SHEA PRESSED AGAINST THE HARD, ROUGH BARK of the trunk which failed to conceal him, and blushed hotly.

Through the leaves, Shea saw how the elf watched him still. Calm. Patient. Then the other man broke into the widest, most handsome grin.

"Well? Come on, then. You didn't say hello yesterday. I was hoping you would."

With great effort, Shea swallowed the lump of despair in his throat. His posture straightened, and his legs propelled him forward. Once more Shea became an automaton—his consciousness was chased off by his snapping, hound-like nerves.

The stranger had known?

The human's cheeks glowed hot crimson as he left his hiding spot. The elf watched him come; his wide grin widened. He rose from his seat when Shea was near.

It was then that the human learned just how much taller the golden man was than him. The leanly muscled elf towered by at least a full head, and Shea had no idea what age he might be. The being's wrinkle-free features suggested his youth, but his gravity—the way his fathomless emerald-and-gold-flecked eyes were so firm, and knowing—implied an unnerving timelessness. Shea wished his mother had told him more, for the mystery created by the elf's uncertain lifespan hinted at something like godhood.

The inhumanly graceful figure surprised the human as he marched right up to him and hooked one firm, warm, living arm into the curve of the small of Shea's back.

Flesh.

He was real.

"I'm Telor," the elf said, so close that the breeze of his breath teased Shea's ear. The hot-cheeked youth stammered his name in return, but Telor ushered him along: he guided Shea through the tent's drawn-open facade and playfully pushed him over onto the piled pillows.

Shea gasped, and blinked and blinked. He gaped, struck dumb. He had fallen back into that dream he thought was lost to memory—was shoved into it, even. For only in his fantasies did he believe that he would sit there with Telor—beautiful Telor.

Oh, what joy, that he knew the elf's name!

Shea gazed into Telor's beaming eyes, and Shea smiled, too. The fire blanketed him with its comforting warmth, and the alluring aroma of roasted rabbit; Shea's famished stomach performed angry flips.

Telor moved, languid, inside of his tent; he cast glances at Shea—friendly looks; beautiful expressions. Shea's enchantment with the creature bordered on a trance.

Telor stacked a few of the larger pillows and lowered himself down onto the tower he had erected. On a higher plane than Shea then, the elf crossed one leg over the other and dangled his moccasin from the tips of his long, shapely toes; his spritely foot bobbed in the air before the youth.

Only the fire talked; it yammered on with crackling erudition.

It was so hard to return Telor's steady gaze with how it pierced Shea's energetic veneer. Try as he might to hang on to that stare, it was as if Shea was in rapids, and clung desperately to a line. He drowned inside of a torrent of elated anxiety.

"Welcome, traveler," Shea spoke after a moment. He stuttered the word and immediately wished that he had come up with something else. Anything else. "What—"

Telor cut Shea off with a curt laugh—a high, happy bark. "Welcome! To me? Welcome to you, human. You claim these woods as your own?"

"Well, yes." Shea blinked a few times. "This is my home. I've lived here all my life."

"Your short life."

"My mother is older. She knows all about elves."

"Oh! Does she," Telor scoffed. "And what did she tell you? These woods are your whole universe, aren't they," Telor guffawed. "This small little world!"

Shea's brow knitted together in frustration. Did the elf make fun of him?

"Why, there's no end to the wood. I've never seen an end, far out, or up or down. My mother tells me I'll never find one. And she grew up in this forest; with her own mother, too." Shea's cheeks were suddenly hot. "I mean"—his words left him, and then—"I know there must be more. Something else. It can't all be trees, right? And you're not from here—you're not from here, are you?"

Shea spoke too quickly, and winced when he realized how he sounded so high and quiet: meek. His consciousness whirled, and it was hard to control his wording, or calm how his voice trembled.

"What do you mean, 'short life,' sir," Shea asked after a moment.

"Your mother knows," The elf drawled; his honeyed laugh—how enamored already Shea was with that jolly music!

Telor leaned in, and his hovering foot drifted closer. Shea tilted backward. It was an involuntary response, as if Telor's foot might lash out at him, a dangerous snake.

"You're a blink of an eye, man. I'm as old as these trees. My last journey through these woods, your mother wasn't yet a mewling babe, nor any of your kin. Your people hadn't found this forest yet. No. They hadn't need of its holes and hideaways, then."

Telor's wide-and-thin lips smirked; his expression set, smug; he snapped his fingers as loud as a cracking whip.

