Nocturne

She was going to carry out something. Whatever it was, it would be big enough that she'd call on him. He sometimes got frightened at these things, barely aware out of the corner of his eye of images that were not wholly meant for mortal eyes, sensations that flickered on the horizons of his awareness, but he had never shirked from his part. The girls were discussing something in low tones, his wife explaining things about Gates and the dangers of Thresholds. Their friend, her apprentice, was trying to take it all in, looking nervous, listening intently.

Whatever was coming, he was certain, would require him to ground himself, acting as a conduit for power to either surge through him for his wife to wield, or for energy she drew to herself for him to send into the earth. That, or confronting something nasty that just needed to be hit.

"I guess I need a shower anyway" he said to himself, standing up and taking his clothes off as he walked out to the Circle of Glory. He paused at the entrance briefly, long enough to acknowledge Those Who Watched, and plunged in. The Circle felt enfolding, comforting, waiting for something.

Naked, he sat cross-legged in the SouthEast portion. The best spot for beginnings, he would realise later, and not at all where he usually went. The moonlight blessed him as he felt the green and growing things beneath him and the starlight on his skin. The silver foliage of the hedge seems to tower protectively as he opened his mind to the World.

Dimly, he was aware of the women talking to each other as they came up the path to the entrance to the Circle. He let himself sink deeper, feeling the Circle's protective embrace. The girls paused at the entrance, his wife encouraging the other woman to go in, she reluctant. Finally, she relented, Opening a path politely as she'd been taught, thanking Them as she did so.

And then he felt the Circle close after her. She sat in front of him, on the stone altar, looking down at his naked body.

"Are you sure of why you're doing this?" he asked.

"Yes. Absolutely sure, now" she replied. The higher parts of his brain were a little amused to feel himself rising to his knees to embrace her, kissing her gently at first, then fiercely. Outside the Circle, he could hear his wife chanting something low in a guttural language he couldn't understand.

Her clothes came off so easily he wondered later what had happened, but at the moment, under the moonlight, all he wanted to do was embrace her nakedness.

Higher brain function took a back seat as he felt her belly against his erection and she returned his embrace as fiercely as she had kissed him that time back in her flat. A corner of the cold sandstone of the altar insisted that they not use that, there, that time, so he guided her next to it, their heads pointing north, the foliage reaching over them protectively.

No foreplay, none need. She was fully ready to receive him, and he entered her slowly, gently, and without guidance from outside their embrace. A soft groan of delight escaped her lips as he slid himself as deeply into her body as he could.

He began stroking his penis into her body, gently, taking his time, feeling the pleasure coursing through her flesh, and something else besides. Outside, things were happening, but the Circle was protecting the lovers from all that. Perhaps their joy was being used, wielded almost, as a defiant cry of Life! against what darkness the other witch was battling. Perhaps they were unconsciously celebrating the Lady's greatest gift at that Halloween, passion and wine and flowers combined.

There was more than mere fucking going on, and as he pleasured her, he could feel the ground sloping away from them, her head now lower than her feet. As her joy mounted, she reached out for and found the solid mass of stone that was the altar, and gripped it, hanging on against some force.

The moonlight seemed bright and harsh as he began to climax himself, bathing the Circle in radiant white as the white if his seed spurted into his lover, the world rippling slightly as her body quivered.

Then as he slowed down, still ejaculating, he began to be aware of an other penis within his lover's body. Not inside her with him, not in her arse, but superimposed over his cock, stroking to a different rhythm. This other was even shaped differently to him, longer, but not as thick

Somehow, he knew she was aware of both of her lovers, and as she began to respond more strongly to the other, he withdrew his own cock, squatting back on his haunches between her legs, watching her move in sympathy to a different, unseen lover.

Wild chanting outside now, dimly glimpsed shadows moving beyond the protective walls of the silver hedge bathed in moonlight.

His lover climaxed again, shivering in the shadows of what was Elsewhere, then reaching for him, eyes closed in wonder and delight. As he leant forward over her, she pressed his face towards her womanhood, pushing gently on his shoulders and motioning him to pleasure her with his tongue.

He briefly recalled her saying, a few hours and a million years ago, that she would not, could not, imagine being pleasured by a man's mouth on her sex, even though she delighted in the sensation of pleasuring a man with her own mouth, receiving and swallowing his seed with greedy pleasure. Then he kissed her pussy, soaking with his own seed and the seed of an other, and felt the joy and wonder coursing through her body, into the Circle, into the Rite outside the Circle, into the World.

She seemed solid and stable, cradled by the grass and the World and Those inside the Circle, but he seemed to be riding a surge of energy. He stretched out full length on the grass of the Circle, feeling it against his softening erection, his naked flesh, his spirit. The slope of how his lover was laying challenged him, and reaching out, he found one hand on the altar, the other on one of the Warden Stones, the East Ward, the Dragon.

As his tongue caressed her body and she writhed against his mouth, her hands now pressing, now stroking his head, he could feel Others within the Circle. Not spectators watching, nor partners sharing the coupling, but crowding in around them, drinking the warmth from their lovemaking like a cat before a fireplace. Finally she released his head, and they lay together, spent. Outside, the chanting ceased and the World returned to the mundane.