Salas remembered the first time he stepped into the Palace of Suscon ten years ago, his eyes rounded in awe as he took in the sight of the endlessly high walls and the towering statues. A dwelling built for giants, he’d thought. The sand from the nearby shore had blown into the hall on salty breezes and dusted the cracks of the statuary marble floors. He had fallen in love with the smooth grittiness of those floors the moment he had made that first barefoot step inside, naked and with his shoulder weighed down by the Emperor’s guiding hand. He knew he would never want to wear shoes again.

Everything around him had been an absolute wonder. While before, there had been only a blackened pit where his memories should have been. The only one he’d maintained had been endless, consistent darkness. Nothingness.

To go from nothing to everything had been both overwhelming and instructive. He had  not known much at the time, but he knew there was work to be done to maintain it.

“Is this your new pet?” a middle-aged statesman had asked upon seeing Salas for the first time, stepping into the palace garden room in which Salas was being kept.

The man had been led in by Emperor Eldron, who had smiled proudly as he looked over Salas from head to toe, as though admiring an investment worth bragging over. “Isn’t he lovely? His fairness easily surpasses the head council member’s favorite bird, I think it is fair to say.”

“The head council’s favorite? There is no need to say it when it’s blatantly obvious.” A chuckle.

Salas was painting in the room in which he had come to know as his ‘place.’ A place in which he had not been allowed to leave, though he had been provided endless indoor entertainments with the promise he could one day venture into palace life once he ‘learns’ more, Eldron had always said, whatever that meant. ‘Once you understand more,’ he had been told.

‘I am to fuck you, Eldron,’ Salas had pouted, when he’d been reminded of his confines once more. ‘What more is there to understand?’

Salas had not responded to the mens’ approach, though he finished his work with a final stroke of his brush and stepped back from his canvas, beaming.

The two men had studied the painting, and they had not smiled. 

“How abstract,” the statesman—Jovack, his name was—had said eventually.

“Abstract,” Salas had repeated. What did abstract mean again? “It is...the sun? My painting is the sun and flowers and marble floors. The ones in the Great Hall. Eldron says this floor crack,” he pointed to a shapely glob of blue paint, “is from when he dropped his wine cup.” He blinked, realizing he was meeting the statesman for the first time, and curtsied. “Nice to meet you, Your Majesty.” 

Another pause. “Your Grace, is your new bird simple?” Jovack had murmured. 

Eldron had sighed. “He...he’s had some type of internal injury.” The lie had been repeated so many times, and sounded so natural falling from the Emperor’s lips that even Salas could have believed it. “He hit his head before I took him in. Fell off an unsteady mare. He’s maintained language, though his understanding of the world has slipped a bit. He is regaining it, though.”

“Hmm,” Jovack had mused. “Well, I can see why you are choosing to hide him away. Wouldn’t want court gossip to be full of the idea that the Emperor is keeping a bird in his bed who’s soft in the head.”

“That,” Eldron said carefully, “among other topics of gossip that could arise.”

The statesman had shot Salas a look of alarm. “My Gods! Does he carry disease?”

“Wha- No, Of course not,” Eldron shut down the accusation immediately.  

“Well, Your Grace, you are acting increasingly peculiar and I’m smelling something cryptic in your evasive explanations. I thought you brought me here to break him in.”

The Emperor had fidgeted, wringing his hands in the silence that followed. He stared near the floor, as if to find the answer to an unsolvable question there. Salas, in the short time that he had known the man, had never seen him so unsure of himself.

A sigh, long and aged. “I’ve lied to you,” said Eldron. “As it is well known, I’ve placed a curse upon Diagor. I received that curse as a boon from a jinx when I traveled to the Faelands to find one. But that single wish was not the only one I received.”

Jovack blinked incredulously, perhaps unbelieving of the information being passed to his own ears, even if it came from the Emperor. Everyone knew how Eldron had used a magical wish to curse the northern kingdom. They had not known about the additional wishes. “What you mean to say is, you had other wishes?” the statesman clarified. He blinked once more, his eyes slicing over to Salas. “And you asked the jinx for the perfect palace bed bird?” When Eldron did not deny the claim, the man barked out a laugh and soon, Eldron was joining in, the men nearly bent over in their amusement.

“I knew you were one to think with your cock, old man, but to waste a fae’s greatest gift on a whore is a bit much!” Jovack went on.

Eldron filled two goblets with wine, chortling. Knowing that neither cup was for him, Salas rolled his eyes at the foolishness and decided his painting needed more detail. His ears were perked as he created brown clouds on his canvas.

“Then you are naive to the pleasures of life, friend” said Eldron, “for what greater entertainment than sexual pleasure? Besides, Salas has his...assets.”

“The color of his cock should pinken to the hue of his hair when he’s aroused, or I would return him to the jinx. For he can’t paint to save his life, if that’s the asset you’re alluding to.” Jovack said, the amusement still thick in his voice.

Salas’ hand stilled in front of the canvas.

“His cock does what it’s supposed to,” the Emperor said dryly. “He doesn’t age.”

“Doesn’t age?!” Another pause. “Hmm. Yes, I can see why that would be appealing: a bird maintaining their youth through time. He looks young, say nineteen, twenty? The prime.”

“Yes, yes, it is why I have to keep him locked up here before I decide what to do. When he still appears twenty years of age in thirty years, how am I to explain?”

“Thirty years!” The Emperor’s friend roared with laughter once more. “You think you’ll last to the age of 90! Now that’s ambitious of you, though ambition is one of your strong suits.”

