A Centaur's Troubles Ch. 01

Christoph was never a particularly big fan of horses. He didn't hate them per say, but the fact that if one stepped wrong he'd lose a foot was enough to put him off. It wasn't usually his job to do anything with the horse on the farm anyway, but the twins had been sent on an errand in town so he was the one who had to hitch the plowshare to Jo, Farmer Keldor's aging draft horse, and till the newest field the farmer had purchased from his neighbor.

He was already sweating through his shirt from spending the morning finding all the big rocks and hauling them off to the border, making a little wall no more than a foot high to mark off the new land while he was at it, and the sun was beating down with a particular harshness as it crawled towards its zenith, so he was mostly just following the horse as it pulled the plowshare through the rich soil, leaning a little too hard on the handles when he heard the squeal of metal on stone.

"Ah hell," he muttered as he stopped, crouching down to look for the rock he must have missed, "Kaldor's gonna have my ass if I wrecked his plow..." But it seemed there was no rock, at least not where he could see it.

It must be below the topsoil, he thought, carefully lifting the heavy plowshare and urging the horse to move further forward and out of the way, setting the whole thing down before going back to the spot.

Sure enough, a stone lay just beneath the surface, where a dozy plowman could scratch it. Happily, it would have only impeded crops, so Christopher counted himself lucky for finding it and immediately set to work digging it out of the ground.

It took some doing, as it turned out to be almost two feet across, but the round stone was flat and relatively light, so he managed to pry it out relatively easily, only to discover that there was a hollow beneath it lined with smaller stones. Inside the hollow was a little stone statue.

"What's this?" he muttered to himself as he lifted it from the hollow, surprised at how light it was. Almost two feet long and apparently made of grey granite, it barely felt heavier than a small river rock, but its size to weight ratio was hardly the most interesting thing about the figure. While vague and simplistic, part of it was recognizable as a man, or at least the upper body of a man. Where the hips would normally begin, the statue instead stretched out backwards in an oblong shape, with four spindly looking legs coming down from it. The strangest part though was between the legs, a long tubular bulge of a shape that reached from the back almost to the front.

It took maybe a moment's thought for him to realize this was some kind of fertility idol in the shape of a centaur.

"What's this thing doing under a field?" he asked Jo, who snorted at him.

"Ah, what do you know?" he said, holding the statue to his ear and giving it a few taps, trying to see if it was hollow.

Muttering to himself some more, he tucked the little statue beneath one of the straps on the horse's harness and got back to work removing every little stone from the hollow and filling it with dirt.

Hours later, the tilling done at last, he was leading Jo back to the barn to drop the harness and rub him down for the night, having quite forgotten the weird little statue he'd found in the field. At least, until it slipped out from where he's stashed it and smashed on the ground.

"Aw nuts," he said, crouching down even as Jo shied away from the noise. Picking up the pieces, Christoph saw that it had been hollow, the horse-body completely empty. Oddly enough, he couldn't remember any seams in the stone, and it hadn't been clay... "Maybe I can fix it?"

He didn't have much hope however, picking up the many pieces. He was never terribly good at puzzles. Instead he simply got all the pieces he could find and tossed them into the rubbish cart at the back of the stable, to be taken and tossed in the morning, and went back to getting Jo all settled for the night.

He managed to get the horse penned into his stall before the dizzy spell hit him, making him lean against the post that edged the wall that divided Jo's stall with the empty one next to it.

"Whoa..." he mumbled, rubbing his eyes as he stood up again, only to be hit with another wave of vertigo, far worse than the last, that actually knocked him off balance and sent him tumbling into the empty stall, hanging off the door and pulling it shut before falling, the back of his head cracking against an upturned bucket and the world went dark.

*~*~*

Waking up, Christoph found himself in a cramped room, with a headache the size of a mountain and a backache that would knock a horse down.

"Oh good, you're up!" a cheery voice answered his low groan, revealing itself to be one of Keldor's brood. Even though one was a boy and the other a girl, they still looked identical from the neck up, with long blond hair, big blue eyes, and lips that could get any man's blood running hot. They even had the same teasing voices. Even after living with them for most of a year, Christoph couldn't figure out which he was looking at now.

