The Art of The Elder Man (Coming Tomorrow!)

Uncovering and divulging  an outlandish conspiracy will put a hard bump into any journalist’s career, and Armin can only blame himself when he’s dispatched from Frankfurt’s skyscrapers into the depths of rural France on the unglamorous job of writing about a cobbing workshop.

Natural building is messy, dirty and sweaty work, but it has its consolations. For example, Van, the greying but undeniably hot master cobber teaching the workshop. Sure, the man is a hopeless tree-hugger, with embarrassing notions about ancient folklore and religions, but he’s still worth a week-long fling, right?

When Van is revealed in all his majesty and power as a long forgotten forest god, however, the week-long fling might well become entangled with eternity, on the edge between life, death, madness, and immortality.

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I can't wait for tomorrow, and the release of The Elder Man, a story that I have worked on for well over a year. It all began even longer ago, with this drawing I made of Danila Kovalev in January of 2018.

"Cernunnos (1)" 

(model, Danila Kovalev)

pencil drawing

© Katherine Wyvern

It was a drawing of Cernunnos, god of the forest and keeper of the gates of the underworld in Gaulish mythology. This drawing was just an homage to the beauty and magic of the woods around my garden, but it slowly became so deeply rooted into my imagination that Cernunnos finally found his way into one of my notorious "short, light stories" and turned it into a wonderfully deep and textured tapestry of wild nature and ancient magic. Since then I made more drawings for this book, and they became part of the storytelling for me. I have gathered them here, and I hope they express some of the love and awe I feel for Van and his woods.

"Cernunnos (2)"

(model, Henry Ian Cusick) 

Pencil drawing, digital color 

© Katherine Wyvern

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"The Great God Pan (1)"

(model, Henry Ian Cusick)

pencil drawing, digital effects

© Katherine Wyvern

 -:-

"The Great God Pan (2)"

(model, Henry Ian Cusick)

pencil drawing, digital effects

© Katherine Wyvern

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“Why the antlered man? Who is it?” repeated Armin, a little confused, looking at Van.

Van shrugged. “He’s … Amun, and Silvanus and Pan, and the Leshy and Veles and Svyatibor  … even the Minotaur, perhaps. There is a picture of him as old as fifteen thousand years in a cave in the Ariege, la grotte des Trois-Frères. The Sorcerer. Prancing fellow with antlers and a thumping big dong.”

Every woman in the room, including the young girls, giggled.

He grimaced theatrically. “Sorry. All these old horned males. What can I say?”

“Anyway, some would say he’s the Devil, too, and Baphomet. And lately, just the Horned God. It all got twisted about since the Christians started messing with the old deities. And the Wiccans just made one big stew of it all to cover all the bases and be on the safe side. They may not be wrong however. In France, the Gauls came to call him Cernunnos or Carnonos or Cerunincos, which all simply mean the horned one or the antlered one. I suppose we might go with Cernunnos.”

“Wherever you look, there was always a god of the forest, the earth, the water… a god of low places, valleys, sources, meadows. His trees were always small trees. Healing trees. The willow, the elder, the rowan. Not a sky god. Not a war god. He was also, as often as not, a god of agriculture and fertility. And death and healing, even resurrection.  Fall, winter, and spring, the seasons. Nature again. It was easy in the old days to believe in such a divinity. And it was wise to pay tribute to him. Forests, fields, death, rebirth, the cycles and forces of nature were rather more … central.”

 -:-

"Stag Night"

pencil drawing, digital effects 

© Katherine Wyvern

-:-

"At the head of the bed was sculpted a huge tree, which rose from a tangle of roots and interwoven grasses or creepers and spread on the walls and under the ceiling.

It took a sort of knack, a subtle shift in vision and a certain familiarity with Van’s twisting and fractal designs, to realize that the tree was actually two slender stags, rearing up belly-to-belly, muzzles raised, legs grappling. Their massive leafy antlers spread up and out like a petrified fountain and ended in a foamy, lacy, semiformal trellis of finely tooled flower heads.

The stags might be fighting, but seeing how their long cocks and serpentine tongues were entwined in two labyrinthine knots, they might also be doing something else entirely.

Armin blinked, dumbfounded, then blinked again, and uncannily, the tree was just a tree once more..."

-:-

"Cernunnos (3)"

pencil drawing, digital effects 

© Katherine Wyvern

-:-

“There has always been something mystical about the stag and his antlers, in all the old Indo-European cultures. The stag was important enough to have his own constellation, roughly where modern astronomers place Ophiuchus. The Celts put it nicely, saying that the stag carried the solar disk in his crown. His antlers and his strength are greatest in the autumn, they are lost in the winter and emerge again in the spring. He incarnates the death of nature and its awakening. He and Cernunnos are avatars of the fall, of the death of nature and its rebirth. Cycles again.”

-:-

 I am immensely grateful toe Evernight Publishing and Jay Aheer of Simply Defined Art for including my moon cycle illustration in the cover of the book.

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Hot dark new release - Hell's Mercy -by yours truly

Three-hundred years after the demise of Earth-that-Was, the Galaxy’s central  government has banned all artificially modified and enhanced humans. Only the remote planet of Cydonia has finally dissociated itself from the ban. The wild revelries of the Black Carnival in the Cydonian capital, Neu Venedig, have now taken an even wilder turn…

On the fifth night of the Carnival, Lukan strolled out of his high walled courtyard, twirling his walking cane in the air and humming Johan Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s “Praeludium VIII” to himself. He had been playing it on the harpsichord again and again that afternoon, and its slippery, silvery perfection still clung to his inner ear like a haunting voice.

