia? He had no words. In fact, he did not want to talk to her at all—that sensation was new, too.

 

He had transformed, and he was ready to molt. But he was shy to show Mia his fresh skin.

 

It was not for her.

 

"You were out so long! It's almost dark. Is everything okay? What's wrong, dear," she asked as she came over to relieve Shea of his load. With a hesitant smile, Mia schooled her voice. "Oh, this is perfect! Thank you."

 

His mother paused like an alchemist who waited for a reaction. Then frowned when Shea failed to speak, let alone look at her. Her eyebrows drew together.

 

Mia put a hand on her taller son's chest and called his name softly until he paid attention.

 

"Shea, what is it? Did something happen?"

 

He shook his head, but his voice choked. "No, it's nothing."

 

"No, it's something. I can tell. Shea, what is it?"

 

Shea swallowed. He had to force the words up out of his throat. Mia deserved to know that they were not alone—but how much else?

 

"There was"—Shea swallowed again—"someone. A person, down at the lake."

 

"In the basin," Mia asked.

 

"Yes," Shea confirmed, and when his mother's countenance clouded over he quickly added: "I don't think he means us any harm. It was just a curious man, bathing."

 

Curious.

 

He wished that he could recapture that word, even as it flew from his lips.

 

"And how do you know, Shea? That he's not here to harm us, I mean. Did you talk to him, boy?"

 

"No."

 

Mia gazed at Shea, dubious. "Well, what do you think this 'curious man' is here for, then?"

 

"He must be a traveler. Passing through, by the look of his belongings. He had, ah, plenty of supplies," Shea lied, "and he'll probably be gone after he's finished washing at the lake."

 

"So you got quite a good look at him! While he was bathing, no less."

 

"Well," Shea started, and had to say the word three more times before he reined in how his tongue misfired. "Of course! As good a look as I could manage. You taught me to do that. He was taller than me, but skinny. He didn't appear to be a bandit, or someone mean. No, not at all."

 

Mia's dark brown eyes drilled into Shea. Her stare cored through the facade of his face, searched his aura for those oh-so-precious little details she suspected he harbored.

 

"Yes, I got a good look at him! Okay? He was very handsome. He had these marks on him—from what I could see, um, around his odd clothing," Shea lied a second time. "And his beautiful long hair."

 

Shea had stammered terribly. His mouth had operated faster than it could be properly supplied by his mind with words. To stop to breathe was an impossibility. He fought to ignore how his blood tingled behind the veil of his skin; how his voice was so very quiet; how he might simply pass right out.

 

His mother's searching eyes tapped at his face like fingertips. Even the very knowledge of the sublime golden man he held in his head sizzled, as if Mia had the ability to read his thoughts word for word, and peered into that which he tried to keep hidden from her.

 

"But what made him curious, son?"

 

Could Mia see it? How he floundered, like a fish caught on a line?

 

"He was just so handsome, mother. Why, in a really rare way."

 

"But what exactly?"

 

"Oh," Shea hated how he stuttered. He squeezed his eyes shut in a bid to bring himself back under control. "Oh, nothing at all. Really, mother—"

 

"Shea!"

 

Never once, in all their years together, had Mia barked at him quite like that.

 

Shea swallowed a cannonball of spittle. "Just every little thing about him. Like his ears, long and tipped, which I found very interesting. And—"

 

Mia dropped the bundle that Shea had collected with a deafening clatter. It was so unexpected, and so sudden and loud, that Shea's feet left the ground as he leapt in fright. Mia gripped him by his shoulders and forced him to stand in place, to face her; his heart pounded powerfully in his chest.

 

"What did you say?"

 

"What," Shea stammered.

 

"He had pointed ears?"

 

"Yes!"

 

"Son, that was an elf. A dangerous creature. Elves hate humans—do not be fooled by his pretty face. If you ever see this beast again, you are to run away immediately. Do you hear me?"

 

"Mother!"

 

"Shea! Promise me you won't approach this elf—or any other! Do not let him see you. Don't let him know we're here! There are no beings more wicked than the elves. Elves are killers."

 

In the state he was in, Shea knew no words would leave him. He was too flustered by his mother's demand. And he was gripped by fierce hatred for Mia for her attitude toward the gorgeous elf that he had seen at the lake.

 

Surely she could not be right about him.

 

His mother knew far more about the world outside of their forest than he did—this was true—but she could not know everything.

 

"Promise me," Mia commanded, and shook him.

 

"Mom," Shea pleaded. He quivered: her stare; her tone. "Mother, I promise!"

 

Even as the oath came out of him, he knew his promise was not true. He had placated her. Shea simply wanted the moment in which he was trapped to end.

 

It had been awful enough, how he trudged back through the forest. That he left him.

 

Mia released her son, but held him with her gaze instead.

 

"I love you, Shea. More than anything in this world. If something were to happen to you, I couldn't go on. You are all that I have. You don't know what elves are like. Thank goodness he didn't see you. I hope to the spirits above and below that he didn't follow you home! No good can come from consorting with so vile a creature. Only misery."

 

Reluctantly, Shea nodded as his mother spoke.

 

But, in his mind: You're wrong!

 

His ire roiled at the way she was so set against the stranger. That she would not give him a chance.

 

Shea wished that the elf had seen him. Followed him, even.

 

Or—it was inconceivable, but—that Shea had mustered the courage to speak with the golden man.

 

If Shea could conquer his nerves, the youth considered, he could bring the elf back to meet Mia, and prove to her how wrong she was about so grand a person.

IN THE DARK, Shea's cheeks were lined with shining rivers.

 

His little room had only one portal with which to invite in the moonlight: a large square formed from the cut logs, with a mesh-weave window pane Shea often left opened and to the side instead.

 

The celestial body projected shapes onto his wall with its ghostly glow, as if to cheer the sullen figure. In that chaotic geometry, Shea's mind recognized familiar silhouettes in the shadows or lights: forest beasts and impressionistic faces; and faces Shea immediately regretted that he noticed, which were too thin, and too tall. Too him.

 

The moon's puppets danced on while Shea watched, but his eyes were unfocused. He was perched on the sill like a bird asleep, and half-listened to the hushed yawning roar of the rain; it splattered high above against the distant leafy sky formed by the heads of the ancient giants. The resulting cool mist, which fell like stardust between the looming trunks, drifted in and wet Shea's naked flesh. If that bothered him—in the chill of that late hour—the youth did not let it show: the twilight passed him by, with Shea as still as a stone that gathered dew.

 

Shea thought of that long, handsome face with its eyes closed. Those hot lashes. Thin, wide lips, set as if with perpetual mirth. Did the stranger feel this mist on his golden flesh, right then? What was it that the elf imagined, as he gazed out into the same night?

 

The young human was surprised when he woke from an indeterminate slumber. He did not recall having had fallen asleep, nor had he any concept of how many hours were spent in what now seemed an empty dreamscape just behind his waking consciousness.

 

Reality dawned on Shea: dim daylight, and its earliest warmth. Yet it was as if he had not rested at all. His longing rumination from the previous night's more furtive hours crashed down once again, fresh. Shea's eyelids drooped; he craved sleep still, and yet knew that the spirits who governed that realm had barred his entry, for the moment.

 

The morning forest, with its beasts and birds and bugs and wisps, called to Shea, but his ears strained for another sound.

 

Shea committed to action—an action that he would have never conceived of, any day before that morning. Yet in that moment it seemed the only sensible course he could take.

 

He waited, and listened carefully. When Shea knew that his mother was wholly occupied by how she hanged their wet garments around the back of the cabin, he slipped from their shelter and into the trees.

 

What heinous rebellion.

 

For the first time, he had left without having told Mia where he was going. Or why.

 

Really, Shea did not know where. The why was just as mysterious. But he was pushed along, guided—somewhere—by an unseen force. Shea could only swim with the irresistible current, and hope.

 

So he wandered. At first, it was easy to simply spiral out of orbit: each and every step carried Shea away from the cabin, and that was enough. The further he went, the more his confidence grew that his mother had not detected his escape—and the more aimless his search became.

 

Would the gorgeous elf be down at the basin again? The boy heard no singing; how he strained to listen for it. He meandered as if navigated by air currents. There were hints of yesterday's melody in every sound, until the succeeding moments proved Shea a lovestruck fool. How cruel the breeze could be.

 

Shea calculated how much land the traveler could have covered after he had lounged by the lake all day long, before he would need to make camp for the night. The youth explored along a curve; he hoped that he might come across a firepit, or at least evidence of one. At any spot that appeared to hold promise, however, there was never any sign that another soul shared the forest with him; none of the tracks that Shea examined were made by a man.

 

At last, defeated and tired, hungry and thirsty, Shea ended up back at his cherished lake. There he found the same story: no footprints led away from the basin in any direction, and the location on the shore where he was positive the stranger had stretched out was entirely undisturbed.

 

Had Shea simply imagined it all?

 

Was the golden man just a dream?

 

No. . .

 

The frustrated young man sat by the lake's gently waving terminus and rested his hands on his knees. He hugged his legs tighter as his stomach growled; he had skipped breaking fast that morning, and now a painful tremor shook his gut.

 

His body was sore.

 

Even the sun's typically rejuvenating light seemed not so warm, or as soothing.

 

Yet he did not want to leave.

 

For a moment Shea pondered if he might be able to catch one of the fish deeper in the water. He could cook it over a fire, perhaps, and then continue his search after he ate.

 

Or, he could give up.

 

The abrupt thought caused his brow to furrow—and yet, if he returned to his mother, there would no doubt be food, and rest.

 

A fresh tear, a ray that streaked downward, wet Shea's cheek. He stared into the water's depths.

 

Shea stood; he turned in the direction of the cabin where his mother waited, no doubt aware, now, that Shea no longer slept, but was gone. He walked forward. Each step was worse than the one before it. There was real physical pain deep in the bones of his legs, and with every movement of muscle. Shea slowed, and slowed, like a ship abandoned by the wind, until he just stood still—his spirit still very much adrift.

 

Rooted as surely as the trees around him, to the shore, by his feet, Shea knew what it was to be truly paralyzed in a helpless fashion. Though his legs were steady, the rest of him shook; he sweat; his body demanded an answer from his mind. It asked him the same question, repeated: where are we going? And the often imperceptible mechanisms that ultimately ruled the locomotion of his skeletal frame—the body's fearful mob—refused him even one more step toward his mother's hut.

 

"Toward his mother's hut." That was not an acceptable answer.

 

Think it through, Shea pleaded with himself.

 

He could turn left, and explore further beyond the rough circles that he had charted along the woods that morning. Perhaps he had missed something. From what he knew of that part of the endless forest, there were plenty of nooks that were ideal for a camp. He had not checked them all. With his gut as his navigator, that was the area where Shea thought the elf was most likely to be still.

 

Or he could turn right, and direct his hunt toward territory not yet scoured. The lake grew a small tail in the form of a thin ribbon of river, which carved a narrow canyon through the trunks—it wound deeply, out of sight. It was likely enough that the traveler wanted to be near a supply of water, after all.

 

But how could Shea be sure? He had failed to find the elf all of that morning, and now the day's light waned. Every moment wasted meant another step taken by the golden man—away from him. How would Shea ever catch him?

 

Did he not see: this resplendent being was far too magnificent for a wretch such as Shea.

 

The blunt thought struck him like a phantasmal open palm summoned by his own rogue mind. Shea stung in the moments after.

 

He was unworthy of the elf. It was so clear. He knew this as fact, completely.

 

Whyever would the spirits who tended fates' strings have reunited that lovely elf and this lowly human?

 

Shea should be happy for his short time cozied up to a star. To have glimpsed heaven. That he experienced nirvana's divine atmosphere with his living flesh, and knew paradise's scent.

 

Shea's rebellious body clamored for action.

 

His bowing consciousness was caught in a loop.

 

And hopelessness, dressed as an axe-wielding executioner, cleaved Shea's sanity in half, right down the middle.

 

The youth shook, painfully tense, body and mind, unable to carry on, sure to fall at any second. . .

 

When along came a melody at long last, which reduced Shea's impossible catalog of decisions down to an effortless single choice.

 

He only had to listen.

 

A reedy clarion note called from somewhere behind him, followed with a sharp rise, ended by a withering fall.

 

Instantly, Shea's revolting form relaxed. He fell as the note fell, with exhaustion, with relief, on his knees, on the soft land. All of his pain left him, even his physical hurts.

 

The wasted youth's head swiveled, homed in on the windy tune. The rest of his body followed in tow, and he crawled in the direction of that soulful sound. Shea descended into the basin, and scuttled around the lake. He was like a beetle that creeped along under the sun's gaze, over rocks drenched by its faint red light.

 

He crawled until he believed his legs could carry him; Shea stood at the edge of the thicket, and peered into the depths from where the song that beckoned him originated.

 

The trees before him were closer together, the spaces between them full of gloom. It struck Shea that this was a part of the forest where he did not often explore, if for no other reason than his natural habits had rarely led him here. That Shea did not come this way was apparent in the smallest details: a little more underbrush; a little more growth; more wild life. More shade.

 

There was a chillier air where Shea slipped in between the trunks, its familiar sweetness now cut with the kind of bitter, primordial rot that was only attracted to forsaken spaces.

 

The song continued to lead Shea through that peculiar stretch of wood. The notes that guided him grew in power as he neared their source. Closer than Shea would have ever expected to find one, he came upon a lavish structure in a small clearing that he did not know existed.

 

The abode was unlike anything Shea had seen before, vivid in its color scheme, with soft walls and a sloped roof hung from a central pole; the front flap was pulled open and allowed Shea to peer into the cozy interior: pillows were heaped all around a cookfire at the space's center—an aroma of crisped rabbit meat perked Shea's nose. Shea watched the smoke drift out from a small hole at the top of the tent. How curious it was to him that he had not detected the smoke in the air until then, and he studied the structure with wondering, glittering eyes.

 

Like his cherished basin, this tent sat there in a rare clearing; in its own ruby sunbeam.

 

Embroiled so in his thoughts, Shea nearly missed how the handsome stranger sat out in front of his marquee tent in clear view, and played his long flute. The next soulful tone the instrument produced nearly spurred Shea's heart to race toward fatal pounding. The youth gasped louder than he would have liked; he ducked, in a panic, behind the nearest trunk.

 

When only music followed his outburst, Shea peered around the bark that obscured him.

 

The lean elf's eyes were closed. He appeared utterly relaxed as he unleashed each unhurried call.

 

Shea bit his lip; he gazed the man all over: the elf was shirtless, and wore billowing pants that were a multitude of thick bands of marvelous color—red, orange, yellow, green, blue; Shea lost track—and the moccasins Shea was now familiar with, and so enamored by. The elf's long hair was pulled into a single thick braid, which draped over the front of his shoulder and the curves of his muscular, vibrantly tattooed chest.

