A gay story: Vortex Quest Bk. 06 Ch. 03 == VORTEX QUEST 6-3 ==
== SNAKE AT MIDNIGHT ==
The passage of time in the abyssal realms had various cyclical consequences but a regular change between light and dark was rarely among them.
The faint auroras and even stranger phenomena had given Goro little indication that ‘bottom notch’ was approaching.
That was until the Sneak Attack had entered the distant, rarely used branch of Hiwinymb’s cavern system where Starbeholder resided.
Towering statues and monuments along the sides of the 100 yard wide cavern tunnel had been crumbling for centuries, the former place of reverence now a depot for heaps of debris. An eternal storm raged from the tip of the tunnel far ahead, which had broken off into limbo, blackness oozing into the area.
The place looked like night. Even the exoteric void beyond the fracture seemed darker than usual.
And at the center of the storm, at the edge to limbo, untouched by the brutal winds, was the Storm Observatory — a jumble of stone, clad in a cloud of smoky, pink bubbles.
Chay checked the time again, on the borrowed glass sphere where three concentric rings spun and turned, and handed it to Goro.
The berserker shoved it into his bag that was slung around his chest. Being the strongest and biggest in the group automatically made him the designated carrier pretty much his whole live. Not that he minded playing a role in this adventure.
He gave one last glance back at the Sneak Attack which was leaving to refuel, then joined his friends power-hopping into the storm.
It was an icy wind, tiny pieces of sand and debris cutting skin. Xane had a shield of thaum-force ahead of them to filter the worst, but it was still an unpleasant march.
The Storm Observatory didn’t touch the ground and the winds were too strong to fly on magic butterfly wings. Jumping with pure leg power and demigod-drive let them hold onto the lowest hanging wall of the crumbling cluster of stone buildings.
They made it inside the crooked, angled hallways where the storm as funneled into even greater strength. Goro wondered if being the biggest made him extra affected or if his insane strength more than compensated. Chay seemed to struggle the most, so the mania-warrior gave him a gentle push from behind. Or maybe he just wanted to hold onto someone.
Chay let a puff of smoke get blown into a corridor. He shouted something inaudible in the storm and gestured forward.
Stemming the force of air, the demigods wandered farther in, then around a corner where the wind came from their back and quickly slithered into darkness.
Finally, the eye of the storm. It wasn’t a tornado, rather a constant flow of air from and to limbo in interweaving loops, but the center of the loops was eerily still all the same.
A large, decrepit hall, the walls plastered with charts and diagrams. The realm’s characteristic pink clouds caught in the storm’s eye were lazily drifting on a gentle current around the area. A hole in the roof. Three man-sized telescopes pointing in various directions, surrounding a truck-sized telescope at the center.
“And now?” Marcus asked.
“The waiting game,” Chay said.
“Ugh.”
They were all rock hard, their dicks irritatingly slipping around in their fundoshi.
Goro handed out plasma from his bag’s waterskin and they quickly hammered their own prostates. He wasn’t even really jerking off anymore, just rubbing the lubed underside of his cockhead like it was a fucking clit. Cumming did nothing to decrease his horniness but the feeling like it *should* was cruel enough to make him want to scream.
His softened dick packed back into his thong, Goro tried to assess threats, hiding spots and vectors for escape. Although he knew Chay was doing the same and better.
Then the clock in his bag chimed for bottom notch and the world stood still.
It had already been quiet. But now it was *Quiet*. Even the whistle of wind in the hallways was gone.
A Wyrm of dark blue and purple popped into existence. She was perhaps twice as big and long as the average adult Wyrm, coiled into a complex pretzel, shimmers like constellations dancing along the scales.
She had two heads, one slightly bear-shaped serpent on the right and a chameleon looking one on the left. Both heads dropped down to look at the pantheon, the chameleon’s twitching back and forth to assess the area.
“Balls, that’s big,” Xane whispered.
“Greetings,” Chay started, one hand raised. “We’ve followed the rumors of your wisdom to ask for advice.”
“Ah,” the weirdly ursine snake head said. “Four little Figments braving the way here? How odd. Who sent you and how was this accomplished?”
