Autumn Pt. 01 Ch. 01

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Author's Note

Here begins a re-telling of my Homelands series. I'm proud of the original versions but don't feel that they lived up to their full potential. For a while, I tried moving on to other projects (check out The Aether Candle!), but I always knew that I'd have to come back and try to get it right. I may work on other things along the way, as it's going to take me several years to complete the series again, but I'm committed to doing so.

This time around, you can expect a slower pace (spoiler alert: there's a good deal of tension building in this chapter, but no sex just yet), stronger characterization (both in the sense that actions should have clearer motivations and in that each person should have a unique personality), and a less grandiose plot (that won't get in the way of the erotic elements but hopefully will still add some intrigue). This is no longer an epic fantasy, with a huge battle between good and evil waiting at the end. The conflicts will be smaller in scale, with few outright villains. The cast of characters is largely the same, as are most of the settings, but the paths they take will often be dramatically different. If you read the original versions, you should feel as though you're revisiting old friends, but you shouldn't assume that you know how their story ends.

If you haven't read the original versions, there is no need to do so. This re-telling is meant to stand on its own and is my preferred version of the tale.

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A gust of wind swept down the hall, carrying leaves of scarlet, persimmon, and yellow ocher in its wake. One of them escaped its eddy and smacked Frank in the face.

By the time he'd recovered from that small indignity, the whole world had changed—or enough of it to make his head spin, anyway. The hallway had widened and the ceiling had grown high and vaulted, while hardwood floors and plain white walls had given way to velvet carpets and marble with sunbursts carved in. The painting Frank had been staring at no longer depicted a farmer working the fields but a strikingly beautiful woman.

Her hair was spun gold and her eyes chips of sapphire. Her yellowy skin almost had a metallic sheen, and her lips definitely did. It looked like she'd kissed molten gold and come away with a distinctive smile rather than severe burns. Perhaps that was why no jewelry encircled her neck or dangled from her ears; with a face like that, such accoutrements would only have seemed gaudy. Yet their absence still struck Frank as odd, as did her plain white dress. Nobles did not dress like commoners; never had and never would. The PhD Frank hoped to complete in the next three years was in economics, not history or archeology, but he at least had some understanding of class stratification. The woman in the painting was clearly of noble birth, though, despite her attire. Whatever liberties the artist might have taken with her complexion and lip color, her beauty was anything but common. And what he took to be her home had clearly been built in a time when those sorts of distinctions had meant everything. The quaint little farmhouse his mother had rented to celebrate Harvest had somehow been replaced by a palace straight out of antiquity.

Shit, for all Frank knew, he'd actually been blown back in time by that gust of wind.

As soon as the thought formed, though, Frank dismissed it. Grad school had turned him into committed rationalist; he no longer had any use for explanations that verged on the supernatural, let alone those that put the impossible front and center. He wasn't sure how else to explain the sudden change in his surroundings, or his appearance, but that didn't mean he was experiencing the sort of phenomena that made sci-fi and fantasy cool.

Wait, his appearance had changed as well?

Yeah, it had. A lot. Frank's usual physique might be described as "stocky" by those who were polite and "pudgy" by everyone else. Now, though, it looked like he'd stepped out of the pages of a fitness magazine, or a freaking comic book. Where a beer keg should have been, there was instead a six-pack that was nicely toned. Bowling balls had replaced his biceps; thick steel cables were wrapped around his forearms; and each deltoid head was visible. He could probably sharpen knives against those bad boys.

At least his complexion remained fair and his fur relatively thick; that kept him from resembling an anatomy chart or a greased pig, the way men with his newly-acquired musculature often did. There were differences even there, Frank noted, but they were subtle. His melanin deficiency was slightly less acute and he'd undergone some light manscaping; the dark curls no longer spilled out past his obliques or crept up to his shoulders, which presumably meant that his back was bare. The wind had left him with just enough body hair to look manly without inviting comparisons to anything that walked on all fours.