 

The human closed his own eyes as he listened to a particularly long and forceful note, held by the stranger. It faded downward into nothingness, and was followed by nothingness.

 

The ambience of the forest crept back in where the tune had retreated, and Shea again discerned the distant leaves that rustled high overhead with each gust of wind. The steady bwop-bwop-bwop of the dripping forest still soaked from the night's rain. Calls of creatures that flew and that scurried. But the music did not return.

 

Slowly, Shea opened his eyes. His eyelids continued to widen: the stranger stared in his direction. The boy's breath caught in his throat. Perhaps the elf did not see him; perhaps there was something nearby Shea—an interesting bird, say—and that was instead what had captivated the traveler's gaze. Yet those steady, sharp eyes never wandered away from Shea's hiding place.

 

"Hello there," the elf hailed. "You can come join me, if you like."

SHEA PRESSED AGAINST THE HARD, ROUGH BARK of the trunk which failed to conceal him, and blushed hotly.

 

Through the leaves, Shea saw how the elf watched him still. Calm. Patient. Then the other man broke into the widest, most handsome grin.

 

"Well? Come on, then. You didn't say hello yesterday. I was hoping you would."

 

With great effort, Shea swallowed the lump of despair in his throat. His posture straightened, and his legs propelled him forward. Once more Shea became an automaton—his consciousness was chased off by his snapping, hound-like nerves.

 

The stranger had known?

 

The human's cheeks glowed hot crimson as he left his hiding spot. The elf watched him come; his wide grin widened. He rose from his seat when Shea was near.

 

It was then that the human learned just how much taller the golden man was than him. The leanly muscled elf towered by at least a full head, and Shea had no idea what age he might be. The being's wrinkle-free features suggested his youth, but his gravity—the way his fathomless emerald-and-gold-flecked eyes were so firm, and knowing—implied an unnerving timelessness. Shea wished his mother had told him more, for the mystery created by the elf's uncertain lifespan hinted at something like godhood.

 

The inhumanly graceful figure surprised the human as he marched right up to him and hooked one firm, warm, living arm into the curve of the small of Shea's back.

 

Flesh.

 

He was real.

 

"I'm Telor," the elf said, so close that the breeze of his breath teased Shea's ear. The hot-cheeked youth stammered his name in return, but Telor ushered him along: he guided Shea through the tent's drawn-open facade and playfully pushed him over onto the piled pillows.

 

Shea gasped, and blinked and blinked. He gaped, struck dumb. He had fallen back into that dream he thought was lost to memory—was shoved into it, even. For only in his fantasies did he believe that he would sit there with Telor—beautiful Telor.

 

Oh, what joy, that he knew the elf's name!

 

Shea gazed into Telor's beaming eyes, and Shea smiled, too. The fire blanketed him with its comforting warmth, and the alluring aroma of roasted rabbit; Shea's famished stomach performed angry flips.

 

Telor moved, languid, inside of his tent; he cast glances at Shea—friendly looks; beautiful expressions. Shea's enchantment with the creature bordered on a trance.

 

Telor stacked a few of the larger pillows and lowered himself down onto the tower he had erected. On a higher plane than Shea then, the elf crossed one leg over the other and dangled his moccasin from the tips of his long, shapely toes; his spritely foot bobbed in the air before the youth.

 

Only the fire talked; it yammered on with crackling erudition.

 

It was so hard to return Telor's steady gaze with how it pierced Shea's energetic veneer. Try as he might to hang on to that stare, it was as if Shea was in rapids, and clung desperately to a line. He drowned inside of a torrent of elated anxiety.

 

"Welcome, traveler," Shea spoke after a moment. He stuttered the word and immediately wished that he had come up with something else. Anything else. "What—"

 

Telor cut Shea off with a curt laugh—a high, happy bark. "Welcome! To me? Welcome to you, human. You claim these woods as your own?"

 

"Well, yes." Shea blinked a few times. "This is my home. I've lived here all my life."

 

"Your short life."

 

"My mother is older. She knows all about elves."

 

"Oh! Does she," Telor scoffed. "And what did she tell you? These woods are your whole universe, aren't they," Telor guffawed. "This small little world!"

 

Shea's brow knitted together in frustration. Did the elf make fun of him?

 

"Why, there's no end to the wood. I've never seen an end, far out, or up or down. My mother tells me I'll never find one. And she grew up in this forest; with her own mother, too." Shea's cheeks were suddenly hot. "I mean"—his words left him, and then—"I know there must be more. Something else. It can't all be trees, right? And you're not from here—you're not from here, are you?"

 

Shea spoke too quickly, and winced when he realized how he sounded so high and quiet: meek. His consciousness whirled, and it was hard to control his wording, or calm how his voice trembled.

 

"What do you mean, 'short life,' sir," Shea asked after a moment.

 

"Your mother knows," The elf drawled; his honeyed laugh—how enamored already Shea was with that jolly music!

 

Telor leaned in, and his hovering foot drifted closer. Shea tilted backward. It was an involuntary response, as if Telor's foot might lash out at him, a dangerous snake.

 

"You're a blink of an eye, man. I'm as old as these trees. My last journey through these woods, your mother wasn't yet a mewling babe, nor any of your kin. Your people hadn't found this forest yet. No. They hadn't need of its holes and hideaways, then."

 

Telor's wide-and-thin lips smirked; his expression set, smug; he snapped his fingers as loud as a cracking whip.

 

"A human's existence is the same as any creature's here, like a bird's or a bug's: beautifully, pathetically short. I'll admit, however, of all the dumb beasts who have served me and my kind, I found your ilk the most fun. Humans were not the sharpest, or strongest, or apt, but what wonderful toys you did make."

 

Shea's whole face was red and hot. He struggled to listen to Telor, so bewitched was he by the movements of the tall, slender man's foot. The words were mostly lost as he focused on that limb that swayed.

 

Shea wanted nothing else in that moment than to reach forward and draw Telor's foot nearer to himself, to better take in how the elf dexterously waggled his supple leather shoe at the end of his toes as they stretched.

 

Telor smirked—amused, bemused—as he stared down at Shea. He cocked his head back and guffawed. As he did, his leg raised and the object of Shea's desire slid ever closer through the air.

 

"You can only dream of my home, my dear little wildling. My world; the city where I live. Its grandeur is beyond your most fanciful visions: imagine sparkling towers, dazzling colors, impossible shapes—taller than these trees and bigger around than that little lake basin. Oh, the lilac sky! Swarming with stylish gliders. Streets atop streets, avenues winding into every little corner.

 

"I can sit all day on my balcony and watch a writhing slice of that place: the ordered harmony of the Above, where my people walk; and the bustling, bloated, overflowing understreets.

 

"There, and everywhere, lesser beings and beasts serve our every need and want and whim. Across my own property I have more slaves than I know—oh, I tend to go through them, too—and, rather long ago, I used to keep plenty of humans."

 

Telor's voice dropped; deep, thick, heavy: "Your kind has long since fallen out of style, really, but my fondness remains even still."

 

Telor considered Shea from on high, and how the charmed human's face floated so attentively at the tip of his shoe—at the tips of his toes.

 

"Humans. Ha! Oh, I suppose it is gauche to retain an affection for you creatures after all this time, isn't it? Look at you, my dear thing. That light in your eyes. You're so full of lurid emotion. You're brimming over. It's vulgar. Obscene! But what supreme indulgence there is, in human delights."

 

Telor's prismatic eyes narrowed; his smirk crept into his cheeks. He kicked his moccasin off and bared his flesh.

 

Like drink, poured slowly into his mouth by hands not his own, Shea quaffed the details of his host's foot: Telor's toes wiggled playfully, and his slick sole flesh wrinkled in lovely response to the wave-like motion of those toes. Shea wished that he could watch Telor's foot for the rest of the day—for as long as he was physically able to, and remain upright. He had a sudden, strange desire to bury his face into the flesh of Telor's sole. To get lost in its softness, and scent.

 

"In fact, your ilk did not always live this way, at our feet, or in this wood," Telor continued as his naked foot wobbled to and fro, and his agile toes scrunched and relaxed. "Your tribes have since been scattered, but in your antiquity, on another world, you built bustling cities heaped high like insects' mounds.

 

"We seeded humans across this space centuries before you, or your mother, or her mother, to serve us, here and elsewhere. Your kind slaved for ours for a long, long time, before you were cast out. Despite our best efforts, some of you managed to skulk away or slip through the cracks, and even survive."

 

Telor's laughter was rich.

 

His voice fell again, low, as it did when the elf spoke with particular merriment: "A wild human! And yet not a savage. How serendipitous."

 

When he glanced up at Telor, Shea was horribly embarrassed at how the sea-depths of the elf's eyes gazed into his. The smile on Telor's lips did not touch the man's boring stare. Shea, sheepish after his daze, lost his wind as surely as a vessel with its masts shot down.

 

"You're a curious one, aren't you?" Telor's countenance turned coy. "But what has you so curious, I wonder?"

 

Shea helplessly glanced toward the peripheral movement of Telor's toes as they shifted: the elf curled his shapely digits like an illusionist who misdirected Shea's attention before a trick. Then Telor's other leg lifted and he let his remaining shoe fall away.

 

Both of Telor's bared soles wrinkled side-by-side in that delicious way that tugged deeply at the young human's lustful, furtive yearnings.

 

While Shea blushed, the elf cattily grinned and raised an eyebrow.

 

"Ah. What has you so rapt?"

 

Shea's lungs would hold no air; his expression suggested a visit by a ghost.

 

"Tell me."

 

 "Your feet," Shea murmured in defeat. "Your toes. Your soles!"

 

"Come now, don't look so horrified." Telor's tone had changed. His voice softened, but in its depths it was just as mocking: "It's only natural; so many of your kind have this reaction to me.

 

"You're beneath me, human. In those deepest, most primal corners of yourself, you know this to be true. It's something a creature like you perceives instinctively, when in the presence of living divinity.

 

"So," Telor's soles, pressed together, came up and blocked the elf's face from view; Shea's vision was filled with roseflesh, and pale-gold wrinkles—magnificent blindness. "Your place in this life is under my feet. Do you agree?"

 

"Yes," Shea instantly confessed—it was the quietest word he had ever uttered.

 

The fleshy planes undulated, and Shea gawped, transfixed.

 

Telor's lovely toes stretched and spread and curled and came together as they gripped at the air. In reaction, his soles were smoothed, the flesh soft and full of curves—then that flesh bunched up, and innumerable valleys formed along the elf's golden skin.

 

How Shea wanted to be like one of the bugs Telor likened him to: tiny, to travel across that dreamy solescape.

 

Telor's feet lowered away, and half a whimper escaped Shea before he caught it.

 

The elf leered at him and bent forward, arm extended—long, thin fingers plowed into Shea's short, messy hair; the appendages closed into a fist, and Telor held Shea's head steady as he raised his sole and pressed it against his captive face.

 

The myriad sensations of Telor's feet were, up until a precise moment promptly past, vague details that before Shea had only guessed at.

 

In the span of a turned page, everything changed, and Telor's sole was a knowable, explorable territory: its velvety plushness; its saccharine, tart scent; the ghostly traces of salt on the captivated youth's lips.

 

Shea's body relaxed with drugged celerity. His skull was a balloon that floated; it held up the rest of him—he was weightless, gripped by Telor's hand; Shea's entire being buzzed with pleasure, drunk with returns to hedonistic queries.

 

Shea's brown eyes were glazed as he peered over the blurred crests of Telor's rounded toes. He stared across the length of the elf's raised leg and along the underside of his overhanging arm, into Telor's fierce, exultant visage. The pleasure drawn on the elf's face was mixed with an entirely selfish satisfaction. Guilt knocked at Shea that he provided Telor with such dubious joy—and yet he wholeheartedly wanted to be the cause of Telor's delectable satisfaction.

 

He loved the wild face Telor wore.

 

The elf's long toes arched over Shea's nose possessively, and covered all of it.

 

There was movement inside of Shea's mind, as if it was reconfigured by magical conjuration: he would do anything for Telor; he wanted to stay beneath his feet always. He knew this was true. This was his rightful place—he believed so in an ardent, unignorable fashion, experienced for the first time in his young life.

 

"Breathe in, deeply," Telor commanded.

 

With cheeks aglow, Shea closed his eyes and filled his senses with Telor's scent. His mind drifted through the woods that were his home, spurred by familiar and new aromas: sour earth, sharp leaves, crisp rain. The way the sweet tang from the man's leather moccasins mingled with his brine was sacred knowledge. Shea drew the redolence of Telor's foot into himself with elongated, full breaths, cataloging every minute, distinct detail that he could with great care.

 

As Shea's eyelids remained closed and he took in the elf's intoxicating musk, Telor's sole slid up, and down, and all over his face. The supple flesh molded to Shea's features.

 

Telor's heel glided across Shea's cheek; toes brushed over his lips; the ball of Telor's foot forced Shea's mouth flat—then his nostrils, then settled heavily across his eyes, accompanied by the elf's silken arch as it found its desired position overtop Shea's face. Telor's long, warm sole covered the entirety of Shea's countenance like a plush mask, and the elf smothered him: he twisted his foot side to side, as if he might wipe the human face away like a stain. 

 

Telor pushed his smooth, round heel against Shea's soft lips. "Kiss my divine sole, human."

 

Shea puckered his lips against the surface of Telor's proffered heel and kissed; a sound: a little pop of air.

 

"Again," Telor ordered; his sole shifted and he rested the delicate patch of skin just above his heel on top of Shea's mouth. "And here," he urged, as he inched his foot southward across Shea's features and covered the blushing human's puckered lips with different spots of his sole. "Slowly."

 

Telor repeated the movement, and his simple order, as he walked the length of his foot downward so that Shea could kiss along its entirety—gently he stepped on Shea's captive face again and again and again—until finally the human pecked at the underside of each and every impatient, demanding toe, too.

 

Telor's coiled fingers released Shea's hair.

 

Shea instantly regretted his freedom.

 

His view of the elf was blocked by the slab of the man's large, long sole; the soft foot pushed against Shea's face, insistent, and Shea drifted backward, confused.

 

The warmth of the golden man's flesh left him, and Shea glanced over in askance of the elf.

 

Telor just grinned and struck out with his leg. He slapped Shea with his sole and uttered, "Down!"

 

Shea blinked away blue-and-purple blotches, his vision spotted. He fell against the pillows, and gasped as Telor scooted forward and sat right on top of his hips.

 

The elf's strong hands deftly pushed away the human's limbs as they weakly protested. Both of Telor's soles were replaced on top of Shea's upturned face. Shea's useless appendages dropped, limp, with all the grace and subtlety of a ragdoll, and Telor chuckled in triumph—he scrubbed Shea's features with his pliant, conquering flesh.

