Dusk Hunters on HotGuySecret
Summoned Up
“Soul Resonance at 89%…92…100… Ankh-lures attached. Flux still 88%…”
“Not a problem. Transmigration Ritual proceeds! We need at least Resonance 55 and Flux 45 or less. Pray the flux closes. Keep tracking that Hundred Resonance. Open the sigil.”
“Understood. Opening the sigil!”
At the center of the circle rested a great disk of stone, almost half a foot thick, inlaid with copper. The metal formed letters and geometric figures. The disk vibrated. The chanters’ voices rose, carrying their incantation above the growing sound of popping electricity.
Eight snarling wolf heads, each extending from a pillar, glowed. Lightning flashed in their jaws. The electricity ran down a short length of ruby chain extending from each carving’s mouth. The lightning hissed and sizzled when it reached what lay at the end of each line. The chains drew back into the wolf heads.
The ends of the chains, monstrous contraptions resembling the combination of a grappling hook, an anchor and a four-sided claw, clicked into place. The wolf heads now looked like they were clinching them between their sparking teeth.
Each wolfhead unleashed a torrent of lightning. The surging, flashing arcs sped along the sharp edges of the grappling claws, converged at the point where their ends touched together spear-like, and lanced out toward the center of the circle. The copper dome set into the spinning disk attracted and gathered all eight forks of lightning. They converged, flashed, and spun into a whirling toroid vortex.
It expanded, running along the disk until the crackling vortex spread across its entire face. The lightning condensed, purified, organized. With a muffled hiss and then a roar, tongues of white fire sprang up, and swooshed in the air like water rushing in a stream while the disk spun them round and round.
“Sigil charged.”
“Flux between 64—91%.”
The fire climbed higher, brighter, then with a final rushing rumble and plunk, it became a milky cyclone of light.
“Flux between 42—87%!”
Depth was perceived now. The light extended downward, boring deep—not into the disk, but through it—into the fabric of time and space… darkness expanded behind the descending vortex of white fire. In this ever lengthening tunnel, sparks from the vortex flew back up the shaft and started spiraling into the darkness like twinkling stars. It now looked like someone had rolled the night sky into a scroll and made a kaleidoscope out of it.
The vortex bored to a certain point, and then, with a squeal of shattering walls meant to stand forever, the virgin seal ripped; space and time between one world and another unified.
Blue and white ether, like water, or glowing fog, bled forth. It spiraled up the black tunnel shaft. It erupted in a frothing, spinning geyser shot high into the air. A tortured glass-shattering scream rang in the sky over the ritual circle. The pillars and the chains in the wolves’ mouths vibrated. The ground shook and cracked. People clutched bones in pain. Clouds fled. Compasses ticked. Clocks spun and pointed at the bore.
Slowly, the geyser twisted back downward, frothing and spinning, moving in reverse. It continued to spin over the surface of the disk, which spun counter to it, a sheathe of white flame sandwiched between them.
“The gate is open, Scale!”
“Soul resonance keeping 100%.” The speaker’s voice went emotionless with confused disbelief. “No flux…”
A pregnant pause swelled.
“…Fire!” ordered Orfinre, the officer in charge, a First Scale of the Avnicenganr Empire.
The grappling claws sprang from their wolf head mountings. Each of the eight hurtled into the center of the gate, through it, and into another world.
Orfinre sucked in a breath. He watched the red chains shiver, and tighten, one by one. Four of the eight grappled into their targeted soul. No flux? That was impossible. Well, it happened sometimes in rare cases or small bores, but never for long, he reminded himself.
He had just defied all warnings and protocol. If this went wrong, he would be executed. He should’ve waited. But then they’d have to start at a new ritual ground. And what if resonance never reached 100%? Resonance did that regularly, but only one time in five. “What’s the fluctuation now?”
Three more lines went taut. Just one more remained, and it wriggled, indicating falling Resonance. Resonance was kind-of the scent in the hound’s nostrils. It was the tracking. And it was the determining factor on how successful the summoning would ultimately be even if it managed to haul up the prey.
“I don’t understand. Still no flux. 0%.”
“Resonance dropping to 90%! Lure is fishing. Shall we reel it in?”
“No,” Orfinre said. He massaged a lump out of his throat. Then he cleared it. He put his hands behind his back and ignored the looks the others gave him. “Bring in the other seven first.” He had a feeling. And he knew to listen to feelings, intuition. He couldn’t sense the future, not on demand. But he still could tap into it, slightly. And he just new, new without doubt, this was going to be worth the risk of losing one of those irreplaceable chains.
