King Afran Yousefi of Rum did not offer to seat his mother at the conference table in his private office in the Iznik Royal Secretariat. Polite it might have been but it would have led to a major rebuke from her involving her opinion of male condescension. What was worse, General Martinovica visibly simpered as her Will seated her elegantly across the table from the Yousefi couple, mother and son, and smirked at Queen Rozhin.
General Cornish took the chair, ignoring the seating sideshow if he even noticed it, commencing in his usual ordered fashion. ‘Your majesties and excellencies, I want to start with a bit of a history lesson. It’s not the sort of well-known history published in the books, but it’s a history which has been put together by our Sichertsdeinst agents working in our eastern outposts and by releases from the Russian agencies that Grand Prince Georg has opened to us since the fall of Regent Medvedhev. It’s a story about the early days of the Black Horde and its evil emperor Malik-Rammu.
‘In those days in the former republic of Iran an Islamic-postnationalist regime was claiming the mantle of the ancient Sassanid Empire, fused with modern insurgent militarism. Its capital was Esfahan, and the regime styled itself as both the protector of civilization and the punisher of heresy—particularly against hybrid lifeforms. Mehmed Torossian, the future Malik Rammu, was a failed factional leader whom his Neo-Sassanid rivals expelled and who took refuge in the chaotic Tigridic caliphate, where he began to recruit his Horde and from where he eventually marched it west to escape his rivals and conquer Anatolia, and of course to be ultimately defeated by NATO, under Rothenian leadership, when he invaded Europe.
“The Neo-Sassanids in the meantime played their own game. They absorbed southern Iraq with little resistance after the collapse of the Tigridic warlords, taking the key cities: Basra, Najaf and Nasiriyah. The new Persian imperium brought the Gulf States under its control through a mix of military pressure and religious-political alignment, consolidating them into a Southern Crescent Protectorate. The Sassanids’ main military advantage since has been the cavalry divisions of their armoured Cataphracts. In some ways they hit on the same strategy that NATO and the Rothenian army had, a swift and mobile strike force deployed decisively, if without the Rothenian judicious use of fortresses and fortified lines. And now they propose to "cleanse" Rum and Kurdistan of their foreign leadership and hurl back the Oecumene. For that they need to seize the Bosphorus and Mediterranean access, for as our Emperor Rudolf foresaw, Constantinople will be the strategic hinge of the new world order.”
The general sat back and was silent momentarily, then resumed. “It will not surprise any of you, and especially not Queen Rozhin, that the Neo-Sassanid Persian empire has identified the Oecumene as the most powerful threat to its continued existence. It is a tyranny without even the old justification of its theocracy. Its people are beginning to recognise that beyond the Zagros Passes there is a new pattern of peace and security not rooted in Western arrogance and runaway capitalism. So, we are heading for a war, and one for which we are not well prepared. And the brunt of it will fall on our friends of Kurdistan, Armenia and Rum. Major General Martinovica, Legate of Rum, is responsible for formulating strategy for the coming campaign, in partnership with Queen Rozhin. General?”
‘Thank you, sir, and may I congraulate you on your imminent promotion to Field Marshal of Rothenia. Those around this table will know that Count Cornish has the greater responsibility of formulating the Oecumene’s srategy to secure the Mediterranean basin and manage the reception into the Oecumene of the Kingdom of Egypt and the Empire of Ethiopia. And our Neo-Sassanid problem is only the opening gambit of a much bigger strategic exercise. We are not well-resourced to meet it. The Kurdish Army is our main asset in the region, and indeed it is already engaged in the opening moves against Persian aggression. There is now an efficient if small Rumish Army in the field and the Armenian armed forces of Armenia itself and the Pontic Principality are not inconsiderable. Emperor Rudolf has authorised the shipping of a division of Rothenian troops to Anatolia as a reserve, but our new ally, the Centaurid Order, may prove to be the most decisive factor in the balance of forces. And I call on General the Count Felip Bree von Tarlenheim, who is Grand Master of the Centaurid Order, to brief you as to what he and his people can offer.”
Eyes turned to the statuesque broad-shouldered male, wearing a brown, plain uniform, though the insignia of a Rothenian one-star general had been recently added to its shoulder tabs. ‘How do,’ the big man greeted them with a smile, his deep voice booming from his barrel of a chest. ‘Now you probably know very little of the Centaurid Order, so prepare to have your minds broadened. You are high in the Oecumene’s ruling group, so you will know about the human avian hybrids called the Petakhij who assisted in the defence of Rothenia at the Battle of Kaleczyk. So you well know there are magical races concealed from the average human yet who work with a common purpose, a purpose personified in that greatest of magical creatures, the Golden Elphberg, King Maxim II, to whom we as much as humanity give our allegiance.