 

"Yes, human. This is where you want to be. Don't resist me. You know you can't. Don't pretend you can. Show me that you know your place," Telor pointedly slid one foot over Shea's nose, and with the other blockaded his lips. "You belong beneath my feet. Am I correct?"

 

Shea murmured something like agreement.

 

Telor's fragrant warmth left him anyway—his soles suddenly raised an inch.

 

This time, Shea fully whimpered.

 

"Call me Master and tell me who owns you."

 

"You own me, Master," Shea replied with a desperate whisper.

 

The elf's soles lowered onto Shea's relieved visage, and Shea sighed.

 

"Kiss." Telor's voice was high and curt, as if he spoke to a dog.

 

Shea eagerly peppered the elf's flesh.

 

"Your lips are so soft," Telor remarked, and Shea blushed at the praise. "And this is the perfect use for them. It's a good thing I caught you, human. Just think, you could have lived out the entirety of your miserably short life without performing the very duties you were born for."

 

There were tears on Shea's rose-red cheeks. Queer relief.

 

The human's hot little tongue flicked at Telor's flesh. It was transgressive exploration. That gleeful, selfish visage stuck in his mind. Shea's tongue retreated back into his mouth with the bittersweet glory that was composed of the sundry flavors of Telor's sole.

 

Sour salt. Sweet earth. Tangy skin.

 

"Yes," the elf urged. "Yes, pet. Lick."

 

Something relaxed inside of Shea; a thread of resistance that snapped so slowly as to simply come apart. Stressful pressure left his chest in a geyser of energy as he licked at the long and shapely soles that rested on his face.

 

His tongue swirled against each heel; he stroked his slick muscle up and down the yielding curves of Telor's arches; Shea scrubbed the puffy flesh below the elf's toes.

 

"Ah, mm-mm-mm."

 

Telor's thin fingers returned to Shea's hair. This time the elf petted and gently scratched his prey—electric fingertips teased the skin behind Shea's ears.

 

"Lick. Lick all over my supernal soles. This is how you can please me most, slave. This is what feels best for your Master. I never tire of an obedient, devoted tongue cleaning my feet. Lick between my toes," Telor ordered.

 

Shea did. With care and patience he worked his tongue between each long toe. He explored the shape of them with his sensitive, flexible organ; relished their salt on his buds. Telor's toes gripped Shea's tongue greedily, pulled it ever deeper into their crevices. Shea was sure to lick twice between each of his Master's toes, before he returned to Telor's soles.

 

As the young man labored in his worship, entranced, the storm outside the tent gathered its strength, heralded by thunder that rumbled and groaned. The hushed rain-roar resounded high above; the first breaths of its mist drifted into the enclosure and glinted with firelight as the chilly spray tickled the short hairs of Shea's exposed skin.

 

"This is where you belong," Telor repeated, but it was not forcefully said. It was a calm, simple statement, and Shea knew it was the truth.

 

Shea tumbled down through a pleasurable sensation like he had never experienced prior to Telor's feet. He could not have imagined gratification of that magnitude, yet in that present moment it was so gloriously keen and clear. It was a new form of happiness, and instantaneously any previous joy paled and dulled, like petals that rotted in his mind.

 

"This is your true purpose," Telor continued, and every word rang rightly to Shea's ear.

 

The longer he worked Telor's sole with his tongue, patterns emerged: ways to lap that transcended simple licks, and became worship. Shea focused on his calling to please Telor's soles. He caressed them, cleaned them, embraced the flesh with the raw passion that flooded his being.

 

"I am your God, human," Telor intoned. "You will worship me without question."

 

"Yes, my Master—my God!" Shea exhaled the words and kissed Telor's feet; he had to remind himself to continue to breathe—it was a real effort.

 

The supplicant was lost to the world around him. Every bit of sense his body and mind possessed was directed toward his mouth—to his lips as they pressed against the bottoms of Telor's divine feet. Only the nerves in his lips and tongue and nose functioned. All of the rest of him had dimmed, as if he had ceased to exist. Every thought in Shea's mind was of how he could better serve and please Telor.

 

In the din beyond the tent—amidst the warped sounds of distant reality—Shea heard a familiar call, but could not place it. Like an echo from the corporeal realm that tried to force its way into his dream, Shea's mind processed the noise as the wind or the cry of an animal, and dismissed it.

 

The second time the same call piqued Shea's ears, it rang a little more clearly. It materialized with a clarity that dropped him out of his fantasy, and dumped him into the horrible world: "Shea," the searching voice cried.

 

It was Mia.

"SHEA!" She hollered his name, stretched it out into one long, desperate note.

 

"What was that," Shea asked, abruptly nonplussed.

 

He was suddenly sheepish about the acts he had committed beneath Telor's feet, as good as he had felt in the throes of that experience. It was all so deviant, and so raw.

 

"That sounds like my. . ."

 

"Yes, it is. Of course it is." Telor replied dryly, every word blunt and heavy. The elf sighed. "What a nuisance."

 

Telor rose and whirled. He walked swiftly to the front of the tent to pull its flaps closed.

 

Shea straightened, his body sore all over from how the elf had sat atop him; his face ached from the attention the man's feet had paid him—their alluring scent lingered on his flesh.

 

There was salt, still, on Shea's lips.

 

The youth's thoughts whirled. "I should go. I can take mother home, and come back when—"

 

"No."

 

"But I—"

 

In the auburn gloom, Telor's face snapped toward Shea. His starry eyes locked on the boy; they burned with an unearthly glow. Flickering firelight picked out the hard lines of the elf's angular visage.

 

The Master appeared wolfish in that wash of illumination; demonic; beautiful.

 

Telor strode over to the fire and grabbed the rabbit on its spit. He brandished the rod toward Shea—aimed its other end at Shea's neck like a sword point.

 

"Eat."

 

Shea's mind raced on and on, but his body was stiff. Mechanically he lifted the hot spit by its cooler ends, and blew smoke from the charred rabbit.

 

A part of Shea was glad to have something to do other than worry as his mother approached. Go away! his mind cried. Another part of his fraught core wanted to charge out there to shoo his mother away from this holy space he shared with the elf, which was pregnant with discoveries that fed Shea's very soul.

 

Yet Shea could not chance Telor's anger. If he fell from the gorgeous man's grace, Shea knew that he would not go on.

 

He also could not repress the angry, painful pit that had formed from the emptiness in his stomach.

 

A bit of rabbit was torn off between his teeth; gratefully he chewed the sweet, crisp meat. His eyes flickered between Telor—who loomed beside the entrance of the tent like a spider that waited on its web—and to that narrow slit between the tent's drawn flaps, where Shea could just barely peer out into the hissing drizzle.

 

As the boy swallowed his meal and took another bite, a shape—a blurry shadow—moved through the haze. 

 

The shape grew larger. Mia neared the tent.

 

No!

 

The boy perked up and opened his mouth to warn the elf, but one glare from the man silenced him. Thoughts dashed, Shea bit into the rabbit again. He chewed with a steady automatic rhythm and watched impotently as his mother continued along her path of doom.

 

It was as if Shea was not there at all—that his eyes floated in space without any body.

 

Mia called out. Her hesitation as to the tent's occupancy was clear in her voice. She paused; she crept forward in the slick flurry, no doubt determined to take at least a peek. She would check for her son no matter how slim the chance that he might be inside the mysterious structure, and no matter what danger awaited her.

 

Shea glanced at Telor. His trepidation peaked as Mia pushed her way in through the tent's flaps.

 

His mother was drenched, and her face was haggard, but when her eyes fell upon Shea she instantly relaxed. It was as if a ghost that had haunted her finally let her be, and she raced forward to embrace her son.

 

Shea held the spit off to the side and cried out, unsure of what to say or do as Telor's twinkling gaze regarded him. The elf had not moved from his shadowed corner behind Mia.

 

"Oh, Shea! Why did you run off without saying anything? Where are we? What is all this?" Mia's mind, freed from its exhaustion, quickly caught up with her words. She pulled away from her son; she fixed Shea with a sharp look. "The elf. Oh no. Shea. Please don't tell me... We must leave at once!"

 

"Mother," Shea began, but his dried-out throat forced him to swallow. He could not say another word: he was torn between his new loyalty to Telor, and his care for his mother.

 

So he shut down.

 

Shea froze.

 

Mia tugged at Shea; she tried to remove the spit from his hands, but he would not let it go. The woman appraised him with shock, appeared as wounded as she might had he slapped her.

 

"Why are you acting like this," Mia asked in a panic. "Shea?"

 

His mother's voice, face, her entire being was shaken by fear; teary brown eyes searched his.

 

"Please," she whispered, "please, we have to go!"

 

"Leave me!" Shea cried as his own eyes teared up.

 

Mia gasped.

 

She had not detected Telor as he crept across the room. All at once the lithe being—over a head taller than either human—had a hand on Shea's chest and pushed him away from his mother with a triumphant chortle.

 

"You're not going anywhere," the elf proclaimed, deep and sardonic.

 

But Telor leered viciously down toward Mia, not Shea.

 

Mia threw her hands up in front of her face and shrieked—the sound was new and terrible to Shea.

 

Telor shoved her; with a quick hop onto one foot, he brought his other leg up to kick Mia in her side.

 

Bone snapped in a clear report of the damage done. The small woman crumpled to the ground in a heap and wept.

 

Telor laughed and walked across Mia. He purposefully trampled her prone form with his large feet as he moved to retrieve something from the other side of the tent: a flamboyantly dyed pouch tied closed with a prismatic ribbon.

 

"Mother!" Shea called as he rose. He clutched the spit as if it might protect him, or Mia—as if he was afraid to lose Telor's offering to him.

 

Telor turned; "Down, pet!" he barked. The elf hurried across the space and loomed over Shea. "This fool needs to learn what happens to rebellious creatures."

 

"Please, don't hurt her," Shea cried.

 

"Oh, I will hurt her," Telor hissed. "And if you get in my way, I'll hurt you, too!"

 

Shea shrank back; Telor leaned in.

 

"You can't stop what I do, little one. You can only serve me and hope that I don't do the same to you." The elf's sing-song voice dropped into a wicked baritone: "Do you want me to hurt you? Humans need to be taught their place, doll, just as you did. And here I thought you were doing so well. Do you falter, now? Am I your Master?"

 

Shea's meek little face bobbed.

 

"Good." Telor placed a hand on the top of Shea's head. "Then eat. . ."

 

His hand slid down Shea's cheek, his chin.

 

"And watch. . ."

 

Telor's strong fingers seized Shea's slender neck and he glared down his nose at him.

 

"And learn!"

 

The elf released Shea, and turned away.

 

Teeth tore into the rabbit's fat thigh, chewed. Lips and throat muscles suppressed any rogue whimpers as Shea watched his mother writhe, incapacitated by Telor's brutal strike. She cradled her snapped ribs; she wore wide-eyed surprise.

 

Telor hovered over her. He placed a foot on Mia's shoulder and forced her to lie flat beneath him.

 

"Meddle in my affairs, will you?"

 

Telor loosened the shimmering bow on the pouch he carried, dipped his fingers into its depths.

 

"Get between me and my new toy?"

 

The elf stooped and held up his hand, poised as if to blow a kiss; brilliant sparkles winked from the ends of his fingertips, like miniature fires—pinprick sprites that danced across his flesh.

 

"So be it. You can join my games, woman."

 

Telor scattered the sparks with his breath. They flew from his fingertips in a twinkling cloud, like lit granules of pollen. The embers drifted downward onto Mia's worried face and disappeared soon after they touched her flesh.

 

The woman's expression changed in the moments that followed. She appeared increasingly distressed; she moaned in discomfort and shook her head in a wild fashion.

 

"What have you done? What is this? Shea! Shea, help me! Oh! It stings! Do something!"

 

Shea continued to chomp and chomp. How he wanted to aid his mother, but Telor's threats and his own perverse fascination rooted him to his spot.

 

And the rabbit: its taste was divine. Its flavor clouded his mind, like a drug, and the meal soothed the horrid pain in his stomach.

 

As his mother's moans became pained cries, however, Shea's jaw slowed, for something horrible happened to her body.

 

On her back, Mia was only be able to move her head. Like a turtle flipped over onto its shell, her head awkwardly swiveled as she stretched to peer around herself, as if she might spy what held her down.

 

"I can't move," Mia murmured, shocked into breathlessness. "I can't move a single muscle!"

 

"Yes," Telor observed, droll.

 

The elf's long, elegant feet patrolled the outline of Mia's form, patiently, before he strutted back toward Shea. Telor's smile was haughty as he spun in front of Shea and lifted a leg. The looming man pressed one of his warm, soft soles right into the squatting youth's face.

 

The elf's mood was much improved; his air was almost genial. Despite how Mia lied there disabled in the middle of the tent, Shea could not help but be relieved by the change in Telor's demeanor.

 

"Oh, pet," Telor murmured giddily; he grabbed Shea by his hair and mashed the human's face into the flesh of his sole. "Pet, pet, pet. I know you're scared and confused. Horrified, perhaps. But this is all part of this wretched thing's instruction. Kiss. Breathe."

 

Shea pressed his lips to the bottom of the irresistible foot. He happily inhaled the scents of its folds and furrows. Like a heady tonic the peculiar, alluring aroma of Telor's sole put Shea at ease—put him in his place.

 

His terror over his mother's condition steadily dissolved: Shea was excited for what might happen to Mia, because Telor was clearly excited for what he had planned. All at once the boy was sick in his gut, haunted by the devious pleasure that called to him, and by his desire to surrender to that call, and to Telor's seductive machinations.

 

The comforting warmth was ripped away from him, and the elf once more strode along in an orbit around Mia.

 

"She wants to keep us apart. That's all she's ever wanted, pet—don't you see? To keep you here with her, forever. Trapped! I'll make sure she can't do that." Telor stopped mid-march to gaze over his shoulder at Shea. "After all, you want to be with me, don't you?"

 

"Yes, Master," Shea answered with rushed breath.

 

He licked his lips and tried to pick through the taste of rabbit for Telor's flavor in the absence of the elf's sole. Shea's eyelids quivered with strain as he fought to take in the sight of his fallen mother: to embrace what happened to her as right.

 

This was what Telor willed.

 

Shea steeled himself for what might come next.

 

His desire to please Telor overwhelmed him so much that he ached; the human was eager to claim the role that Telor dangled before him.

 

"Hahhh," Mia sighed softly. Her mouth was slack and her tongue limp as the paralysis which worked on the rest of her body seized her throat.

 

"Shall I begin this disgusting beast's education, slave?"

 

"Yes, Master," Shea whispered, full of wonder to be included in Telor's power. "Just do as Master says," the boy murmured tearfully to Mia. These last words were driven out of him with forceful anger, and his gaze grew cold and cruel, even as fresh fear welled across Mia's slow-forming expression.

 

The elf grinned wildly at his human, who crouched in the corner. Hot rabbit sap dripped from the point of Shea's chin as if he was an uncouth hound.