With a groaning, moaning sound, the red chains started sliding back into the wolf mouths, link by link. White sparks and smoke billowed up from the bore. The chains flashed blinding white.
“Resonance keeping 96%!”
“And the flux?”
“Still zero. Flat as an anvil.”
The final chain shook once. Then it went taut. It’d buried into the target soul.
“Reel in the last one,” Orfinre shouted.
The final chain started pulling. It flashed like the others.
“Resonance 98%.”
“Flux moving! Range is 14 to… 14—98%! Gods gone wild!”
Fear clutched Orfinre’s heart.
The chains continued pulling. They flashed brighter. The first one snapped, and they lost a soul. The red chain slid into the gate like a slurped noodle. The others flashed wildly. The eighth worst of all. Then four grappling claws burst out of the bore, clutching white, skeletal silhouettes. The figures writhed, flashed with light brighter than the sun. A noise so thin and high, it could not be heard, deafened everyone’s ears.
“Flux is down. 0%! It’s down again!”
“Resonance 100%!”
The fifth and sixth chains pulled out, and their souls flashed and flickered dimly only once, then glowed pure and bright like twin suns at high noon. The light changed on the bodies. Countless flashes of rainbow light, as if the figures had been suddenly transmutated into skeletons of glittering thousand-faced diamond, danced across Orfinre’s face.
“Sixth and Seventh have perfect resonance! Power is building in them beyond our ability to measure! It’s indescribable! Overwhelming! First through fourth are stabilizing. First and Second’s power is decreasing, about average. Third, Fourth and Fifth stabilized. Power is flooding in, above average, far above…”
The chains continued reeling in their prizes, dragging the seven writhing figures off the spinning circle and across the ground. The skeletons thickened, gaining white outlines of human shape. They gained weight and fell to the stone of the ritual circle. They writhed and clawed at the stone, and at the chains gripping their souls.
The wolf heads grinned down at them. They kept pulling in their iron tongues with clinking metallic growls. Orfinre joined them under his breath.
The first three reached the end of their lines. The wolf heads sat three quarters of the way to the top of each pillar. This was more than high enough to raise the new body off their knees but not to their feet. The bodies bent backward and squirmed in pain. Their cries fell octaves until they reached human hearing. The voices were high like someone breathing helium. Then the voices lowered further, to more deep, masculine tones.
The first body flashed into being. It was the third catch. The glow faded in a haze of golden smoke, revealing a naked young man in complete incarnation. For a brief instant, Orfinre almost saw the boy’s skeleton glowing from within his body, but it faded in an eyeblink. One after the other, the bodies precipitated into physical form.
“Transmigration successful,” he announced. “There’s almost no chance of them failing now. Either way,” he said, raising a hand, “deactivate the sigil and raise the disk up. We don’t want something uninvited coming through.”
The ritualists got to work quick on that. It would surely speed anyone on their task by reminding them something horrible might slip in from the Beyond.
The disk’s energy dissipated. It hissed to a stop. It rose, slowly, like a lid opening upon a chest, until it rested within a half-moon shaped stand formed of two upwards sweeping pylons of stone. The copper rune inscriptions upon its surface flashed and glowed in reds and blues and yellows.
Orfinre advanced to the nearest prisoner clockwise from him, ignoring the empty pillar and its missing red chain. The third, sixth and seventh bodies were still materializing. The second captive, the first to come through successfully, had finished early. He frowned. Boy 1 had a withered physique with an emaciated rib cage, and the magic was dissipating rapidly from his form in a radiant cloud of light. “No good. We’ll send it to the petrimatorium.”
He went to the next. This was number two to arrive. Alas, his body was shriveling as he looked on. Tragic. He wouldn’t even survive the trip to be converted into Saturium.
He glanced back at the pillar whose red chain snapped. He might still find himself on his way to the petrimatorium himself, unless…
He went to the next pillar along the way. The third captured soul was still materializing. He moved to the next pillar. That body had just resolved and the light rose up in a pale cloud laced with silver about him. There wasn’t as much energy loss from this one. The smoke almost looked normal. Good.
Orfinre cupped the young man’s hairless chin in his fingers and tilted his head. This young man was number 4. He looked about 86 seasons.
The prisoner’s jaw was well defined, balanced between masculine and feminine, a perfect symmetry. No blemish adorned his skin. It was a paler color than Orfinre preferred, but a good march through the desert would fix that problem.