"What time is it?"

"An hour after a sunset," the blonde said. "Dad saw you bring Jo in hours ago but you never came in for dinner so when me and Kella-" Ah, so it was Keldan, the brother. "-came back he had us check on you. Good thing too, you probably shouldn't be alone right now."

"Why's that?"

"Try standing up."

"Why do I need..." Even as he questioned, Christoph moved to rise, except it wasn't a movement he was used to. There was far too much mass, and too many limbs that he didn't remember having.

Looking down at himself, he screamed to find a horse where his legs should be, or at least most of a horse. Where the withers would normally transfer to a horse's neck, he found his waist instead. He tried to get up again, to get away from the nightmarish vision, only to see long, dainty legs and hard hooves flailing for purchase, kicking out at the wooden walls of the stall he suddenly filled when normally he would barely be able to touch both sides with his arms outstretched.

And then a bucket of water was dumped over his head.

"Kella said you'd probably do that, so I had the water bucket in hand," Keldan said with a grin, watching as Christoph huffed and puffed, human chest rising and falling with lungfuls of air, equine barrel doing much the same, but with far more air.

"This is so weird," Christoph said softly, staring at his altered body, fingers running along the dark brown of his new coat. The ridiculous thought of 'At least it matches my hair' ran through his mind as he wondered at how he could feel his fingers perfectly normally. The shredded remains of his pants laying across his back and hanging down his front were almost entirely unnoticed. "So Fucking weird."

"You should try standing," Keldan's voice said, from the side of the stall rather than the door where Keldan was standing, and he realized that Kella had joined them. "Slowly, this time."

"Right..." It took him some time, and bracing himself on the stall with his hands, but eventually he managed to get his gangly limbs beneath him and pushed himself upright, dizzied yet again, this time by the extra three feet in height he'd gotten. "Ohhh fuck im huge..."

"At least seventeen hands," Keldan said, looking from hoof to equine shoulder. "Maybe even eighteen!"

"Is that big for a horse?"

"Jo's only sixteen hands," Kella supplied as her brother opened the door of the stall Christoph was in. "And he's a big ol' draft horse. You're a right monster of a horse now, Christoph!"

"Not sure I like that term," he said, shifting his hooves, still weirded out by the fact that he had four feet to worry about.

"What, monster?"

"Horse," he said, twisting around to try and follow her brother as he gave him an inspection. "I'm clearly a centaur here- And Kalden, please be careful, I don't wanna step on you okay?"

The twins were both barely topping five feet, and with Christoph's new size, it was easy for Kalden to be lost to sight behind his flanks.

Ugh, his flanks.

"I know how to move around a horse, Christoph, relax," he said, gently stroking along his side. "Besides, you trust me, right?"

"I guess," he said, even as caught the glint of mischief in Kella's pretty blue eyes.

Before he could ask about it, he felt a dainty hand grab him by the balls, which was a riot of unfamiliar sensations all on its own. Now that someone was drawing his attention to them, his balls felt huge, especially compared to the whole human hand fondling one.

"Whoa what the fuck!?" he managed to get out, barely restraining an instinctive (and confusing) urge to kick the everloving hell out of Keldan, and failing to keep his tail from whipping the handsy boy in the face, just as the twins' father came into the barn.

"Kids, how's he- Oh, yer up.... Way up..." he said, noticing his hired-hand's new height. "The hell happened to ya, boy?"

A light smack on his broad flank startled Christoph out of the stall and into full view of his employer.

"How uh... How ya feelin' there, Christoph?"

"Uh... Not bad, sir?" When he really thought about it, Christoph did feel... Well, fine. Just also... Horsey.

"I see." Keldor was not a particularly clever man, but he was a practical one, and gave himself a moment to think about his hired hand turning into a centaur, weighing the possible reactions he could have to the situation, the pros and the cons, and eventually decided that it wouldn't be very productive to freak out about it. "Well then, I suppose I'll give you some lighter chores tomorrow until you get a feel fer, well, yerself there. C'mon kids, go grab his dinner and bring it out here."

"Aw, I have to eat in the barn now?"

"Sleep here too. Yer about nine feet tall, lad. Ya ain't fittin' in my house no more."

"Awww..."