 

Telor's eyes were electric.

 

Shea was pulled keenly, then, by the energy in that tent: he was minion to his Master.

 

He had given himself, and now this beautiful being owned him.

 

Telor's scintillating eyes dropped away from Shea's. He put his hands on his hips and considered Mia's horror-struck countenance with a pleasant expression of his own.

 

"You heard my pet," the elf announced. Gracefully one leg lifted; Telor placed his lengthy sole onto Mia's incapacitated face. "Silence!"

 

With fascination Shea watched how Telor's foot covered Mia's features—how the elf's flesh twisted back and forth and smeared Mia's visage, smothered her incoherent hissing. Even still, clipped pleas escaped from her lips as she blubbered.

 

"Why, I don't think she's going to listen to me."

 

Shade spread over Telor's smirk; he draped his forearms across his raised leg and leaned forward, which added weight to his foot. What must have been Mia's nose creaked dangerously—cartilage pop-pop-popped, bone snapped.

 

When Telor's sole lifted off of her face, the woman's eyes swam—her appearance was especially pained, even while numbed. A thin trickle ran from Mia's nostril; it drew a red line around one corner of her lips.

 

Blood.

 

Telor had hurt Mia, just as he promised he would.

 

The elf did not leave her be: the sinister being pressed his foot onto her head and forced it sideways; Mia's wounded face gazed pleadingly at her son.

 

"Tell her pet. Tell this yapping welp to be still at once!"

 

Shea gazed at Mia from behind the gnawed rabbit, now just a carcass. His hands shook, shook the spit that he clutched. Tears poured down his cheeks, and each pull through his nostrils was wet and loud.

 

Yet there was a mad grin on his face—its sharp points dug painfully into his cheeks.

 

"Please. Please, mother, just do as Master says. Please." Shea whispered the words, but his frenetic ire grew and grew. With morbid fascination he took in the cherry-like nub of his mother's bruised nose as she bled.

 

"Just be still, creature!" Shea hissed, and glanced up eagerly at Telor, whose smile was small, but it was there—the elf appeared especially beautiful and towering; as tall as Shea's trees.

 

"She isn't being quiet. She just won't STOP, pet!"

 

Hands still on his hips, Telor wore a mask of agitated disdain and mashed the side of Mia's face roughly with his foot.

 

His perfect foot, Shea was powerless to think, even as his mother squirmed beneath Telor's sole.

 

Telor let Mia's face be with an angry huff.

 

"If you continue on as a dumb animal"—the elf stooped over and grabbed at the simple frock Mia wore; he bunched the material at her chest within his fist—"then I will treat you like a dumb animal!"

TELOR LIFTED MIA'S BODY by her garment as if Mia weighed nothing.

 

With one powerful shake the woman's soaked clothes tore away, and her nude form dropped as if from a sack, and flopped against the floor. Mia went totally limp where she landed.

 

Shea was instantly embarrassed to see his mother naked in this fashion. They had lived together in a small cabin, and he had beheld all of her flesh before—and even admired her from time to time as something like an alluring beauty, for Shea seldom interacted with anyone else—but this was different. Telor was Shea's amorous focus, and Mia's undressed body was an unwanted befuddlement.

 

With only her head under her command, Mia glanced between Shea and Telor, for help, for mercy. The elf just laughed and walked his spritely path around her; Shea sucked noisily on the rabbit's briny bones as tears streaked around his mad smile.

 

Mia's limbs were scattered all about her after her haphazard fall. Telor, hands ever at his hips, jaunty in grin and gait, carelessly trod upon one of the woman's thin, pale forearms. The appendage crunched like dry leaves underfoot. Mia's voice was strained and deflated, yet she produced a shocked, tortured shriek even still.

 

Mother and son alike observed her injury with horror, and how part of her arm was smashed completely flat—as if a cart wheel had rolled over Mia's forearm, but instead of the wheel's blunt edge, her flesh was textured by Telor's tread, glistened with the elf's sweat, begrimed with grit from his sole.

 

The air was still before Shea's open lips. Gears turned in his head.

 

His eyes drank in every little detail they could.

 

The more the youth stared between his mother's crushed arm, and gazed upon the tall elf's beauty—which was only magnified by the sudden and violent acts that provided Telor with such delight—the more Shea craved the kind of awful, terrible sight of Mia's wound, and the thrill it inspired.

 

He wanted to see Mia completely smashed, a pancake of gore.

 

To see her so utterly destroyed by Telor's wondrous feet.

 

She was no longer his mother, not right then: she was the beast that Telor claimed her to be, which dearly needed his instruction; and Shea knew, deep down, that he was the same.

 

No: Mia would not listen. She did not want to learn. Shea would; Shea did.

 

The spit, which held a picked-clean skeleton, slowly lowered along with Shea's hands, and the young human began to breathe again—long, slow, steady breaths, as Shea imbibed on the sight of how Telor trod all over the worthless varmint beneath his godly feet.

 

Telor started to really stomp around. The soles of his large feet thudded onto the semi-firm canvas-on-dirt floor of his spacious tent, and onto Mia's arms and legs. The gorgeous elf smiled gaily and laughed, which only half-drowned the sounds of Mia's crackling bones every few footfalls.

 

His strikes appeared careless, and yet they had brutal precision: Telor stamped down somewhere new along Mia's limbs with each step and did as much damage as he could. In the short span of time that it took the sublime being to complete a series of orbits around Mia's supine body, Telor left her legs and arms horribly trashed in his wake.

 

Rather than be repulsed by the sight of his mother plastered to the floor by her squished appendages, Shea studied her destruction as carefully as he had the whorls and lines of Telor's soft, deadly soles—for Telor's soles were the cause, and this effect was their art.

 

Mia's limbs were crinkled like folding fans; their bones were snapped and zig-zagged. Her trampled flesh sagged flatly, sullied and shredded, and had the appearance of emptied-out bags tossed to the ground. Exposed muscle glistened in the openings of her wounds. Her blood was everywhere, in streaks, and slashes, and pools that spread from the torn stumps that remained. Pieces of her were everywhere: bone fragments, meaty bits, skin scraps.

 

Telor left crimson footprints in a circle around her.

 

His soles shone red.

 

Mia's head twisted back and forth as she begged, or she screamed when the pain was too great. Her eyelids were squeezed shut; no longer did she beseech her tormentor, or her son.

 

What was left of the woman's fractured bones crackled horribly—wonderfully!—with each step that Telor took. The elf smashed her already ruined extremities beneath him with relish, pressed them ever more flat, slowly, bit by bit. His handsome visage flittered between lust and delight.

 

All the while Mia fought against her sedation. She strained her head and neck against the stupor which had seized the rest of her form, as if her head might be of some use. And for what, Shea wondered, after so horrible a mutilation? What inspired her to fight on? When she did weakly peel her eyelids, she glared between the two men. Her look cycled from fury, to fright, to pain, and back around again and again in loops.

 

Shea returned the glare of his mother-turned-beast. His dark hazel eyes glittered in the firelight. The boy licked his lips in a wide circle and he tasted the last of the roasted rabbit, Telor's faint tang. Predatory delight tugged at the youth as surely as if he dangled from these sensations by yoking strings tied to Telor's fingertips.

 

Mia was just a torso—topped by breasts that sagged almost humorously, with the blossom of folds of her sex at her bottom—and a head, totally helpless. Her nudity was not erotic or of interest to Shea; it was offensive and inspired disgust.

 

His mother should have died from how profusely she bled from the stumps at her shoulders and hips, or at least been robbed of consciousness, yet she was aware and forced to live through the violence. Instead of confounding Shea, this detail only pleased him. It was no doubt some effect enabled by Telor's magic dust.

 

Finally, Telor's morbid orbit halted. He wiped his bloody soles clean on an unspoiled patch of the tent's supple flooring.

 

Then he strode back over to Mia, but grinned at Shea as he did. The eager minion's heart soared at Telor's fleeting attention, and he held onto that moment of time after the elf's hot gaze left him.

 

With excitement, Shea watched Telor place his shapely foot atop Mia's bare chest, her breasts askew from how she had thrashed and the ragged way that she breathed. The elf mmm'd and rubbed a sole that Shea knew was so beguiling soft against his fallen mother's breast, before he repositioned his foot onto her shoulder.

 

How Shea wished he could see through Mia's eyes at that moment: to see Telor from below, and to behold how he loomed, like a giant. Shea was mesmerized by the way Telor stared unblinkingly at Mia—how horrific it was for her, and would be for Shea, and yet how endlessly it roused him to consider himself under that merciless gaze!

 

Telor lowered his foot into the roundness of Mia's shoulder. The slow movement appeared completely effortless and relaxed, and yet Mia screamed as if he had stomped on her instead. There came an awful creaking racket. Shea watched with mortified wonder as Telor pressed his foot all the way to the floor with ease; he had totally smashed Mia's shoulder beneath his sole.

 

A deeply discolored and misshapen mass of meat was all that was left behind as the elf's foot raised. Curves of skeleton, its natural order destroyed, bulged beneath Mia's tissue at all the wrong angles, and poked through where her shoulder had teared or pulped—sharp white splinters, and snapped bone that showed its marrow.

 

Telor laughed like it was all just in good fun. His glinting eyes roamed across the length of Mia's torso; they performed dark calculations.

 

He planted a foot in the middle of her exposed tummy next—even just the fierce shaking of Mia's head was enough that the rest of her quivered—and then the soft surface of her stomach ballooned dangerously around the outline of Telor's sole.

 

The elf pumped his foot a few times, pleased with how Mia's innards visibly swam. When it was clear that he only throttled her to hear more of her whimpered pleas, Mia broke and sobbed uncontrollably.

 

Telor drove his foot into her, added more weight onto her tummy. Her guts protruded under the skin, and squirmed around as they all tried to fit inside a shrinking space under constantly increased pressure.

 

Then Telor flexed his long toes into Mia's swollen tummy. A tear opened up just beyond their tips: Mia's side split open above her hip, and blood and viscera gushed out and slopped onto the tent floor. Another gurgled squelch: Mia's other flank unzipped as Telor rocked his weight toward his heel, and her body ejected its contents in either direction.

 

Telor roared with laughter as if Mia had just taken a pie to the face. With his foot, he continued to squeeze her insides out of her.

 

The wicked being forced his foot all the way down; a section of Mia's spine was caught beneath, and snapped and popped beneath Telor's arch.

 

The elf did not lift his leg this time to survey the damage he had done, as he had with Mia's shoulder—no, he raised his other foot, and his sole hovered above Mia so that she might better survey his deadly instrument. With his one foot planted squarely in the center of her flattened, wrecked tummy, Telor brought its twin down, and his sole stopped as it rested along the curve of Mia's lowermost ribs.

 

Shea focused his vision on the length, and shape, and features of Telor's flawless foot, too excited to blink in anticipation of its inevitable show of violent power. Telor did not leave his captivated acolyte to wait for long.

 

Shea sat straight up, and was stone-still, and observed Telor's every movement with rapt attention: with even the slightest increased pressure, Mia's ribs creaked underneath the elf's hard round heel and the muscular ball of his sole.

 

After a menacing pop, the prone woman's chest bowed upward—a blunt triangle of bone rose between her breasts and stressed the flesh there until her skin turned a bloodless white.

 

Even Shea winced as he waited for Mia's chest to be torn open.

 

But the bony protrusion lowered in the next moment and left a red mark in its wake instead, as Telor's foot lifted and quickly adjusted its angle.

 

He brought his sole down once more. This time he covered one side of Mia's chest: his toes rested atop her right breast, just under her demolished shoulder.

 

Telor gripped at her soft mass with his long digits. He squeezed with enough force that Mia groaned in pain. As Shea watched with wonder, Telor squashed Mia's breast into a bulging pancake; he slowly wiggled his toes so that its plumpness danced beneath them, and enticed more worried moans out of his prey. With each fanning wave-like motion made by his toes, Telor exerted greater force, and Mia's breast bulged like a balloon overfilled to a worrying degree—

 

Her breast burst.

 

It ripped open in a ring around its too-stressed periphery.

 

Blood flowed out across Mia's chest as the woman screeched with abandon. Shea caught a disturbing glimpse of her inner workings: her red-slick, yellowed fat was revealed by the ragged tear in her flesh, and ruptured veins uselessly squirted jets of blood into the air.

 

Telor's strength was inhuman. How effortless such extreme carnage was for him. Again it must have been the magic sparks that Telor had so rudely blown into his mother's face, Shea ruminated, for even the elf's lightest touch had devastating consequences.

 

His magic must have also sustained her life force, as Shea had surmised, for no creature that the human knew of in those woods could survive the horrendous damage that Mia continued to wail through—then gurgled through.

 

When Telor's cruel foot lifted, Mia's bosom was left in a state of half ruin.

 

There was so little of Mia left with how her limbs were trampled, her shoulder caved-in, one side of her chest flattened. Yet still there was life in her eyes—the faintest glimmer, but it was there.

 

Shea had never watched a person die before. But he had hunted animals for their dinner, and knew how truly fragile life could be. Mia should be dead. He knew this, too. In fact, despite how her head moved, his mother was already surely clutched within death's unshakable grip. There was no way she could come back from what Telor had done to her.

 

The thought sickened Shea, but not for any right or noble reason.

 

How truly appalling a notion it was—Shea's heart was broken, and yet his heart seemed to float in a void inside of him, in a place he could not reach.

 

His guts, his mind, his soul—all of Shea revolted against how excited he was to witness what Telor would do to the helpless little head and battered torso that remained.

 

To watch Telor end what he had started.

 

To go all the way.

 

Mia's sullen, stricken visage lolled to the side. Her dark brown eyes found her son's, which were the same shade—he had her eyelashes, too.

 

Those eyes: a pair of twins.

 

Lifelong companions.

 

Yet each appeared so alien to the other, then.

 

There was no motherly rebuke in Mia's clouded gaze; there was fear, horror, hopelessness.

 

She was alone in that tent. Abandoned.

 

She had no son—not there.

 

And Shea's eyes—more than any other part of him, Shea was most aware of how steady his own gaze was. The rest of his body tensed and flinched and fought itself, but his eyes were unblinking, unwavering, eager.

 

His eyes took, and did not give.

 

Telor's lovely foot clamped down on Mia's head. Shea chortled at how her face contorted as she moaned with fresh pain, squeezed underneath his Master. Her skull popped loudly in protest. Shea fully expected Telor's foot—so perfect in profile—to effortlessly squash Mia's head at last.

 

Shea wanted to see that.

 

He craved that sight.

 

"Yes," Shea heard himself whisper.

 

His tongue licked his lips; he was aware of this motion in a disconnected and distracted way, as if removed from his body, as if he floated just above his form.

 

His eyes were as big and round as an owl's, and full of orange fire, lit by the genteel flame in the center of the dim room—which rarely crackled, as if it watched, too.

