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Dalamar stood beside his Shalafi, their gazes fixed into the distance, studying the jagged edges of distant mountains where they scraped against the velvet sky. From where he and Raistlin stood perched in the tower study, the world felt small, ready and waiting to be taken. The man who could conquer it, Raistlin Majere, had finished his wine and held only an empty glass as he gazed upon all that could be his, if he only wished it.
Invariably more interested in the sight of Raistlin than the horizon before them, Dalamar glanced sidelong and down at the master of his future. He'd given up everything to learn the Art of magic; in taking the black robe, Dalamar had turned his back on elf-kind. He'd known then he was destined to study at the feet of Ansalon’s greatest mage. There was power in the darkness, so Dalamar sought that power, and found it in the shape of a man who inspired in him both great fear and excitement. Standing beside Raistlin Majere was to stand beside a precipice and lean over it—it promised great risk as well as great reward.
So much had been revealed to Dalamar about his Shalafi's plans. He was in awe, if not a little ill. The sheer breadth of Raistlin's ambitions left him feeling light-headed, as if the air at the top of the tower had become too thin. Raistlin intended to look down upon the world from more than a mere spire, the sort of building erected to imitate the might of the gods. No, Raistlin didn't intend to imitate the gods; he meant to become one.
It was a shame, Dalamar thought ruefully, that he also must act as a spy for others unworthy of knowing his master's business. He sipped his wine and grimaced. It was dry and bitter, and he didn't like it very much. He'd only half-finished his drink; it was stronger than he had the stomach for tonight.
Lunitari, the red moon, had started to sink out of sight behind the mountains as the night neared its zenith. Only the heat of the fireplace behind them kept the night's chill at bay—that, and the gentle heat that always rolled off Raistlin's body.
It was an honor to be by Raistlin's side. Dalamar was proud to have been found worthy of the Shalafi’s teaching, and prouder still to be trusted with the affairs of his master's home and study—despite being caught once already in a lie about where he'd placed his hands. The books forbidden to Dalamar burned to touch, and Raistlin had seen the burns. There had been no reproach, only a knowing look.
Yes, Dalamar served his Shalafi with gladness in his heart, even as he deceived him. Caught between masters, he was no longer sure where his loyalties lay, not really. He was caught between worlds once again. Perhaps this was how it must always be for dark elves.
Still, Dalamar believed that in the end all would fall in step with Raistlin's plans, whether they willed it or not.
Raistlin set down his empty wine glass, signaling that their conversation about the future had come to an end.
"I have kept you long enough," he said, glancing at Dalamar. The light of the moon caught the archmage’s mirror-like eyes, making them red. It was cat-like, the way his eyes often caught and hurled back the light of the world.
Raistlin continued, "You of course must make your journey, and be back before I leave in the morning. There will undoubtedly be some last-minute instructions for you, besides my own. You will be in charge here, of course, while I am gone."
Dalamar nodded on reflex, paused, then frowned.
"My journey? I'm not going anywhere—" and he coughed as he realized that he did, indeed, have somewhere to go that night. His other masters, the Conclave, were expecting a detailed report of his Shalafi’s plans. And now he had so much more to report—
"Don't you?" Raistlin sneered.
"I—no, Shalafi, I have no business to attend except for your own."
The words rang false; they seemed to echo in the silence that followed, fading like a temple bell until only the weight of Raistlin’s displeasure hung in the air. The archmage squinted up at his apprentice, and Lunitari’s light left his eyes, subjecting Dalamar to their unvarnished stare.
Suddenly nervous, Dalamar tried to hide his discomfiture by taking another sip of his wine, but shaking hands and trembling lips made a jest of it, and he missed, spilling more than he drank. He was forced to set down the glass and dab at his face with his sleeve, flushing under his master’s reproving gaze as he chased errant drops dripping down his chin.
And Raistlin continued to stare.
"Excuse me," Dalamar whispered, and cleared his throat, withering under his Shalafi's eyes—both in spirit and in time. The hourglasses of Raistlin's eyes had dilated to an alarmingly large size, as if taking in his apprentice's future, and found it lacking.