It hadn't made him any taller either, for which he was grateful. Frank didn't particularly enjoy being a few inches shy of average height, but he'd lived with that for so long that he'd no longer feel like himself if the wind had done there what it had elsewhere. He wasn't entirely sure that he did anyway, but at least his glorious new form shared some connection with his real body. That made him feel like there was some actual Frank left.

What was wrong with him? Did he seriously think a gust of wind had transported him to a forgotten time in a faraway place, dramatically altering his physique in the process?

That sort of thing didn't just happen. Today's forecast: cloudy with a chance of time-travel and body transformation. Stay tuned to see if your area will be affected.

"Frank? Is that you?" a woman asked as she stepped out into the hallway. The room she'd emerged from was right where his mother's had been back in the farmhouse, but this new arrival couldn't be his mother. She just couldn't be. No fucking way.

Unless, of course, people were inexplicably turning into idealized versions of themselves. Good thing there was no evidence of that happening, then, such as the body Frank himself was inhabiting at that very moment. That would be all sorts of confusing.

It would also raise questions about whether it was okay to stare lasciviously at one's mother if she was only technically the same person. If they were to play a video game together, though, and she chose an avatar that was sexualized as most female characters were, would he be obligated to say that an image he'd found aesthetically pleasing in the past no longer was because his mother was controlling it? Of course not.

Was this really so different?

"You too, huh?" Frank asked as his eyes traveled down to her feet, back to her face, then revisited key parts to soak in all the details he might have missed on the first pass.

Ordinarily, she looked like a typical middle-class woman in her early fifties. Her black hair was shot through with silver and her bulky frame was obscured by mom jeans and a loose blouse. She wasn't much to look at, but, then, there was no reason for her to be. His mother had played the game society forces all women to play and had won, landing herself a handsome man with whom she'd had four children she had every right to be proud of, as well as the resources to provide for those children. Her social status no longer depended on the size of her waist, the luster of her hair, or the trendiness of her clothes, but on her children's achievements, the Martha Stewartness of her domicile, and the conspicuousness of their consumption. Not to put too fine a point on things, but it showed.

As a budding young economist, the last thing Frank would ever do was judge someone for behaving in accordance with their incentives. The facts were what they were, though.

The rules had changed for his father as well, of course. Frank wasn't one of those "red pill" people who thought society was biased against men or that marriage had evolved into a scam whereby women traded a few months of sex for a lifetime of financial support. It was just that his dad's way of taking the relationship for granted, after twenty-something years, had less to do with letting himself go physically than making himself emotionally unavailable. The man worked longer hours than were strictly necessary and didn't take the vacation time to which he was entitled—hence their celebrating Harvest without him. When not at work, he preferred watching the game with his buddies or visiting his sister to spending quality time with his wife and kids. That they'd both given up trying to win their spouse over hardly made them bad people, though. It didn't even mean they had a bad marriage, no matter what all the advice columns said about how bad that was for a relationship. Frank's parents were no more prone to arguing in front of their kids than they were showing affection, and that counted for a lot in his book. Economists no longer saw marriage as a mere means of pooling resources to make child-rearing more efficient, but that had always been a big part of it. Nowadays, people expected companionship as well, and that was a wonderful development, but it seemed to Frank that passion and romance remained akin to whipped cream on dessert. By any reasonable standard, his parents had done just fine.

Whatever it did or didn't say about her, though, his mom didn't normally look like that.

The lingerie and heels weren't helping anything, but even in a burlap sack, she'd rupture aortas. It was like her body was designed to produce that exact response, with all other concerns relegated treated as tertiary. It didn't even look like there was room for a diaphragm. Yet, slender as she was in certain places, his mom was quite generously endowed where it counted most. Her breasts were nearly the size of her head, and if her hips were anything to go by, she had an ass to match. The way her body flared out then tapered back in, first in the middle then again at the thighs and calves, made Frank dizzy.

