Adrissu nodded silently, pressing his mouth to Kian’s skin to stifle the moan threatening to escape him. Kian yelped as Adrissu moved faster, the sound echoing through the woods around them, and with one hand, Adrissu reached over and clamped his fingers around Kian’s mouth to silence him.
“Quiet,” he hissed, even as Kian moaned against his hand. “Unless you want anyone walking by on the road to hear you.” Kian whined against him, hips rocking, as if the very thought excited him. Adrissu groaned, the hand that was around his waist gripping him harder as he quickened his pace, pressing the human’s body into the rough bark of the tree they braced themselves against. One of Kian’s hands lowered to touch himself, and within moments his tight channel clenched hard around Adrissu’s cock as Kian came, his cries still stifled.
“You’ve wanted me so badly, haven’t you?” Adrissu growled, dropping the hand covering Kian’s mouth to grab him by the hips and fuck him harder, chasing his own orgasm. “You came so fast, you’ve wanted me all month.”
“Come inside me,” Kian urged, his voice rasping. Adrissu moaned, pressing his lips to the side of Kian’s neck and nodding. “Please come inside me, please, I want to feel you.”
It took only a few more hard, rapid thrusts for him to come, driving himself as deep inside Kian as he could reach. For a long moment, all he could focus on were the primal waves of bliss radiating through his body, sated with his mate in his arms. How had he ever functioned when they were apart?
Adrissu snaked his arms around Kian’s waist, pressing his face into the crook of his neck. He could feel the human panting hard against him, but eventually his breathing slowed down, and he chuckled.
“We’re never going to make it home before sundown at this rate,” he teased, and Adrissu smiled against his skin.
“Alright, alright,” he conceded, then carefully separated their bodies. “You don’t happen to have anything to clean up with, do you?”
“Oh, you’ll remember the lube, but not that,” Kian complained, but he smirked as he turned to face Adrissu. “Can’t you just magic us clean?”
Adrissu huffed, but did magic the oil off his skin. He hated cleaning himself this way—it made his skin prickle and sting afterward as if he had scraped it raw—but it would be easier than digging through their things to find a towel. He did the same to Kian’s backside, making him hiss with discomfort before pulling up his trousers.
“Can’t believe I let you talk me into having sex in the woods,” Kian grumbled as they walked back toward the road. “Look, my hands are all scraped up from being pressed against the tree.”
Adrissu grabbed his hand as Kian held it up, then held his palm to his lips and kissed it, letting healing magic flow from his grasp as he did so, knitting together the superficial wounds. Kian chuckled as Adrissu released him, turning his hand to observe the healed skin.
“Better?” Adrissu asked, wrapping one arm around the smaller man’s shoulders. Kian grinned up at him, eyes brimming with possibility and promise. They still hadn’t talked about his discovery, but there would be plenty of time for that.
“Better,” he agreed.
Just as Kian said, they ended up arriving back at Adrissu’s tower in Polimnos long after the sun had set. Glad as he was to see Vesper, who was overjoyed at his return as always, Kian went straight to bed after he’d unpacked. Adrissu was just as tired: flying great distances like that, soothing as it was to his mind, left his shoulders sore afterward even in his elven form, and weariness had sunk deep into his bones.
They both slept late into the next morning—luckily there were no classes that day, so Adrissu did not need to worry about being on campus—and had a leisurely breakfast together; it was well into the afternoon before Adrissu finally herded Kian into his study so they could discuss what he had learned.
“Okay, okay,” Kian sighed, sitting down at Adrissu’s desk next to him and setting out a pile of notes. “So, how much do you remember about Starck’s ritual?”
“Most of it,” Adrissu replied, and Kian rolled his eyes.
“How do you have room in your brain for centuries’ worth of stuff? Transmutation isn’t even your specialty.”
“To be fair, this was only, what, four years ago? Andeverythingis my specialty.”
“And so humble,” Kian teased, nudging Adrissu’s foot with his own beneath the desk. “Anyway, so, I know Starck didn’t really get it right, but his ritual is the closest anyone’s ever gotten, at least that we know about or has ever been recorded. Every time I tried to start from scratch, it ended up being similar enough to Starck’s ritual that I decided to just use it as the starting point and work out where he went wrong.”
“I see,” Adrissu said; none of this was news to him, but he learned long ago that this was just the way humans explained things.
“Sowheredid Starck mess it up?” Kian said, shuffling through his papers. He procured a diagram of the ritual, which had his own notations in red. Some runes were circled, some crossed out. “That’s what I spent a lot of time figuring out. The consensus is that we think the runes he used were too broad and general, that they weren’t precise enough to accomplish what he wanted in the way he wanted. But what specific runes were wrong, and what specific runes would work better? Everything that seemed like it might work wastoospecific, if that makes sense—so instead of being able to transform myself into whatever I wanted, I would need a specific ritual to transform myself into, for example, a big brown dog. And it wouldonlywork to make me that exact thing. Sort of like the iron-to-gold rituals that are banned. It works, but it doesn’t have the flexibility I think something like this would need. But obviously there’s a point of it beingtooflexible, hence the whole Starck debacle, and why no one else has tried this.”
“So you narrowed down the range of flexibility it needs, then?” Adrissu asked.
“Sort of,” Kian said, pausing as he shuffled through his papers once more. The next sheet he pulled out and set atop the rest was another ritual, one Adrissu was unfamiliar with. He recognized the same layout as Starck’s failed ritual, but the runes used were not the same. In fact, he thought as his eyes flickered up and down the paper, several of the runes were not transmutative in nature at all.
“I thought about you,” Kian said softly, gesturing up and down Adrissu’s body. “How your form like this is... different. It’s an illusion, but it’s physical. It’s reallythere, obviously. And you can make yourself look however you want, the way a glamor charm works, but with a true physicality that illusion doesn’t have. So I figured, why not use the transmutative formula, but with illusory runes?”
“That seems dangerous,” Adrissu said, frowning. It made sense; but to combine schools of magic like Kian was suggesting, while not impossible, was known to be perilous if implemented incorrectly.
“It does,” Kian agreed, and pointed to two runes. “But look. The primary illusory runes, really the only ones that influence it, arewillandvision. That’s the only part where illusion is used, and these are already similar to transmutative runes that let you adjust the physicality of something. It becomes what you envision, what you will it to be. But the driving force behind the ritual is still transmutation, so the change is physical, rather than illusory.”
“So you would need to have a very specific vision,” Adrissu said.
“And a strong will,” Kian agreed, nodding. He was smiling as he spoke, but a thrum of anxiety still pulsed in Adrissu’s chest. It made sense, of course, but so had Starck’s ritual. There was still so much about magic that was a mystery—that he had long ago accepted would forever be a mystery—it would be impossible to say for sure whether this new ritual might work, and therein lay the problem. If it were to backfire, it had the potential to do so explosively, enough to harm or even kill Kian.