‘Centaurids are an ancient people who roamed this region of Anatolia in the time of myth. We are equine-human hybrids, some of us are also pegasids, winged equines. Now there is all unsuspected to you humans an Equine Imperium which comprehends several races: pegasids, centaurids, talking and common equines. It is ruled by the Empress Brunhild the Great, who has at this time chosen to ally with the Oecumene, though she does not acknowledge its authority over her people. I am one of her chief councillors, along with my wife Queen Sylvie of the Centaurids, our daughter the Imperial Crown Princess Fenice Fleetfoot of the Equines, and my son, Crown Prince Oskar Oakheart of the Centaurids, who are both currently enrolled in Year 11 of the the Strelzen International School, learning more of the human world and the way equines and humans can work together.’
Queen Rozhin gave a curious but calculating stare at this half-equine vision. ‘And how do your people fight, your excellency? Rudolf Elphberg has promoted you general of cavalry in the Army of the Oecumene, so it would seem to me that the Centaurid Order is being prepared for battle, and that needs must be battle against the Neo-Sassanids and their cataphract regiments.’
General Cornish coughed. ‘General Bree, war has already begun on Queen Rozhin’s frontiers. The Persians have begun testing out the Kurdish border lines in the Tigris valley. They seek to see off the Kurds the way they did the Black Horde. Their defeat of Mehmed Torossian’s Black Horde gave them both high morale and a deadly cavalry playbook. Also they do not expect to meet the Rothenian regiments who expelled the Horde from the Balkans. So … we may expect an overconfidence from them that the Centaurids will be able to exploit.’
King Afran stared across the table at General Cornish. ‘And can you tell us what Emperor Rudolf’s end game might be in this campaign, sir?’ ‘Why, sir, to establish the Oecumene and its friendly regimes in North Africa and Near Asia, the keystone of the empire of Humanity which is to come.’
***
The Oecumenic general staff in Anatolia were in the field south of Sardis, a green and tumbled stretch of landscape; a plain studded with limestone outcrops and knolls. The screech of reconnaissance drones overhead marked the beginning of the exercise. Six of them—sleek, silent-winged skimmers in Rothenian livery—swept across the Sardian plain in diamond formation, scanning the terrain and transmitting real-time telemetry to the command monitors strapped to the wrists of the observing generals.
From a high ridge above the plain, the human commanders of the Oecumene watched through field glasses. Queen Rozhin sat her big Anatolian gelding with the poise of a seasoned horsewoman. Beside her, General Cornish shaded his eyes with a gloved hand, while General Martinovica, on a Kurdish mare, alternated between peering through her monocular and making dry observations.
The Centaurid battalion was forming up below—three hundred strong, arrayed in deep ranks. They were a fearsome sight, their equine bodies armoured at withers and flanks in dull-iron plate, their human torsos rising from the horse-chest where necks should be, helmeted and braced in corselets that glimmered under the Anatolian sun.
At their head rode—strode—King Whiteblaze, a magnificent chestnut stallion of massive proportions, his coat gleaming copper-red and his torso proud and broad. A long sabre rode high on his back, the hilt shaped like a flame. His helm bore no plume—only a jagged crest like a lightning bolt. Slung across his side was a submachine gun alongside a huge axe that would have done credit to a Viking epic.
From a command drone overhead, a flicker of green light signalled the start of the mock engagement. “They’ve deployed a hidden target array in the ravine,” murmured Martinovica, watching her tactical display. “Dummies, heat-traps, and reactive return fire from automated posts.”
Cornish grunted. “And they’ll burn through them in less than three minutes.”
A low thunder rose across the plain—not the percussive sound of iron horseshoes, but something deeper and more resonant: the rhythm of unshod hooves pounding ancient Anatolian earth. The Centaurids moved with balletic precision, their mass a surge of iron and flesh. At their centre rode Whiteblaze, his long chestnut tail streaming behind him like a standard.
“They don’t use tack,” Rozhin observed. “No reins, no stirrups. They are the horse and the rider both.”
Martinovica tilted her head. “No rider can respond faster than a centaurid. The moment he sees a threat, he shifts his own centre of gravity to react. Try training that into our human cavalryman.”
Below, two flanking wings broke from the main formation and circled wide, descending the escarpment at a gallop. Their targets—automated turrets disguised as trench emplacements—flicked to life. But even as bolts of simulated laser fire erupted from the turrets, the Centaurids wheeled, darted, and struck. They leapt the trenchworks entirely, vaulting in synchronized lines over the threat and leaving behind clouds of dust and shattered metal.
Then came the second wave—the heavies. These were war-centaurs of immense size, bearing shoulder-mounted mass drivers and heavy assault bows braced against recoil. As they cantered into position, their barrage thundered downrange. Dust geysered up from the impact zone. The targets were consumed.
At that moment, three of the drones pivoted mid-air, forming a loose halo above the battlefield, feeding targeting data and relaying holos back to the ridge. On Cornish’s wrist, a schematic showed enemy kill zones blinking red, then vanishing.
