(c) 2020, Taz Xandros, All Rights Reserved.


This is an entirely fictional story that is licensed solely to Nifty for workshopping purposes. It may not be reproduced, distributed, or commercially exploited in any form without express written permission from its author.

This story is Historical Fantasy set in the Early Victorian Era and may be too slow burning for some folks. If you're looking for a quick wank, this probably isn't for you. But if you like action, intrigue, magic and character growth between sex scenes, then this is your cup of tea.

This story contains graphic M/M sex between teenagers, and between adults and teens. The sex is sometimes romantic, sometimes rough and/or non-consensual with an authoritarian, medical, or BDSM bent. Slavery, forced indenture, medical experimentation on the destitute and corporal punishment in schools were still common occurrences during this time period, so things may happen that should never occur in modern real life. Protect yourself and your health by using PReP and condoms and do not try these things at home, especially if they violate the laws of your locality.

If you are a minor, or think something in this story might bother or offend you, STOP HERE.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, read on, and feel free to email me with comments or encouragement at:

taxandros@protonmail.com.

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Your humble author, Taz

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End of Last Chapter:


Bran stole a glance at Mr. Champness, then looked up at Driscoll. There was a seriousness in the men's faces that made Bran wonder why they would trust anything so vital to him. Driscoll slapped his balls, and he yelped. "Aye, sir," he promised breathlessly. "I'll say whate'er you want, do whate'er you want, I will."

"Good, then," Mr. Champness intoned. "You are to tell him, when he asks, that we do not employ any children, here."

"But what about the traps? Dee Moss is only six, and--"

Driscoll slapped him again. "Tell him you're the youngest."

"Remember," Mr. Champness added. "He is a Duke, so treat him accordingly."

"And `ow is that?" Bran had never met anyone of the Quality. He wasn't sure how to treat someone noble, other than keep his mouth shut and his eyes down.

Driscoll pulled his hand back to strike again. Bran whimpered, but the blow didn't come. Instead, Driscoll set him down on his feet. "You call him `Duke Lacock' or `Your Grace.' Understand? You tell him that there's no children working in the mine. Tell him you're the youngest. And you're paid well. Treated fairly. Understand?"

"Aye, sir."

"Good," Mr. Champness smiled at him. "Mr. Driscoll will take you to him. You do this well, boy, and you'll be paid for a full day, today."

"Aye, sir. Thank you, sir."

Driscoll clamped his big hand on Bran's bony shoulder and steered him out of the office after unlocking the door. They marched down the hall, past the stairs that led down to the company store and the ground floor, all the way to the west end of the building. Driscoll rapped smartly on the door with his free hand.

"Enter," came a muffled reply.

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Topping the Duke (Chapter Three - Light)


The voice was soft, cultured, and English. Not quite womanly, although it lacked the deeper timbre of an adult male. Driscoll opened the door to reveal a head framed by the shoulders of a vermilion tailcoat. The youth wearing it hunched over some strange contraption set up on the large table in the center of the room. He seemed to be tinkering with something deep inside the machine. A ray of afternoon sunlight from the open window gilded his crown of wheat blonde hair, giving him a halo that echoed the droplets of light scattered by the brass gears aligned on the table before him.

"Duke Lacock" Driscoll bowed his head. "I've brought one of the boys, as you requested."

The youth lifted his head, piercing Bran with eyes as blue as the heavens just after sunset. Transfixed for a moment, Bran forgot himself and met that gaze. He saw intelligence and a burning curiosity in those eyes, and then Duke Lacock went back to his tinkering. "Sit down, lad." He flapped a distracted hand at the wooden chair at the end of the table closest to Bran. "You may leave, Mr. Driscoll."

"Yes, Your Grace." Driscoll gave Bran a warning look, then slipped through the door and closed it behind himself. In the relative quiet, the only sounds to be heard were the distant clanging and keening of the smithy and sawmill across the yard through the window.

Bran fumbled with the chair, pulling it out and taking a seat. The wood was cool against his bare back. As he waited to be addressed, he studied the youth across the table.

Duke Lacock's high collar boasted a cravat of powder blue silk framed by a tawny-colored, low-cut waistcoat beneath the bright red topcoat. A top hat of the same tawny hue adorned the hat stand near the door, decorated with a powder blue hatband. This young duke certainly was a colorful bird. A finely wrought leather bag lay beside the hat stand near the door beside an open, empty trunk. Bran surmised the trunk was where the machine on the table had come from.

