Old Time Religion 2: Lord of the Forest

Author's note: This is a sequel to a story that got lost in the crash. I'll have to recreate it at some point.

In the missing story, a pair of college students are going to see a movie. Instead, they meet Aphrodite, who offers one of them a gift. He asks for better understanding of women, and was changed into one for a semester. Then she turns to the other, and says she'd give him a boon as well, but someone else has plans for him. This is his story.

I'd appreciate any constructive advice anyone might want to offer.

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Let us worship like the druids,

And drink fermented fluids,

And naked through the woo-ids.

It's good enough for me!

My girlfriend Jess and I were standing on a hillside on the edges of the Texas Hill Country. It was May first - Beltaine - a warm spring night, and we were skyclad, or naked. In front of us was a large flat-topped boulder with an embroidered altar cloth on it. On the wine-colored cloth was a chalice, a knife and several candles. Jess was calling her Goddess as we started the ceremony.

Until a few months ago, I had been somewhat amused by Jess's choice of belief. Then I met the goddess Aphrodite and had watched her change my roommate into a girl. Since then, I have become a believer in magic. My roommate, Tom, now Tommie, had used some of the insights he, er, she had gained to hook me up with a friend of ours. And that's how I ended up standing naked on a hillside, taking part in a neo-pagan ritual.

I listened as she finished her invocation and lit the Goddess candle. It was my turn to call the male half of the divinity. I began, rather nervously, to say the words I had rehearsed seveal times in my mind. Aphrodite had said that some other deity had plans for me. With that in mind, I was sure that invoking a deity was asking for trouble. Still, I loved Jess, and she wanted me to be here.

I mumbled something about the Lord of the Forest, Stag-king, Cernunnos, protector and father, asking him to join us and lend his power to our rite. I struck a match and lit the God's candle.

Immediately, a surge of heat seared into my feet from the sandy soil. I tried to pick them up but I could not move. The heat traveled up my legs, and cramps forced me onto my toes. Bones in my feet grated against each other. I looked down, and three of the toes on each feet were receding upwards. The other two were changing, darkening, hardening. It took me a few minutes to realize they were becoming hooves. Cloven deer hooves. I watched in horrified fascination as my feet grew longer, and my ankles became hocks. Brown hair sprouted on my legs as they cramped and cracked. The heat traveled up my body until it felt like I was completely engulfed in flame.

   (Is more detail needed here, or is it okay to leave some to the reader's imagination? -Triskie)

At last, the burning stopped. From the waist down, I was a male elk. Above that, I was a man, a fit, muscular man, except for the impressive rack of antlers on my head.

An owl flew overhead, and I could feel its thoughts, focused on a mouse in the bushes on the of the side of the clearing. I realized that I could feel all the life around me - all the birds and animals, down to the invertebrates scurrying across the ground and burrowing beneath it. I could even feel the web of life sustained by the microbes in soil, plants and air. I stood and marveled at the intricacy of the pulsating, constantly changing web of life energy that surrounded us.

I threw back my head, and uttered the bugling challenge of the stag elk whose antlers and hooves I wore. The coyotes on the hillside stopped their hunt and added their song to mine, and the white tail deer in the valley thickets below us knelt to me. Even the military dogs on the Army camp on the horizon yelped and howled, confusing and alarming their handlers. I was the Lord of the Forest, and I was magnificent. From horizon to horizon, every creature with enough intelligence enough to do so signaled its obeisance to me.

All creatures save one. Jess stood facing me, with a small knowing smile, lips slightly parted, and a look in her eyes that said she knew just what to do with an uppity male. She stepped forward and ran one hand up over my muscled chest, barely touching the skin. With her other hand, she reached up, grasped my antlers, and pulled my face down to meet hers. Our lips touched, open mouthed, and her tongue lightly ran over mine. She held my mouth to hers with a hand on the back of my neck, as her other ran down and massaged the elk bull's sheath between my legs.

We made love on our altar. Her fair skin glowed gold and white in the moonlight and candlelight. Her head was haloed by the pentacle embroidered on the altar cloth. She was every bit the Goddess to my God. I tried to be gentle, conscious of the size of my elk parts. She took me with a force that surprised me. A small part of my brain rebelled. After all, the head of my cock should be somewhere around her rib cage. Then the rest of my brain realized that quibbling about it made no sense, given the rest of what had happened. We moaned loudly together as her orgasm brought me over the top. I lay down next to her, gathered her to me, and pulled the altar cloth over us as a blanket.

I woke up the next morning at sunrise. The memory of last night;s events came to me in a rush - the wonder of the magnitude and glory of the life surrounding us, and the sacred sex that followed. I grabbed my legs, unsure whether I hoped to feel human skin or elk hair.

I felt skin. It came with a deep sense of loss, mingled with relief. Then I realized my leg felt odd. Hard. Firm. I lifted up the altar cloth we were using. Instead of the scrawny body I had arrived with, I was toned and muscular.

A bluebird flew over us. I realized I had known it was going to before I saw or heard it. I didn't have the square mile awareness that I did last night, but I still had some of it. I wondered how I was going to tell my dad I wasn't going to major in business like we had planned. Instead, I was going to major in ecology with a minor in ancient religions.

The same sense that told me about the bluebird told me that Jess was starting to wake up. She too had been blessed. Her body was toned and strong, yet quintessentially feminine. I woke her up with a kiss. We made love again as a soft, warm rain fell. After we finished, she reached up above my head, and handed me a perfect elk antler.

--Triskelelynx 04:54, 3 December 2011 (UTC)