“Of course I will. And by that time, I’ll have to share the secret behind my little bird.”

“You don’t wish to share this now? I mean, it certainly is something to be boastful about. To be honored by a jinx is nothing but praiseworthy.”

“I do not trust the greed in others. I don’t want some foreign dignitary to attempt to swipe him from me. This is especially so when I show you what else he can do. Salas, come here.”

Salas looked over his shoulder to find both men staring at him with a certain gaze he had come to recognize immediately, though did not know enough of the language that he could put a name to it.

Jovack had grinned, stepping forward. “I knew I was here to help break him in.”

The Emperor pulled away the wrappings of Salas’ skirt.

Afterward, Jovack’s heavy, short breaths were wrapped in absolute bliss as he clung to Salas’ torso, unwilling to let the bird fly off. They were laying on Salas’ crumpled bed, naked and wound in linens and sweat.

“What…” Jovack's lungs did not appear to have capacity for speech. “What is this? Have you drugged me? Where does this...this pleasure come from? I’ve never felt anything like it.”

The Emperor had still been in the room throughout the encounter, acting as voyeur. “Ah, and that is why I would have failed two explain, as the only way to truly understand would be to experience it. The pleasure one experiences by using Salas is...incomparable to laying with anyone else. A heightened pleasure that does not exist elsewhere. I’ve gone as far as nine times with him in one evening and my cock never softened.”

The statesman laughed, pulling Salas towards him and planting a sluggish kiss on his temple and stilling him with graceless hands when Salas tried to sit up to cleanse himself. “It is a blessing and a curse. Another one of his assets given by the jinx?”

“Yes.” 

Finally, when Salas was able to rise without being captured up again, he made his way to a side table where cool water pitchers and cleansing cloths were waiting for him. He let the other men continue their conversation without him.

Later, when Jovack had made his exit and Eldron had lingered, Salas had voiced a pestering concern that had sat with him ever since he’d been taken to bed. He felt uneasy about what he’d just done, and he wanted to know why. 

Eldron had calmly explained that sexual intimacy was nothing to be ashamed about, and the feeling was something he would grow out of. Soon, he would know how to explore another’s body, as well as master his own ‘needs,’ and it would no longer be intimidating. 

Salas, at the time, decided to take his word for it. Despite the odd weight of guilt and wrongness he felt after these sexual encounters. It was an easy chore to ignore it, so he did.

Emperor Eldron had been correct in expecting that Salas’ presence would raise questions amongst the court. Salas was kept in his quarters near the gardens for five years, unable to explore the world he desperately wished to see, as he was locked inside. He watched the world move from the viewpoint of the garden window and wondered if enough time should pass, he would turn into one of the stone statues he’d witnessed upon entering the palace for the first time, staring blankly with a marble gaze and undisturbed by the passing of time. Would Eldron carry him out, and prop him up in the Great Hall?

Salas had asked about the statues once, upon one of the man’s nightly visits. “Were the statues once people?”

The Emperor had sighed. “And just when I thought we were making progress, you prove yourself witless.”

Salas had smiled knowingly, stretching his neck and bowing his body in a way he knew Eldron appreciated. “Why should I learn a thing when you take so much pleasure in instructing me? The other day, when I asked you if bees made love to flowers, well...you liked that lesson quite a bit.”

“Sit up, you ridiculous little thing. I don’t believe you’re as much of a lost cause as you suggest.”

And the Eldron had been right. Slowly but surely, Salas became culturally versed in all things Susconian. His understanding of the workings of the world around him had improved to the point where he was relaying new curious information to Eldron that he’d learned from Jovack, who often visited Salas to provide additional lessons. Though that was not the only thing they did within each other’s company. Jovack, as the Emperor had put it, ‘had become addicted to Salas.’

As had a few of the guards and some others who knew of Salas’ existence.

Salas decided he liked having others want him. They brought him figs and handed him flowers through the garden window, and he couldn’t find a reason to argue with any of it. The strange feeling he received after intimacy continued to arise, but he discovered tactics to ignore it and instead use the attraction others had towards him, as he had learned to do with the Emperor.

As for the Emperor, he did not seem to mind the transgressions whatsoever. In fact, on the occasions where he had been present, he often encouraged soldiers, in the act, to press Salas against the wall and ravish him. As the meeting with Jovack had proven, Eldron liked to watch.

Though Emperor Eldron was Salas’ jailer, Salas felt no malice towards the man. He knew that Eldron wanted him to be deemed ready enough to venture out and claim a spot amongst the court, almost as much as Salas did. In that sense, the two were partners working towards the same goal. 

Eventually, it happened. Salas had met other birds for the first time as they rushed into his quarters with instructions to prepare him. He’d been introduced to the court at the evening feast. The first stories of Salas had emerged from the table that night.

The Emperor has his own bird? I heard his mother was fae.

No, I daresay his mother was a prostitute; sold her son to the slavetrade before the poor thing was rescued by palace guards.

Is it true that he was kept in the garden for several years?

Salas felt a small thrill upon hearing each and every rumor. He reveled in them, the attention and praise. When he caught an earful of the particularly more elaborate stories, he playfully provided false details in what was obviously a satirical tale, and it had earned him laughter and good humor. The court warmed to him immediately.

It was then that Salas knew that if he were to live forever, he wanted to live exactly like this. He could stand catering to the whims of the Emperor, the slick between his thighs at night, the heat of other men, as long as he got to keep these eyes upon him, the gold on his limbs, and the sandy marble floors.