The duke couldn't be more than a few years older than Bran, but he carried himself with all the confidence and self-possession of an adult. Bran supposed that came from being a Duke. Some Dukes were Princes, like the Duke of Wales.

"What;s your name?" Duke Lacock asked without looking up.

"Bran, Your Grace."

"That's rather familiar. Don't you have a surname?"

"Goatsby."

"That's not very Welsh."

Bran shrugged. "It's my mother's name. She's a whore, she is. In Carmarthen."

The young duke seemed surprised by Bran's brutal honesty. Clearly, few people ever spoke to him so plainly. "Do you know who I am? Why I'm here?"

"You're Duke Lacock, you are. But I am not knowin' why you are `ere."

"I'm Charles Montgomery Herbert, Fourth Duke of Lacock. My father is George Robert Herbert, Third Duke of Gower." He seemed to expect Bran to know what those names and titles meant.

Aside from Dukes being nobles and Gowerton being miles away, across the river on the road towards Abertawe, Bran was at a loss. The nobility were all above him. Everyone was above him. He'd just as much knowledge of who was who and why it mattered as an ant did about what happened on the moon.

To hide his ignorance, or at least deflect from it, he kept his gaze averted, choosing instead to stare at the dust motes swirling in the sunlight streaming through the open window, and the blue sky beyond. With his hours so long in the mine, he'd not seen the sun for close to a month, since the weather had been so dreary on the past few Sundays. The light hurt his eyes but he didn't care. He loved the sun; longed for its rays upon his skin.

The Cyhyraeth had never sung to him while the sun shone.

When Bran didn't reply, Duke Lacock continued impatiently: "I am here on behalf of Lord Ashley, who was commissioned by Queen Victoria to investigate conditions regarding the employment of women and children in the mines. Which leads me to ask: Are you always so confoundedly dirty and half-naked? Clothed in such filthy rags?"

Bran felt that rage bubbling up again. Driscoll hadn't bought him new breeches in over a year. He couldn't recall when he'd last had a new shirt. All his Sunday clothes had come from the poor box, donated by families who had lost their boys to bad luck or cholera. To have to lie about his own poor treatment added insult to injury. "Just come from the mine, Your Grace."

"Do they not allow you clothing, there?"

"It's `ot, down below. And wet. Clothes get in the way."

"You're no longer down below. Did they not allow you to bathe, or to properly dress before meeting with me?"

"Want me to leave, do you?" Bran pushed his chair back, angry enough to forget how Driscoll and Mr. Champness might react to his early dismissal.

"I wish to understand how a boy of such tender years can be allowed to comport himself in such a condition."

"I'm fifteen, I am."

"No." At last, Duke Lacock raised his golden head from the complicated collection of interlocking gears and regarded Bran with disbelief. "You're no bigger than my brother, Sidney. And he's only just turned ten this March. I daresay he's got more meat on his bones than you."

"I'm small, I am," Bran admitted. "But I turned fifteen in June."

"How long have you been working in the mine?"

"Started on the traps when I was eight. After the law changed, and Mr. Driscoll bought my indenture from the mill."

"What year was that?"

"1834."

Duke Lacock pursed his full, pink lips, his brows furrowing. He had very fine face, with noble, expressive features. The sort of face one might find on a statue in a church. "Well, at least those numbers add up."

Bran scowled. "You thought I was lyin'?"

"I did," the young duke admitted. His gaze met Bran's. "Is it common? For eight-year-olds to work down below?"

The question sent Bran's heart racing. He was sure that Duke Lacock would catch him if he lied, but to tell the truth meant that Driscoll would beat him. Mr. Champness would likely punish him, as well. Out of desperation, he tried distraction:

"And `ow old are you?"

"Sixteen."

Surprised that the duke answered him instead of chiding him for his impertinence, Bran continued to question him: "What's that machine you're buildin'?"

Duke Lacock's face broke open in a beatific smile, his eyes shining with zeal. "It's a scale model of an automated system I wish to design. To improve the quality of air in the mines. I had the good fortune to consult with Dafydd Reid regarding his theories on forced ventilation. He's quite a brilliant scientist..."

The duke continued on, but Bran had stopped listening, amazed at how striking the young man was, with his hair haloed by the sun and his blue, blue eyes blazing with a joyous sort of fire. His fine cheekbones were accented by a perfectly chiseled nose. His lips moved with hypnotic rhythms as he recited a list of technical terms and innovations that could have been magical incantations for all Bran understood them. He had never seen anybody as deliriously enthusiastic as Duke Lacock in the throes of his scientific ecstasy. That happy resolve stirred something deep and buried in Bran's core. Something he didn't understand but hungered for, nevertheless. That fire in his blood blazed up, and before he knew it, Bran had slid a hand down inside his breeches, secure in the knowledge that the activity was hidden by the table top.