“We’re not slaves,” Chay said and let his shoulders smolder with umbra-power. “We’re demigods from earth and we’d like to free the ones trapped by the Time Ghoul.”
The chameleon head moved away to look through two telescopes at once. Constellations of light started to fade in around the walls, floating in front of diagrams until they found their match.
The bearish head leaned in. “And have you brought me anything?”
Goro looked to Chay for a nod and unpacked the bag’s paper content. Books, news, pamphlets. Anything a creature who lived outside of time would need to stay up to date.
Constellations flickered. The papers fluttered off the ground and spread before the serpent.
Constellations continued to dance overhead, attempting to conjure strange memories. Goro could feel himself recall gym sessions and study meetings as if the memories came from elsewhere.
He shut the intrusion down.
Starbeholder hummed at the first page spread of the KKa’Shwe Herald. “I see,” she mumbled. “Typical. Another fuel crisis. Who’s gone to war now? Hm, and Jeggri-Glaff is expanding back into his old territory. Good for him. Hehe, seems the Ripping Bitch Tribe overextended themselves. Tehehe.”
“I…” Chay started. “We were given the impression we wouldn’t have much time.”
The right head vanished behind the sheets of the Mogomogo Tributary. The chameleon head moved closer instead. “Don’t you worry about *time*. I have my own supply of that and it is nadir notch until I’m done. Now… Why can’t I see your patterns?”
“You mean…” Chay started. “Ah, we had lessons from an Esper Wyrm.”
“That’ll do it. So you have talent. Then there’s hope.”
Starbeholder’s tail wiggled like a hand doing an ever-so-forth gesture as the ursine head spoke again.
“To take on a Ghoul, well, you’ll need Chrono Sight to even perceive it, some kind of temporal protection or it can age you into a dusty corpse in seconds and an adequate weapon of course. Do you have any of this?”
“I’m afraid not,” Chay said. “Which is what brings us here.”
There was something incredibly fuckable about Chay being so confident and commanding yet careful and diplomatic. Okay, there was something extremely fuckable about his slightly oversized glutes and thighs, always had been.
“I can teach you Chrono Sight myself,” Starbeholder said, “since you seem to have aptitude. For the protection you’ll have to ask an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in a few… well, it would have been a lot longer from her perspective. The weapons… Not sure. Something that doesn’t require demon blood to wield. A sustained beam.”
The ursine head interrupted. “The Spear of a Hundred Curses!”
The lizardy head glanced at her twin. “Impossible to procure and not sustainable to boot.”
“Hm, an Unsolar Ring — if they can weather the madness.”
“Not without consent by the Grand Smithy.”
“Mockery technology perhaps?”
“Fickle. And with the king’s mandate most of those artefacts can’t be activated.”
“A psychic attack? Poison?”
“Can all be reversed. Time Ghouls require huge but sustained damage to slay.”
Chay waved. “Does it change anything that we’re demigods? Some angelic artefact maybe?”
Silence, then both heads jolted in unison. “A converter!”
The right head said, “Some ancient guns, built before the Mockery Cataclysm, could convert all magic to projectiles.” The left head chimed in. “Demonic, runic, divine, psychic, ghostly, zirnular, hnefrish, astral, you name it.”
Xane sighed. “Great, where do we get one?”
“Not so fast,” the left head said with an unsettling smirk. “Learn Chrono Sight to prove yourself worthy of my counsel. We can start right now.” Her tail pointed at the missing wall and roof part where the blackness of the void was visible, all telescopes pointed at it. “What do you see out there?”
The pantheon stared. And stared some more.
“I’m sorry,” Chay said after a minute. “There’s nothing. It’s emptier than any spot in the realm exoteric we’ve seen so far.”
“Hm, disappointing. Let’s start smaller. See that desk?”
“Y-yes?” Chay said, looking at the paper covered table where Starbeholder’s tail pointed.
“There is normally a book on it, which is currently put away. ‘On the Movement of Ether-Sparks along the Inward Spiral of the Western Limbo Sphere, Part 2, by Whitegaze’. Green cover, some pages are loose. Now, *perceive* it!”
