Chapter 14: Mage Arches Redux
At the wash that took us off towards Mage Arch, we dismounted. Carlo looked quite happy, no longer nervous, but I got us off the trail and down the wash quickly, putting distance between us and the trail, taking up the rear screening position, the nudists my vanguard.
As soon as we got well out of sight of the trail, we stopped long enough for me to get my clothes off, joining in my nude companions’ state now for the first time since breakfast.
We got out to the campsite near our holy spot without incident: the place where I’d become a mage, the place where Kaitlyn and I had first made love, the place where we’d discovered sex magic, the place where we’d first consciously healed a patch of land.
“It’s beautiful!” breathed Carlo.
He sank down into a bowlegged squat I initially took for some kind of stretch until his arms came up, like he was trying to hug the pale full moon.
I realized he was imbibing in the land.
On standing straight, he added, “So much greener than the surrounding land! And that arch! How is it that no one else knows about it?”
“It’s kind of our secret, Carlo. We’d appreciate your keeping it,” my wife answered, and he mimed zipping his lips shut.
“How’s the boys?” I asked him, waving meaningfully at his pelvic area.
“A little sore, but no worse than if I’d been wearing bike shorts,” he reported.
“Well, we said we’d heal you up, and that we mean to do,” said Kaitlyn definitively.
I pulled out the massage oil, bidding him, “In the sand, you. We’ll have you feeling great soon.”
“I already feel great. This is wonderful out here,” he said, twirling, face to the sky, arms upraised.
We smiled at him, then waited for him to join us in the wash, laying face down between us.
Kaitlyn and I did heal him up as much as we could, taking care not only of his slightly battered ’nads but also the usual assortment of sedentary job problems: back misalignment, DVT, RSI, neck pain…
He was flaccid when we turned him over to do his front, but that didn’t last. He stiffened right up at seeing Kaitlyn swaying over him, so she mounted him and began frotting his erection with her nether lips.
“We can do this?” he asked through a pant.
“We already told you we’re not paying you with massage, so this must be gratuitous between friends, right?”
His eyes strayed to me, so I said, “It’s fine, Carlo. Enjoy it; she is. For that matter, I am, too.” Then I let go of the control I’d been keeping over my own erection to underline my claim.
Several minutes later, I saw my wife shudder with an orgasm, pausing for a few seconds, re-opening Carlo’s eyes in curiosity. He watched her after-show, then had his eyes closed for him by my wife dipping her fingers into the oil bowl and finishing him off with a handjob. When he began to orgasm, she bent down and instantly deep-throated him, using her magical powers to arrange a smooth comfortable passage down her throat for his pulsing member, sucking him dry.
After he’d recovered, I asked, “So, how’re the boys now?”
“Feelin’ no pain,” he said gently. Then looking a bit scared, he added, “This was really okay?”
“It’s fine, Carlo,” we said together, smiling down at him.
“Besides, there’s a service we want from you now,” Kaitlyn added. “Davie and I are going to go see to our own gratification over there in the arch, and you’re going to document it for us. We want art, not porn, so we want your head in the game, Carlo, not all distracted.” Then she flicked a few fingers meaningfully in the direction of his again-flaccid cock. “Will you do this for us? Not for distribution, of course.” Then she added, “Not unless we get some shots we really like and feel are worth sharing, anyway.”
“I’d love to,” he said simply.
Through the mage bond, I asked her, «This is your healing plan?»
«Yup. Watch and learn, my shishya.»
That nearly caused me to snork in amusement.
She raised her eyebrow at me, and that settled me right down. She was serious!
«Yes, my guru,» I said meekly back through the bond.
This was what Kaitlyn meant last night, I realized. She hadn’t told me anything about it, certainly not that I’d be the subject in a series of erotic art photos. I had a vague sense of what she was up to here, but I didn’t pick at it, just waited to let her secret blossom before me. I trusted her, knew she was working up to a good end here.
I kissed her lovingly to communicate it, in case the mage bond wasn’t doing it for me.
«Yes, Davie, this will be good for all three of us,» she promised, catching my thought, kissing back passionately.
Thus it was that I didn’t even notice the first click of Carlo’s shutter. He certainly didn’t try to suggest positions, just worked with what we offered, moving back and forth, side to side to create new framings, new compositions while we pleased each other.
I could tell she was shooting for a long edging session with a single simultaneous climax. We didn’t have to say it, I just knew what she wanted, and I rolled with it, supported it, worked to achieve it.