He fondled himself, and then gave that up to stroke himself in earnest. He kept his gaze attentively on the young duke, but his mind was awhirl with lusty images: He was feeding his cock through those pink lips, driving into that cultured mouth, fingers entwined in that golden halo of hair. He was buggering that pert bum, driving his pego deep and hard, causing the Duke to wriggle and moan as Bran gripped the youth's balls and held them down, preventing him from finishing...

What a delicious moment that would be, for a duke to beg him for release, to grovel and scrape, to worship Bran's cock the way Driscoll insisted that Bran serve him...

"Don't you agree?" Duke Lacock asked him eagerly.

It took Bran several moments to realize he was being addressed. He froze, panic rising up in his throat. Had he been caught frigging himself? "Uhmm...what?"

The duke's face still held that beatific sheen, his strikingly blue eyes focused on Bran. "Don't you think this device might revolutionize not just mines, but how buildings are ventilated?"

Bran swallowed hard, licking his lips as he forced himself to resist spending right then and there. His prick, his entire body sang with the thought that the Duke had turned such a ecstatic expression on him, and seemed to sincerely care for his opinion. He squirmed in his chair, shifting his hand lower, so that he could grip that juncture between sack and pole tightly, tugging down to keep himself from spending, the way he had just dreamed of doing to the boy across the table from him.

When the crisis was averted, Bran realized that the Duke was still awaiting his reply. He nodded, clearing his throat to cover the low groan of denying himself. "Aye. But that is lookin' too small to push much air."

Duke Lacock laughed, a high, musical sound. "This is merely a model. I would show you how it works, but I can't get these blasted cogs into place."

"Shall I try?" Bran immediately regretted his offer. He had been so eager to get closer to the handsome youth that he had forgotten how the stallion between his legs refused to return to the stable.

"You can certainly give it a go. Although, I warn you, I've been trying to get these gears on the shaft for the better part of an hour with no luck. And I designed them."

"I've quick fingers. I fit the bobbins in the mill, I did. And picked oakum before that." Bran eased his hand out of his pants. The moist flesh of his foreskin clung to his palm, dragging the bell end of his prick up to be trapped under the rope keeping his breeches up. The fabric dragged his foreskin back a bit, revealing the only clean, pink part of him against all the coal blackened skin and fabric. Before he could tuck the naughty posy down, Duke Lacock beckoned him over to his end of the table.

Bran slid out of his chair. Careful to keep his belly against the cool, polish mahogany of the table, he sidled along the edge so that the Duke would not see his prick peeking up. Halfway to the other end, he gasped as he brushed against a cross brace. Made of rough hewn wood, it scraped across his exposed tip. He gave a long, low groan, vexed that the painful scraping across the sensitive flesh didn't cause him to deflate, but instead made that stallion rear and buck so hard, he felt it in his nipples and arse. A shudder ran through him, and he gripped the edge of the table tightly.

"Are you ill?" the duke asked, looking him over with sincere concern. "Shall I call for a doctor?"

"No!" A few more shudders racked Bran as he worked his way across the broad crossbeam. He realized suddenly that he had not addressed the young man properly and added, more sedately: "No, thank you, Your Grace. You're very kind." He continued on, past the cross brace, and breathed a sigh of relief, only to encounter another. He groaned and bent his knees, sliding past it, only to find himself standing in the bar of light shining through the window and splashing across the duke's end of the table.

The sun on his back flooded him with a peculiar sensation, as if he was standing in two worlds at once. His back felt a solid, honeyed warmth, as if he'd been draped with a blanket of radiance. The light shone on the shiny brass workings of Duke Lacock's machine, scattering into tiny amber gems across the table top.

When Bran put his hand on one, it felt warm and viscous, a thick goo made from distilled sunbeams. He glanced over at the duke, to see if he had noticed the strange quality of the light reflecting off the gears, but the youth had resumed prattling on about his masterpiece: "I believe I have improved on Mr. Reid's concept." His eager, expectant expression held a thread of concern for Bran, but no sense of the wonder and amazement that Bran was experiencing. "I've increased the airflow several times over via these series of gears attached to the bellows..."