“You mean… try to find it in the Storm Observatory or…”
The Wyrm shook both heads. “No. On that desk. Don’t look for *where*. Look for *when*.”
Goro resisted the urge to let his shoulders sag like Marcus was doing and fortified his posture instead. But this *was* going to be a headache.
“Objects,” the Nightwyrm started, “are like Wyrms slithering through time… or like people walking maybe. In any case, the nature of temporal residue left from intra-planar echo-fracturing is as follows…”
===***===
Boarding the Sneak Attack again, the pantheon crammed into their cabin and sucked each other off in a square, pulling load after load from each other’s crotches.
There was something fun about being between Chay’s legs, even if Goro’s tongue wanted to move down to the hole instead. Not *that* fun, though. He enjoyed the challenge of sucking huge cocks and frankly his friends were medium sized. He was no giant either, but that had rarely bothered him.
“Ughhh,” Marcus made and rolled away, his dick shrinking to a semi. “It’s ruined. Blowjobs are fucking ruined. Being a demigod turned them from a ten to a zero-point-one.”
Chay chuckled. “They were always more of a six or seven for me.”
Marcus frowned at him. “You’re shitting me?”
Chay shrugged. “Maybe you had better bitches.”
It was Marcus turn to shrug.
Xane pulled himself off Goro’s spent crotch, rolled onto his back and absentmindedly spun a tiny lightning bolt like a pen. “What ruins it more than anything is that penile orgies are the most boring ones we’ve ever had after seemingly a lifetime of aegis-aided abyssal whole-body gut-gasms beyond mortal reckoning.”
Goro agreed with a grunt.
“Man,” Xane mumbled to himself. “When I got flipped gay I really thought I was a top, but turns out I just like ass and not dick, not even mine. Shoulda asked our Devil buddy how he did it.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
Chay let Pie pop from his ring and puffed some pink clouds into the air. Having understood the principles of Chrono Sight first among them, the leader had busied himself mixing his mist with the drifting bubbles and acquired the power of pink-ifying his smoke. Other colors were less successful and Pie remained skeptical of the new ability, huffing at the bright tendrils from above.
Marcus’ petitions to rename the pantheon to Chroma Crew, Prism Party, Spectral Suckers or Rainbow Rod Riders had been vetoed.
Despite the gentle hues and amorous atmosphere, nobody felt like cuddling.
Goro didn’t like the sour mood.
So he sat up and slapped his thighs. “I still like the challenge of taking a meatsicle all the way. I’ll see if the Hellions are up for it. I want to know how deep…” He gestured at his navel. “Technically they should reach my stomach and since I can hold my breath…”
Chay chuckled. “Took you a while to want to try.”
Goro drummed on his pecs. “Confidence growth, baby.”
“Actually,” Xane said and sat up, too. “Don’t we have new shades? You sent them to refuel, right Cap?”
A minute later, Goro was sucking his first twenty-inch, red-skinned dick, giving Seventh a deep impression of his empty guts. It was an adequately challenging experience. Something about cocksucking always reminded him of diving.
The other demigods were introducing themselves to the shades. Marcus assisted with a bit of glitter while Xane let his mage-mouth go around draining demigod balls — they were hard again.
The berserker barely registered his own cumshot, especially once fists got involved with his rear. Even Seventh wanted to try fist-topping. He wasn’t too into it but Goro enjoyed losing his monsterhand virginity.
===***===
Chrono Sight took years to master but the demigods were preparing for a Time Ghoul, which tended to slither just at the edge of the present. Seeing where something had been a minute ago was all they’d need.
Still, Goro wanted to keep practicing. Looking from the deck to the abyssal lake below and vaguely perceiving how it had looked a thousand years ago was fascinating — Chrono Sight was easier on objects that stayed in place for a long, long time so ancient ruins were good training.
The Defiled Sanctuary had had a whole additional tower that had broken off, for example. It was too blurry to his sight to figure out what it had been used for.
Gallant waited for them on the dock.
