The Dreaming: Eros Fantasia

By Lucas Angel

Two lovers, kept apart by demands in the waking world, must meet instead in the world of dreams, for only in the Dreaming can they fully give in to their lusts. But as they explore both their passion and the dreamlands, they risk venturing too far and discovering that even in dreams there are dark places, and the waking world isn't always so easily left behind. An ofttimes explicit fantasy of romance, eroticism, adventure, and of a love that transcends the physical.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goblinbrook Manor LLC
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311798473

Lucas Angel

Lucas Angel lives in a house somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. When not sipping wine on his deck overlooking a brook that feeds into a river, he can be found writing.

Book preview

Prologue:

So many things keep us from being together in the world. We must find someplace else. Someplace that is ours.

Sleep when I sleep. Dream when I dream. There, in our shared dream, I will build a tower for you and place it upon a mountaintop.

~.~

Chapter One: Kiss

I wish to hold her in the moonlight,

her eyes turned up to mine;

touch her shoulder, her neck, her chin.

If she should smile, in that vast silver night,

Then I should melt away;

become light, too.

And, as ethereal glow,

enwrap and encase her;

become and be

one.

It is quiet where we are. Low music plays in the background, but it is soft and dances lightly about the room. Lighted candles flicker on every available surface and, since our place isn't a place bound by the physics of the waking world, many hover, suspended in the air. The sweet and subtle and shivering aroma of vanilla spins in the slight breeze.

That same breeze moves the nearly transparent white curtains that surround our room. The curtains open onto a stone balcony outside, a balcony that we do not need to be on to know that it overlooks a vast and starlit valley of trees and rivers and small, sparkling towns. There are dreamers down there, dreaming of us.

You are wearing white, a diaphanous gown that is little more than a whim of thought and heartbeat. You walk to the silk-wrapped dais raised in the center of the marble-tiled floor. Candlelight and whispering star-glow light your way. You let the gown fall, ascend the wide steps leading to the top of the dais, and lie facedown upon it. I come and sit on the stone beside you.

For a moment all I do, all I can do, is regard you in the rich, flickering light. The music wraps us. The scent of vanilla wraps us. All of the night and dreams of the dreamers below wraps us. An owl speaks from beyond the windows. A fox barks somewhere in the woods.

I touch you, trace with a fingertip your shoulders, the sharpness of your shoulder blades, the run of your spine. Taking up oils, warmed upon a small brazier nearby, I pour these slowly upon your back. I put the bottles down and, still with a hummingbird touch, spread the glistening oil. The warmth of the oil merges with your skin, glosses it with a golden gleam. I continue to work the oil in, moving in larger circles, then smaller, still with the lightest of touches.

With both hands, but touching you only with fingertips, I draw lines down the length of your back, from your neck to the base of your spine, slowly, languorously...once, twice, a third time. You make a sound of pleasure in the back of your throat.

I move my hands between your shoulder blades again, and with my thumbs, find the muscles, tensed and tightened by a day spent in the Out There. But the Out There isn't anywhere near here. Where we are is timeless. There is no tomorrow here because there was no yesterday. Only the now.

I find the muscles with my thumbs and I work outward from your spine. Slowly, slowly, but deeply. I move downward, working the anxiety, the fears, the doubts, the hardness from your skin, from muscle, from soul.

I add more oil, warmed to near feverish heat by the coals in the fire, then, with the heel of my palms, I press deeply into that skin, muscle, and soul, pushing down and outward, pushing it all away and bringing you back into the real reality. This place.

After that comes softness again. Tracing worlds upon your back with my fingertips.

When you sigh, I touch you one last time. You turn, shift onto your side, with one arm beneath you upon the soft silk covering the dais. I touch the side of your face. Brush the hair from your eyes. I lean in and we kiss.

Because there must always be this kiss, this moist lip brushing against moist lip, tongue testing and teasing, mingling breath.

The candles flicker, the curtains move. The soft music kisses with us. And we know that we will always be here in this now, this place, even when we aren't.

~.~

Chapter Two: The Eider Brook

All it takes is a thought, and we are at an inn in the valley village below your tower. Time is not the same here as it is in other worlds. It is twilight and we sit at a small table set out especially for us on a wood-floored patio overlooking a burbling stream. The stream is called Eider Brook, and I have never shown it to anyone before. You smile at me from across the table when I tell you this, then you look down slightly and nibble at your lower lip. My heart stutters in my chest. I reach across the table and take your hands in mine until you look back up and I can see the color in your eyes, lit by the wild-pastel twilight in the clouds above us and by the hanging bamboo lanterns strung across the balcony. Tonight your eyes are blue. While we wait to be brought our wine, I lift you to your feet and we walk to the railing.

The water in the brook rolls across time-smoothed rocks and gurgles down small declines, making happy little waterfall sounds as it goes. A small waterwheel spins just upstream, splashing and frothing. Fireflies, attracted to the coming night and the lanterns hanging above inn's patio, make a flashing starscape among the trees of the wilded wood across the brook. I stand behind you and hold you tightly against me. You rest your fingers on my arms. Your touch makes my skin tingle.

The waiter brings the wine, a velvety red made from the grapes that grow in the vineyards on the side of the mountain beneath your tower. If we turned, we could see the light of that tower shining like a small moon, high above, but we don't need to turn. We know it's there. The waiter serves the wine to us at the railing and nods. He doesn't need to be told what food to bring. Speech isn't always required here, in this place.

