Metamorphoses

XIX

Jules and Oskar didn’t speak as they climbed the stairs. The house was quiet. His father had gone out to a meeting, and the heavy hush of the Kral residence had settled over its rooms like dust on a table top. Jules led Oskar up past the framed photos, past the door to the spare room, and into his bedroom, where the curtains were half drawn against the late afternoon sun. He didn’t turn on the light. He didn’t need to. Oskar followed without question. Jules closed the door behind them. Then, without speaking, he began to undress.

It wasn’t calculated. There was no seduction in it, no practiced angle of shoulder or hip. He peeled off his hoodie, his shirt, the socks he hadn’t realised were damp. The belt clattered faintly as it slid free of the loops. When he stood bare on the rug, he turned, not sure what to expect.

Oskar was already undressed. He had stepped out of his tunic with the same quiet ease he brought to everything. He stood in the amber half-light, composed, radiant, unbothered. The heavy organ between his thighs hung in its usual weighty presence—unashamed, half-lifted by blood, dark, but not offered. Simply there.

They faced each other in silence. Jules’s chest rose and fell. He lowered his eyes. He stepped forward. And then—his knees gave. He didn’t force them. They simply folded. And he knelt.

The carpet scratched his knees. The room felt hotter now, or maybe the heat was in him. He felt cool sweat bead in his armpits. His hands hovered awkwardly, not knowing where to put them, but knowing he had an act to make that needed them.

Oskar moved one step closer.

Jules looked up. ‘Please,’ he whispered. Oskar gave the smallest of nods. Jules bent his head. The Thing—because that was still the only name he could give it—hung heavy and living in front of him, the foreskin just parting now with slow arousal as its erection pushed it up more to the horizontal. It smelled faintly—not of sweat or musk, but of something feral, something deep. Like clover crushed under hoof. Like summer earth.

Jules leaned in, and—trembling—delicately took its hot weight in his hands, and kissed it on its wide flare. He didn’t linger. He didn’t dare. The kiss was light, reverent, precise. A gesture, not a claim. He bowed his head. Oskar’s hand came down gently and touched his hair. ‘Thank you, my little one.’ he said. No other words were spoken.

And Jules remained kneeling. Not humiliated. Not even aroused by the powerful maleness of Oskar Bree. Just still, like an empty and abandoned battlefield..

Jules knelt for what felt like hours, his lips still tingling faintly from the kiss of surrender he had made, his eyes lowered. Then came a shift in the air—subtle, but real. The weight of Oskar’s presence folded down over him not as domination, but as shelter. The magical boy moved to enfold him tighter. Strong arms circled his bare midriff and shoulders. Oskar pulled him close, slow and carefully, cradling Jules to his chest as if he were a much smaller boy in need of comfort. Jules didn’t resist. His body melted into the embrace with the ease of someone who had finally stopped fighting.

He was pressed against warm skin, a brown nipple near enough to invite him to lick and suckle on it, had he dared. Oskar’s scent, strong but not sharp, enveloped him: golden hay, warm leather, something faintly animal and clean. Jules felt the rise and fall of his chest and realised—Oskar’s heartbeat was impossibly slow. Deep. Like a drum heard through earth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jules murmured, though he wasn’t sure what for.

‘You did nothing wrong,’ Oskar said gently. His hand moved slowly over Jules’s back down to his small cheeks and cupped them, not in sexual arousal, but with something more basic than that. Simply care. ‘You answered a call.’ They stayed like that for a long while. No shame. No tension. Just two boys, naked and clasped, silent, at peace in a pool of fading light.

Eventually, Oskar spoke again. ‘You’re mine now, you know. The ritual is complete’ Jules nodded into his chest. ‘I know.’

Oskar smiled and added, ‘I won’t hurt you. I never will.’

‘I know,’ Jules said again, barely audible.

