Phaze Fantasies VI

Augusta is super excited about the release of the Phaze Fantasies VI anthology.  This is a BDSM-themed anthology with a wide variety orientations and situations.  All of the stories are fabulous, and Gus is honored to get to share pages with these wonderful authors: Jude Mason, Yvette Hines, Jessie Verino, D. Musgrave and N.

Gus's story, Precious Things, is a dystopic, yaoi fantasy set in the distant future.  Society has basically broken down and humans cower in walled city-states for protection from the dangers of the vast Wastelands between them.  The city-state of Alexandria is ruled by the military and allows slavery.

Leaf has been happy and content in his role as slave-boy to his beautiful and enigmatic Master, Leannan.  But when Rin Miyamoto, an associate from Leannan's past, arrives, Leaf is forced to confront truths about his Master that he'd rather not know.  When Leannan and Rin devise a dangerous plan, Leaf is caught in the middle, and must find the strength to do what he dreads most, act alone without his Master's protection and guidance.

Excerpt:

          Leaf's home, unlike those surrounding it, lived.  It sat at the crest of a hill, overlooking the corrugated metal dwellings of the rest of the city-state of Alexandria.  Stone stairs, flanked with cinnamon ferns, wound up the knoll, across the emerald lawn that contrasted sharply with the bare dust or cracked asphalt patches below.   Hundreds of years ago, before the third Great War and the subsequent plagues had ended the Golden Age, the red brick structure and its grounds had served as some sort of a temple and school.  Sons and daughters of a forgotten god had filled the rooms and stretched languidly across the grass.  Sometimes, especially when he'd been left alone for a long time, Leaf thought he could hear their phantom laughter.  From the corners of his eye he saw them standing in front of the arched front entrance: girls in pleated skirts clutching books to their chests, boys, at the threshold of manhood, slinging bags over their shoulders.

          Dusk was the most felicitous time for spirits.  As the setting sun gilded the foliage, the ghosts danced on the springy moss between the great trees.  Leaf perceived them as smoky shapes, as if white vapor had been channeled into a human-shaped mold.  They seemed to favor the copse of birches behind the building, and each night flitted and wove in and out of the alabaster trunks.  Their presence didn't frighten Leaf.  He knew all too well of the things waiting beyond the grounds of the school, eager to hurt him.  The child-ghosts, though, dispersed into the sapphire sky like frightened doves at the young man's approach.   The chain-link fence that surrounded the haunted sanctuary, topped with razor wire, deterred most everything else.

          As an added precaution Leaf's Master, Leannan, had invented a way to electrify the barrier.  Times were dangerous, ever since a faction of the militia had overthrown the rest of the army in a bloody revolt.  As he did each evening when he was alone, Leaf poured corn oil from plastic jugs into the generator his Master had built.  The rattling machine would provide luxuries very few possessed: music from shiny silver disks, hot water, light and security.  After his trembling hands had lifted the last jug of viscous, yellow fluid and sent it gurgling down the chute of the generator, Leaf prepared to walk the property's perimeter and check the fence for breaches, as his Master had instructed him to do.

           While the spirits didn't scare Leaf, almost everything else did.  He hated to walk alone through the darkness, hurrying from one pool of bluish light to the next, clutching a rapier he didn't really know how to use.  It felt as though things, men mostly, waited in every patch of shadow or behind every clump of bracken to snag Leaf's ankle or seize his waist.  Strange sounds reached Leaf from the hovels of the settlement below: eerie howls, the shouts of drunken confrontations, the keening of people being victimized in ways Leaf understood all too well, little explosions and the rapid fire of ancient weapons restored to deadly use.

           Each noise, whether a scream from the city or the snap of a twig, made Leaf jump.  Oftentimes he dropped the glass lantern he carried.  It fell to its side in the dew-slick grass, the candles within sputtering out.  Chill wind whipped Leaf's pumpkin-shell hair into his mouth and stung his cream-colored skin.  As Leaf crouched, shaking hands fumbling with the matches, he longed for the return of his Master.  No one would dare to touch Leaf with his Master beside him.  No one would even dare to consider it.

          But Leannan was still away on some secret errand.  It fell to Leaf to protect his Master's home and guard his Master's most precious possession: himself.  Terror-stricken though he was, Leaf edged the property three times, stopping only when he was certain everything was in order.  How disappointed Master would be if he returned to find his beloved home vandalized or his favorite amusement damaged.   Leaf couldn't bear the idea of failing the Master he loved.