Half an hour into the session, we disengaged from our coupling, allowing our erectile tissues to relax and recover for a time, switching to soft touches, gentle kisses, and tight passionate embraces.
Refreshed, we reengaged, coupling like crazed rabbits for a while to bring ourselves back to the brink, where we held ourselves, building the magic, emotional and natural.
Perhaps another half hour in, Carlo was focusing on detail shots: my mouth on Kaitlyn’s nipple, a long slow slide of my cock up her passage, my finger rubbing her winky star, his composition at an angle to artfully show the curve of her buns and my finger nestled between rather than to produce a simple lewd portrayal. Into this sequence my wife interjected a demand through the bond: «Now! And fast!»
We let loose our controls, shifting into a final sprint toward ecstasy. We took off so fast that Carlo began scrambling to reframe for a wider composition. He’d clicked his camera into his tripod’s quick release mount, one hand grasping a tripod leg to move the assemblage back when our simultaneous orgasm hit.
“Aaaaaaayyaaiiigh!” I hollered up past her shoulders into the curve of the red sandstone arch above us, but Kaitlyn held silent through her wracking tremors, concentrating our combined magical power, gathering it and aiming it in a 2 degree cone at Carlo’s breadbasket, just covering one kidney in a tremendous burst of healing nature magic.
Carlo staggered backwards, the tripod tottering back and forth from his inelegant release, the two sets of legs barely remaining under cameraman and camera. As they steadied on the ground there before the arch, our breathing settled.
Kaitlyn said through the bond, «It worked! One kidney is good as new!»
I was going to ask when we’d be going after the second when Carlo muttered low and intense, “I felt that! Your orgasm, I felt it, right here!” he exclaimed, hand over his floating ribs on one side. “It was like…alive? Something. Very weird. What happened?”
I was up beside him, my cock deflating, one hand on his elbow and another on his shoulder to steady him. Avidly I asked, “Describe it!”
He spoke louder now, “I don’t know how, other than…life. You know?”
“Better than you might guess,” I told him. “Here, sit down. Let the Indian immigrant guide you in a meditation. It’ll help calm you down.”
This was a deflection, of course: I had a covert goal here. Could it be?
Over the next half hour, I soothed him into a beginner’s trance, much as I’d done with Kaitlyn the day we’d met. When I succeeded in this, I knew: «Carlo is a mage,» I reported to my wife through the bond.
«This I see,» she replied with some amusement, having come to the same conclusion earlier.
So had I, but I’d had to check to be sure. The very fact that we could sense his active life presence join us in the Gaia bond when he’d slid into a trance was proof enough. Non-mages appear as passive life force to a mage, but that active presence… Only a mage could do that.
“Carlo,” I said aloud to our newest student, “you’re in a trance state. It is delicate, and you will have to work to hang onto it. It will help to keep your eyes closed.”
“Okay,” he said simply.
“But also, with your eyes closed, do you sense me?”
“Of course. I can hear you. You’re right before me where you were when you sat me down here.”
“But can you also feel Kaitlyn? She’s moved since you last saw her.”
“Yes, she’s right over there,” and he pointed right at her, over his shoulder.
“Keep pointing at her,” I told him. Through the bond, I bade Kaitlyn to quietly sneak around behind him.
As if his finger was tethered to her arm by a string, he followed along exactly, through double-backs, behind obstacles, over about a hundred meters’ distance!
“How are you doing that, Carlo?”
“I just know where she is, that’s all.”
“Look closer, around her. You feel the trees, too, don’t you? The big ones, anyway.”
“Is that what all those lumps are?”
“Point to the largest presence, other than the three of us.”
And he pointed right at the tallest tree nearby, a big old healthy juniper beside the wash, where it must catch most of the rainwater that passes by this point. Between that and our magical fertilization of the area, it was taller than any other juniper I’d seen, not squat as the breed tends to be.
“Open your eyes, Carlo. You can let the trance go now.”
He saw where he was pointing, then looked around, finding that the other trees were significantly smaller than the one he was indicating. His finger slowly fell, his hand resting limply in his lap. “How did I do that?”
“If we’re going to be scientifically rigorous, the most plausible hypothesis is that you saw it earlier and noticed its size, pointing to it from memory, but that doesn’t explain how you found Kaitlyn. You had her nailed the whole time.”
“So how?” he demanded.
“You’re a mage, Carlo,” my wife said, sitting down beside him. “It’s how you felt what we did there in the arch. We healed one of your kidneys, by the way.”
And that kicked off an animated discussion which took us through lunch.
