Elf-Boy and Friends
by George Gauthier
Chapter 38. Elf-boys and Druid
Dahl and Aodh and Ran soaked their tired bodies in the large hot tub the twins and Ran had constructed during their long vigil at the safe house. It was big enough for all three of their diminutive bodies. None of three young males stood more than Dahl's five foot one with Aodh an inch shorter and Ran at tad shorter than that. Their slender wiry physiques left plenty of room to stretch their legs for a good soak.
Ran ducked his head underwater, tossing his dark blond locks as he emerged. Blond elves were a rarity, in his case due to his one quarter human blood. Dahl and Aodh wore their dark hair medium length. The young druid had decided he did not care for the long mane that Merry had promised he would grow. It just got in the way. And as nearly a senior druid himself, Dahl was his own man, still Merry's friend, but no longer his protege.
It was Ran who had come across the hot spring bubbling out of the ground on the bluff behind the farm they were staying at. Dahl used earth magic to re-route its waters past the farmhouse to fill the wood lined pit that was their hot tub. To make the temperature tolerable, he mixed the hot water from the spring with a second flow from the stream that ran through the property.
"Ah, I can finally relax." the weary wir sighed. "All this running around in panther form takes its toll. As a cat, I am not built for long distance travel except at a walk. No wonder I am worn out after the better part of a month on circuit collecting intel from our string of wir agents. It didn't help that on my return, as I got close to base, I had to outfox, you should pardon my vocabulary, a bunch of angry farmers who pinned the blame for recent losses of lambs and calves on a black panther. I happen to know their livestock were taken by a pack of wolves which recently moved into the area."
"Did you take it out on the wolves?" the druid asked anxiously. As a druid he was a defender of Nature's way.
"Of course not, Dahl. Wolves do not kill wantonly but only at need. It is in their nature, as natural predators. Who would understand that better than a wir-panther? And no, I did not take it out on the farmers either, who were just defending their legitimate interests. Nobody is at fault so there is nobody to punish, including me. I mean, this close in to our base, I know better than to kill local livestock and rouse the country folk."
"The farmers had thought they had surrounded their quarry, but I tricked them and avoided a confrontation by changing back to human form. I walked right past a dozen of them, greeting everyone politely, looking much like any other naked farm boy on an errand. Some of the hunters were grown men in tunics or loincloths with a few youths and young men as naked as myself. Folks around here are like those across the continent, juveniles usually run around nude while older males have the option of clothing."
"As I understand it, young males here live with their families rather than in communal youth lodges. Even so they are still socially if not spatially segregated from nubile females in other households. No wonder I drew such hungry looks from them. To explain my presence in these parts, I reminded a couple of farmers whom I had met before that I worked for the twins in their orchards."
"Naturally, with your epicene look, they assumed you not only worked here, you bent over for your employers."
"Which is only the truth. I do the same for all of you except Merry, who does not know what he is missing."
<I heard that!> the unicorn snorted in mind speech.
Actually Aodh was very choosy these days about whom took him to bed. He was loyal to Count Klarendes, his lover in Elysion but he also cared for those with whom he had forged a bond during their trek crossing the continent. That short list included Dahl and the twins and, by extension, their "third twin" Randell. Aodh and Balan often found themselves widely separated though he knew the giant still fancied him and vice-versa.
Dahl was well past his rent boy days too. There was Aodh, the twins and Ran too as a fellow elf-boy. Merry was still a lover but not Balan any longer. His other lover was his mentor Owain who was far away in the stronghold of the druids in the Great Southern Forest. Not just an expanse of trees, the Forest was a million square miles of green sentience and was the ally of the druids and through them of the Commonwealth.
As part of their intelligence work in the barbarian lands, Aodh and Dahl did seduce a number of comely young men and boys and subtlety questioned them during pillow talk. But that was business, not love. Still all of the five young males had put their period of promiscuity behind them. In the past, they had financed their long journey across the continent buy selling their charms. They had had no problem attracting custom.
Dahl and Aodh, were taking a well-deserved break from their arduous traveling as spies in enemy territory, the lands of the Eastern Barbarians. The safe house lay in friendly territory, far to the south and east of that vast realm.
Their field agents, seven wirs from Aodh's homeland, gathered the raw intel and turned it over to Dahl and Aodh, who brought it back to the safe house. To maintain security, the other seven never got anywhere close. At their base, the blond human twins Jemsen and Karol compiled all reports into a systematic description of the barbarian lands and society, and drew maps of their vast lands.
Which was why Ran was also there. Where the twins went, so went the elf-boy Ran, their Boy Friday and general factotum and boy toy and vice-versa. None of them bothered with clothing, as only fitting for elf-boys and the human elf-friends who had reverted to the clothing free life-style of the elves. Also their preference for same gender sexual relationships.