Oskar’s arms tightened. ‘You’re not just some plaything or tool. You’re part of what’s coming. My own realm, the Centaurid kingdom on Earth. You’re the first human who’s submitted in full awareness. That matters. It brings you honour, Jules Kral.’

Jules looked up, eyes wide. ‘What are you, lord?’

Oskar gave a small, tired smile. ‘You’ll know soon enough. But what matters is this: you’re safe now. No more games. No more hunger you can’t name. All you need is to be found in me, your prince.’

Jules swallowed hard. His throat eased with sudden relief. ‘I don’t want to be clever anymore,’ he whispered. ‘I just want to be kept safe.’

‘You will be,’ said Oskar. ‘Kept. Honoured. Used well. Loved.’ The last word raised Jules’s spirits high, like the sight of a moon breaking through clouds on a stormy night. He shuddered, then stilled. They stayed in their embrace as the light slipped slowly away. Jules felt, for the first time in his young, damaged adolescence, something like peace.

***

‘Beer, your majesty?’ Willem offered Afran one of the green bottles he’d been cooling in a string bag hung from a nail on their dock out over Lake Iznik, milky blue in the summer evening haze.

‘Thank you, Will. Very considerate. You take the office of Consort of Rum as seriously as I knew you would. I thought the Assembly took the announcement of our intended marriage pretty well, considering.’

‘You prepped them carefully, Franzi. The king’s flatmate in university in Strelzen, who after graduation becomes a supposed Rothenian private secretary somehow always at his side; enough photos released that questions are asked online and eventually in print, and now to your face in the Assembly. Not a squeak out of the Muslim Brotherhood, other than a surly statement deploring any state funding for the Consort of Rum.’

Afran giggled. ‘That’s hopefully as homophobic as it will get. They clearly know the public is not with them on the issue of the king’s boyfriend. And we’re not going to put them to the trial of a state wedding like James and Jason have done in Canada.’

‘And you’re not going to make me a duke or anything. Just issued a court regulation that Willem Martinovic, son of Her Excellency General Martinovica, Legate of the Oecumene in Rum, is to be known for official purposes as His Highness the Consort of Rum. I liked that touch. It made our relationship look like a political alliance, a pragmatic touch which will appeal to a number of my fellow citizens.’

Will grinned. ‘My grandad was in touch yesterday. He said the boy twin has literally conquered SIS. His homeroom teacher said the kid is all the rage in the upper school, and his … er … cultural eccentricities have been adopted rather than ridiculed.’

‘And the young princess imperial?’

‘All quiet. Apparently Fleetfoot/Fenice has gone totally native with the human girls. Grandma Martinovica says she’s into clothes, media stars and even human boys.’

‘And that is unexpected, why?’

‘Now you mention it, I dunno. I suppose the authorities think her equine side would have made her compete with the other mares, but apparently she doesn’t see the human girls as rival aggressive brood mares.’ Will laughed. ‘To be honest my experience with the girls in Sudmesten Central upper school was that the girls there were exactly that. But what does the gay Consort of Rum know?’

The two boys subsided for a while, Will resting his head on Afran’s warm taut belly and staring up into the blue evening sky. He was drifting off into a doze when a movement under his head alerted him to something. He sat up and followed Afran’s pointing finger out to the lake. A white streak of foam ws heading quickly towards them from out in the lake.

‘Fuck. Why couldn’t he have come in a limousine with outriders like any normal king?’

The powerful swimming form surged under the dock and his wet head popped up next to the boys. He had the head of a Triton on a hugely muscular naked body and bobbed in the lake water. He was grinning like the naughiest of boys. But he was the Centaurid King, Whiteblaze, known temporarily as Brigadier General of Cavalry, the Count Felip Bree von Tarlenheim. He even had a Wikipedia site to prove it, provided by Will.

Afran inclined his head. ‘Your majesty?’.

The Triton-head tilted rakishly as Whiteblaze swept his wet hair back with both hands, spraying the boys with lake water.