"A human's existence is the same as any creature's here, like a bird's or a bug's: beautifully, pathetically short. I'll admit, however, of all the dumb beasts who have served me and my kind, I found your ilk the most fun. Humans were not the sharpest, or strongest, or apt, but what wonderful toys you did make."

Shea's whole face was red and hot. He struggled to listen to Telor, so bewitched was he by the movements of the tall, slender man's foot. The words were mostly lost as he focused on that limb that swayed.

Shea wanted nothing else in that moment than to reach forward and draw Telor's foot nearer to himself, to better take in how the elf dexterously waggled his supple leather shoe at the end of his toes as they stretched.

Telor smirked—amused, bemused—as he stared down at Shea. He cocked his head back and guffawed. As he did, his leg raised and the object of Shea's desire slid ever closer through the air.

"You can only dream of my home, my dear little wildling. My world; the city where I live. Its grandeur is beyond your most fanciful visions: imagine sparkling towers, dazzling colors, impossible shapes—taller than these trees and bigger around than that little lake basin. Oh, the lilac sky! Swarming with stylish gliders. Streets atop streets, avenues winding into every little corner.

"I can sit all day on my balcony and watch a writhing slice of that place: the ordered harmony of the Above, where my people walk; and the bustling, bloated, overflowing understreets.

"There, and everywhere, lesser beings and beasts serve our every need and want and whim. Across my own property I have more slaves than I know—oh, I tend to go through them, too—and, rather long ago, I used to keep plenty of humans."

Telor's voice dropped; deep, thick, heavy: "Your kind has long since fallen out of style, really, but my fondness remains even still."

Telor considered Shea from on high, and how the charmed human's face floated so attentively at the tip of his shoe—at the tips of his toes.

"Humans. Ha! Oh, I suppose it is gauche to retain an affection for you creatures after all this time, isn't it? Look at you, my dear thing. That light in your eyes. You're so full of lurid emotion. You're brimming over. It's vulgar. Obscene! But what supreme indulgence there is, in human delights."

Telor's prismatic eyes narrowed; his smirk crept into his cheeks. He kicked his moccasin off and bared his flesh.

Like drink, poured slowly into his mouth by hands not his own, Shea quaffed the details of his host's foot: Telor's toes wiggled playfully, and his slick sole flesh wrinkled in lovely response to the wave-like motion of those toes. Shea wished that he could watch Telor's foot for the rest of the day—for as long as he was physically able to, and remain upright. He had a sudden, strange desire to bury his face into the flesh of Telor's sole. To get lost in its softness, and scent.

"In fact, your ilk did not always live this way, at our feet, or in this wood," Telor continued as his naked foot wobbled to and fro, and his agile toes scrunched and relaxed. "Your tribes have since been scattered, but in your antiquity, on another world, you built bustling cities heaped high like insects' mounds.

"We seeded humans across this space centuries before you, or your mother, or her mother, to serve us, here and elsewhere. Your kind slaved for ours for a long, long time, before you were cast out. Despite our best efforts, some of you managed to skulk away or slip through the cracks, and even survive."

Telor's laughter was rich.

His voice fell again, low, as it did when the elf spoke with particular merriment: "A wild human! And yet not a savage. How serendipitous."

When he glanced up at Telor, Shea was horribly embarrassed at how the sea-depths of the elf's eyes gazed into his. The smile on Telor's lips did not touch the man's boring stare. Shea, sheepish after his daze, lost his wind as surely as a vessel with its masts shot down.

"You're a curious one, aren't you?" Telor's countenance turned coy. "But what has you so curious, I wonder?"

Shea helplessly glanced toward the peripheral movement of Telor's toes as they shifted: the elf curled his shapely digits like an illusionist who misdirected Shea's attention before a trick. Then Telor's other leg lifted and he let his remaining shoe fall away.

Both of Telor's bared soles wrinkled side-by-side in that delicious way that tugged deeply at the young human's lustful, furtive yearnings.

While Shea blushed, the elf cattily grinned and raised an eyebrow.

"Ah. What has you so rapt?"

Shea's lungs would hold no air; his expression suggested a visit by a ghost.

"Tell me."

 "Your feet," Shea murmured in defeat. "Your toes. Your soles!"

"Come now, don't look so horrified." Telor's tone had changed. His voice softened, but in its depths it was just as mocking: "It's only natural; so many of your kind have this reaction to me.

"You're beneath me, human. In those deepest, most primal corners of yourself, you know this to be true. It's something a creature like you perceives instinctively, when in the presence of living divinity.

"So," Telor's soles, pressed together, came up and blocked the elf's face from view; Shea's vision was filled with roseflesh, and pale-gold wrinkles—magnificent blindness. "Your place in this life is under my feet. Do you agree?"