“So how did this even happen to me?” he asked postprandially, the three of us laying out in the wash under the developing shade of a cluster of junipers and sagebrush.
Kaitlyn didn’t answer, but I essayed, “We’re working on scant data. You’re the fourth known mage of the modern era, as far as we’re aware.”
Carlo interrupted incisively, “You two and who else?”
Kaitlyn sort of rolled her shoulders uncertainly, temporizing, “We might tell you later. It’s not entirely our secret to tell, you know.”
He looked disappointed, so I quickly picked the prior thread back up. “Superficially, you’re an exception, Carlo. The rest of us are closely tied to nature in some way, but I’ve been getting mixed signals from you on that. Social nudism is new to you, particularly out in the wilderness like this, but the way you drank up the area when we first got here…”
Carlo supplied, “And my home nudism doesn’t count.”
It was my turn to bobble my head. “I’m not sure about that, either. See, people are drawn to nudism disparate reasons. For some, it’s simply exhibitionistic gratification, but you seem to be a different sort, Carlo, one attracted to the practice for its own sake. I’m quite certain you’re sexually tapped out at the moment, yet you’re not feeling any need to get dressed again.”
I wasn’t asking, because this wasn’t a guess: I was reading his body’s state with my life sense, but Carlo confirmed it anyway: “Definitely not. I’ll stay naked as long as I can get away with it.”
My wife put in, “Then there’s your Halloween costume. You chose to be as close to nude as possible at a public party. I have reason to believe you could’ve gone further, but what matters is what you thought the limit was.”
That made me wonder if I’d missed another mage: maybe the woman dressed as a ghost at the Alexanders’ Halloween party was one, too? She’d come wearing only the sheet and her high heels, after all. This idea of using nude massage to seek out mages looked like it would be more successful than I’d hoped!
Carlo pried, “Did I already meet this fourth mage? Is she one of your family, Kaitlyn?”
“Sadly, no,” she answered.
Carlo looked puzzled. “But if an affinity for nudism is a good indicator of magical talent…”
Kaitlyn just shrugged, so I offered, “Her family didn’t come to nudism on their own, drawn by an affinity for nature magic; we brought it to them. Their reasons to pursue the practice vary considerably from ours, too, as does their interest level. Kaitlyn’s father and big brother are still rather reticent, and though Allison’s eager, she comes at it from an attention-seeking angle, not from love of nature itself. Carmen’s like Allison, too, now that I think on it. Kaitlyn’s mom enjoys nudism, but I think it’s more in a social way than out of love of being naked, specifically.”
“Carlo, you’re unlike any of her family, more like us two. I discovered my own magic out here accidentally years ago while on an impromptu vacation. Last year, I met Kaitlyn on another outdoor nudist adventure about 15 minutes’ drive from where we parked, and rather than run away screaming, she stayed to talk.”
My wife added, “And he had me out of my clothes ten minutes later!”
“Right,” I agreed, remembering. “I figure that has to make her at least nudist-curious from the start, Carlo, since I’m not exactly panty-dropping hawt.”
Kaitlyn smiled at that characterization. “Don’t sell yourself short,” she joked.
Carlo added, “Yeah, she’s right, Davie: I never even felt the need for panties around you.”
I laughed, then continued, “This spot is special to us for another reason, Carlo: Kaitlyn and I consummated our bond up there in Mage Arch. From that evening on, our marriage was nearly inevitable. Now we have a third reason: you, Carlo.”
“Mage Arch,” he repeated, nodding in understanding. Then he breathed out in wonder, “So this is like a holy spot for you.”
“Exactly,” my wife and I said together.
I added, “To the extent that we have a religion, Carlo, it’s worship of the Earth. This cliffside patch of desert here is our local branch cathedral, that arch our altar to Gaia. Mind you don’t mess the pews up, all right?”
He belly laughed at that one.
That must have reminded him of his health problems, perhaps from a twinge in his remaining unhealthy kidney. “Can you heal the other one?” was all he said, his referent clear.
“Of course,” Kaitlyn answered him. “That bit with the sex show was cover for the real work. I didn’t want to send the wrong message by just jumping your bones, so I devised that scheme instead.”
“Scheme it may’ve been, but I got a lot of great shots. You’ll love them.”
In a mysterious tone she said, “The best schemes are multilayered.”
“So, my other kidney?” he prompted.
“Carlo,” she began, “with the need for pretense gone, it’s best if I just show you sex magic, one on one.” She bent down and began fellating him without pause, mounting him once she’d achieved a full erection. Through her exertions, she continued her lecture, introducing Carlo to the topic inside and out, bringing him into a mage bond with her to accelerate the learning curve.