‘Oh dammit, Afran. You know I hate it when you call me that. But needs must.’

Whiteblaze grinned wider and rested his muscled arms on the dock beside them. His powerful equine hindquarters swirled unseen beneath the surface. ‘I came to see how my favourite humans are settling in. And to stretch my legs. And also to check none of you are thinking of claiming this lake for Elphbergia or something ridiculous like that.’

‘We wouldn’t dare,’ Will said, wiping droplets off his face. ‘But you could’ve worn clothes, y’know.’

‘Could have,’ Whiteblaze agreed cheerfully. ‘Didn’t.’

Afran gave a fond sigh. ‘Alright then. Since you’re here, sire, tell us—why Rum? You could’ve claimed half the planet if you wanted. Why dig your hooves into this particular patch of soil?’

Whiteblaze’s smile softened, grew distant. He turned and floated on his back, broad chest rising in the water like a marble altar. He looked skyward for a few beats before replying.

‘I’m no scholar like you Afran. But I don’t have to be, because Rum remembers,’ he said. ‘The stones under these mountains still echo with the sound of hooves. There were herds here before the Deluge. Wild, free, talking beasts who knew the wind by name. The forests remember our shapes. The rivers and lakes still call us back. This place was always Centaurid in its spiritual archeology, and now we’re only claiming what was waiting for us.’

Whiteblaze rolled back upright, regarding the boys now with a steady, regal calm beneath the playful glint. ‘And though the land is hard, yet the grass is sweet. That’s the other reason. The mountains don’t give you anything without a fight. The soil’s poor in places, the winters bite, and the predators don’t fear our songs yet. But that’s what my people need. Not soft fields and easy wheat, but a place to earn our lives and prove ourselves.’ He reached up, dripping, and brushed Will’s shin with a damp finger.

‘We’ve made camp by Lake Beyşehir. Stone longhouses rising on the shore. The mares in equine shape are carrying young, strong foals from the Mating. Our numbers increase, and we have ways to add to our numbers beyond childbirth, the same way as Queen Sylvie was recruited. That is a power my son Prince Oakheart Sylviescolt has, gifted him from the One, and he is already using it. We’re not just hiding—we’re building. A society. A future.’

He gave a very equine snort. ‘And the Oecumene? We’re not just a wild herd on the edge. Of course, we’ll guard the mountain passes, teach what we know of speed and earthlore, offer our strength when others offer their minds. We’ll help hold the middle together when the old powers finally fall away. For we come as warriors to help build the Elphberg imperium. And we do it as our gift to the One, who has called us back into being.’

Whiteblaze gave a contented sigh and floated a little closer. ‘You see, boys,’ he said, voice quieter now, ‘I didn’t come here to be a king. I came here to make sure that in a thousand years, there will still be hooves thundering down these slopes, and our songs rising to the moon.’ Then he grinned suddenly again. ‘Also, the trout here are excellent, and skinny-dipping is practically a constitutional requirement.’ He splashed both of them in one muscular flick of his hidden tail. ‘Now who’s for a swim?’

***

The morning flooded golden across the city of Strelzen. Familes were waking, and all across the city children and adolescents were preparing to make the trek to school. The Kral children and Oskar made the trek down into the Neuvemesten on foot, as the parking around the International School was notorious. Herr and Frau Kral had resigned the supervision of the school trek to Oskar, who had established an ascendancy over the Kral children, which miraculously included Jules, who was now the boy’s perpetual shadow,

Oskar was already outside — radiant, and as bare as the morning itself. Only a book bag slung over one shoulder marked him as a student at all. His stride was easy, primal. There was no shame in him. Just a primitive clarity.

Jules hesitated for only a heartbeat. Then he shrugged. ‘Fuck it,’ he murmured, and left his white shift behind, walking out into the streets as naked as Oskar. And just as with Oskar, no one queried his nudity, or even apparently noticed it.