The pantheon hopped down to the floating island chunk and Chay handed the time telling device back. “Hi Gallant. Uh, this thing’s gonna need a retuning. The Nightwyrm desynched us from the flow of time, so…”
The golden giant with an expression much too serious for his cutesy face tugged the sphere into a belt and waved them inside. “There’s someone you should meet. I have little doubt about his authenticity but I wanted your opinion first.”
“We’re honored,” Marcus said, sounding suspicious.
Goro glanced at Chay, who was surely analyzing the situation. Did the leader already know who awaited them?
In an open atrium where a bench wrapped around a plasma fountain, was a lean muscled, brown skinned guy with smooth black hair in a fringe. Fully nude, jerking off with a thick string of white goo already running down his well-built leg, flimsy clothing and a coiled whip beside him.
He creamed out a drop of cum with a pained expression just as he registered that he wasn’t alone anymore. Heavily breathing, he rose with a grin, his cum-dripping hand spread to his side.
“Hey there.”
Marcus was the first to slam into him, giving a full embrace.
Pie shot from Chay’s toe ring and bounced at the new arrival, collecting ear rubs.
Xane threw sparkles and confetti over the groups’ heads. “Hello, welcome. How? Why? The fuck?”
Diego slipped into his leather loincloth that hung from a broad belt. “First tell the golden guy you know me.”
Chay waved back at the Nephil. “Gallant never doubted it’s you, but he wanted to make sure we meet you before…”
“What?” Marcus said. “Before what, huh? Oh no, you’re going home to earth, aren’t you?”
Diego laughed. “Far from it. I’m here to take Gallant up on his offer from back during our conversation in the spire. I want my aegis back.”
Stunned silence settled in the room. Surely Chay had figured it out but Goro was shocked. Then his gears started turning. And there was only one station for that train of thought.
“Me too.”
Every pair of eyes snapped to Goro.
He gave as casual a shrug as he could. “It’s nothing but frustration and distraction. We haven’t had a major fight since we finished the main quest but what if we do? I’ve considered just ripping my cock off and keeping it from growing back until the end of battle.”
Everyone winced, even Gallant.
“We only kept going because we figured there’s a way, but if Diego-”
“Why?” Marcus interrupted, staring at Diego.
The former Devil sat back down. “After you left, I had some time to think. But also with the demon blood gone from my veins I was feeling the effect of the abyss differently, like I did during my time with the aegis. I became a Devil almost as soon as our mission was over and… Well, now as a human I crave anal. My-” he gestured at his loincloth, “-is nothing but trouble without reward. And I’m not becoming a Devil again.”
“There’s no hope,” Marcus whispered, clutching his chest.
“We’ll see about that,” Chay said, sounding just a little resigned. “Anyway, are you going back to Mockery afterward?”
Diego sighed. “My little empire fell apart. Without demonblood things were more difficult and then a lot of my slaves popped around the same time. And with me wanting to bottom the whole dynamic changed and… Would you mind if I hang around a bit? Find my footing?”
Marcus groaned. “We’ve just come back from the most boring lesson ever — and college is quite the competition. Don’t tell me we have to go back.”
Chay rubbed his chin. “Not sure we can teach you Chrono Sight ourselves but… Do you have any experience running a barge?”
“Been a while but for our divine mission we went undercover on an inter-realm trading vessel for a bit. A luxury casino-yacht thing, but I did pilot it a bit and learned the mechanics. Half-articulating twin Zuu-jets with a-”
Gallant placed his hand on Diego’s and Goro’s shoulder. “How about you continue this conversation in private — after the procedure.”
Goro nodded.
“You understand,” the fallen angel continued, “that it is not within my power to *remove* an aegis once activated. And that the heavens will consider a prayer too remote or too trivial to answer.”
Goro nodded once more. He had seen their last straw break.
The group moved on, to the antechamber of Gallant’s vault where Goro dropped his black fundoshi and Diego his belt. Then they waited, hands on their own nipples.
The berserker’s heart was racing but he had no fear. Since his first full hour in the abyss, he hadn’t had a truly clear head, sexual craving rising to impossible height until he was constantly swimming in lust. But now, thinking about eternity in a chastity cage, on some deep emotional level, he was a different kind of horny.