"Do you think me an imbecile, apprentice?" Raistlin asked. His voice was like a ruler rapping over Dalamar's knuckles, as if he were an unruly student. He continued, his words harsher with each snap: "Do you think I am dull and ignorant? Do you think me blind and dimwitted like my dear brother? Is that why you have come here, to study under a fool and an idiot to perfect your craft in stupidity?"
Dalamar stooped in an apologetic bow under the blows, shrinking before his master. "I would never say such things of you, Shalafi—"
"But you would think them."
"No—!"
"Yet you treat me as such," Raistlin said, and he lifted his hand, waving it between them in a dismissive gesture, and Dalamar flinched. Raistlin's sleeve fell down past his wrist as he grasped at the air, and Dalamar's eyes followed the contours of his Shalafi's skin as it glistened, the soft gold color of his body caressed by the warm candlelight. Many times Dalamar had witnessed those hands carve the world according to their master's will, and often he craved their touch—just the once.
It was a shameful thought he couldn't suppress.
"You're unworthy of me," Raistlin snapped. "But, in my benevolence, I keep you and teach you the ways of the Art. In return, you deceive me, and deny it."
"I-I don't think I understand. Please teach me, Shalafi."
“Teach you? You? Ungracious pupil that you have proven to be?” Raistlin took his hand back from the air, and Dalamar watched as it tucked again into the folds of Raistlin's robes. "Fine, I can afford to be generous this once."
Raistlin's gaze turned up again at his apprentice, his eyes glittering spitefully. Dalamar's heart quickened in his throat as his body surged with that same soft, anticipatory tingle he always felt before the casting of magic.
"Did you not just agree that the world could be mine, should I want it?"
"Yes," Dalamar said. "This is surely true."
"Why is that, apprentice?"
Dalamar flexed his hands. His palms had become damp, and he itched to fidget with the hems of his silken robes, but he refrained—with effort. "You are the greatest mage to have ever walked Ansalon," he said.
Raistlin's penetrating gaze lost some of its hard edge, and for that Dalamar was—not relieved, but he relaxed somewhat.
"You don't believe that, apprentice. If you did, you would not make such bumbling attempts to deceive me.”
"How have I deceived you? Please, instruct me, Shalafi."
Then Dalamar saw his own face in Raistlin’s upturned eyes, his own anxiety and desire reflected back at him by his Shalafi’s implacable stare. A creeping sort of dread crawled over Dalamar as he realized that Raistlin knew. He knew that his apprentice had been sent by the Conclave as a spy, and now would exact his revenge for this betrayal.
Raistlin approached, and Dalamar shrank back, feeling very small under the weight of the archmage's glittering gaze. He took several steps backward, stumbling over the thick carpet until he was caught, his shoulder blades striking one of the room’s many heavy bookshelves. Words and spells alike failed him, and Dalamar found himself exposed.
He was at his Shalafi’s mercy.
Raistlin’s expression remained impassive as he raised one hand. Before, Dalamar had mused over the wonders he’d seen the archmage’s hands weave. Now, he recoiled in fright, keenly aware of what those hands could do to him if raised in wrath.
His Shalafi finally deigned to touch him, and Dalamar could only shudder as each fingertip grazed his chest, five sharp points of terror and ecstasy. Raistlin’s fingers were preternaturally warm, as always, and Dalamar could feel their heat through the thin silk of his robes.
Despite his fear, Dalamar’s body responded to the unfamiliar touch with an unfortunate development: a shameful stiffening in his smalls. Thank dark Nuitari for the concealing nature of his black robes, lest the master see—
“Shalafi, please…” he whispered.
The words had barely left his mouth when he realized that the heat of Raistlin’s fingers was no longer pleasantly strange. It burned, searing through the silk into the skin of Dalamar’s chest. The scent of burning fabric filled his nostrils and stung his eyes. An agonized scream locked itself behind Dalamar’s teeth as the archmage’s fingers flexed, pressing further into his tender flesh.