"Yes," Shea instantly confessed—it was the quietest word he had ever uttered.

The fleshy planes undulated, and Shea gawped, transfixed.

Telor's lovely toes stretched and spread and curled and came together as they gripped at the air. In reaction, his soles were smoothed, the flesh soft and full of curves—then that flesh bunched up, and innumerable valleys formed along the elf's golden skin.

How Shea wanted to be like one of the bugs Telor likened him to: tiny, to travel across that dreamy solescape.

Telor's feet lowered away, and half a whimper escaped Shea before he caught it.

The elf leered at him and bent forward, arm extended—long, thin fingers plowed into Shea's short, messy hair; the appendages closed into a fist, and Telor held Shea's head steady as he raised his sole and pressed it against his captive face.

The myriad sensations of Telor's feet were, up until a precise moment promptly past, vague details that before Shea had only guessed at.

In the span of a turned page, everything changed, and Telor's sole was a knowable, explorable territory: its velvety plushness; its saccharine, tart scent; the ghostly traces of salt on the captivated youth's lips.

Shea's body relaxed with drugged celerity. His skull was a balloon that floated; it held up the rest of him—he was weightless, gripped by Telor's hand; Shea's entire being buzzed with pleasure, drunk with returns to hedonistic queries.

Shea's brown eyes were glazed as he peered over the blurred crests of Telor's rounded toes. He stared across the length of the elf's raised leg and along the underside of his overhanging arm, into Telor's fierce, exultant visage. The pleasure drawn on the elf's face was mixed with an entirely selfish satisfaction. Guilt knocked at Shea that he provided Telor with such dubious joy—and yet he wholeheartedly wanted to be the cause of Telor's delectable satisfaction.

He loved the wild face Telor wore.

The elf's long toes arched over Shea's nose possessively, and covered all of it.

There was movement inside of Shea's mind, as if it was reconfigured by magical conjuration: he would do anything for Telor; he wanted to stay beneath his feet always. He knew this was true. This was his rightful place—he believed so in an ardent, unignorable fashion, experienced for the first time in his young life.

"Breathe in, deeply," Telor commanded.

With cheeks aglow, Shea closed his eyes and filled his senses with Telor's scent. His mind drifted through the woods that were his home, spurred by familiar and new aromas: sour earth, sharp leaves, crisp rain. The way the sweet tang from the man's leather moccasins mingled with his brine was sacred knowledge. Shea drew the redolence of Telor's foot into himself with elongated, full breaths, cataloging every minute, distinct detail that he could with great care.

As Shea's eyelids remained closed and he took in the elf's intoxicating musk, Telor's sole slid up, and down, and all over his face. The supple flesh molded to Shea's features.

Telor's heel glided across Shea's cheek; toes brushed over his lips; the ball of Telor's foot forced Shea's mouth flat—then his nostrils, then settled heavily across his eyes, accompanied by the elf's silken arch as it found its desired position overtop Shea's face. Telor's long, warm sole covered the entirety of Shea's countenance like a plush mask, and the elf smothered him: he twisted his foot side to side, as if he might wipe the human face away like a stain. 

Telor pushed his smooth, round heel against Shea's soft lips. "Kiss my divine sole, human."

Shea puckered his lips against the surface of Telor's proffered heel and kissed; a sound: a little pop of air.

"Again," Telor ordered; his sole shifted and he rested the delicate patch of skin just above his heel on top of Shea's mouth. "And here," he urged, as he inched his foot southward across Shea's features and covered the blushing human's puckered lips with different spots of his sole. "Slowly."

Telor repeated the movement, and his simple order, as he walked the length of his foot downward so that Shea could kiss along its entirety—gently he stepped on Shea's captive face again and again and again—until finally the human pecked at the underside of each and every impatient, demanding toe, too.

Telor's coiled fingers released Shea's hair.

Shea instantly regretted his freedom.

His view of the elf was blocked by the slab of the man's large, long sole; the soft foot pushed against Shea's face, insistent, and Shea drifted backward, confused.

The warmth of the golden man's flesh left him, and Shea glanced over in askance of the elf.

Telor just grinned and struck out with his leg. He slapped Shea with his sole and uttered, "Down!"

Shea blinked away blue-and-purple blotches, his vision spotted. He fell against the pillows, and gasped as Telor scooted forward and sat right on top of his hips.