He crossed a little bridge into a narrow calle, then turned right into a slightly wider canal-side, lit by glowing fire-bulbs and the shimmering reflections from the dark water. The place was quiet, and the music hummed on in his head, undisturbed. Even at the height of the festivities, it was almost deserted in this part of Neu Venedig. He had carefully chosen his 16th century palazzo to be well out of the raving crowds.

He skipped from flagstone to flagstone along the edge of the canal, almost like a child, almost like a dancer, following the music that he alone could hear. The long tails of his embroidered coat flapped behind him as if charmed by the inaudible melody. His ghostly shadow flickered in and out of existence as he passed streetlight after streetlight.

It was Carnival, and he was going to Hell.

The Praeludium in his head gave way to an altogether more spirited Rigaudon, and he skipped faster, actually counting, two, three, four—he skipped a larger flagstone—five, six seven. Eight, nine, heaven.

Hopscotch. A forgotten game, like the music was forgotten, like the harpsichord was forgotten, ghosts of a dead world, long, long ago. But he was alive, and he remembered. He had been alive a long time, far longer than his looks suggested.

The night was cold, and he was as taut as a violin string, ready to snap with ache and longing, and something else, too, a sort of mute grief he didn’t want to acknowledge but that haunted him all the time, subtly gnawing at him.

But he was going to Hell, so all would be fine tonight. Soon, he would be all right, freed from that silent sorrow, and released into flaming brilliance.........

New Release!!

 or at least, newly edited re-release

with this mouthwatering new cover by Jay Aheer

Twelve years after Ivory first visited the Black Carnival, Neu Venedig has changed: wilder, crazier, and even more surprising, this new Carnival has even old hands like Lukan staring wide-eyed.

I have bittersweet feelings about this story, which first appeared in an anthology put together for the benefit of Doris O’Connor and her family in the final days of her struggle with cancer. There will always be this great sadness connected to it.

On the other hand, it was great fun to dive back into the world of Cydonia, the Sci/fi series that started my published author career in 2011 (2011? Eight years ago? How did that happen?) with the release of Black Carnival.

It’s a great pleasure to re-release the story, with a new edit and this fabulous cover by Jay Aheer.

I am terrible at short stories, because my world building addiction always brings me to write a bit more, and a bit more, and then the short story becomes a full length novel. I thought it might be easier to write a short story in a pre-existing universe, but, no even so, the world and the characters still managed to do their own thing. Everything changed in the telling. Neu Venedig is a wholly more interesting place now, and I am wondering if it is not time to write a new full length instalment in this series… all this just to say, that this story was a tremendous fun ride for me, quite the surprise, and brings me full circle, in a certain sense, connecting my current Transgender Romance theme, to my debut novel. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Blurb:

Wealthy, charismatic, influential and damn near immortal, Lukan Løvensgård looks like natural Dom material, and in fact he has never, but never submitted to anyone in his long life. But among all the bizarre and fantastic people roaming the far planet of Cydonia, there is one who stole his old, cold heart.

And her love comes at a price. Complete surrender.

With her impressive presence and unusual equipment, Helenay is the hottest and trendiest professional Domme in Neu Venedig and she hardly has the time to top for pleasure these days.  But she knows what her old friend Lukan needs, something he never suspected. Release from power.

#transgendererotica #futanari

Excerpt:

He knew all her favorite toys by their sting, and the sound they made when they met his flesh.

Helenay slapped the split strap of thick leather hard on his buttocks and then down his thighs, in a neat crisscrossing pattern. She could leave crisscross switch welts as neat as a corset’s lacing if she wanted. At his knees, she stopped, and Lukan breathed deep. The sharp sting of the tawse was pure fire, but it faded quickly enough. Still, his skin was now definitely well primed for the real pain.

He breathed hard.

Hell placed a hand between his buttocks and stroked the edge of his butt plug again and again, sending it to stroke his prostate, over and over, while at the same time, gently pulling on the cord that tied his cock and balls. He groaned, feeling waves of pleasure and the afterglow of pain mingling in his flesh and in his brain, addling him. Soon he would hardly know the difference between the two. He groaned again, not knowing anymore if he had come for the pain she could give, or the pleasure she so often withheld. Sometimes she would give both. Perhaps he would beg for it today.

Yes, he would certainly beg if he had to.

“Turn,” she said, and he let go of the wall, gingerly, because his knees were soft. Her tawse was still in her hand, and from one end of it, on a thin silk cord, hung a long suede tassel. Not quite a flogger, but a vicious enough little thing, when one was standing naked with a swollen glans reaching out, begging to meet that deceptive velvet kiss. He took a deep breath and then gave a sharp gasp when the first soft swish of the tassel hit his engorged cock. The suede was neither rough nor stiff, but his stretched, blood-filled skin exploded in pain at its kiss. The pain was so close on top of the pleasure he had been savoring a moment earlier that he could not quite tell them apart. The almost-gentle, almost-intolerable flogging went on and on, perhaps for only a few seconds, but he was jolting back at each blow, crying out, whimpering. When she stopped and palmed his balls again, he actually screamed, although she did nothing, just held them.

“You are so full of it today,” whispered Hell, seriously.

“It”   was the unbearable tension that mounted inside him between their encounters, as he knew well.

“Why?” she asked.

He shook his head wretchedly. “I don’t know. Help me. Help me, please.”

She sighed, and kissed his forehead for a long moment.

Moments like this, long or short, made his heart stop. Neither he nor she were made for tenderness, really. And yet it materialized, from time to time, out of the blue, unexpected, unexplained, often unacknowledged. Half the time, they almost pretended that it hadn’t happened. A secret they kept, even from themselves.  

Get it for FREE at Evernight

It will soon be for free on Amazon too, as soon as they can be induced to match the proper lower price... sorry, Amazon is great, but it does send us nuts sometimes!