His Shalafi’s eyes never left his; their strange golden glare bored into Dalamar, holding him captive.
White-hot pain arced through his body, a sharp zap of lightning that traveled straight down his spine, into his pelvis. A thin sheen of sweat began to form under the duress of the blistering pain and Raistlin’s callous scrutiny.
At last, Raistlin let his fingers trail away from the weeping wounds his terrible touch had inflicted, lingering on their path down his body, a feather-light taunt. Blood glistened in the candlelight as it smeared down Dalamar’s robes where those fingers roamed. I can burn you again, they said. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
A small gasp escaped Dalamar’s lips as those bloody fingers brushed over the damning bulge hiding beneath his robes that even mutilation couldn’t soften. Raistlin’s eyes flickered down as a minute expression of disgust twitched across his lips.
“It seems I continue to fail you as an instructor,” he said acidly.
“M-my apologies, Shalafi,” Dalamar stuttered. “I can’t help—”
“Of course not,” Raistlin jeered. “You have no mastery over your own urges, and it has made you a poor student. Very well then. Show me your failure.”
Dalamar’s mouth went dry as the Northern Wastes on a hot summer day. Surely he had not heard that order correctly. He opened his mouth to protest, but Raistlin silenced him with an impatient gesture.
Swallowing back the words weighing on his tongue, Dalamar opened his robes and untied the knot at the closure of his breeches with stumbling fingers. Finally, he shoved them down, baring his arousal to the cool air and his master’s molten gaze.
Raistlin’s hand wrapped around his cock and for one sickening moment Dalamar thought he meant to mark him there, too. But the archmage’s fingers merely caressed, soft and slightly tacky against the delicate underside of Dalamar’s erection. Even through the haze of his agony, the master’s touch was sublime—the warm tingle of arcane power made flesh. His golden hands teased the possibility of pleasure amidst the pain.
“Should I give you relief?” Raistlin asked. “Will that clear your head for the tasks ahead, apprentice?”
A pitiful whine passed Dalamar’s lips as those torturous digits stroked along the edges of his foreskin stretched taut around the head of his throbbing cock, making him tremble.
“Pathetic,” Raistlin sneered, his thumb spreading the sticky precum over the emerging head. “Your body weeps its wretched desire even as you snivel and cower.”
His master’s attentions were not gentle—Raistlin didn't seek to extract from his apprentice any pleasure, but wield his vulnerability as easily as he did Nuitari's black magic—and Dalamar found it did not matter. Arousal and terror had forged an inextricable bond in him, he and his body responding eagerly, greedily to his master’s ministrations until he was panting.
“Do you play the whore for Par-Salian, too?” Raistlin asked suddenly. His voice was deceptively soft, velvet hiding the bite of a steel blade. “Or perhaps Ladonna?”
“N—no, Shalafi,” Dalamar stammered. “Never.”
No other master in the High Tower ever affected him so. It was only Raistlin who could hypnotize him thus, make him desire the unthinkable all while his chest wept with blood and the stench of his own burning flesh hung in the air. The slick sweat beading across his chest trickled into the wounds, sharpening their sting.
Dalamar's knees buckled as he rode a sharp wave of sensation toward the crest of his release. He inched down the bookcase behind him as it approached, the shelves digging painfully into his shoulder blades.
“Shalafi, I—”
“You will not,” Raistlin snapped. His hand stopped at the root and squeezed just enough to halt the release. The sound Dalamar made was incoherent, as fear of another fiery touch seized him. He grasped for Raistlin's robe on reflex, seeking—something. Comfort? Relief?
Vice-grip fingers clamped over his wrist. “Don’t touch me,” Raistlin hissed, twisting and pinning Dalamar’s errant hand to the bookshelf. The candlelight in the room swam as Dalamar’s eyes struggled for focus amidst the haze of pain and heady denial. The master's rejection stung like the salty sweat in his wounds.
Raistlin released Dalamar’s cock and grabbed his chin. The archmage’s thumb pressed down on Dalamar’s lower lip, and Dalamar tasted the salt of precum and the copper tang of his own blood. “Don’t ever touch me,” Raistlin commanded.