Was there such a thing as a dayglass? Because it would take more than an hour for all the sand her bust or hips could contain to pass through her waist.

While curves that sharp absolutely would have made an impression no matter what she wore, the wind had seen fit to make things even harder on her poor son by dressing her in a sheer red babydoll, black thigh-high stockings, lacy boy shorts that almost seemed to be of a piece with her garter belt, and red patent leather heels. Platform pumps with a rounded toe, he noted. It was all brought together by a gold necklace and ruby studs in her ears.

Frank was in no position to judge the immodesty of her attire, however, wearing nothing but drawstring pants himself, but damn. That just wasn't fair. He wanted to behave himself, he really did, but how could he, when she was dressed like that? Built like that?

For the last two years, Frank had shared an apartment with a grad student from sociology, who had opened his eyes to all the ways society punished slight deviations from gender roles. Frank had become quite skeptical of the notion that it was "simply natural" for men to see women as objects rather than people, to be used then discarded. If it was that simple, there'd be no need for subreddits and youtube videos telling guys how to do the things they were supposedly hardwired to do, and dudes in fedoras would spend a lot less time lamenting how feminism had emasculated modern man had turned him soft. After all, wolves didn't go online to shame one other for being "so beta" or anything like that. Whether evolution or socialization was to blame, though, Frank would have had an easier time turning water into wine than ignoring his mother's obvious—and infinite—sex appeal. As he watched her strut down the hall in those fabulous heels, hips swaying mercilessly, he couldn't help but objectify her some more. Fucked up as it was, Frank analyzed his mother's every feature with the same detachment and curiosity that he applied to his research.

She had dropped a staggering amount of weight—enough that her varicose veins and cellulite should at least have been replaced by stretch marks and droop. As they no doubt would have, if she'd undergone such a transformation for real. Yet no one could say his mother had become skinny. "Voluptuous" was the only word that could describe her now, and Frank didn't see that as a euphemism for "fat" the way everyone else seemed to. As far as he was concerned, it referred to a classical notion of beauty that would never be obsolete.

Though, in truth, even Aphrodite would envy his mother's new body.

Frank had once read that if the Greek goddess of love and beauty had been real, she'd have a 37-26-38 figure. While every one of those numbers was too big by current standards, they'd nonetheless give her a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.68. According to Wikipedia, an infallible source if ever there was one, 0.7 was considered ideal. There was no measuring tape handy, and it would have been awkward to make us of it had there been, but Frank was willing to bet that his mother's had shot down to 0.5. There were women out there who were even narrower in the waist, but they were mostly underfed runway models whose sharpest curves were found in their cheekbones or their elbows. The woman striding towards him had proportions that might not appeal to everyone, but they sure did to Frank.

His eyes finally ventured up past her collarbone again, where they should have been focused the whole time. At first, Frank thought his mother had been given the face of a woman in her mid-twenties; the collagen and subcutaneous fat that tended to melt away with age had returned, making her cheeks round, and her skin was firm and radiant rather than ashy and dull. Noticing the wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, though, he decided that she had more of an ageless look. Which only added to her beauty. Her crow's feet merely served as a reminder that she was a woman of experience, who knew how to please a man and had a pretty good idea of what worked for her as well. Real twenty-somethings were so concerned about coming across as "slutty" that they often kept such information to themselves. Women in their fifties didn't have time for that shit. They'd learned that orgasms weren't worth missing out on in order to preserve some illusion about being chaste and innocent. Or so Frank imagined.

Not that he cared how inhibited his mother was sexually.

Or did he?

Fucking-fuckity-fuck-FUCK. It was one thing to appreciate what the wind had done to his mother's appearance; it was quite another to ponder what she'd be like in bed. That was seriously not okay. He had to stop that train dead in its tracks.

Fortunately, her beauty was more than sufficient to keep him from holding onto any thought for more than a few seconds. As soon as he started to chastise himself for entertaining forbidden thoughts, Frank went back to taking mental pictures of her. He could worry later about whether the fantasies they'd inspire should make him feel guilty. For the time being, it took all his processing power to commit every glorious detail to memory.

