“Melchior,” a low voice called out, “it is the night of a thousand wishes.”

“I agree, Balthazar,” another voice replied. “Tis the night of the pure of heart.”

Their voices retreated and the sound of sleigh bells jangled in drowning their departure.

Etienne knelt at the foot of the rough bed and weariness rested in his bones. The rags of his clothes fell around his thin bones and his arm hurt where he’d been bruised by the bullies on the street. His sister EstrellaLuz was out working again – scrubbing the stables for the few euros it would earn. The baby Jesuine slept now, her small infant son. It was finally quiet in the cold of the two small rooms and Etienne shivered – at seventeen he was too young for this, but as a family they must press on. He thought to pray but nothing came, instead he only hoped that some relief would finally come from his long cough. He crawled onto the bed and opened the worn superhero story with its corners missing from the long dogearing. It was the story of Teen Angel – an entity of angelic beauty and might. The comic book told the origination story for Teen Angel about how a 17 year old boy who had been a town weakling became a winged teen bodybuilder who wandered around with nothing but snow white posing briefs showing off his bowling ball shoulders, his peaked biceps, his mighty young quads, his slim boyish waist, his luscious ass globes, and his hyper-erotic, hefty package. Etienne only flipped two pages when the exhaustion finally pulled him into sleep.

The apartment grew quieter. And colder. The comic book fell from Etienne’s chest to splay on the floor. Etienne drifted into deeper sleep but grew colder too – until his teeth chattered behind his blue lips. It was hours that passed, when a star began to shift into the view of the open window. Its light was more golden than most – and it seemed nearer in a way if that was possible. Its journey progressed across the window until in mid-frame a light began to climb down in a shaft faintly at first, but eventually so intensely bright that Etienne’s body vanished in the bathing immersion of it. Just as suddenly as it began to glow, it stopped again and all returned to normal in the room, with Etienne’s lips less blue and the chattering now gone. Midnight came and soon it was 4 or 5 and Etienne began to come to.

“I feel strange,” he thought to himself having forgotten the street ruffians and what they had done to him, forgetting that yesterday was one of those he’d gone without food, forgetting that he had coughed such a spell yesterday that blood had come from his lungs. “Why am I awake so soon?”

He heard the sound of horses in the alley way – and he looked. Not horses, but camels from some pageant, he realized.

He returned from the window and against the far wall’s mirror he caught a glance of himself. His shirt was torn and his underwear showed above his pants where they’d tugged and battered it. The bruise on his upper arm made itself plain with a purple blotch he hadn’t expected to be so deep. The sadness in him, and the pain and the exhaustion welled up and in a moment of frustration he bemoaned, “I wish I had the physique and powers so good that no world could push me around again.”

And with that, a glow of light more powerful than a thousand suns suddenly expeled from his chest and in a moment of transformation Etienne began to grow. In front of his very eyes, he could see muscles starting to form and bulge. The sexual feeling was incredible. Ettiene’s loose tattered t-shirt began to pull taut across his shoulders and a chest that shouldn’t be there. To have a piece of clothing actually grip his skin was alien to Ettiene like sleeping in a palace would be or riding in a gilt-finished jet to a world far away. His shoulders pulled further and the t-shirt was stretching to its extreme. When his swelling chest caused the garment to explode into ragged strands, Etienne stood and his pools of brown eyes opened with an innocence of a being whose heart is of gold. He looked at the pectoral muscles that shielded his chest and it was the most foreign but glorifying sight he had ever seen. A stirring in his arms started, and Etienne saw that the sticks that had been his arms were beginning to grow. His biceps began to look like softballs climbing from elbow joints that looked healthy and vibrant and alive. There were incredible veins criss-crossing across the hard, strong muscle. “Oh, Etienne,” he murmured to himself, “it is like you have always dreamed.” The t-shirt sleeve, dingy in its gray color, stretched over the new bicep muscle that was more like a mountain than a mound, until the swelling size became so excessive that the sleeve, all that was left of the once loose t-shirt, bunched up to pinch tightly between his new bulging bicep and the bulging deltoid that exploded from below his trap. The cutting strip of cotton was like the tightest armband ever seen on a studly, teen muscle freak. As the soiled cotton began to transmute into a tailored band of molten white gold, he realized that it was the royal ornament of Teen Angel himself that now dressed him.