The elf's strong hands deftly pushed away the human's limbs as they weakly protested. Both of Telor's soles were replaced on top of Shea's upturned face. Shea's useless appendages dropped, limp, with all the grace and subtlety of a ragdoll, and Telor chuckled in triumph—he scrubbed Shea's features with his pliant, conquering flesh.

"Yes, human. This is where you want to be. Don't resist me. You know you can't. Don't pretend you can. Show me that you know your place," Telor pointedly slid one foot over Shea's nose, and with the other blockaded his lips. "You belong beneath my feet. Am I correct?"

Shea murmured something like agreement.

Telor's fragrant warmth left him anyway—his soles suddenly raised an inch.

This time, Shea fully whimpered.

"Call me Master and tell me who owns you."

"You own me, Master," Shea replied with a desperate whisper.

The elf's soles lowered onto Shea's relieved visage, and Shea sighed.

"Kiss." Telor's voice was high and curt, as if he spoke to a dog.

Shea eagerly peppered the elf's flesh.

"Your lips are so soft," Telor remarked, and Shea blushed at the praise. "And this is the perfect use for them. It's a good thing I caught you, human. Just think, you could have lived out the entirety of your miserably short life without performing the very duties you were born for."

There were tears on Shea's rose-red cheeks. Queer relief.

The human's hot little tongue flicked at Telor's flesh. It was transgressive exploration. That gleeful, selfish visage stuck in his mind. Shea's tongue retreated back into his mouth with the bittersweet glory that was composed of the sundry flavors of Telor's sole.

Sour salt. Sweet earth. Tangy skin.

"Yes," the elf urged. "Yes, pet. Lick."

Something relaxed inside of Shea; a thread of resistance that snapped so slowly as to simply come apart. Stressful pressure left his chest in a geyser of energy as he licked at the long and shapely soles that rested on his face.

His tongue swirled against each heel; he stroked his slick muscle up and down the yielding curves of Telor's arches; Shea scrubbed the puffy flesh below the elf's toes.

"Ah, mm-mm-mm."

Telor's thin fingers returned to Shea's hair. This time the elf petted and gently scratched his prey—electric fingertips teased the skin behind Shea's ears.

"Lick. Lick all over my supernal soles. This is how you can please me most, slave. This is what feels best for your Master. I never tire of an obedient, devoted tongue cleaning my feet. Lick between my toes," Telor ordered.

Shea did. With care and patience he worked his tongue between each long toe. He explored the shape of them with his sensitive, flexible organ; relished their salt on his buds. Telor's toes gripped Shea's tongue greedily, pulled it ever deeper into their crevices. Shea was sure to lick twice between each of his Master's toes, before he returned to Telor's soles.

As the young man labored in his worship, entranced, the storm outside the tent gathered its strength, heralded by thunder that rumbled and groaned. The hushed rain-roar resounded high above; the first breaths of its mist drifted into the enclosure and glinted with firelight as the chilly spray tickled the short hairs of Shea's exposed skin.

"This is where you belong," Telor repeated, but it was not forcefully said. It was a calm, simple statement, and Shea knew it was the truth.

Shea tumbled down through a pleasurable sensation like he had never experienced prior to Telor's feet. He could not have imagined gratification of that magnitude, yet in that present moment it was so gloriously keen and clear. It was a new form of happiness, and instantaneously any previous joy paled and dulled, like petals that rotted in his mind.

"This is your true purpose," Telor continued, and every word rang rightly to Shea's ear.

The longer he worked Telor's sole with his tongue, patterns emerged: ways to lap that transcended simple licks, and became worship. Shea focused on his calling to please Telor's soles. He caressed them, cleaned them, embraced the flesh with the raw passion that flooded his being.

"I am your God, human," Telor intoned. "You will worship me without question."

"Yes, my Master—my God!" Shea exhaled the words and kissed Telor's feet; he had to remind himself to continue to breathe—it was a real effort.

The supplicant was lost to the world around him. Every bit of sense his body and mind possessed was directed toward his mouth—to his lips as they pressed against the bottoms of Telor's divine feet. Only the nerves in his lips and tongue and nose functioned. All of the rest of him had dimmed, as if he had ceased to exist. Every thought in Shea's mind was of how he could better serve and please Telor.

In the din beyond the tent—amidst the warped sounds of distant reality—Shea heard a familiar call, but could not place it. Like an echo from the corporeal realm that tried to force its way into his dream, Shea's mind processed the noise as the wind or the cry of an animal, and dismissed it.

The second time the same call piqued Shea's ears, it rang a little more clearly. It materialized with a clarity that dropped him out of his fantasy, and dumped him into the horrible world: "Shea," the searching voice cried.

It was Mia.