Her black hair had grown long enough to wear in a crisp bob, rather than the spiky cut favored by so many older women. It had also lost its silver highlights and acquired the sort of volume and luster touted by shampoo commercials. This new version of his mom could do a lot to boost cosmetic sales as well, Frank decided, if she so desired. Her luscious lips, captivating eyes, and porcelain skin needed no embellishment, but the wind had opted to give her quite a bit anyway. To his surprise, Frank found that rather effective.

Normally, he wasn't a big fan of makeup. He prided himself on dating women who didn't care that much about their appearance. The more time a girl spent making herself look pretty, it seemed to Frank, the less likely it was that she cared about anything beyond the superficial. He'd never admit to holding that view, obnoxious as he knew it would sound to most people, but experience often seemed to bear it out. A little was fine—he wasn't one hundred percent opposed. When it was caked on, though, he started to worry.

Besides, that attitude only carried a whiff of misogyny because the world told women that their physical appearance dictated their worth as human beings. They were bombarded with that message so relentlessly that even the most beautiful among them were afraid to let their faces be seen in public without any makeup, and those who posted makeup-free pictures on social media were hailed as brave. In a more egalitarian world, Frank could dislike people who put too much effort into looking good without sounding sexist. He did hold men to the same standard, in a sense; if a guy looked like he spent all his time in the gym, or would rather die than allow himself to be the second best-dressed man in the room, Frank made assumptions about him that were less than flattering. But he was aware that ninety-something percent of judgments about superficiality targeted women.

Up until about a minute ago, he'd had a healthy disdain for cosmetics. The longer he studied his mother's new face, though, the more Frank wondered why he'd ever thought that the smoky eye popularized by clan Kardashian made women look like raccoons. He'd once assumed that anyone who made a conscious decision to emulate that look possessed no greater intelligence than the scavenging critters. Now, though, he understood.

The heavy eyeshadow and matte lipstick, brick red, made his mother's complexion seem even paler than it was. She bore a certain resemblance to a pristine sheet of paper as it was, but the stark contrast offered by her makeup really drove the point home. Granted, with hair as black as pitch and eyes a beautiful dark brown, the idealized version of his mother would have personified chiaroscuro even without the embellishments. Frank wished he could say, then, that the eyeshadow and lipstick did nothing but detract from her natural—or was it supernatural?—beauty. He couldn't, though. Not without telling a bald-faced lie.

That his mother had a pale complexion was not news to Frank, but that had never meant anything to him one way or the other. He'd no more admired it than he had resented her for passing it on to him, the way some of his siblings did. Now, though, it seemed a core part of her appeal. She had a lot more than that going for her, to be sure, but the color of her skin and the contrast with everything surrounding it was having a powerful effect on him—so powerful that he was finding it hard to breathe. Which probably should have concerned him, seeing as he'd once heard that oxygen was pretty important.

For all that it even mattered, Frank decided that his mother wasn't even wearing makeup in the traditional sense. Was it natural for there to be rings around her eyes a totally different color than the rest of her face? Or for her lips to be so dark and colorful? No. Somehow, though, those things didn't seem artificial. It was like the actual pigmentation of her skin had changed, the same way her physique had. There was no paint, powder, or plastic involved—or whatever else makeup contained. Depleted uranium for all Frank knew.

If his mother wasn't wearing any of that stuff, then there was no reason Frank couldn't appreciate the way it magnified her beauty. It was just a part of who she was.

Or what the wind had turned her into. Was he already having trouble telling the difference between their upgrades and their true selves?

Either way, the embellishments said nothing about his mother's priorities or intellectual capacity. Frank was free to admire her, to desire her, without fear of making a hypocrite of himself. There was still the matter of her being his mother, of course, but that was a minor detail that didn't complicate things at all. Not even the teensiest bit.