His obstinate prick forgotten, Bran turned to face the sun, lifting his gaze to look up through the window at the blazing disk. Suddenly, his eyes focused in a way they never had before. He saw into the luminous heart of the heavens, and felt himself shattering, whirling, every iota blazing with light, like dust motes shining in the rays of the sun...


He stood naked in a gilded chariot pulled by two gigantic golden lions with fiery red manes and swanlike wings of brilliant white. The red reins wrapped his wrists and forearms all the way to the elbows, and his entire body strained with the effort of keeping the wild and uproarious creatures from veering off into calamity. The blue bowl of the sky stretched out across the sea towards the western horizon, and far below, the continents peeked up at him through cloying veils of clouds. The heady sense of power, of speed, and the soaring sense of flight made him both dizzy and aroused.

He felt a presence behind him, a radiant warmth like the sun on his back, and then a powerful hand smoothed along his shoulder and down his flank. Radiant white, with long, manly fingers that were somehow both artful and delicate, the hand traced the muscles of his abdomen, tickling the black hairs leading down to his weeping prick. He glanced over his shoulder to find the hand belonged to Beli Mawr, himself.

Astonishingly beautiful, the sun god stood astride the chariot behind him. Tall and well made, he was naked save for a green mantle closed with a silver pin, a golden torc terminated with lions around his neck, and a quiver of javelins and a golden harp slung on his back. His corona of wheat yellow curls and his fiery red beard whipped wildly in the wind generated by the wings of the lions. His body was perfection in alabaster. Even his cock was white, rising rampant from a nest of red and gold curls, huge and pulsing with radiant vitality. Bran could feel the heat of his huge, erect member. He trembled at the sight.

Fear and lust warred in him. He had never wanted to be buggered before. He had always merely endured Driscoll and his mates. But something about that brilliant, rigid pego made him salivate, even as he quivered with dread at the thought of being impaled on something so large. He couldn't tear his gaze away from it, amazed that the ooze from the tip was like liquid sunlight.

The God laughed, a sound of mirth and thunder. He bent down, grabbing Bran by the hips, and slid that long thick may pole between Bran's thighs, so that the tip grazed the sparse dusting of hair on his balls. The sensation was electric, awakening a fire Bran had never known before. His own prick was so rigid that it painted a hot line against his belly, bobbing and slapping as he struggled to control the wild creatures at the end of the reins.

"You're my charioteer now," Beli Mawr curled his fingers around Bran's chin, forcing him to meet those searing blue eyes. "Forget your old life. I'll give you wings." That blazing beard and hair whipped against Bran's face as the god's lips sealed against his own, stinging like a shower of embers.

Hands and arms held fast by the reins, Bran could do nothing to escape the god's affections. He wasn't sure he wanted to, but something deep in his core told him he was forgetting something. Missing something. Beli Mawr's kiss sent a honeyed fire through him, a sweet blaze of lust and passion that sent his blood singing.

"That's right, my pet." The god's thunderous chuckle vibrated through Bran's core as those incandescent hands roamed across his bare torso. "You are the sheath to my spear. You will steer me through the Ages..."

The long, luminous fingers strummed his nipples like a harp, the other hand claiming the pulsing root between Bran's legs. The heat from Beli Mawr's palm felt both excruciating and ecstatic. That immense, blunt battering ram sawed back and forth between the half globes of Bran's arse, scraping liquid fire along that sensitive region between his sack and his hole. Bran groaned, dancing from foot to foot. It was so hot, he feared it would char his flesh away, but at the same time, it made his blood boil over with need. "Please...please..."

He wasn't sure whether he was begging to be released, or to be buggered. The lions roared and reared up, clawing the air, as if sensing his confusion. The chariot bucked and shuddered underfoot. Bran threw his shoulders over the front rail and wedged his elbows under the golden bar to steady himself, trying to regain control of the raging beasts. The position forced him up on his tiptoes, and put his rear at the perfect angle to be pierced by that fiery lance. Beli Mawr gripped his hips and speared him to the core.

A shattering cry left him, pealing across the heavens, but it was drowned out by the god's triumphant roar. The lions leapt forward with answering roars, galloping forward as if spurred on by each cleaving thrust into Bran's backside.

"Do you feel that?" Beli Mawr growled, increasing the pace. "Let it fill you. Transform you." Faster and faster they flew across the stormy ocean below, their shadow skimming across the white-crested canyons of water. Or was that another chariot below?

In his dazed state, Bran could not be sure of what he saw. Was the singing in his ears from those shapes in the sea, or was it just the blood in his ears echoing the passion of Beli Mawr's triumph over him? Bran swooned, torn asunder by the pistoning, even as his own lust galloped inexorably towards a shattering climax. Garbled sounds left him, full of pleading and praise. It was agony and ecstasy in equal measure. They approached the horizon with dizzying speed.