The corridors of the SIS whispered with the squeak and slap of sandals and bare feet. In the gathering hall, most of his cohort had made the same choice — tunics, kilts, or nothing at all. Not as rebellion, but as something older, ritual, remembered. Their bodies bore marks of change: gleaming skin, subtle flares of form. One boy stood taller than yesterday, hips narrower, chest broader — not unnatural, just in the process of becoming. Oskar’s Gift was shaping those who had gone to their knees before his Thing, each in their own image, or perhaps in the image of some deeper pattern rising through their personalities. Most noticeable, and most remarked upon among the boys thenselves, was the fact that their genitalia mimicked Oskar’s as they changed, and for many, including Jules, their flared penises now swung heavily between their knees.

The Year 11 girls too were radiant — many nude, some adorned in white linen that caught the light like sculpture. None looked away from the boys. None pretended other than that the Gift had changed them, given full heavy breasts and wide hips, almost adult. They were like statues in a temple to Aphrodite that had just begun to breathe.

Then came the sound — the clop of a hoof, but not of any animal: it was instead a rhythm from an older world, a place of myth and anthropomorphic gods. Fenice Bree, now once again the Imperial Crown Princess Fleetfoot, stood at the front — bronze-toned, eyes lit from within, mane braided with vine and copper wire. Her voice was calm but commanding:

‘Our People! This weekend,’ she said, ‘we meet out in the Wenzlerwald, at the Sacred Dell of the Starel Elf. Good horse country. Come naked or not at all. We gather not to perform but to become.’

There was a silence — not stunned, but solemn. As if everyone recognized that something had already begun shifting under their skin. The old rules were thinning like morning mist. And beyond them, something mythic waited. Not a rebellion. A metamorphosis.

***

That Saturday, the Wenzlerwald assumed an air that it had not exhibited since the days when naked men threw stone or bronze axes into dark pools as offerings to forgotten gods, or their neglected Dead. It was not in the wind — but through equine breath, hoofbeat, and the chant of speaking horses. The forest had become a cathedral: moss-carpeted, branch-vaulted, ancient and alive.

Students of Year 11 came naked, in nothing but brown skin. Each of them bore signs of metamorphosis already: glints in the eye, ridges along spine, pulses of strength humming beneath their skin like chords of an instrument. There was only one exception, the youngest of the year, a slim hairless boy who had not yet found the spirit to make homage to the equine kingdom. But that afternoon he cast aside his linen robe and knelt naked at Oakheart’s feet, Tears running down his cheeks, he strained forward and closed his lips around the prince’s dark member, and accepted Oakheart as his lord, while his human body confirmed his decision. For he looked down in awe at what was happening between his legs.

Fleetfoot stood in the clearing's center, hooves planted firm in the loam. She had changed. She occupied her powerful form of a mare: chestnut like her parents and her empress, swift and grounded. Her mane was braided with gold. ‘You came,’ she said, voice echoing like thunder over still water, as loud as her great grandmother’s. ‘Good.’

She raised one hand, and the chant began to rise from the assembled human throats — low, rhythmic, far older than language. The students joined one by one. The air thickened with earthlore and memory. It wasn’t magic. It was deeper — remembering. As if this was not something new, but something far older they had always been meant to become. A mist poured down the slopes, thick and silver with moonlight. Then the transformations began in earnest.

Some cried out — not in pain, but release. Limbs lengthened, balance shifted. Hooves struck loam for the first time. Tails flicked with instinct. Hands reached for one another — not for reassurance, but recognition. They were no longer children of the old world. And they no longer had hands with which to grasp.

The clearing was filled with centaurids — in form they were pure equines sleek, luminous, each uniquely formed: chestnuts, silvers, obsidians, dappled ash. But they stood taller than common beasts now, breathing as one herd. Their eyes burned with intelligence. And wings at length burst from all their shoulders. Their hearts thrummed with shared purpose.

