Flight of the Hierophant

A commission for Glitch!

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Azakhen gaa Solraa, Hierophant of the Southern Oasis, grew tired of his latest plaything. He regarded the toothy mouthed creature not with contempt, but boredom. He had been promised a strong warrior and the Sobrekian pit fighter was not up to his standards. Not with his broken claws, his scarred leg, or his missing eye. Some injuries were old, some had been obtained in the pit. The Sobrekian failed to win his latest bout, and because of his weakness Azakhen had lost one of his prized camels, and suffered the indignation of signing his property away to another Jakali. A man from the merchant quarter, of a lesser station no less. The embarrassment festered in Azakhen, and he briefly considered destroying the pit fighter where he stood.

"How do you intend to make this right?" Azakhen said. "Will you give me one of your limbs? Worthless as they are. You Sobrekians can regrow yourselves from the tiniest lump of meat, so it begs the question. How much is a pound of flesh worth, if you have an infinite supply?" His power thrummed behind glowing eyes, pupiless and coloured like the lush vegetation of the floodplains.

The Sobrekian bared more of his teeth. Some were broken, and some had been crudely replaced with metal replacements to keep him viable as a gladiator. He snarled, his crocodile hiss echoing through the sandstone throne room. "I hope you choke on your own words, sorcerer."

Azakhen rolled his eyes. "Again, sorcery, how many times do I have to tell you?" He raised the Sobrekian from the floor, but sat far away from him, barely deigning to lift a slim arm to focus his powers. "Magic is the act of drawing power from a third party, and channeling it through symbols, words, and gestures. Though it can be understood, it is never innate to the person who calls it forward."

The Sobrekian clawed at his own throat. He tried to pry a hand from his neck that wasn't there. An impression of fingers indented his skin, and he struggled for breath.

"What I have, you see, is power. Plain and simple. A dominion over all that exists within my sight, and I need only exercise a thought to bring that power down upon you." Azakhen relaxed his hand, and the Sobrekian dropped to the floor. "Your people are under the delusion that we can cause your heads to explode. Truth be told, the necessary concentration, and time, and effort it would take to make your thick skulls burst is completely uneconomical. It would be easier to stop your heart."

The Sobrekian stared at his ruler, his eyes were defiant, but he remained complacent. For now.

"Tend to your ablutions. If you're going to walk around my palace, you might as well be clean and presentable. I have a new toy on its way, and I don't want your ineptitude to rub off on it."

“Hierophant. A gift has arrived for you from the Western Oasis.”

Azakhen’s ears perked. He liked gifts, and the tributes given from his peers were more luxurious than anything his citizens could present. He beckoned the messenger to ascend his throne, and snatched a box from his hands with his thoughts. He bid the meek Jakali goodbye and went to open the box in solitude. He was now the only living creature in an expansive throne room the size of most town squares, with the only sound the trickle of water from the myriad statues spouting clear river-water from his private reservoir.

He unboxed what appeared to be a yellow stone, perfectly round, with a large P in white as its only discernible marking. He read the note which came from Ghaten gaa Bhantet, ruler of the Western Oasis, and frowned. It read: ‘A little jest between friends, inheritor of the Azure Sun. Finally I have found an object that will match your body to your ego, please enjoy.’

Azakhen bristled and prepared to throw the orb against the ground to shatter it. But it ‘popped’ as if it were simply fabric filled with air, and he felt a strange current run through his body. “Magic!?” He snarled, and tried to control its flow. He could feel it working its way through his body, it attempted to transform him. He had some skill with magic but evidently it wasn’t enough to counteract whatever enchantment had been present in Ghaten’s orb.

He felt tension in his skin. His jet black fur flattened against his body. One by one, his muscles puffed up like well-defined balloons. He watched the expansion starts in his pectorals, then spread to his abdominal muscles and to his flank as he widened. His hips and buttocks were not exempt, and grew fuller with hot air. He realized that he had been hollowed out, and transformed by the orb into some kind of balloon-Jakali. He made a mental note to send one of his own cursed objects in revenge. But for now, he had more pressing matters. His toned legs beefed up in appearance with multitudes of pressure, but in actuality he had become light as a feather. Azakhen bounded up from his throne and took to the air.

He gasped in alarm. The upward momentum of getting up from his throne had been enough to send him floating above it. He tried to use his psychic powers to pull himself down, but his ascent was increasing in speed. The tension grew and his muscles continued to bulge until they melded together into long, smooth curves. He rapidly lost his definition as muscular, and rounded out into what looked like a child’s balloon with Jakali limbs. Limbs which slowly sank into divots, as the expansion continued. He grit his teeth and in his anger, didn’t notice that he had swelled large enough to fill his throne room three quarters of the way. The speed of his expansion was as insane as it was meteoric. His face pressed against the smooth sandstone of the wall above his doorway, and the walls and roof of his palace throne room came loose with the force of his shiny black rubber body expanding out of it.