Boy 4’s hair was black with wavy curls of indigo that lightened to cobalt at the tips. It reached down just below his ears. His pubic mane was almost non-existent, a mere wisp of straight black hair. He was smooth of skin elsewhere, save his eyebrows, one of which was black with, if Orfinre squinted, a little indigo. The boy’s left eyebrow had a deep cobalt streak in it, like an artist had accidently let their hand slip while painting the boy’s hair. Orfinre liked that. He reached down and twisted the boy’s dark brown nipple.
Groaning, Boy 4 opened his eyes, both stunning silver-grey with a marvelous rainbow glint when they moved suddenly. He blinked, then clutched his heart, and pressed against the pillar in an attempt to back away from Orfinre’s satisfied grin and pinching gauntlet. His feet dragged. He was especially tall, so he had to bend a bit awkward, and pressing his hands up against and around the pillar for support. Then he moved them to grip the wolf’s head carving, which was the only real handhold. Then, his eyes followed the chain from the hideous head down to his chest, where he doubtless felt it clutching his heart. He loosed a cry of horror.
The wolf’s eyes glowed red. Chains extended from the sides of the statue and wrapped around the boy’s forearms, calves and ankles, and one looped around his neck. The chains about his arms pulled them up high and then back around to the rear of the stone. His thick biceps fought the movement the entire way, and the heads on his forearm muscles and deltoids bulged with the effort to pull his arms back. His feet were pulled up as well, suspending him from the ground, showing his excellent calves. He flexed and jerked awkwardly, almost like he was dancing, or trying to fuck an invisible partner. His cock flopped awkwardly. His face did not flush crimson. He was too terrified and disoriented to feel shame.
The chain reaching from his heart held the boy’s full attention. He whimpered and then screamed again, his eyes widening until they almost looked like they’d fall out of their sockets.
Orfinre couldn’t resist rubbing the body’s shoulders. He was scowling at Orfinre now, despite still struggling with the horror of the heart chain. The captive’s torso bent and flexed in a great show of flexibility. His shredded serratus between his rib cage bulged out beyond the bones, and broke his sides like cracks on a cliff face. And his abdominals rippled like half-fluid armor, shifting and heaving with his breathing.
Orfinre ran his hand down the boy’s abs with one hand, the other clutching his respectable lats. They weren’t quite as big as they could be, but were exceptionally hard. So were the abs, he slapped them hard at the navel. Then he snatched the boy’s cock and pulled it up by gripping the head between his thumb and forefinger.
As expected, Boy 4 started cursing and spitting, and tried to pull away, only for that to prove painful. His face reddened. Ah, so shame was remembered at last. He couldn’t find any comfort as he was, being basically crucified to the angler’s pillar. But he did stop writhing. “Who are you? Where am I? W-where’s…” he paused, and a confused look overtook the fear and anger on his face.
Yes, the boy wouldn’t remember much of his previous life. In fact, he’d forget everything in the next few minutes. He probably didn’t even know his name anymore.
“Hmm, a handspan long plus one finger digit. No telling the girth without arousing you a little. That can wait.” He rapped the pillar. A chain looped out from around its back and gagged the youth.
“You’ll stay there and dance until someone comes to cut you down. Behave, or we will never remove that chain from your breastbone, understand?”
Boy 4’s brow furled in deep trepidation. But he nodded his head.
The next one in line was number 5. He was rather short—perhaps on the younger side?—despite the usual body from this process forming around 80 seasons. The young man’s eyes were open and he was staring at Orfinre and his other captors. They were of a startling quality in color, they looked almost like actual gemstones, watery and reflective and glowing bright green, an excellent sign of great magical retention. Boy 5 would prove very powerful.
His eyes portrayed a wild countenance. And his head hair and eyebrows were yellow as sunflowers, but slowly blended into a burning orange, and then reddened at the roots. He had quite the trail of hair running from his navel to his cock, where an excellent main of dusky orange-to-brown grew. Despite his short body, his muscles bulged with incredible hypertrophy.
“Looks like we’ve fished out a young lion,” Orfinre said, admiring Boy 5’s face. His was more youthful than the previous one, but the jaw was more square and the adam’s apple more prominent. But there was a certain degree of baby fat to the cheeks that lent him a more supple beauty. He snarled, showing a pair of very prominent canines.
“If only there was more time to just admire the show. But I have other slaves to observe. Behave,” Orfinre said, tapping the boy’s chest. The chain extending from the center of his sternum rattled. The boy lashed out, trying to wrap Orfinre in a bear hug, perhaps, and crush him. But the chains from the pillar whirled through the air and bound his arms up in one sudden motion.
“Take it out,” 5 said in a voice ragged with savage anger. “Take it out of my heart! Take it out!”
“We will slave. Eventually.”