 

Shea's lips curled: "Beast," he whisper-growled, and glared at his destroyed mother.

 

When the youth glanced up at Telor's angular, pretty face, he was ecstatic to meet his Master's gold-and-emerald gaze.

 

"Smash her," Shea urged; "Crush it," he hissed.

 

"Oh, ho," Telor tittered delicately under his breath, and added a warmly spoken, resonant, "pet."

 

But the deific elf did not drive his leanly muscled leg downward, or send his foot to the ground with his usual malicious glee—his leg elevated instead, and a jilted gasp escaped Shea.

 

Telor chuckled, but Shea was too lost as he observed how the man's foot soared to notice.

 

Telor's foot ascended, as graceful as the long-necked birds that sometimes shared the lake with Shea. The elf's lengthy, dextrous toes flexed. The curved arch of his incomparable sole changed from a smooth and alluring plane to an arrangement of supple wrinkles. The limb's upward trajectory paused, and Telor's playful digits wiggled around each other—a movement that seemed just for Shea, and spread waves of pleasure that bounded up and down Shea's spine—just before the foot dove south.

 

As if in for the kill; as if after its prey.

 

Shea could not breathe, or blink.

 

Time froze, and reality was still.

 

Only Telor moved. Only Telor existed.

 

The grinning elf's foot returned to the base of Mia's ribcage, and this time the upper musculature of his sole, and his long toes, pressed down with ruthless finality. A loud and brutal pop played prelude to how Mia's sternum bloodily erupted from amidst what was left of her her bosom—bone shaped like a shark's sinister fin breached the surface of her flesh—and her lowermost ribs were pressed flat in an awful cacophony of squelches and snaps.

 

Her murderer's lips made a shape like an O as he hooted, as if with surprise, at how Mia came apart.

 

Telor's expression was full of devilish glee, and he stood with his hands on his hips—it was a powerful pose, to Shea's mind: Telor did not need the strength of his arms, or his hands, to "teach" this beast, only his killer feet. Telor barely put any effort at all into Mia's murder.

 

With a haughty laugh like he had read Shea's thoughts—which the youth would believe possible if Telor told him it was—Telor drove one of his feet into the ruination of Mia's body; she moaned horribly, her voice flat and blood-drowned and just barely audible.

 

Telor kicked his leg upward and flipped a bloody flap of the woman's bisected chest over—Mia's quiet scream deflated—and the flop of gore spread out under her horribly trampled arm smashed at her side, like a joke of a wing. The elf repeated the process with her other side. He dug his foot into the cavity of her torso and turned her chest over—the part that held her intact breast—so that it plopped underneath her opposite arm.

 

It was a gruesome sight beyond Shea's wildest nightmares: Mia's chest divided in half and spread out like an open book. Her inner machinery, which struggled and failed, was laid bare by this act, and still Mia lived. She sobbed breathlessly as Telor started to march in place on top of her; he wore a wolfish grin.

 

He stomped one of pushed-out flaps; he stomped the other flap. Blood gushed out in all directions as her turned-over breast popped with a wet splash.

 

One by one her quivering organs were mashed flat. Telor stepped on each of these purple or reddish balloon-like structures with relish. He kicked out long sloppy ropes from her guts, and then pressed them thin so that they formed snaking patterns on the floor—almost like the tattoos that adorned Telor's torso. Telor paid particular attention to two large inflating and deflating sacks, and air was forced out of Mia's mouth, choking how she gurgled when he stepped onto these.

 

His mother's body was truly destroyed. Shea had envisioned a pancake of gore. Now here it was, and the reality was far more dreadful and wonderful than he previously imagined.

 

It was bloody art; she was fully a creation of Telor's feet.

 

That one thought was enough that Shea loved to gaze upon her, and with great interest he studied how Telor's feet continued to work on her.

 

Mia's form was still there, in shape, but it had been—and continued to be—pounded magnificently flat by the elf's relentless soles. Her limbs were crooked as lightning bolts, and the way her skeleton and compacted flesh was arranged on the ground, and her ribs were stamped out to her sides—her profane wings—made her appear more avian than human. At the top of this obscene wreck was her head, which moaned, and begged wordlessly, and wailed without air. She pleaded constantly but weakly, and it was all unintelligible—her voice was little more than a slurped hiss.

 

Only Mia's heart was left intact in that mess. A red little fist clenched tightly around her fast-fading lifeforce.

 

Telor stepped off of Mia. He stood just to the side of her, and stared right at Shea.

 

The tall, handsome elf's slow-growing smile was as beautiful and as satisfying as a sunrise.

 

His radiant flesh shone gold.

 

And there was Mia at Telor's red-soled feet, Shea's own mother—your own mother! a voice in his mind screamed—reduced to a head: face, skull, brain.

 

Her eyes swam in their sockets as her head rocked to and fro. She paused to lock Telor or Shea with a glazed glare—but like a capsized ship that filled with water, she could not keep her head steady for long.

 

Her body was ruined, trampled. Her exposed, smashed organs pulsated. Ruptured tubes peeked out from her carnal remains. They weakly squirted arcing spurts of blood, like some hellish fountain, as her heart continued to function beyond the point of terminal failure. Her lungs fluttered and collapsed; they spilled air out of the tears in their sack-like structures and refused to fill any further.

 

She was a trampled bird.

 

A blood eagle.

 

The youth had to lick his lips to unglue them from one another.

 

"My... She's. . .

 

"It's beautiful, Master," Shea murmured.

 

Telor showed all his shapely teeth then, and they sparkled inside the frame of his cruelly shaped lips. "You lovely thing!"

THE ELF LAUGHED, high and happy, and walked along a curve around Mia's splattered form—now he took care not to trod on her.

 

Shea watched him come; his Master's eyes never left him.

 

Shea struggled for air. He was not prepared for Telor to be so close, or so tall.

 

It was as if the elf grew a little more with each moment that passed.

 

Shea had not stood since Telor first ordered him down onto his knees, which were raw with dull pain after so long a time in that position. He imagined that his mind must have played tricks—and Telor was so naturally lofty and lithe besides—for he stared ahead at the elf's thighs, and not at his waist, as the youth thought he should.

 

A disoriented sense of scale nagged Shea.

 

But Telor pushed his long, thick fingers into Shea's hair and ruffled the soft brown threads like the fur coat of a beloved pet, and Shea was lost. A moan poured from Telor's elegant neck and lovely mouth: deep honey; Shea whimpered at the heavenly sound, and pushed his face forward into Telor's thighs.

 

Beneath his clothes the elf's flesh was firm and warm—so full of rich vitality, and finely muscled—and the material of his pants was the softest of any garment that Shea had ever felt. He nuzzled his cheek against his Master's leg and purred.

 

The young human was overwhelmed. His lips parted as if he might say something.

 

Telor tapped softly at the back of Shea's head; Shea closed his mouth.

 

The suggestion was the only hint that the longing servant required. Shea lowered himself and prostrated on his hands and knees before Telor, and he kissed the lengthy tops of the elf's bare feet. His nostrils caught their sweet salt, as well as something else—an iron tang; blood. 

 

Inside the tent's sultry atmosphere, Mia's sighing death was a softer tune than the dying fire's hushed crackle. For the first moment in a lengthy stretch of time, the sounds of Shea's forest home reached him once again.

 

There were the psychotic shrieks of the long-tailed parrots that called to one another in the early evening. Droplets rapped on the marquee's roof—the rain had died, but would pick up soon enough, Shea knew. Nearby, even, as Shea lowered his lips to the tops of Telor's deadly, beautiful feet, over and over, a doe grunted caution to its calves.

 

A simple sigh from Telor shattered Shea's attention on anything else, but it was a pleased and relaxed sound. Shea did not cease his kisses along the tops of Telor's feet until they eventually moved, and slid out of reach of his eager lips.

 

Shea sat up to find that Telor gracefully turned before him, and that the elf bent one leg at the knee so that his foot rose as he spun.

 

With one languid movement, Telor pinned Shea to the tent pole at his back.

 

The elf's warm, grubby sole pressed against the human's bare chest—Telor's powerful and steady pulse, the blood-beat of the man's heart, drummed on Shea's trunk, and thumped in time with his own heart.

 

Shea glanced down to find that his shirt drooped awkwardly from his shoulders. The garment's neckline sagged, almost at the line of his navel.

 

Telor's sole, too, struck the youth as so imposingly large and heavy that no amount of squirming would budge the weight of his Master from him.

 

The realization that he was snared and could not escape Telor in that moment flooded Shea's already overloaded mind with excitement and fear—the dueling sensations roiled inside of him, oil and water; they sloshed like the waves of a thrashing tempest.

 

It was a taste of Mia's savage demise.

 

"I love the look of her," Telor said as he held his pose. "She's my new favorite rug."

 

His form loomed over Shea. The human quaked, enveloped, trapped behind the elf's long legs, and rooted by the firm press of Telor's lethal sole.

 

And Shea could spy what remained of his mother from between Telor's legs.

 

Her body, spread out and thinned, was truly like a grotesque carpet, but made with chunks and paste, instead of fibers.

 

Her head—all that was whole of her, besides her useless heart—was turned on its side. She faced her killer, and her betrayer. Still and pale, drained of its blood, there was an undeniable light in her eyes yet, dull as it was.

 

Life. As it teetered over death's invisible void.

 

The pressure which held Shea in place lessened as Telor cast off from the young man's body. Shea winced from how the motion had compressed his chest, and wondered if he might bruise—Telor radiated power; his height seemed oddly grand. The tall elf sauntered over to where Mia's head lay and Shea watched him go, choked by anticipation, hands on his knees—those knees stung viciously, having had no relief since the gory display had started.

 

The warm imprint of Telor's sole lingered on Shea's chest—the exact shape of it, and all of the precise curves where the elf's toes had touched him.

 

How Shea wished that spectral presence would never fade.

 

He wanted to wear the sensation of Telor's large stamp on him, like a brand.

 

He hoped that spot would bruise and capture a relief of Telor's sole.

 

Mia's brown eyes—so glazed that they appeared gray—tracked Telor's advance and flickered between his two feet as they approached. The woman's lids and lips slowly stretched to display her worry. Her head shook a little as it strained to take in her butcher's return, powered by what orphaned muscle remained in her neck. If it could have, Shea mused, Mia's head would have wriggled away like a worm.

 

Her heart was in Telor's path, and the elf's foot stomped down and squished the organ as if he did not even see it. There was not any blood; that heart had no more blood to give. 

 

Afterward, with a haughty laugh, Telor stepped onto her head as he passed over, like Mia's skull was simply the next stone in the sequence of a river crossing.

 

Joy twisted inside of Shea; he noted how Mia's face could still move and show pain as Telor had wickedly trod onto her. The elf swung right around, and stepped onto and over Mia's head as her face contorted—comically, to Shea. There was something cartoonish about her drained features. It was absurd that she was even still alive. How Telor toyed with her sent Shea into a fit of giggles he could not contain.

 

Telor's handsome face turned toward his slave, and the warm grin that blossomed there gleamed like a trophy to Shea.

 

Telor paused then, and frowned down at Mia's head.

 

He planted his foot on top of her skull as one might to stop a ball from rolling, and left his sole on her as he appeared to think. The elf irreverently smeared his flesh all over Mia's head as he pondered—smooshed her scrunched-up features even more. Her pale flesh grew pink from the thin coating of her own blood that Telor's sole was brushed with.

 

There sounded a clap! clap! clap! as Telor rapidly lifted and lowered his foot. He smacked at Mia's cheek with his sole. She winced, braced against his buffeting slaps, but Telor did not stop. His blows did slow, but only so he could clap his sole onto her harder, and harder, and harder.

 

More and more: Slap. Slap! Stomp! Stomp!

 

With each hard impact, Shea expected Mia's face would buckle.

 

It quickly did.

 

Telor pushed his heel down through the woman's cheek, which caved in her cheek's curve and skewed her jaw. Even after that, Telor stomped, without remorse or hesitation—a staccato of pops told how many of Mia's teeth were dislodged by the blow. She spit them out in a bloody mess, and Shea cackled and cheered at the show.

 

Telor chuckled, and used his foot to turn Mia's injured head with an incongruous amount of care.

 

Mia's faded gray-brown eyes cast one last flat look at Shea before she was forced to gaze at the elf who towered above her.

 

Telor's hands returned to his hips. There was that insufferably smug grin on his lovely face. His leg shifted; his foot lifted over her. She could only stare upward: his malevolent smile, his crimson sole.

 

The elf lowered his foot and simply let it rest atop Mia's upturned face.

 

He cast a sidelong glance at his slave—inclined his head upward and spoke gently, like a teacher to a student.

 

"Watch carefully, pet," Telor said in a tone that admonished. "Don't blink, now."

 

Shea had gazed with awe and lust at his Master; with hungry eyes the youth stared then at Mia's head as commanded, and he did not blink.

 

Telor's large foot was so long that his heel and his toes spilled over Mia's chin and forehead. Her face was smothered into his plush flesh; it disappeared.

 

Conflicted jealousy seized Shea as his Master rubbed his sole back and forth on the woman's face. How he wanted to be under it, instead. He did not yearn to be destroyed like her, no—yet he could not deny that the thought was exciting. Shea's lungs became as useless as Mia's as he fantasized about Telor's violence; he forced air in and out of himself with conscious effort.

 

Telor loomed like a giant over Mia's small, fragile head. The golden man, in his wonderfully gay attire. He wagged his raised foot slowly, tauntingly. Mia's expression toggled between the immeasurable hurt she had suffered through already, and fearful anticipation of the pain about to be inflicted upon what remained of her.

 

Her bloodless lips worked, just barely, as if she might say something.

 

Even after all this, Shea wondered, would she beg for his Master's mercy?

 

Ha! But there had been none all along, not even for a moment.

 

Would she beg for Telor to end her?

 

"Time to die," the elf declared; his voice had dropped into that rich brassy timbre.

 

Shea licked at his lips.

 

Stomp!

 

Telor's foot had plunged, with force, with finality, and pressed on Mia's head. He kept it there, and continued to add pressure. Shea was sure that Mia's skull would collapse. When it did not, Telor's foot soared up into the air.

 

Stomp! Stomp!

 

With a loud pair of gruesome snaps, Mia's head visibly flattened beneath Telor's attacking sole. Her features crumpled, her face skewed there, and distended here. Shea watched, hungry for every detail: she was no longer recognizable as his mother, or anyone he had ever seen, the way her puffy face sagged, misshapen.

 

Stomp! Stomp! Splat!

 

Each blow elicited its own report of cracking bone. Mia's head was no longer round in shape. It was a beaten-in, lumpy ball. In the ruined mass of her face, Shea spied one of her eyes. It moved still. The pupil and iris on the little white ball swam around.