Of full human stock, the twins Jemsen and Karel, now twenty, were of medium height, slender, crowned with cornsilk blond hair, and incredibly cute and sexy. At eighteen Ran was the youngest by almost two years, barely five foot tall, lithe and svelte, his dark blond hair cut short.
Dahl was a walking wet dream, slender yet muscular, tanned, taut and toned with good shoulders, a ripped torso with corrugated abdominals, a flat belly and narrow hips. He had one of those impossibly small waists you could almost put your hands around and a pert rump, with small but firm and shapely buns. No hair interrupted the flow of his faultless lines. Elves never grow body hair, even at the fork of the legs, and are beardless. The same was true of the others though in the case of the twins it was due to potions the elves had applied to their skins when they were adopted as elf-friends.
As for Aodh, small, skinny, and smooth muscled, comely as an angel, with a skin like porcelain, and looking utterly fragile and vulnerable, his large green eyes dominated the stunning face of an androgynous youth which tapered from a broad brow down a pert nose to a narrow chin. Adding to his fey look, the wir boy cum minstrel was sloe-eyed, his orbs shaped like almonds and slanted faintly upward above prominent cheekbones.
The epicene youth was actually two or three times as strong as he looked thanks to his magical wir nature. Dahl was much the same standing some five feet one even and even stronger from druidical magic. He also had superhuman reflexes and senses.
Except for the identical twins, each of the five youths was distinctly different in looks, each the epitome of his type. The young druid was the raven maned filly of the bunch and preternaturally lovely. The rangy twins were a pair of palomino colts, boisterous and rambunctious, exuding good health and sex appeal. With the sleek and smooth physique of a dancer and an impossibly cute face, the wir and sometime minstrel was the playful kitten of the bunch and the only left hander. Ran was a little imp or scamp, irrepressible and impossible both, not to mention both ambidextrous and bisexual.
Just then Ran was horsing around in the bath, splashing the twins, tossing bath water into the air with cupped hands, squeezing his palms together to force water to shoot up like a water spout.
'Thar she blows!" he called in imitation of the sailors on the Great Inland Freshwater Sea. Karel rubbed his head affectionately.
"Have you ever wondered why same sex relationships are so common on Haven?" Dahl ventured to ask.
"Actually, Dahl, I never thought it the least bit strange. It seems perfectly natural to me. Part of the order of things" Karel replied. Otherwise you can be sure I would have asked professor Balandur about it.
"Isn't that the truth!" Ran piped.
"You are right. Same sex seems natural now, here on Haven, but it was not always so. Ages ago humans lived on a single planet with many different cultures, some hostile to same gender relationships. In time the mechanical arts and knowledge of natural philosophy of the humans became so advanced they allowed mankind to spread to many worlds around distant suns. In that long ago age, humans experimented with their heredity, modifying their bodies to create sentient races that had existed only in myths and legends like elves, dwarves, and giants."
"Those who favored sex with other males combined with others of like mind to pool their wealth and power and knowledge to create the race of elves, Women who favored women joined them, providing for the propagation of new generations, in ways you are familiar with. The elves settled many planets and sought to live in peace with others and in communion with nature."
"The civilization of the ancients reached stupendous heights. It lasted for millennia before crashing down in great wars and ecological collapse. It survives in isolated and remote enclaves in cultures that now accept the need for limits and caution. The heedlessness of the ancients led them to poison and deplete the environments of most of their planets. Even worse, intolerance among the different species lead to wars of unimaginable ferocity, some of them fueled by religious zealotry and social prejudice, especially against the worlds of the elves who were damned and condemned for their nigh unto universal practice and approval of same gender sex. Worlds ruled by the zealots waged holy war against the elves and their allies, giants, humans, and others. Eventually the losers retreated through a portal in space to planets like Haven, lying in an island universe far far away from their origins."
The twins nodded and said: "Even here on Haven there is a degree of social prejudice and religious zealotry and intolerance. The barbarians are the prime example but there are also those backward peoples of the desert who oppress their females and ban the display of the human body, whether male or female."
"Enough history for today. Who is for supper? Personally I am famished."
The unicorn Meirionnydd or Merry was on hand for long distance communications. He could reach Balan anywhere on the planet with his mind speech. More than that, he could transmit images of the twins' maps and drawings to Balan in a sort of reverse of the magic by which druids sent their consciousness into animal scouts. Balan had no particular ability in making maps, but he was an good sketch artist, as anyone involved in reconnaissance would have to be. He caught the transmitted images then sketched them out quickly and also transcribed the textual material.
The idea was that even if the safe house were discovered and overrun, much of their intel would already be in the hands of the Commonwealth.
The payoff was so great that the Forces of Light, as they now knew their enemies called them, had risked so many of their best people on the perilous venture.
At night, Ran slept sandwiched with the twins on a triple bed he had constructed early on. Dahl and Aodh took the guest room together. Given all their hard work, it is not surprising that sleep rather than frolic was on the agenda.
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