Scott turned the ornate cylinder over in his hands, inspecting the delicate sleeve of stained glass with its interlacing strands of silver. The foot-long tube was capped on each end by swirling cones of the same polished metal, and Scott could see what looked like a scroll waiting for him inside.
He set it down, hesitating. He'd been waiting for it to arrive, but he hadn't expected to find it sitting in the middle of his spacious penthouse apartment when he came home from the office. There were several layers of security between entering the building and reaching the top floor, and even if someone had made it past all of that his door had been locked and there were no signs of forced entry. Considering that he was more than twenty stories up, that also ruled out someone coming in through a window. Yet there it was, sitting on his dining room table, the silver webbing sparkling in the fading daylight streaming in through his wall of windows that overlooked the city.
Scott was impressed, an emotion he hadn't genuinely felt in years. In his forty four years the handsome playboy felt like he'd seen and done it all before. He'd traveled the world, climbed mountains, hiked through uncharted jungles, dived to the bottom of the ocean, gotten high on substances most people had never heard of, and fucked his way across every continent, including a few lucky women at an Antarctic research outpost. He was built like someone half his age, with a chiseled, leanly muscled body and a distinguished, brooding face that only seemed to grow more handsome as the years passed. With his money and looks there wasn't a door closed to him anywhere. A single phone call was all it took and the middle-aged hunk would have whatever his heart desired. It was the kind of life people dreamed of having.
But Scott was bored. The thrill of it all was gone and he'd started to seek out less-than-legitimate means of adventure. For someone with the kind of money he had access to, nothing was off the table. If he'd wanted to hunt people for sport while high on weapons-grade coke and fucking his own personal harem, he could have made it happen with little effort. But fortunately for the rest of the world, Scott's interests didn't lie in making people suffer. He didn't get off on corporate takedowns and crushing people under his heel; he got off on sensory experiences. The handsome stud loved nothing more than putting his impressive body through something new. He'd been tattooed and pierced and had both removed. He'd been bound and fucked in every conceivable position. He'd even paid an exorbitant amount of money to spend a month as a sub to an especially aggressive dominatrix. His head and body had been shaved of it's raven hair, and he'd spent the following thirty days naked, with his thick hose in a cage, getting whipped and punished on a regular basis. The humiliation had been thrilling at first, but by the end of the month even that stopped scratching his itch. His hair had regrown, the bruises faded, and it was like it never happened, leaving the unsatisfied man back where he'd started.
Then Scott remembered the Garden. He was flipping through an old notebook he'd kept on his travels through the Sahara years earlier when he'd found an entry that mentioned the existence of an unnaturally lush plot deep in the heart of the desert. None of his guides had wanted to say much about it, nor did they know where it was or anyone who'd been there in person, so Scott had written it off as nothing more than local superstition.
Now though, with nothing else to occupy his time, he'd dug in. Scott pored over every piece of information he could find, scouring the internet and making trips to plumb the moldy depths of libraries all over the world for whatever scraps of information they held. It was a painstaking process that had taken Scott well over a year of dedicated effort, but he'd finally managed to piece together a view of the bigger picture.
It was staggering. There wasn't just one Garden lurking in the Sahara; they were everywhere, with mentions in both remote, uninhabited corners and bustling pockets of civilization. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to their placements, but whatever the location, they were spoken of as places of worship, tended by a dedicated cult of gardeners that Scott could frustratingly find absolutely nothing about. Where they came from and exactly what they worshipped no one seemed to know, but one thing was clear: they'd been around for a long, long time. Scott found references going back as far as there was recorded history, the oldest being a series of cave paintings in the Australian outback.
It was exactly what he'd been searching for. From the very start Scott had felt a bit of the old thrill returning, and with each subsequent piece of information that feeling only grew. He wasn't just on a path that was new to him, from what Scott could tell he was on the verge of something that no one else had ever managed. He just had to find them.
The wealthy adonis had spared no expense in making his interests known. He'd plastered the internet with posts seeking information and had sent messages to the farthest corners of the globe, all in the hopes of catching someone's attention. The false leads had poured in as he'd expected, but now, months later, it seemed he finally had a genuine response.
Scott resisted the urge to open the scroll case and chose instead to savor the heart-racing excitement at the thought of all the possibilities. He left it on the table and stripped out of his shirt on the way to his bedroom, loving the way his hands trembled as he popped each of the small buttons to expose the salt and pepper dusting on his solid pecs. He was positively giddy as he dropped his slacks and shucked his briefs, his long, thick cock twitching as it shared in his excited state. First he would shower, then he'd pour himself a drink, then he'd open the case. It was all about control and prolonging the experience.
Which isn't to say he was above enjoying himself in the process. As he stood in his room-sized shower and ran his hands through his thick, dark hair, the water cascading down his olive-tinted muscle, Scott felt more aroused than he had in months. Having a tangible result from his tireless searching, being on the cusp of something truly unique, was a turn on like no other. He let his hands drift across his sturdy chest and over his chiseled abs before cupping his low, heavy balls and stroking the wide, rigid pole, thinking about the ornate cylinder and its possible contents until he gave a low grunt and erupted with a force he barely remembered.
He basked in the sensation until he'd dripped dry and then sauntered back out into the expansive estate of an apartment, his spent hose swinging between his powerful legs and the muscled globes of his ass looming over the city below as he stood in front of the windows and poured himself a scotch. Scott nursed the glass, the peaty liquid warming his chest and steadying his nerves until he'd drained the tumbler and turned back to face the table.
"Here we go," he purred, his voice a smooth rumble. He gently took up the case and tested each end, tentatively unscrewing one of the silver caps when he felt it give. A pungent floral aroma of ylang-ylang, jasmine and rose wafted out in a vaporous cloud when he removed the cap, drifting down and settling against the table top like a layer of fog. Scott fished out the rolled up document inside, a thick, coarse parchment that felt more like a type of wood than a piece of paper, and whose spicy, peppery scent joined in with the floral melange still spreading throughout the apartment.
At first glance Scott didn't recognized the bizarre symbols as writing, but as he stared the shapes began to shift and merge across the page until they formed the familiar letters of the english alphabet. Dizzy from the heady aroma, the stunned man gave a short laugh when he realized he was holding a list of directions to a location only a few blocks away. After all of his searching, one of the supposed Edens had been in his own city, right under his nose.
He wasted no time. Despite the late hour, Scott hurriedly dressed and bolted from his apartment, practically sprinting down the busy sidewalks. The surrounding crowd thinned with each direction he followed, first turning down one alley, then another, and another until he was alone in the labyrinth of towering buildings and so turned around he didn't know which direction he was facing. The last step proved the most difficult as Scott had to wedge himself in the narrow gap between two old tenements, the rough brick tearing several large holes in his tight t-shirt as he scraped his muscled frame through and into the small courtyard in the center. The building looked abandoned as there were no lights in any of the dirty windows that he could see, but Scott couldn't shake the feeling of being watched as he struggled the rusted trap door open.