 

Shea tried to imagine what his mother might have thought—how Telor appeared from her perspective. Did she welcome death? Did she hate her son? Perhaps she was well beyond such inklings. Perhaps she did not think at all.

 

The elf continued to stomp on her head without a care.

 

Until finally: his foot rested on Mia's mashed face once more, and once more applied pressure.

 

This time, Telor was able to push his sole through Mia's weakened skull, all the way to the floor.

 

It was a stunning, surprising end, and Shea was careful to catalog every detail.

 

The boy did not blink.

 

Mia's flesh deflated as her cranium shattered, and the woman's glistening brains oozed out from under the conquering foot; the matter splattered outward from beneath the elf's toes. At the same time, her jaw buckled under Telor's heel and cracked in twain, and the sharp wings of her mandibles slashed through the flesh at her cheeks.

 

Telor chuckled with cruel delight as he utterly obliterated what was left of Mia's head: he employed both of his feet, marched in place.

 

So Mia's head joined the rest of her disintegrated morass. Telor's soles pounded her cranial remains thin before he eventually—reluctantly, even—stepped off from the pounded disc.

 

Telor turned to survey his work, and glanced over at his pet—as ordered, the kneeling human gazed over the sight of his crushed mother. Still Shea did not blink. His eyes were wide, and red, and full of tears, and there was that wild grin that haunted his mouth from the moment the carnage began.

 

"Oh look, slave," Telor remarked, and he pointed. "You can still make out her face, there. Can't you?"

 

Sure enough, when Shea studied where his Master indicated, Mia's features had flattened into a still mask: her horribly warped face wore an indistinct expression.

 

Maybe it was agony. Or sorrow. Relief to be dead.

 

Still and cold. Covered by blood, yet bloodless.

 

Shea felt nothing right or justifiable as he gazed at Mia's face and the rest of her bodily ruin.

 

There was pride in him. Elation. Lust.

 

His disobedient eyes flicked toward Telor's nearby feet. He admired the instrument of Mia's demise.

 

Telor whistled softly, and Shea's eyes bobbed upward.

 

The elf grinned widely, sauntered toward his stooped pet. Outside, the misty hush had developed into a rain that softly drummed. The sweetness of the world beyond reached Shea's nose; inside, the tent's atmosphere was marked by fire smoke, cooked meat—and reeked of iron, raw meat. The fire danced and jumped as it sipped from each gust of the wind that managed to swirl into the interior, and filled the air behind Telor's gorgeous, drunken leer with a backdrop of flaming chaos.

 

"Now it's just us, my oh-so-good, darling, docile little toy."

 

Shea was slack-jawed and full of wonder. He stared upward at Telor as the elf approached.

 

Up and up.

 

As the elf glided nearer, it was as if he also grew. Telor's handsome, angular face—its beautiful, arched details that Shea wanted to keep in his vision and thoughts, always; eyes, turned away from the firelight, that were as dark as sea depths; those thin lips; long, straight hair combed back, pulled into an intricate braid that spilled over the curve of Telor's shoulder—that lovely face tilted lower and lower to track Shea as the elf loomed like never before.

 

A fearful instinct directed Shea's vision straight ahead of him.

 

His sight was level with Telor's knees.

 

Shea's grin faltered.

 

Something was not right.

 

Something was very wrong.

 

There was no mistaking it: Telor had grown larger. The elf continued to. With each passing moment, he became the giant he had appeared to be.

 

No, Telor did not grow; Shea shrank.

 

The tent, Shea noticed just then, also yawned more cavernous to the young man. What should have been a low fire in the center of the room was a blaze, and it popped and crackled.

 

The youth recalled the press of Telor's foot on him as it had pinned him against the tent pole. How much it had hurt. There had been no hope of escape from the elf then, and now Telor was only more powerful compared to Shea. Dread of that captivity welled up anew—of being in a position where Shea could not stop the elf.

 

What would Telor do to him? He was full of fear as he imagined himself splattered like Mia.

 

It was awful, too, how all of these thoughts that scared Shea also excited him so.

 

Shea's body tightened; conflict ruled his mind. It was all too much.

 

Fight, be free, his spirit demanded.

 

Still, another side of him urged him to be quiet: be obedient.

 

"Master," Shea began, and stopped. He could not find the words.

 

What happened to him? To his body? His size?

 

The powder, Shea ruminated—perhaps whatever Telor had blown onto Mia had also affected Shea. There was no denying that he dwindled, and continued to, as his clothes bunched up around his diminished frame.

 

Mia.

 

The name caught in Shea's mind.

 

Inside his head, his voice said his mother's name.

 

Her voice: "Shea."

 

He would never hear that singular sound thereafter.

 

Gold flecks glittered in Telor's dark gaze.

 

"Quiet, pet," the elf murmured through grinning lips. His eyes studied Shea's; his expression was warped with curiosity.

 

Oh gods, Shea thought. Mother!

 

The boy's mind melted into kaleidoscopic ruin. How he wished he could rewind time and have Mia back. To live with her as he always had in their cabin, in their woods. The woods! The rain, and the creatures, and the sighing leaves high above the tall, tall trees themselves—all of it called to him. This tent, its violence, his mother's demise—none of it could be real. He was in a dream. Telor was a nightmarish apparition. Shea was sure of it.

 

He was still asleep on the ledge of his room's window—he must be!

 

Shea could leave this dreamspace and return to his wood, and everything would be okay. Mia would be there, and Shea would have never met Telor. It was time to wake up, Shea's mind-voice urged.

 

"Oh, toy."

 

He could do it. He could wake up. Keep thinking it, the soothing whisper advised. Just focus on how much you want to wake up right here, right now.

 

"Toy, toy, toy."

 

Shea clenched his eyelids together so hard that they tingled.

 

The elf laughed, and Shea opened his eyes.

 

Telor was only another step away.

 

Shea yelped, and leapt to his feet.

 

He almost fell back over. The world was magnified. Everything was disturbingly large—Telor most of all.

 

Though he stood, Shea's eyes were level with Telor's navel rather than the man's graceful neck. As he gazed and gawped, Shea saw Telor as Mia probably did, in the end: as a powerful titan.

 

Telor's eyelids widened at Shea's precipitous rebellion. For a brief moment, Shea noticed something he could have never imagined on the elf's face: surprise. But, quickly, the expression faded as renewed delight took hold.

 

"Master, I'm smaller!"

 

Telor's vicious expression said it first. "Yes, I know."

SHEA LET OUT A STRANGLED CRY. He surged forward into the space beside Telor's towering body. The little human slipped right out of his shoes and pants with the movement, and fought with his blanket-like shirt.

 

Out of the corner of his vision, Shea only just spotted how the elf held out his long leg; Shea's limbs were swept from beneath him, and he soared along an erratic trajectory. Shea fluttered out of his shirt as he did—like a butterfly, dazed, that fell rather than flew.

 

Fueled by panic, Shea extended his arms and tried for the best landing he could manage. His palms slapped down on the soft-but-firm floor of the marquee tent. He had saved himself from a rolling tumble—right beneath him, however, was Mia's destroyed, flattened visage. It stared up at him.

 

Shea shrieked.

 

Her face had no eyes. Telor had smashed them into oblivion, and only jelly remained. Her teeth were crushed along a messy line; a gruesome, clownish smile. It was a weary expression, and a mockery of what Mia's countenance was—like a face lifted from its skull, and then discarded in a heap. A soft mask lazily thrown onto the floor.

 

Mia was not recognizable—and yet dreadfully recognizable—in that mound of skin, which was mixed with and surrounded by the shattered fragments of her cranium, pulped brains, splattered red. Her face was so trodden on that there were whorls and lines from the print of Telor's sole flesh stamped distinctly into the tissue.

 

As Shea, on his hands and knees, contemplated the brutal vision, something large and heavy and soft and warm settled wholly across his backside.

 

Awfully, Shea knew what it was: Telor's sole, so long and wide that it covered all of the miniature human's back.

 

The giant's strong pulse pounded through his plush flesh: whump, whump, whump; the sole throbbed against Shea—a living blanket.

 

Telor's voice was downright sinister as it filled the air above him. "Did you enjoy the rabbit, little one? Did it have just the right amount of spice?"

 

Gods, spirits, fiends, and fae—it was the rabbit!

 

Shea was now so very small.

 

His mother's ruined face was large enough to be hung on a wall, like a ghastly quilt.

 

Around him, too, the tent was a vast chamber; a great dragon's lair.

 

The fire was more like a furious conflagration that consumed a house, than kindling lit to warm a cozy tent.

 

And Telor—Telor was a giant, Shea thought with fear, and could most likely, very easily, press the life from him with a single step.

 

Mia's ruination had been slow and painful.

 

Shea might be ended in an instant.

 

The young man could not stop his little legs and arms from how they shook—he did not realize that he pissed down one thigh until the warm liquid reached the back of his knee.

 

Telor's thick, rounded toes curled; they flexed across Shea's shoulders, pushed on his head.

 

Then Telor's foot added more pressure onto Shea, and forced him down. For a moment, Shea held this pose; his limbs wobbled horribly. Nearly a second too late he surrendered. Telor's sole pressed the youth flat against the circle of Mia's flattened face, which was like lying on a tanned hide.

 

It was an amazing sensation; it was a horrid sensation: Telor's expansive sole totally covered Shea. His little head was trapped on its side beneath the elf's powerful toes, and the ends of Shea's legs were held fast beneath the hard curve of Telor's heel. Together, Telor's toes and his heel kept Shea completely restrained, helpless but to squirm and wiggle beneath the soft plane of the towering man's fleshy arch.

 

The giant's voice was just a whisper, but to Shea's miniature ears it still sounded with a powerful rumble: "Trying to escape me, slave?"

 

Shea mewled with worry as the muscles along Telor's sole undulated all over his naked backside.

 

"After all I've done for you?"

 

The elf's foot lifted ever so slightly, but not so much that Shea could get free; though the boy was able to pull himself up far enough that he could gaze across the nightmarish vista of gore around him.

 

"Why, I made this for you!"

 

When Shea began to sob, Telor kicked him in the side and flipped the diminutive human onto his back.

 

Shea beheld Telor then as a proper colossus. The legs of the elf's colorful striped pants stretched upward like endless pillars. High above, across the muscular plane of Telor's torso, only Telor's eyes and forehead were visible: his glinting stare peeked down at Shea. Telor leaned forward, dizzyingly he loomed. The rest of his beaming visage appeared over the horizon of his chest like a menacing sunrise: smiling eyes and a grin full of shining teeth.

 

Shea made no move to flee as Telor raised his sole overhead. For as much fear filled Shea, he was enchanted with awe in equal measure: that he gazed upon Telor's foot from below, from a bug's perspective—it was a new experience of the man's sole entirely.

 

Telor was a ravishing, inexorable giant.

 

From Shea's diminished vantage, Telor's flesh was a large structure full of wondrous fresh detail, with arcing and swirling lines that drew intricate shapes that Shea recognized from Mia's printed skin—a mesmerizing and artful pattern.

 

The expanse was lightly brushed with dirt from the floor, smeared with crimson, and flecked, horribly, with bits of what looked like meat. Mercifully, most of what besmirched the bottoms of Telor's foot from how he had stomped Mia had rubbed off as the elf strolled around the tent. Even still, the history of her end was written there in plain language.

 

Shea shook as he watched the sole lower down.

 

Sharp pain in his side served as a reminder of what Shea would earn with any further disobedience.

 

So Shea remained inert and let the giant cover his body.

 

Telor's soft flesh settled all across him, imprisoned him. Even still the sole had tremendous weight, and Shea was pushed down under the firm muscles that worked just beyond the plush padding.

 

Movement: Telor's foot slid up and down, and Shea shuddered with pleasure. Anguish and regret followed as Shea's immobility sank in.

 

There would be no escape, the boy knew.

 

And yet, though grit from Mia's demise rubbed onto Shea, Telor's foot absorbed him into another realm: the silken texture of the elf's flesh was electric against Shea's bare skin. He could not move, but he was in ecstasy—that he could not move only heightened the sensation. Telor's foot had him completely pinned; the naked sole smothered his nudity. The young man was flush with arousal, but there was a chill that would not leave him, a thought: that Telor was going to crush him.

 

This was how he was going to die: pressed flat like a bug beneath Telor's glorious sole.

 

Shea's tongue slipped out from between his compressed lips.

 

He lapped at the giant's salty flesh.

 

Shea squirmed with all of his might, which did not produce much movement at all. Not to escape—no, he begged Telor with his body.

 

Yet his pinned cock throbbed brashly with life. Despite how scared he was to die, Shea was endlessly excited by the size and weight of Telor's foot on top of him. All of its pleasures were amplified: its warmth enveloped; its scents were powerfully potent and drug-like. Shea could not help how he rhythmically pressed his hips against Telor's giant sole; it just felt so wildly good to be beneath that canopy of flesh.

 

Telor's sole shifted, and if Shea could have, he would have yelped. His worry that he might be crushed bubbled back up. But instead of lowering down and smashing him flat, Shea was at the mercy of a circular motion—a smothering, twisting pressure. Telor worked his foot side-to-side on top of Shea's little form. The length of the giant's foot was greater than Shea's height; the elf's heel swept over his legs, and the plush ball of Telor's foot rubbed across Shea's little face.

 

It was hard to breathe, but Shea suffered happily. Even through the coppery tang of blood, every whiff that the youth managed carried Telor's distinct musk—brine and flowered honey—and Shea wanted more. The great foot oscillated on top of Shea, and his face ended up directly beneath Telor's toes, which tumbled across the tiny slave's rapt visage. They had a potent perfume all their own—more sour, like fresh pollen, more salt—and Shea hungrily breathed in his Master's scent.

 

When Telor's foot lifted up and off of Shea, the little human gasped in frustration.

 

The warmth was gone. The air was not as sweet. That mesmerizing texture did not so totally blanket him.

 

Above Shea, Telor's foot drifted further and further away, as if it launched into outer space, away from the earth—Telor's face was revealed; he wore a devious smile.

 

Shea could not control himself at the sight of Telor: he wept.

 

The giant elf had not crushed him. He was still alive.

 

How he yearned for an order from Telor. Shea was desperate for any chance to please his Master again.

 

Without uttering a word, the grinning elf stepped over Shea's supine, shivering body.

 

The tent was even more enormous, viewed from the ground.

 

The hulking grace of Telor's form settled onto the nearby mountain of pillows that the elf had piled earlier. Telor appeared to be so far away, and yet when he stretched his long, long legs, he was able to comfortably place his feet on either side of Shea's body. It was an odd comfort to be between the sweeping hills of Telor's skin—to be flanked by the giant elf's beautiful feet. Shea was properly placed, between that pair.

 

Telor stared down at Shea from between the frame formed by his legs. The elf pursed his lips.

 

"I've enjoyed my time here, little one. But there are still pleasures ahead, for me. I must move on in pursuit of them."