You sip your wine. I leave mine on the railing and put my mouth to the curve of your neck. I taste your skin there, nibble, move my head slightly and kiss your throat. You put your glass down and move your hands back to my arms, squeezing tightly. I turn you to me, pulling you as close as physics allows and then closer, because physics is not the same here. Separate, but one, your arms wound tightly around my back, mine around yours, I look into your eyes for a moment, and then you lift your lips to mine and we are kissing. Kissing, swirling together, rising, rising, rising into the cool air above the patio, the inn, the village. No fear of falling, because we cannot fall.

The clouds burst into red and orange and purple as the last rays of sunset flare out across them. They are a quilted, unreal, upturned seascape and we spin slowly below the sky sea as doves careen and whirl around us, come to play with us in the sky.

We're looking into each other's eyes, and we are looking at each other through the other's eyes. For a moment, you see what I see and I see what you see: robin-egg blue reflected in hazeled copper reflected in reflected in reflected in, reverberating into infinity. Then our hands are moving over each other's bodies. My fingers run down your arms as yours do mine, our fingertips touch. I move my hands to your face, touching, tracing, remembering. I caress your cheek, your neck, move my hands to your shoulders.

You move a fingertip from my Adam's apple down my throat and chest, playing with the down hair of my chest. You come to the first button of the black shirt I am wearing and pop the button off. Then another and another. Your smile is devilish. I slip the straps of your pale dress off your shoulders and then our clothes are evaporating. Our bodies are pressed skin-to-skin, merging, merging. We dance in the sky as one. Your arms behind my head become my arms, my lips and yours become the same, and all the world is whirling and wheeling around us. For a moment we are the only creature in the universe. There are no birds in the air, no people below us, only us. We. A plural that is no longer plural, but singular.

Then we spin back to the ground, back to holding one another beside babbling Eider Brook. Our clothes come back to us without us noticing. Our food is brought without us noticing.

We just stare into each other's eyes.

~.~

Chapter Three: Of Trolls and Unicorns

We walk:

The trees on either side of the path are tall and golden in the mid-autumn sunlight. Great boughs reach for one another above us as we go, each trying to touch a limb to a mate on the other side. The arched tunnel of branches doesn't block the light. Rather, the sunlight is captured by the leaves, is refracted and amplified, until we are walking hand in hand through a tunnel of blazing gold. Late-season monarchs flutter, whirl and caper in tiny tornadoes of black and yellow across the path ahead of us. You laugh and tighten your grip on my hand.

Not far ahead, new-fallen leaves have created a carpet. You laugh again, pull me forward, and we run through the broad, arrowhead shapes, kicking them up in a cloud that seems to hang suspended around us for a moment before settling again.

I grab and spin you, and we both fall to the ground, cushioned by the leaves we'd so recently disturbed. The smell of them, a rich, earthy muskiness, thickens the air. We roll and laugh and tickle one another until our play sends a flock of birds wheeling through the tree branches and into the sky. More leaves rain down on us and we lie there in the middle of the path, looking up and marveling at the golden light patterning every single leaf in the arch high above. My arm is around you, and you nestle your head against my shoulder. I tell you that I could stay like this forever. You look at me and smile.

Nearby, the Eider Brook whistles its merry little tune. A squirrel goes chasing its own tail up a tree trunk. A fawn leaps out from the trees, stands in the path for a moment, then bounds away into the woods on the opposite side.

You sigh with a sound that speaks of contentment and fulfillment and longing all at once.

We lie there a while longer, nestled against one another. Then we stand and walk some more, fingers twined.

A small crescent-moon bridge crosses the stream not far ahead. Willows line the water and as we pass, a troll--a kindly, wrinkled old soul--tips his hat and pets the head of the goat he has tethered nearby. You look surprised for a moment when you see him, but I smile and squeeze your hand. This valley isn't just a place for dreamers, after all, but also for their dreams.

The bridge is wooden and solid and arched. We pause for a moment at the top to lean over the railing and watch the koi move grandly in the clear water pooled below, orange and white sides catching the light. Your hair falls into your eyes. You brush it back. This seems a good place to kiss and so we do. I pull you close and touch your lips with mine. Then your tongue is tasting mine and mine yours, we are breathing each other's breath. I pull away only so that I can nibble at your neck and your shoulder, then another deep kiss, one that takes minutes or hours or centuries, and we move down the far side of the bridge.

The path opens out onto a meadow covered with bobbing dandelions and wildflowers of strange and marvelous colors. Reds, yellows, pinks, blues, purples, and a thousand thousand whites. I pick a few daisies and put them in your hair. Sunlight fills the open meadow. Huge, puffy white clouds drift through a piercingly blue sky.

Unicorns frequent this meadow, I tell you, but I also tell you they are shy. There is a better chance they will come out the next time we pass this way.

I could call them here, with word and dream, but that seems like cheating. They must come on their own, for they are unicorns. Some dreams demand more respect than others. We look for a moment, hoping, but decide to move on. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that we are together on a path that winds through an ancient wood and touches the sides of the meandering Eider Brook.

And then, just as we are about to leave the meadow behind and re-enter the whispering, golden forests, you grab hold of my shoulder and, very, very slowly, point. I look to where you are looking and--

--and it is there: beautiful creature of pale, diffuse white. It doesn't look like a horse with a horn, or like a malformed goat, or like any creature of mortality. Its lines are all sleek and long, It stands far higher at its withers than at its shank, such that it seems to be sitting up, rather than standing at rest. Its neck is curved and long; its lean, narrow head is covered with a long, rich loam of hair that drips down like ice. And if that loam is ice, then its horn--that glorious, wondrous horn--is an icicle like no other. Almost as long as the animal itself, the horn is thin, a stretched-out mother-of-pearl curling, and very, very sharp. The creature bats at the air with its horn, and bells tinkle out small tunes throughout the woods.

We are seeing a rarity that is rare