FRACTURED TIME CHAPTER III
The God of Thunder and the Dream of Fire
⚠️CONTENT WARNING – 🔞+ ONLY⚠️
This work contains explicit sexual content, including homoerotic themes and graphic male/male intimacy, as well as historical violence and psychological intensity. Intended for mature audiences aged 18 and older. Reader discretion is advised.
The pain was a white-hot explosion behind his eyes, then nothing.
When Adrian opened his eyes, the world was upside down. He was hanging, suspended by his ankles, rope cutting into his skin. Below him—above him—the ground spun dizzily. Three painted faces stared up, watching him with a mixture of fear and awe.
They had stripped him of his clothes. He hung naked, vulnerable, his hairy body exposed to the humid Cretaceous air. The primitives were arguing in guttural clicks and grunts, gesturing at the smoking time pod half-submerged in the yellow water.
One of them—the leader, the one who had struck him—pointed at the pod. Lightning had struck it when Adrian arrived, or perhaps some temporal energy discharge. Whatever it was, the metal hull was scorched black, and smoke still curled from its seams.
The leader approached Adrian cautiously. He carried a crude stone knife.
"Please," Adrian whispered, his voice hoarse. "I don't mean harm. I just want to go home."
The leader stopped. He looked into Adrian's eyes—those deep, hypnotic blue eyes that Mason loved so much. There was something there, some recognition of intelligence, of strangeness. The leader turned back to his companions and spoke sharply.
They cut him down.
Adrian collapsed into the mud, coughing, his body screaming with pain. But they didn't attack him. Instead, they backed away, falling to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the earth.
The leader—the one who had captured him—now approached differently. He touched Adrian's shoulder, then his own chest, then pointed at the sky.
God, the gesture seemed to say. You fell from the sky. You are a god.
Adrian looked at the smoking pod, then at his naked, pale body covered in dark hair so different from their smooth, brown skin. He understood. The lightning, the falling metal egg, his strange appearance—they thought he was divine.
"I need..." Adrian gestured toward the pod, toward the sun. "Light. Sun."
He mimed the solar panels charging, his hands spreading wide. The leader watched, then nodded. He barked commands, and the others dragged the pod—carefully, reverently—onto the shore, positioning it where the pale Cretaceous sun could reach its panels.
Adrian sat in the mud, naked and shivering, watching the small indicator lights on the pod's surface begin to blink. Charging. Slowly, painfully slowly.
The primitives brought him food—some kind of roasted lizard meat, bitter berries. They covered him with furs against the humid night. And they watched him, worshipped him, this hairy god who had fallen from the thunder.
Three days passed. Or four—Adrian lost count in the endless twilight of the ancient world. The pod charged enough for him to crawl inside, to check the systems. The coordinates were scrambled. He tried to enter November 2026, but the machine rejected it. Tried October 2026. September. Every date in his present produced only error messages.
External temporal interference, the screen read. Coordinates locked.
Someone—or something—was blocking him from returning home.
But there was another option. The emergency jump protocol. Random forward leap, maximum 10 million years. It was dangerous, unpredictable. But staying meant death—either from the dinosaurs, the primitives' eventual fear, or simple starvation when the pod finally died.
Adrian looked at the small group of humans who had fed him, protected him, worshipped him as a god. He felt a strange pang of guilt. He was no deity. Just a desperate man trying to save his husband.
He entered the coordinates. 55 million BC. Forward. Forward into the unknown.
The pod hummed. The primitives fell back, screaming, as light enveloped their thunder god. Then silence. Adrian was gone.