Carlo absorbed a lot about magical healing that afternoon.
Me? I grabbed his camera and filled the rest of its memory card.
Once I found myself with nothing left to do but watch, Kaitlyn invited me into their coupling, giving me a very sloppy blowjob while I ran my hands over the both of them, raising them higher and higher.
When the two finally let go together, the backsplash of the magic from Carlo’s healing kidney and the pumping and clenching down below dragged me into the orgasm with them, creating an explosive three-way simultaneous mage climax, he flooding her uterus, me her throat, her polar passages pulsating our peckers. Kaitlyn harnessed that, too, using the tenfold increase in energy to polish her work on the two kidneys.
“That…was…amazing…” panted Carlo some time later.
“Which part?” my wife teased. “The sex, the healing, the scenery…?”
“All of it!” he said with a widening grin. “I’m not very sexually experienced, so maybe this won’t mean all that much to you, but this was the best experience of my life!”
“Well, it gets better, Carlo,” I said. “While you would not have been able to heal your kidneys yourself without a lot more experience, there’s a lot you can do.” I then explained the concept of magical self-healing, which is simply the body’s normal power of self-repair accelerated by pouring the power of Gaia into the process. “Carlo, examine your body internally. It knows what is most wrong with itself. Find that problem, and tell me what it is.”
He got a look of concentration on his face, spending something like half a minute working on it before finally saying, “I’m getting sunburnt.”
“Well, blessèd ye are, then,” commented Kaitlyn drolly, “if that’s the worst health problem you currently have.” Then she taught him how to wipe the sunburn away.
That reminded me…”Your thigh, Carlo… Please excuse me for bringing it up, because I know it’s a touchy point with you, but it didn’t pop up on your body’s internal radar?”
“No.” he told me. “I guess it’s because I’ve lived with it for so long, and it’s as healed as it’s going to get. Though I can feel the difference in the skin’s texture there, and it doesn’t have as much sensation as other parts of my skin, it feels normal to me now.” He then shrugged, clearly unable to explain it any better than that.
Before I could comment, he added, “Come to think of it, it really is a part of me. I don’t think I’d get rid of it if I could. It was a painful experience for me at the time, but that was decades ago now, and the scar now reminds me to be careful in life. Maybe it’s what’s made me so timid, but that is me now, you know?”
We nodded, and he went on, “Besides, too many people know about it. There would be awkward questions if I removed it magically, or if you did it for me. The kidneys I can hide, being internal: all I have to do is just not go back to the doctors, but the scar, that’s with me for the duration.”
I just nodded at him in respect, and Kaitlyn patted his hand. It sounded like a wise decision to me.
That evening as sunset made the red rocks glow, Kaitlyn and I swore a modern Hippocratic Oath, wishing to uphold modern medical ethics, our version modified only slightly from the one many doctors take to suit the special needs of nature magic. As witnesses, we had Carlo and Gaia, man and nature. It felt sufficiently holy and sacrosanct for our purposes; we’d keep the oath.
Over dinner, into the night, and through the next day, we taught Carlo as much about magic as we could, giving him a crash course much like the one we’d given to Ranger Kristen Nemo, most of a year back now.
Kaitlyn said, “I’ve been thinking, Davie: we should introduce Kristen and Carlo. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they hit it off?”
We certainly hadn’t brought our phones out here with us, being both inimical to the magic and in fact useless this far from the nearest cell tower, so I said, “We can call her when we get back to the car.”
With that, we began to break camp, intending to bike back to the parking lot with the setting sun.
As we approached the trail network, Kaitlyn and I leant our bikes up against a tree and my wife told Carlo, “Wait here.” We strode far enough down the wash to get free of the bikes’ tech interference, then spread our awareness out through the trail network, searching for animate life signs, particularly the bipedal sort, but las turistas had all gone home. We found little more than lizards scurrying under cover for the night.
Once we were ready to pronounce the trails abandoned for the evening, we summoned Carlo to us, his bike left behind with ours and showed him the trick of it. We didn’t bother to re-scan the whole trail network, but he quickly saw why we were confident that there were no potential onlookers.
The three of us rode bare out to the parking lot under a glorious sunset, loaded our things up in the parking lot in no particular hurry, then drove back to our house, concealed only by the early evening darkness, the roughness of the road telegraphed through our wobbly bits by the dashboard light.
Mages: 2; Anti-Nudists: 0.