Azakhen gaa Solraa exploded out from the roof of his palace, to the shock of the entire city. Everyone in the Southern Oasis stopped what they were doing to witness the soaring zeppelin of a man, who blocked out the sun and continued to replace the skyline.

"I am Azakhen gaa Solraa, Firstborn of the House of the Azure Sun. My power is absolute. My sovereignty is unquestioned. I... must... not... be... defeated..."

The scion of the Azure Sun spouted his titles and his accomplishments through fat and cumbersome cheeks that pushed against his about and pursed his lips. The impressive words of a noble Jakali son were now the slurred fever rambles of a hot air balloon with a vague resemblance to the Southern Oasis's Hierophant. He repeated himself endlessly like a mantra. If he kept asserting himself with the same divinity he had before, maybe he could regain control, and work out a way to return to his normal self. He had enough of the gawking from his subjects below, their amusement and shock tickling his mind like a drizzle on his forehead. When this was all over he intended to search the memories of everyone in the oasis city, and subject them to the same humiliation he currently endured. Those who refused to submit to a heartfelt apology would pop, and the scraps they left behind would be woven into clothes for his city guards. To remind the masses of the great man they owed their safety and prosperity.

Though Azakhen worried he wouldn't get to do any of it. He radiated heat like a miniature sun, and sweltered with no way to relieve himself of the burning pressure. He was made from rubber now, but he felt the phantom sensation of sweat pouring from him like he did in the months when the small sun appeared in the sky. He closed his eyes and focused. His power came to him, and he created waves of force to push at him from all angles. He squeezed himself like a ripe fruit. He was semi-successful in pushing the hot air out of his body, but he was still larger than the bulk of his palace. A few meters of deflation was irrelevant, a gigantic balloon was still a gigantic balloon. And he was beginning to fray.

A seam along his right side popped open. It was small and he forced it shut with a thought. But now he had to focus on it to keep it from re-opening and growing into a tear. He groaned in frustration, but it was drowned out by the deep synthetic groan of his body straining to adapt to the climbing air pressure inside of him.

Azakhen could feel the tension mount underneath another seam. It was about to blow, and to his horror, he found himself anticipating the event with an eager mind. To have the air expelled cooled him, just a bit, and eased the ache he felt in his taxed rubber skin. The seam tore, very slightly, and released a pinprick vent of scalding hot air. Azakhen's body tingled pleasantly, and he recognized it as the approach of something he never thought he would associate with his current situation.

An orgasm.

A million questions raced through his head. It certainly felt that way, he could probably fit thousands of queries in either cheek with how overblown they were. But one stood out to him. If he was experiencing something so sensual and climactic as an orgasm in his inflated state, then what did that mean for him? A thought made itself known, and he shuddered: If the tingling was spreading throughout his body, did that mean his giant pumped up form, was now a singular sexual organism. And if he did reach climax... would he expel the air as release until he deflated, or would he explode? The part of him which welcomed that oblivion warred with his rational mind.

He was forced to close his eyes when his cheeks became so overinflated, they encroached on his muzzle and denied him the ability to speak. Deflate or burst. He was about to find out. The tingling grew until it became a stimulating wave of electricity, flowing across his body and occasionally it jolted him to the tune of a creaking-obscured moan. "Gods of the stars and suns and moons, I... can't... think straight..."

Azakhen gaa Solraa grew slowly, and in staggered, resistant bursts. His balloon-like body had no give and was hard to the touch. He tried to use his psychic powers to push against his rounded form to expel air like before, but he was as hard as steel, and the invisible hands he conjured from his mindscape were pushed back by the unstoppable swells of his body. He squinted and tried to hold on to sanity, but there was a fire raging in him. A flame of wondrous pleasure and rapture that tempted him with its heat. He felt something inside of him finally snap. A rubber band pulled too far, had finally split in two. And the tension he had held on to in his thoughts became slack.

Azakhen inflated smoothly for all of ten seconds. Ten seconds, that was all. But in that window he ascended to a size no creature on the planet had ever witnessed in a living thing. His dark black rubber body, the all-encompassing orb he had become, pressed down on buildings and spires in the Southern Oasis. He resisted puncture, and filled every available inch of his domain, pinning people to the desert floor. For a scant ten seconds he felt immortal, ascendant, omniscient. Then he felt the pleasure fill and overfill him, and he let out a cry of ecstasy.

POP!

The Southern Oasis was covered in large sheets of black rubber when Azakhen popped. It took hours for the citizen’s hearing to return. The temple priests began their work to reconstitute their hierophant, though many of them dawdled, fearful of the wrath of their hierophant who must have felt humiliated in his last moments whole. None of them could have predicted that upon his re-summoning, Azakhen gaa Solraa would have a taste for such things.

Though he decided, while in limbo following his detonation, that he would use his newly acquired ability to grow and burst to further his rule. If he were to be known as the exploding hierophant, he would make people fear that epithet instead of laugh.

Azakhen gaa Solraa popped that day for the first, but not the last time.