Fleetfoot looked over them with pride ‘You’ve crossed, my people, ‘ she said. ‘There’s no going back now.’

But no one stepped backward. No one wept. They were a strong people, and they were beautiful, and they belonged to this world that needed them.

It would be remembered that here in the glens and slopes of the Wenzlerwald in the reign of King Maxim II of Rothenia, a new order was born — not made, not summoned — remembered into being. They were human adolescents, once. But now, they were an order of mythic equine warriors formed to change their world and climb into legend.

***

At sunrise, the new centaurids, led by their warrior prince, Oakheart, trotted off the moors in a herd. Equine Jules marvelled, as he cantered across the heathland and under trees, at the vitality of his new frame, but there were many other new things to accommodate. The most surprising was the all-embracing scent of the herd, which made him part of something in a way the loner boy never had been before. But now he was a potent stallion amongst other stallions, males he found he loved deeply, but in no sexual way.

Stefan Mannstejne, when he submitted to Oakheart, had regained his distinction of ‘Biggest Dong in Year 11’ in his new shape. His sinuous black rope of a massive penis was longer even than Oakheart’s. ‘Jules Boy,’ Stefan said in friendly fashion as they trotted side by side, ‘I really gotta give this cock an outing. When we gonna be let to breed the mares? Any idea?’

Jules was overwhelmed at the feeling of fellowship that Stefan’s recognition of him as a fellow stallion and colleague inspired. He recognised the same mating impulse in himself, and he pictured himself mounting the back of Year 11 girls he had previously given no thought to, and plunging his own huge dong deep inside them. But he was also still Jules Kral, and his measured intellect engaged with the question despite distractions. ‘Dunno Steff,’ he eventually said. ‘You mount these mares and they get pregnant, which may not be the Empress’s plan as yet. Osku said there is a Nursery place where mating is monitored and pregnancy comes to term. But shit! I so wanna get my thing up some mare.’

Stefan bared his teeth. ’Change of tune there, my mate. People say you swung to guys’ asses not girls’ twats.’

Jules was just as puzzled by that discovery. He responded carefully. ‘When I’m a stallion, I want to do stallion things. Maybe when we change back to human I’ll be gay again.’

Stefan whinnied with amusement. ‘Hah! Fuck it Jules boy, you won’t find many male takers for that cock you swing now! Hey … when d’you think Osku will give us flying lessons?’

Eventually the herd reached the perimeter of the heathland. The three score boys and girls reverted to human form and walked naked back into a world that they had learnt was now theirs to arbitrate — quietly, evenly, with eyes that now saw everything differently. Their bodies may have been light again and human-shaped, but that was a surface, a shell they wore like a borrowed cloak. Beneath it, each carried the truth of forest and steppe: power, grace and warrior purpose.

Jules looked down at his hands. They were the same — but they weren’t. He could still feel the press of hooves on moss, the twitch of a tail, the wind singing past a long flank. The body could hide it; the heart never would again.

Oskar grinned as they walked together. ‘Think anyone’ll notice?’

‘No,’ Jules said. ‘That’s the point.’

At SIS, things continued — on the surface. Classes resumed. Meals were eaten. But something unspoken connected them all now. A glance. A scent. A shared smile. The clop of hooves behind a locked door at night.

Fleetfoot passed Jules in the corridor, no longer Fenice, no longer merely a girl. She tapped two fingers to her temple — a salute? a sign? — and was gone again, her gait too fluid, too silent for the tiled floor to notice.

The world outside would never understand. But the centaurids were not made for the world as it was. They were the hidden soldiers guarding its future. Were-beasts. Augmented animals. Dreaming their old dreams in daylight and guarding the new ones by night. And their empress-to-be and her brother were telling them that the new dreams would soon emerge into daylight, and the plains echo with the thunder of their hooves, a fear to overthrow the hearts of their enemies.

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Copyright © 2025 Michael Arram