There was a lightness in his heart and a feeling of power and energy that came from embracing of light. Etienne felt his body becoming alive like the power and the wisdom of the stars.

Etienne stood in shirtless glory, sexually charged with energy. The boy looking back at him was some kind of myth. Where once was a thin pencil neck there was now a muscular column holding the head of a devastatingly handsome teen. His neck muscle curved down to boulder like shoulders atop an inflated chest. Etienne’s new guns were five times the size of the puny sticks he’d used to call arms. He couldn’t get enough of his new massiveness, first turning one way, then the next. He examined every inch of his new found torso’d musculature. Each new pose showed what a titanic teen he had become. He brought one wrist to his waist and the other to his forehead and caught his single biceps pose out of the corner of his eye. How magnificent he had become.

He turned to the mirror and brought both hands behind his back and rested the backs of them on his ass and realized how it too felt different. He looked down and saw that his soft servant pants are completely stretched and misshapen, like a pair of dancer tights on a body-building monster champ. With deliberation, Etienne grabbed hold of the waistband and with one tug of his powerful arms caused the fabric to rip from his body like stripper pants…. Except it was the steel-like hardness and tree trunk dimensions that demolished the seams and caused the garment to give way to the knotted monstrousness beneath.

Then standing in only his underwear, Etienne drank in the sight of his own magnificence. Each leg was the diameter of his former chest – each quad muscle stood out distinctly – the separation so deep that he could see one muscle rooting over another.

The extreme size of each mighty leg was stretching Etienne’s white briefs so that they began to look like the briefest of bikinis, and Etienne drank in the beauty, appreciating the Herculean torso and the Olympian legs. “Oh, Dio,” he prayed with his breath.

A glow of gold began to build behind his head, and Etienne knew he should have expected it. This is the golden halo of Teen Angel – a light pure and protective and warm. And a light that in issue after issue had framed a face whose beauty the world should not truly have expected to know. “Oh, thank you,” Etienne bayed and it was with a sense of everything and all things.

He turned to his back and the muscles were rippling and monstrous and v’ed. “What beautiful muscles you have, Etienne,” He said to himself and then watched as the snowy white wings of his hero and god sprouted from his shoulder blades and extended into their 8 foot grandeur. His heart stuttered at the beauty and for the first time in his life he understood what it was to feel awe.

He turned back once more to face the divinity of himself in the mirror. His tattered and soiled briefs had become a dazzling white pose-worthy bikini about his miraculous hips and his arm-banded might bulged magnificently against the blinding purity of his angel-feathered wings. “Etienne, your heart is pure,” he said.

He reached down into his briefs and tugged the seat off his sides exposing his perfected flanks the way Teen Angel’s were exposed in issue after issue, view after view. Etienne shifted his weight from foot to foot, his muscular ass rose and fell and his two dramatically inflated globes demanded all that the poor briefs could give. With a final move, Etienne reached into the purest smoothness of crotches and took what had been given to him, took what was quite evidently a monstrous cock and balls. He took them and put the cock folded over the balls in the pouch to create the magnificent sweeping package that weighed down Teen Angel’s briefs.

It was a dream more impossible than words could have explained. He looked and he had been deified. He was more magnificent and glorious than anyone in the world should ever have hoped to be. His teen bodybuilt might was larger than the largest Olympian but with the suppleness and glory of youth and all the promises youth has to give. He smiled and it was lightness and felt easy and had the luminescence of his new existence amplified a thousand times more.

He flexed his radiant physique in the mirror and his light flooded over the babe. He scooped his young charge in his arms, and flew out the window taking to the air with the pledge, “Because I have been made far more than man, I will now do good for all mankind.” •