"That's right," Beli Mawr crooned. "Forget everything else. Serve me. My spear has five heads. With you at the reins, I will add two more. Every god and man will bow to me, and offer me tribute."

A sinuous shape reared up from the white sea foam ahead. A dragon! It beat its wings and howled with the voice of a thousand storms. The sound reached deep into Bran's core, pulling an ache from his heart that turned him inside out. He felt like a roasted chestnut cracking open, or perhaps he was a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

His skin ruptured, the hard shell of his being bursting like a discarded husk as wings erupted from him. Huge white wings that stretched over the world, catching the wind as if it was a lover. His mind was everywhere and nowhere. His eyes focused with such power and precision, he could see each individual bubble in the foamy whitecaps below, every scale on the dragon's crystalline form, every white hair on the head of the green-skinned man in the chariot below.

"Neifion..." Bran whispered, desperately clawing together the faint, gossamer memories that name awoke in him. His heart swelled. His entire being yearned for the green man below, even as Beli Mawr flooded him with glowing seed, claiming him. He clenched his entire body, resisting the climax that threatened to undo him. Somehow, he knew that returning the sun's passion would burn away all memory of the sea god below.

"No!" Beli Mawr sensed Bran's restraint. His lions roared as the sea dragon whipped it's tail at them. A bright golden disk hurtled towards them. It looked like the reflection of the sun off the water, but it hit Bran with such force, it tore his wings away and knocked him out of the chariot.

Blinded, he plummeted through the howling wind, a whirling, terrifying descent. He struck the water with such force that the only thing that survived the impact was the tiny, dreary speck of mud and spittle known as--


"Goatsby?" A hand shook Bran's shoulder. "What's wrong, my dear chap?"

Bran blinked, glancing around. He was standing with his back to the table. Duke Lacock's hand was on him, his fine, expressive face mere inches from Bran's lips. Bran opened his mouth, but then remembered himself. Such things could get him whipped. Or hanged.

"You staggered back against the table. Are you feeling ill?"

"I'm fine, Your Grace." Bran took several deep breaths, bending forward to hide his oozing prick. Whether it had been a vision, or just a hallucination, he was still brimming with a fierce desire to rut. He could feel the trickle leaking out of his prick, which was still peeking up above his breeches. He turned quickly, to hide himself against the table, and also to lean his elbows upon that cool surface. His knees were weak, although he wasn't sure if it was due to the strange vision or to the duke's hand on him. "I `aven't eaten much today. Just a bit faint, I am."

Suddenly, the floor shook beneath them. The entire room swayed, timbers creaking. The lamp globes rattled in their sconces. Dust rained down from the rafters. Bran felt himself tumbling back into his tiny, human body. His heart stopped, gripped by a cold fist. He knew what the shaking meant. The keening of the Cyhyraeth had warned him. He gave silent thanks that he was here topside, safe from the hellish blast and the choking, crushing darkness that invariably followed.

He hoped Mr. Jones was all right.

The Duke put his hand on Bran's shoulder again, perhaps to steady them both. Bran glanced up at him, startled by the electric jolt that surged through him at that touch, but Lacock was already moving to peer out the window towards the engine house, where the alarm bell clanged in a desperate, urgent peal. "What's going on?"

"Fire damp," Bran explained. His voice sounded reedy and distant in his ears. "They must've `it a pocket. Exploded, it did. Might be a collapse, as well."

"I don't see any smoke."

"Down below, it is."

"Bloody Hell," Duke Lacock scrambled around the table to the leather bag on the floor beneath the hat rack. He snatched it up by the handles and rushed to the door. "With me, Goatsby," he ordered as he ran down the hallway to the stairs, his footfalls receding until Bran could barely hear them over the sound of the alarm clanging through the window.

Bran wondered at his haste. There was nothing to be done but pray for the dead. He sighed, dragging his finger slowly across the top of his prick, blinking in surprise at the glowing fluid that coated his fingertip. Surprised, he licked it off.

It tasted like the honeyed warmth of Beli Mawr's kiss. Bran shuddered, aflame with desire to suck that massive white scepter, to swallow that liquid sunlight that had filled him with with such magic while he wanked himself to destruction.

"Goatsby!!!" Duke Lacock shouted.

The urgency in his voice forced Bran back to the here and now. He tucked himself back down into his breeches and turned to follow.