          After securing the property's boundaries, Leaf retreated inside the school's thick stone walls.  Despite the partition of brick standing between him and the dangers of the night, the electric barricade, and the other, imperceptible protections Master had cast, he didn't feel safe until he checked each of the many rooms for trespassers.  He began with the East Wing.  It contained rooms unused by Leaf and his Master, rooms which had once been used for teaching.  Most stood empty except for slate boards hung on the walls.  Overturned desks and chairs littered a few.  The windows had broken out of many of the classrooms, allowing them to fill with brittle leaves, broken branches, and cobwebs.  With so little furniture for a potential thief or rapist to hide behind, Leaf was able to lift his lantern above his head and simply scan the space before being satisfied.  It pleased him to leave this part of the house, which radiated sadness for a world long ago destroyed.

          The West Wing, long ago dormitories, held Leannan's things.  Leaf's Master possessed so many ancient and modern treasures that only about a quarter of the fifty rooms stood vacant.  The weaponry, art, armor, clothing, jewelry, books, and dishes had been categorized in a way that escaped Leaf, possibly, he thought, by the historical periods in which they'd been made.  It took Leaf hours to check behind every velvet chair, carved wardrobe, splattered canvas, and chest of silverware, but he didn't mind because he could touch and be with the things his Master loved.  To caress an embroidered pillow, lift a crystal vase, or gaze at a faded picture of a mermaid combing her hair, made Leaf feel closer to Leannan.  Like Leaf, these sculptures and boots and appliances had been fortunate, because Leannan favored and would protect them.  They would be honored, from time to time, with his approving gaze or the touch of his fingers.  Unlike the fire-haired young man, the scrolls and beads and silver mirrors would remain eternally beautiful, a comfort to Leaf's Master long after Leaf's body lost the ability to please him.                   

          Leannan and Leaf lived in the central section of the school-made-house.  This wing stretched out of the back of the structure at the center, making the building resemble, in Leaf's imagination, a male body reclining on its side, the member long and erect.  It contained a former dining hall, with a great fireplace, flagged stone floors and arched windows edged in amber glass.  Though Leannan had left most of the long wooden tables and benches in place, he and Leaf never ate in the hall.  Standing beneath the vaulted ceiling made Leaf feel tiny and quite alone.  Echoes of long-lost conversation and laughter, the clang of forks on plates, reverberated. 

          Another room, once a sort of common area for the students to relax, felt cozier.  The fire Leaf had built before venturing out to the spirit-sprinkled lawn still crackled behind the screen.  A marble statue of a vanished goddess holding a lamb stood beside the hearth.  She'd been beautiful, but Leannan detested the many idols around the school, and had broken off her arms, chipped away her lips and nose, and painted black x's over her eyes and heart.  Master's sumptuous green velvet sofas encircled the blaze.  A sculpture he adored, a rounded stone carved with spirals, sat on the carpet.  He'd also left some of his ancient magazines on an end table.  Leaf stretched out beside the warmth and read about the people of the past, of the Golden Age.  They seemed to have been pre-occupied with dressing themselves, painting their faces, and eating rich foods while trying to keep their bodies thin.  From the pictures, Leaf discerned that there had been many more women in the past, and that they lived without the fear of capture or assault.  None even carried weapons.

            After reading until drowsiness crowded out loneliness and nerves, Leaf bathed in the round stone tub in the kitchen, so he'd be clean and pleasant if Leannan returned in the night.  He could've taken the violet sleeping draught his Master had concocted, but it would leave him defenseless.  So he applied to his nails a lacquer his Master had chosen: terracotta flecked with gold shavings.  He untangled his marigold locks with a silver comb, shaved and oiled his legs, and replaced the expensive jewelry his Master had purchased for him.  From a ring in each of his nipples delicate gold chains dangled down.  At the end of each chain hung a jade leaf so intricately carved it looked freshly plucked and miniaturized.  Matching decoration swayed from his earlobes and brushed his shoulders.  A gold horseshoe twisted through the skin above his navel, an emerald bead the size of a pea at each end.  More emeralds, each valuable enough to feed a man for a year, twisted onto the ends of a barbell through the loose skin where the base of Leaf's cock met his scrotum.  Leaf lifted his penis and tugged the spear of gold, stretching the skin and remembering when his Master had inserted it into his flesh.  Leannan, his eyes pale sea foam green that day, had crouched in front of Leaf and called him beautiful.  His lily-petal lips had brushed Leaf's stomach from Leaf's belly button to the triangle of fire-colored hair below.  Leaf's heart had swelled and tears that had nothing to do with pain sparkled down his speckled cheeks.  Leannan had let Leaf touch his hair, as a reward for patiently enduring the piercing.