He gestured at the wolf’s head. Its eyes flickered in response.
“Take it outggghgg!”—The chains pulled the captive’s head back until his face stared up at the dark clouds. His monstrous chest heaved. “Gghgrrr.”
Orfinre stepped over to boy 6. The young man was in the middle of a panic attack, maybe.
He was very tall, and yet by his girlish face and slim frame, he definitely looked younger too. It was hard to tell with the thinner, tall ones. He might have been 75. His narrow, slender jaw was set. His lips quavered and the nostrils of his thin, pointed nose flared.
His eyes were wide as they could go. They were a riveting primary blue, with an almost reflective, polished surface like sapphire. His hair was green, a vibrant color like grass that darkened a little to a holly leaf shade. He had no hair below his brows. His smooth muscles were excellently defined, and had a wiry strength it seemed. The awkward position of being bent backward in an almost u-shape didn’t seem to bother him at all, despite that his chains had wrapped him to his pillar long ago.
“Well, I suppose you’re behaving like you should,” Orfinre said in passing.
Orfinre moved on to the 7th catch. This one only just finished forming. Golden motes flickered around him. No steam. A very, very good sign. The magic was taking with this one. He was not conscious. He hung limp by his chains. The young man looked from the smooth perfection of his face to be around 88 seasons, if Orfinre was pinning him right.
Regardless, his body was bound in massive strength. His arms were almost as thick as Boy 4’s thighs. And those were smaller than his boulder-like shoulders. They squished his traps up against his roped neck muscles, belaying their incredible height. His gigantic chest rose and fell softly, drawing Orfinre to the nipples. They were turned out slightly, and were of a chocolate brown. The rest of the skin was a nice tan on olive skin. Boy 7’s torso tapered from his monstrous traps to a very, very whipcord narrow waist. Despite this, his trunk was bricked in deeply chiseled core muscles, each ab a smooth-edged block. “Perfect cobblestone abs,” Orfinre murmured. He tapped 7th’s second pair of abs, producing a sound like tapping rock. “And just as hard.”
His quads, glutes and calves were extremely cut, and while smaller than his massive upper body, still seemed to hold incredible power. He suspected they could manage some real endurance work. Then again, perhaps it was just how lean his waist and crotch region were. It narrowed there, before his quads expanded his profile out again. It was such a rarely sublime combination. And it was due largely to his height. The boy was tall, easily six and a half feet.
His cock was the kind that shrank and shriveled. But it was still about six inches in length and girth. He was disappointed the muscle-boy wasn’t awake yet. He suspected he could get much, much bigger when at full arousal. But there was no way but to prove it later. He clapped his hands.
Soldiers moved in and began placing the fresh slaves into new sets of magic-deadening restraints, now that their flesh had stabilized, so that their latent power would be lamed. They’d surely have no clue how to use magic in Orfinre’s world, but nobody was going to tempt fate. And the slaves would soon struggle desperately once they realized what horrible future awaited them. He sighed. Grim necessity. He glanced at Boy 7. The young man eyed him with beautiful amber gold eyes. “You’re going to save my skin, Seven.”
Or at least, he thought while swallowing a lump in his throat, he hoped so.
A flash came behind him. He spun around. Something weird was happening to the third captive. They had just resolved, but instead of the glow fading in a controlled manner, their body flashed, and then materialized, then flashed again, a phosphorous flare, burning a skeletal afterimage into Orfinre’s retina. The body flashed once more, and then very, very, very slowly, the body went limp. Orfinre rushed over and put an ear to the boy’s chest. There was a heart beating in there. He drew back, and then examined the new slave more closely. This one was still not quite corporeal. What in the world was happening?
“I guess you’re here to keep me guessing. A wildcard, eh?” Orfinre felt his own heartbeat drum a little faster. This one was supposed to be powerful, but if the magic didn’t take… that could end with both of them doomed. A bead of sweat dropped from his brow.
Groans and muffled cries rose up around him. Orfinre looked around to see the other four healthy slaves writhing while soldiers dragged them along by halters about their necks. They cried out, begged through their gags, pleaded with their eyes.
Boy 6 looked at Orfinre with a look of purest, desperate supplication for mercy.
“Don’t look that way again, slave. I’m sorry, but it won’t help either of us to seek mercy.” Orfinre spread his hands off-handedly around them. “This world is damned. There is no more mercy to be found here no matter where you search.”
Believe it or not, but the young man actually did find mercy there, and perhaps more than he expected, in Orfinre’s eyes.
But Orfinre turned away, his cloak swishing, gauntleted hands behind the small of his back.