 

Shea drowned in the sweet music of Telor's powerful voice.

 

Telor was leaving?

 

The confused young man imagined himself taken away somewhere with his Master. How he wanted to escape the wood, in that moment, even if it was in the captivity of the elf—to go somewhere else and forget this place, and Shea's life before Telor, forever.

 

Shea would have escaped from Telor, if that was possible.

 

Shea would have given himself to Telor, if he was allowed.

 

The golden man's voice was tired and imperious:

 

"You don't know it, of course, but there are quite a lot of your kind here, scattered throughout these woods, and across this world. Though you would not recognize them as your own, as fighting to survive in the wild has reduced them to a more primal state.

 

"My people visit, from time to time. Human servants are out of fashion, as I said, but that's not the whole truth—no, your kind was cast out for your disobedience; your inferiority. But, oh, I'm still quite fond of you little humans. Others may enjoy you for sport, or hunt you to please their hatred—I do not judge them for following either whim—but I think you do make such delicious, adorable pets."

 

Suddenly Telor's massive form leaned over Shea—a face so painfully handsome, adorned with a flawless, winsome grin.

 

Telor's leg moved.

 

His foot hovered over the human.

 

The elf's toes formed a wall of flesh just above Shea's head. They blocked out his vision of the giant man's face, save for the barest glimpses offered between them. Shea's face was trapped in an alcove formed by Telor's graceful, arched digits, and the youth was awash in their heat, and tart perfume. As Telor's voice trailed on, Shea wandered along with his Master's words, lost in the dreamscape of his imagination.

 

"A tireless, noble mother and her precious, adorable son. It's rare that I come across humans who live as if they are people. What a charmed existence you've had, against all odds—and with no concept of just how fragile it all was. Don't remember your father, I imagine. Do you even know what a father is, child? Or do you think that magic spawned you in your mother's womb? If your mother told you of him, you may have known to fear me."

 

Telor purred as his huge toes flexed and relaxed atop Shea's mystified face; his voice overwhelmed Shea with the mysteries of his history.

 

"Now I will divine your arcane beginnings: your mother ran away from something terrible—terrible someones; my people. She never told you what happened, or of us, but she reassured herself that you two could hide, if you kept to yourselves. No, she never talked about the past, or the people she used to know, before you were born. She never told you of the world beyond your little thicket. To think, she might have been right: you two may have never been discovered, had you not followed my song to the lake, or wandered into my tent."

 

Telor's words mixed in the air, like a spell: this aura mingled with his potent aroma, and the plush warmth of Telor's flesh—the human surrendered to the energy the elf cast. His tongue obediently slipped from between his lips and he licked at the giant toes that drifted in and out of reach. As Shea lapped at Telor's salty-sweet skin, his reality narrowed, and there was nothing beyond Telor's irresistible foot.

 

The elf's powerful voice called from the very heavens:

 

"It's a shame, really. How utterly broken your kind is. What you've become. No more towns or cities for you lot—no grand designs. Usually I find your ilk living like wolf packs in caves, or like grubs in holes and ditches. And so often feral! Good for little more than a bit of fun.

 

"If only your soul found this life earlier, little one—found me. Oh," and Telor's tone dipped into his sugared baritone as he continued, "I have no doubt that you would have fit right in amongst the human servants I had.

 

"How they adored me—they followed me around like happy pups; unfailingly attentive. Why, I had so many of your kind as slaves I lost count! Of all sizes, for all purposes. And they were loyal to their very last moments, every one of them."

 

Telor's voice drifted off, lost to a euphoric moan.

 

Shea dreamed of these faraway cities. Not that his kind had built long ago, but of the grandeur of the elves. At one time, someone like him might have strolled along after Telor, his servant, his pet—that's what Shea wanted, more than anything, and as he held that fantasy in his mind he knew that he would do anything to make it a reality. Surely, his chance for such a life had not come and gone before he was born.

 

Shea could not bear the thought that it was too late!

 

As Shea licked Telor's toes, he ached to be away from the awful forest. It was not his home, now. He wanted to leave; he needed to: he needed to be Telor's.

 

Shea was so drunk on such dreams that when Telor's toes left him he lapped at the air, and afterward mewled like a dopey cat in the absence of his Master's comforting flesh. When Shea opened his eyes, though, his blood ran cold: the giant loomed over him, and his face lowered as if to better inspect Shea—and that way that he grinned.

 

"Are you loyal to me, doll?" Again, Telor's voice sank to its depths: "'Til the very end?"

 

Like one of the forest's massive trees, Telor's body moved above Shea. The elf's sole, as long as Shea was tall, slid by overhead and filled the youth's view for several beats of his heart.

 

Shea braced for the end.

 

The crimson-hued surface soared on, and with quaking footfalls Telor lumbered away. With nothing else to focus on, Shea's eyes went to that small hole in the distant peak of the ceiling then, as the devious elf left him to wait, and breathe, and wonder what would happen to him.

 

"Pet," Telor's sonorous voice intoned, finally, and the sound of it unfroze Shea's dormant limbs. "Come."

 

As Shea gathered himself up, his lower lip snared between his teeth, Telor added one more word: "Crawl."

SHEA DID: he scrabbled on his hands and knees across the floor of Telor's tent. There was Telor, hands on his hips, smiling, beautiful, vast. His enhanced size only attracted Shea more, the youth was surprised to consider—there was a side of him that would not mind crawling around Telor at that size, always, despite the fear that Telor's enormity instilled in the miniature human.

 

As Shea drew closer, he noticed how Telor's foot indicated something: the elf stood with one leg forward, foot arced downward, toe pointed—Telor's graceful signal asked for Shea to pay attention to the shoe that was before the elf. It was a sandal, simple but elegant, and its length was impressive to Shea's tiny frame of reference. He could make a generous bed of that shoe.

 

Shea continued to crawl; he could no longer pull his head back to take in the expanse of his Master's body as he did so, for Telor was too tall. Soon, all Shea could see was Telor's looming legs and towering foot, and his waiting sandal—those toes tapped at the shoe-bed ever-so-slightly.

 

"On your back, slave. Right here."

 

Shea's mouth dried out; he could not swallow as he stared at the shoe.

 

Telor's sandal was longer than Shea was tall. Pressed to its surface was the darkened imprint of Telor's sole, where weight, sweat, and friction had permanently stained the material. Shea thought of how Telor's foot had trapped him against the tent pole, and his own desire to be branded by that shape, much in the way that Telor's sandals were.

 

That Mia was.

 

The order hanged in the air: Shea was to lie flat on the sandal.

 

And then what?

 

You know what, an angry, bitter little voice whispered.

 

Just like Mia.

 

In one moment, Shea could not move. Every breath was endless, yet his lungs did not fill. Every second that passed, it seemed to Shea, laid bare his hesitation to the elf. No doubt, Shea feared, he would be punished at any second. The foot-tall youth was incapable of hiding the fear that seized his features. Only with great effort could he force his lips into something like a gruesome smile. Tears dripped from his cheeks.

 

Shea knelt beside the sandal's stage, and shivered.

 

"Here, boy." Telor's toe tapped and commanded. "Right here."

 

He could not run.

 

Nor wake up.

 

Above him, Telor smiled warmly, and stared without blinking.

 

Oh, it was awful; it was wonderful.

 

Shea lowered himself to just above the musty floor of the tent. He crawled forward, slowly. The weight of the giant's gaze pushed down on his back—a palpable force. It was ice cold in Telor's shadow. As he wriggled onto the platform of the elf's shoe, the tent's must subsided as a familiar, sour brine called at his nostrils, sweet and tangy with every pull.

 

Shea resumed his kneeling position once atop the sandal. He gazed along the length of its surface. There were five well-worn grooves just before him, darkened with grime that Telor's foot had pressed into the shoe over what must have surely been years. A smooth plane that had molded to the shape of Telor's foot—yielded to it.

 

Just like Mia had, Shea ruminated once more. His mind was broken, a record that skipped; the thought made him bodily flinch, as if he was struck.

 

"Slave," Telor's voice droned, at once flat and bored; a statement and a question.

 

The little human's head shook; his features twitched. On his knees, he appeared far smaller than his foot in height. Waifish and thin, Shea's naked body shivered in spite of the fire.

 

Telor's large feet were on either side of him—dark gold as lit by the flame—and the shadowed outline of his leanly muscular legs, visible through those thin, loose pants, soared like the trees outside that tent.

 

So high above that Shea had to bend his neck back as far as it would go were the shimmering orbs of Telor's eyes; they twinkled darkly.

 

"Slave," the elf said, louder now.

 

Shea eased himself forward. He rested his palms flat against the platform of Telor's large shoe. But he could move no further.

 

"Master," Shea whispered.

 

The human's head hung; his eyes roamed over the expansive imprint, desperately searched all of the way to the crater worn into the insole by Telor's round, hard heel. Shea imagined that heel lowering onto him.

 

That familiar lined texture of the giant's flesh had grooved the leather; Mia's flesh was decorated by that same pattern.

 

Would Shea's flesh be lined?

 

The boy licked his lips.

 

"We're"—and licked his lips again and, with effort, swallowed—"We're going to go there together, right? You'll take me back with you, to your city? I'll live with you there, and serve you, and we'll be—"

 

Telor roared, his voice filled the room like thunder: "SLAVE!"

 

Shea shook all over, like a hound left out in the rain. Tears dripped from his chin and cheeks and from off the tip of his nose. Pained whines escaped his lips. His mind swirled chaotically as he grasped for some kind of guarantee, or a way out.

 

He was trapped, even though Telor's foot was not yet on top of him.

 

It was a death sentence, to lie down on that sandal. Shea knew it, but still he fought the quiet voice that whispered to him.

 

"You're coming with me," Telor unexpectedly drawled.

 

The little human leaned back and gazed skyward.

 

Shea no longer trembled, save for a few final spasms. At Telor's words, it was as if the maelstrom that seized the youth's mind cleared. Shea's wet eyes studied his Master, his jaw slack.

 

High above were Telor's eyes, and the elf leaned forward so that Shea might see more of him: his upturned nose and wide, thin-lipped mouth; his curved ears that tapered up into fine and delicate points—all the many angles of his beautiful face.

 

Telor arched one long, thin eyebrow, and grinned. "Don't you trust me, slave?"

 

It was with wooden movements, in a daze, that Shea finally splayed himself across the length of Telor's sandal. He breathed slow and steady; he focused on fantasies of himself in the glorious city of the elves, accompanying Telor as his slave. The imagery filled him with peace.

 

A trace of warmth greeted his back—a warmth fused with the supple hide stretched over the shoe's insole, as if some spectral presence of Telor's sole remained there always.

 

"Good," Telor cooed; he stretched the word.

 

There was that singular perspective: Telor, from below. As though seen with the eyes of an insect. As Mia must have gazed upon her killer, in her last moments. Telor was colossal.

 

It overwhelmed Shea to be the focus of this giant's attention. Shea quivered anew atop the elf's sandal. He laid his head down into the depression caused by Telor's heel, and waited.

 

Telor chuckled.

 

The giant's body shifted.

 

His hands went to his hips, as they often did before he lifted his leg—and Telor's leg did lift. He positioned his long, smooth, rose-kissed sole in the air above Shea. Desire flooded the diminutive pet at the sight of his Master's foot—at its gorgeous bottom. 

 

"You'll be with me every step of the way."

 

Telor's foot lowered, and Shea flinched. His mind was split in two, as it often was by Telor: Shea wanted to continue to lie there on the sandal; he wanted to get up and flee.

 

That heavenly sole filled Shea's vision—its labyrinthine wrinkles and whorls filled in; those tiniest of details—and its heat and scent invaded his atmosphere.

 

Shea experienced a surge of acute panic at the last second. It was just too much, and he tried to squirm from beneath Telor's flesh.

 

Telor's foot was firm in how it pressed Shea flat against the sandal's surface.

 

Shea gasped.

 

His open lips strained to hold their shape, for a smile tugged at them, even as he was rocked by his flight response.

 

To be under Telor's foot; smothered by it, submerged in the sensation of the giant's sole—it was a blissful moment. Shea's worries would not leave him, but they were pushed to the back of his mind: to experience Telor's foot on this smaller scale continued to be a rapturous experience. Almost impossibly, Shea could forget that he was pinned against the man's sandal by a potentially deadly force.

 

A bug on Telor's shoe.

 

Shea groaned as Telor's flesh slid over him. The soft slab pushed downward atop his nudity and stoked Shea's uncontrollable arousal. Telor's looming body—and his distant handsome face—were briefly visible from between his toes as the giant played with the tiny human's head.

 

Telor laughed spritely, and his foot quickly moved up and over the length of Shea once more; the youth's cock was teased further with the motion, and hardened underneath its Master's soft skin.

 

Shea moaned; Telor's sole undulated as the giant's foot found its place atop the sandal, toes wiggling into position. Telor's toes covered Shea's feet; Shea's head was on its side beneath the elf's heel.

 

And then there was weight. Horrible compression. Very nearly crushing weight—all at once, all over Shea's body.

 

Telor's soft sole grew more firm with each moment that passed, and Shea's struggles were curtly squashed by the force of Telor's mass. Shea could not even open his mouth to protest for how the giant's sole molded around his whole form—Telor's heel mashed the features of Shea's face, and forced them to be as still as a mask, frozen in a rictus.

 

As quickly as it happened, the weight spared Shea: Telor's foot rose, though only by inches.

 

The overhanging peachy ceiling eclipsed Shea's vision still. Its scent filled his nostrils, its heat radiated all over his body with tangible, wave-like energy. Shea's skin was damp; damp from his own stressed sweat, and from even a short moment underneath his Master's foot.

 

Telor's sole hovered so close that Shea's cock continued to bob against it as Shea's organ bucked from how blood tentatively filled it.

 

The youth gasped for air like a drowned man who had just erupted from the ocean's surface, after a time trapped by its depths.

 

He shook mightily with fear—Telor's weight could be so frightfully immense.

 

Whimpered begging words spilled out of Shea as he gawked at Telor's sole overhead. Shea glanced to either side of the flesh: open air—freedom! So very close. If he quickly rolled, perhaps—and only perhaps—he could be out from under Telor's foot before the giant could react.

 

As if Telor could read his little pet's mind, the colossus's foot moved.

 

The flesh-ceiling lowered.

 

With a wild scream, Shea flung himself to the side toward his only possible escape.

 

High above, Telor laughed.

 

Shea was smashed down onto his flank, hard, his shoulders painfully crushed inward toward one another.

 

The trapped human panicked anew; the fast-growing pain kept him acutely aware of how awful and precarious his new position was. And he could not adjust himself into a comfortable configuration as Telor steadily added weight on top of him.

 

Shea pushed and strained, and fought and wiggled, but all of his efforts were fruitless.

 

He was just too weak.

 

He was totally powerless.