Dalamar whimpered. “I did not mean—”
His tongue failed him under Raistlin unblinking stare. The fire crackled behind him, loud in the silence.
"Yes, Shalafi."
Finally, Raistlin released his face, and for a moment, Dalamar thought he meant to resume their prior activity, but as with everything this evening, his master surprised him.
“Whose will do you serve?” Raistlin asked quietly, his hand sliding to cup Dalamar’s balls in a hot, dry grip. There was an edge of threat to the gesture; this question had a correct answer. His chest throbbed with a vibrant reminder of the price of Shalafi’s disappointment.
Par-Salian and the Conclave weren’t here to save him; there was only one master controlling his fate now.
Dalamar’s reply was barely audible, even to his own ears. “Yours, Shalafi.”
He was rewarded with a gentle squeeze on his balls. Then Raistlin repeated the question, and again Dalamar answered, louder this time: “Yours, Shalafi.”
Raistlin leaned in, and the unnatural heat of his body was almost suffocating. Dalamar could smell all of the strange spell components hiding on his master’s person, mixed with the faintly sour tang of the archmage’s own sweat.
"What have you learned, apprentice?" Raistlin whispered. His breath was hot and moist against Dalamar’s ear, making the elf shudder.
"I—have learned—learned that—"
The next squeeze of Raistlin’s fingers around his sack was harsher—almost painful. Dalamar clenched his teeth and suppressed the cry rising in his throat.
"You have learned your place," Raistlin said, and he released Dalamar's wrist to pinch his ear with an almost vicious twist. The noise Dalamar made was shrill and undignified as a new wave of mingled shame and arousal rolled through him, rushing straight to his already aching groin. His back arched, whether to escape the sensation or lean into it, he couldn’t say. Elven ears were sensitive, erogenous even, and his master used this against him with malice.
Raistlin released Dalamar’s balls and slid his hand back to the writhing apprentice’s cock as he tweaked his ear again.
"The only reason I have kept and taught you, despite your insultingly bad attempts at deceit, is that you learn quickly."
Another rolling pinch of his ear set Dalamar’s hips bucking as Raistlin began to stroke his cock once more with a methodical efficiency. For all the archmage had praised Dalamar’s quick wits, it was he who was a true prodigy; he’d already learned the contours of Dalamar’s pitiful pleasure.
"I believe you understand now, apprentice. Well done." There was no warmth in the praise, only the Shalafi’s usual thinly veiled mockery. “You may finish.”
All the tension, pleasure, need, and pain in Dalamar's body precipitated under his Shalafi's hand. The wounds in his chest throbbed and leaked fresh blood as he came. Stars swam behind his tightly shut eyelids, and he gasped, then groaned as his release spread through the rest of his body, filling him with the same fierce sense of power as his greatest spells—spells his Shalafi taught him. His spend splattered across the study’s expensive rug and he once again leaned his weight on the bookcase as his knees turned to gelatin.
With a disgusted frown, Raistlin wiped his hand on the shoulder of Dalamar’s robe.
“Relate to them accurately both what I have told you,” Raistlin said, straightening the cuffs of his sleeves as he spoke. “And whatever you may have guessed. And give the great Par-Salian my regards, of course, apprentice.”
Dalamar collapsed upon the floor with a moan, his puppet strings finally cut. He clutched at his chest as the burning sting flared into white-hot intensity anew. In a frenzy of pain, Dalamar ripped open his robes and stared down at his master’s handiwork. Five red, glistening trails of blood streamed down his breast, welling from sunken lesions—one for each of the Shalafi’s magnificent fingers.
The archmage turned on his heel and made for the door. He paused, hand on the handle, as he turned to appraise his apprentice, lying in a heap with his blood-smeared cock dripping on the rug.
“And do clean up your mess.”
Raistlin closed the door behind him, leaving Dalamar alone with the crackle of the fire and the harsh drag of his own ragged breathing.