 

Telor's sole pressed down onto him with purpose, and elicited a single, loud, telltale snap.

 

Shea's eyelids and jaw shot open, and though he desperately wanted to, he could not scream, for the spike of pain was too much.

 

Something at the back of one shoulder was broken: a fissure inside of him along the plate of his shoulder blade. Hurt like he had never experienced before shocked him into a near catatonic-state: the muscles at the top of his throat ground against one another, flesh dry and raw, like stone. All over, his body tensed, but he could not move: he was buried beneath Telor's sole, as surely as he would have been in his grave.

 

Master had lied.

 

Telor lied!

 

The great weight on top of Shea shifted. The roof of Telor's sole rose, and finally Shea did scream. It was a hoarse, strained sound, and it mixed in and was lost inside of Telor's triumphant cackle.

 

In the absence of Telor's foot, air cooler than the elf's stifling flesh billowed over Shea's naked body. He was rocked with sudden shivers.

 

The pain only grew worse: able to writhe, Shea discovered that his movement irritated his wound more than the firm compress of being underfoot. With mobility, too, came the terrible knowledge of how Telor had broken him. His right arm was draped, inert, across his body, and barely responded to his brain's commands.

 

Terror lit a spark in Shea's mind, and erupted into flame: his arm was ruined. Smashed. He was broken. Forever. In a way that could not be repaired. His threshold had been crossed. He had been violated.

 

Escape, Shea pleaded with himself. Escape, now! But, in the throes of his pain, he could only wriggle and squirm.

 

A mewling whine left Shea. He wanted words. Words to beg Telor with. To ask him why. To tell him, please stop; he would do anything. Truly—absolutely—anything.

 

The quivering little human was balanced perfectly on a precipice between hatred and love for his fiendish Master.

 

His soul was shattered. He was desperate for Telor to piece it back together.

 

In the briefest moment, Shea managed to regain control of his spasmodic throat, and uttered five of the quietest words he had ever spoken: "Master, please don't kill me."

 

High above, behind the canopy of his sole and out of sight, Telor's contented sigh was like a rushing breeze. Though Shea could not see Telor's face with his eyes, his Master's happy visage materialized clearly in his mind.

 

The mass of Telor's foot—lengthier than Shea's height, and wider, fuller—moved in the space above the boy.

 

Telor's foot came down.

 

That sole was like an avalanche that slid down a slope. A force. One which Shea was in the way of. And could not escape.

 

Telor's toes settled into their familiar grooves at the the front end of the sandal. The elf's toes wiggled on top of Shea's feet—they felt for the strap at the front of the shoe, sought Shea's tiny, delicate appendages.

 

The tower of a man's voice dripped, thick and hot. Spoken deeply, from depths, even from so high: "Oh. Toy."

 

An abrupt thrust from Telor's toes completely flattened both of Shea's feet.

 

Shea now began at the ankles. Unlike his crippled arm, his feet were gone, smashed into oblivion.

 

Shea howled and flailed like a moth that had flown into a lantern.

 

He punched at Telor's arched sole with his one good arm, awkwardly, pinned as he was by his feet.

 

Shea squirmed with all of the grace of a fish that flopped on the shore, helpless as his legs stubbornly clung—with ligaments and tendons—to the smashed vestiges of his extremities. 

 

Telor's sole fell, a wave of flesh.

 

More and more of Telor's mammoth foot rolled over Shea's legs. The bones at the beginnings of Telor's toes were like giant hammers as they shifted that caved in the youth's shins with a sickening pair of snaps.

 

Shea thrashed mindlessly; he wailed wordlessly.

 

His knees popped beneath the ball of the elf's soft, deadly, unstoppable foot, which bulldozed into Shea's thighs.

 

Even though Telor's arch was so supple and plush on top of Shea, its firm musculature destroyed the boy beneath without resistance, all the way up to his waist.

 

In a primal response, Shea propped himself up on his last limb, in that dwindling space, so he could stretch himself and scream one long, lilting note—an injured wolf that howled its last.

 

The foot paused.

 

The flesh twisted in the air above Shea; it further pulverized the parts of Shea that were caught and crushed as it did.

 

Like the sun as it crested the horizon, Telor's lovely face bloomed beyond the wrinkled wall of his sole, and his pale sea-green eyes observed the tinier being.

 

Shea gazed straight into his Master's eyes—brilliant gold flecks glittered there—and Telor stared back. The elf's pupils flitted about as if he studied Shea's face with great interest.

 

The youth's once beautiful visage was now a portrait of overwhelming pain. His flesh was red with strain, wet with tears, bruised from how Telor had wrecked him. Shea blubbered and screamed up at the giant. Unable to speak. Unable to do anything other than wriggle and writhe, like a worm mostly trodden upon.

 

Though shock drowned the young human's ears with an intense white noise, for a moment, he could hear through it. A wet storm raged once again outside the tent, and beat at its soft walls.

 

A heavy rain. Wind that whipped.

 

The collective sigh of all those broad, flat leaves high, high above.

 

Fat drops fell in through the chimney hole at the apex of the tapered roof.

 

Whiffs of the storm's fresh scent teased Shea's nostrils with the world he was to leave; that intimate home, soon to be lost.

 

Telor's grin disappeared as his sole reassumed its altitude.

 

The peach sky lowered, and the rain sound vanished—too far now from Shea's ever-shrinking foothold on existence—and Telor's honeyed aroma overpowered any scent from Shea's home.

 

Once more the flesh-wave crashed down.

 

Shea's hips crackled and flattened completely as the firm plantar expanse broke upon the sandal without any regard for his diminutive frame.

 

As the elf's flesh clamped down onto his stomach, the boy was refused even his squirming. Shea shook his head violently instead, as if possessed. His body just needed to move. To get the pain out. But nothing helped. It was a useless and sad response, and entirely involuntary.

 

Shea's guts swam inside of him with disturbing clarity as the pressure mounted.

 

His ribs crackled like the crust of an old bread loaf—the lengths of bone snapped and broke off of his skeleton and scythed through his insides.

 

The little human's belly unzipped at his sides as if knives gutted him, and his entrails seeped through the gaping tears in a deluge of blood and plasma.

 

Shea's banshee wail deflated, and went silent; his brown eyes rolled upward as he gyrated randomly atop the sandle.

 

Yet his body continued to produce sound, noisy in his demise: bones crunched and snapped, his fleshy substructure squelched.

 

His one good arm beat futilely against Telor's descending sole with an erratic, lethargic rhythm, before it was caught and was crushed, too.

 

Shea's shaking head slowed—like a machine that unexpectedly lost its power, and wound down toward stillness.

 

The youth's walnut-sized skull was cast into gloom by Telor's heel, which paused just above Shea's face. Shea's vision was clouded, as if it had frosted over. All he could see besides was flesh.

 

Rosy, tender, lined skin.

 

Telor's flawless flesh.

 

His end.

 

Shea's mind seized, and failed, but his raw senses were aware of the incalculable weight of Telor's heel on his features as it pressed on his face. His face was squashed tortuously flat.

 

His brain registered the drastic increase in pressure that acted on his skull, and a moment later recorded the first cracks that crept across its cranial housing, just before Shea's head totally collapsed.

 

Pain! From innumerable points, that pain overwhelmed Shea's consciousness as splinters of his skull shredded his matter, and

UNDERNEATH HIS HEEL, Shea's head squished like a ripe berry, but with an oh-so-pleasing, crackling crunch.

 

Telor sucked in air as he straightened.

 

He cocked his hips.

 

The elf was charged; he breathed through his teeth. Underneath his sole, as he stood tall, he was treated to a few final, delicious pops.

 

Telor bit at his long, thin lower lip.

 

Carefully, the elf sat down, slipped off the sandal. Shea's body could not decide whether to stay stuck to the shoe, or cling to Telor's flesh.

 

Telor chuckled.

 

He managed to keep almost all of Shea on the insole of his shoe.

 

He raised the human's flattened form for inspection: Shea had died face-up with his body mostly twisted to one side.

 

Telor could not tell Shea apart from any other crushed human, not really—and there had been many—save for how his hues and hair distinguished him.

 

Well, okay: even squashed, Telor had to admit, that cute little face of Shea's did persist.

 

Telor's short-lived toy was smooshed, exploded, bloodied. Piled meat and bone arranged as a caricature of a human body atop wildly brush-stroked crimson. Telor was like a youngling again, studying the remains of some hapless creature he had destroyed, as his eyes roamed over Shea's delectable ruination.

 

It had just been so easy.

 

Telor lowered his shoe with the intent to replace it on his foot, when another idea struck him: he considered Shea's mangled body as it slapped against his sole as he walked in his sandals—what would happen to his plaything's messy ruin. No, as much as the idea pleased him, that did not strike the elf as quite right—not for Shea.

 

Telor had worn murdered pets in his sandals in this way before, and as pleasant as the sensation was, their bodies were often tossed about and lost.

 

The elf reached for his moccasin slippers instead, the ones he wore by the lake when Shea first came upon him as the adorable human had followed his siren song.

 

With a grin, Telor herded what was left of his toy with his fingertips. He brushed the remains into one of his moccasins. Telor was pleased to see that Shea's body mostly stayed together, and resumed its cartoonish pose there on the insole of his moccasin.

 

That was right. Shea's perfect place of rest.

 

Telor slid his long foot into one soft shoe and then, carefully, put on Shea's.

 

The cruel demigod departed his marquee enclosure.

 

He panted.

 

Beneath one foot, with every step, he smashed what was left of Shea.

 

After only a few strides, Telor fell to his knees and scooped his thick hard cock from his silken pants. Telor shoved his pants down under his folded legs and squatted there in the soaked grass.

 

Mist and errant drops fell on his bare back as he stroked himself and murmured with delight.

 

The air was sickly sweet and thickly wet, having had rained so powerfully just a moment before.

 

Telor's mind was overcome by a wild, ravenous state. With great focus he recalled all that he could of Shea's demise. Of how he rolled his foot over the little human, in totality, to death. How Shea whimpered and begged him. His sole was still so electric from the kill, and the phantasmal aftermath of those myriad, wonderful sensations from how he had crushed Shea overwhelmed him.

 

Shea's meek voice: "Master, please don't kill me."

 

That lupine wail—

 

The elf groaned as he came, with force.

 

His mana poured forth in several lengthy spurts, and splashed into the pooled rainwater beneath him. The milky drops curled in on themselves and solidified immediately as they spun into spheres, and drifted away, like strings of pearls.

 

Telor's body shook after; he fell forward. Uncontrollably he quaked with pleasure on his hands and knees, and could not move as he rode out the spasms that seized his form.

 

The rain had slowed. After the previous torrent, the unseen clouds now dusted the tall-treed forest with sporadic showers. Still the grass was waterlogged as the earth struggled to drink all that it had been given.

 

The breeze was cool, but the mist was warm.

 

The elf scooped up some of the water in a nearby pool, splashed it in his face.

 

Telor stood, shrugged out of his sopping wet pants.

 

He breathed, flexed his body.

 

How grand that present moment was.

 

In only his slippers, the lithe being picked his way through the forest. He stuck to drier patches, leapt from stone to stone. He wanted to enjoy the sensations, slight as they now were, of how Shea's body was pounded parchment-thin beneath him.

 

Every step that Telor took, his one foot churned Shea so that the human was relentlessly reduced: at first he was slick and slippery; then, gritty; finally, like almost nothing at all.

 

Telor picked a winding path that led him to some higher, less logged ground, toward the basin where he had bathed in the lake. Its pebbled shore was darkened by the storm, but had dried enough in the peeking sun that Telor's footing was sure as he strolled down toward the lake's edge to sit.

 

The water was restless. It would not stand still in the breeze.

 

At the other end of the lake were graceful birds, large and beautiful. Sleek bodies, long wings and necks. Beaked heads as thin and sharp as knives. Their feathers, like lengths of fluffy string, shook in the wind.

 

What a surprise it was to come across that little pocket of humanity.

 

Really, he never would have discovered Shea and the woman, if not for the boy's curiosity. The human woman had been wise to try and create a sheltered life for her and her son. 

 

And Shea-

 

Telor's eyes widened.

 

Then he threw his head back and burst out laughing.

 

The elf noted with delight that he had forgotten where Shea was, exactly. Telor had to remember that the thinning remains of his prey were beneath his foot, in his shoe, at that very moment.

 

Shea was already like something in the past. A happy memory, which Telor very much looked forward to getting off to time and time again. 

 

"Oh, pet," Telor drawled. "Pet, pet, pet. Did you notice? When you were away from me, you wanted to be with me. When you were with me, you wanted to be away from me. Why was that, little one?"

 

Telor's grin was indulgently cruel.

 

"Were you always that bizarre, doll," Telor asked the rippling lake.

 

He wiggled the toes of that foot.

 

"Or was that entirely because of me?"

 

The day no longer misted as Telor made his way back to his tent, singing as he did.

 

Shea was an invisible force beneath him, no longer tactile. It was hard to recall which foot he was under, even.

 

Yet, as the man neared his modest camp, he paused, missed a note.

 

Rare for him.

 

Telor's gaze sank toward the forest floor.

 

The hushed chorus of leaves high overhead tracked how long the elf stood there.

 

In his tent, Telor removed his slippers and rested his one foot on his knee at the ankle.

 

His sole was red.

 

Not his usual rose, but slick with Shea's blood.

 

True to his character, the tiny human had been split by indecision.

 

Shea's remains had been beaten into something more like a paste that was smeared across Telor's flesh, though some of his bones were intact in all that mess. The rest of Shea was more like a crude drawing of him, imprinted into the material of the moccasin insole. There was Shea's itty-bitty flat face; it wore a ghostly expression of shock.

 

With a low, happy hum, Telor massaged the viscera into the flesh of his sole. He pushed Shea's essence all over his long toes, and rubbed the offal into the sensitive skin between them.

 

Telor's smile faded, and his fingers slowed.

 

Shea, who came to him from the forest.

 

Lured by his song.

 

So innocent and curious.

 

What sweet, gentle eyes.

 

How wicked it was, hurting Shea.

 

Delicious.

 

But then why did Telor feel the way that he did, in his chest?

 

A void of sorts. A sudden hole.

 

Telor stared at the sole of the foot that had destroyed the human—remnants massaged into oblivion, now little more than a blushing contrast against his golden skin.

 

Telor's hot whisper washed over Shea's spectral form in whipping waves. "You know, I rarely regret. I have no doubt you would have made a fine pet. And I can't help but wonder at your life serving me, had I kept you, forbidden as it might be."

 

Telor's pink lips nearly brushed his sole.

 

"But you were just so, so sweet to break."

 

Slowly, the tip of Telor's tongue parted the line of his mouth, wetted flesh, and caught the quick tear that raced down his cheek.

 

The distant ends of his thin, wide lips curled upward.

 

Telor grinned with all his teeth.