Rozhin exhaled. “I take it back. I don’t feel sorry for the Sassanid cataphracts. I feel sorry for whoever’s behind them.” A winged squadron came in low over the battlefield—pegasid centaurids, their wings tucked tight until the last moment, when they flared them in a sweeping descent and landed behind the enemy emplacement with chilling grace. Swords flashed. The assault was complete. Then came silence.
Whiteblaze reared high, hooves pawing at the air, his voice erupting in a cry that blended a stallion’s whinny with the clear projection of speech, amplified through what must have been an embedded aural charm: “Queen Rozhin of Rum! General Cornish of the Oecumene! Friends and allies! You have seen how we fight. Now show us where to march, and we shall run. The Centaurid Order awaits your command.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Cornish smiled faintly. “General Martinovica, you may want to consider revising your deployment matrix. And I believe another Centaurid battalion is flying here from Strelzen, led by Crown Prince Oskar Oakheart, so factor that into your calculation.”
***
The sky above the Glottenberh Massif was pale with weak autumn sunshine, the air edged with the promise of frost, though the sun still poured gold across the vast vaults of blue. A host of centaurids—neither wholly horse nor wholly man, but all winged—swept southward from Strelzen, their wingbeats muffled in the rare air, their shadows racing over the hills like a dark prophecy. And at their vanguard flew Prince Oakheart, the flame in his golden mane matching the war-fire in his eyes.
The recruits—newly changed, raw with the memory of flesh and bone bending into myth—kept formation with admirable discipline. Some were men of the old army, recruited by the young prince for new service, but still on the payroll of the Rothenian army. But most were Oakheart’s fellow pupils of SIS, boys and girls drilled in code and conduct, who had studied history in their upper sixths and joined up with the school cadet force before the wars began. Now, they flew as pegasids under royal command, their human pasts a trailing contrail behind them.
Among them flew Jules Kral, white-tailed and narrow-flanked, and visibly delighted with the turn his life had taken. His laughter was audible over the wind as he banked and rolled through the currents, testing the strength of his wings, letting the cold air ripple across his belly and between his thighs. The sensation—half flight, half sex—was intoxicating, and he gave a small whoop as he dove through a thermal, levelling out alongside Stefan Mannstejne with a grin.
Stefan, grey-coated and dark-eyed, gave him a sidelong glance. “You’re enjoying this,” he said, not accusingly but with a kind of restrained awe.
“Wouldn’t you?” Jules called back. “The wind’s round my balls and I feel like I could fuck a stormcloud.”
Stefan laughed despite himself, though he kept it low in his throat. He was older than Jules by a year, but that difference had all but collapsed in the Transformation. Where once he had been a stoic good-humoured schoolboy, he was now a stallion—winged, bare, and increasingly distracted.
It didn’t help that Jules was flying with such... insouciance. His hindquarters flexed as he adjusted his stroke, each muscle moving with unconscious grace. Stefan’s eyes were drawn, again and again, to that tight cleft below the dock of Jules’s tail, and he found himself thinking things best left unspoken on campaign.
Or perhaps not. The prince had made it very clear before departure: “No stallion of mine mounts a mare while under arms. Keep your lust for the battlefield, or for your comrades—but if I smell rut in the herd, I’ll take your balls myself.”
Which had, of course, sparked a discreet flurry of flirtations in the male lower ranks. Not among the heavy cavalry of the Prince’s Stallion Guard, who flew like warhawks behind Oakheart—but among those like Stefan and Jules, who retained their human aspect in camp and were under no ban save discretion.
And Jules... well. Jules liked to be looked at as a human male. He’d taken to sleeping on his belly, negligently naked, casually arching to draw attention to his ass. He bathed alone, but never quite out of view. And though he claimed not to notice the attention, he’d smile, faintly, whenever stalwart, muscular Stefan’s gaze lingered too long.
They flew in silence a while, Anatolia beneath them and the muster at Sardis still over the horizon. Eventually, Stefan edged closer, their wingtip feathers brushing.
“You always this much of a tease?”
Jules glanced at him with a slow smile. “You always this obvious?”
“No one’s forbidden us from enjoying the war,” Stefan said, voice low. “Only from breeding foals.”
“I don’t think I’m in danger of that,” Jules murmured, his tone a challenge.
Their wings locked briefly as they caught the same gust, and Stefan exhaled through his teeth. He ached. Not just with the strain of the flight or the rush of air—but with hunger.
And Jules—beautiful, unbothered, willing to play—was glancing at him again.
“Tonight,” Stefan said, eyes forward. “After chow. If you’re not too sore after a day on the wing.”
“Tonight,” Jules replied, turning into a slow roll, his tail flicking like punctuation. “Try to keep up.”
Above them, the prince said nothing. But his ears twitched once. He heard everything in his host.
The air in the glade was dry and pine-scented, moonlight dancing on the surface of the spring like a veil half-lifted. The prince’s host, now grounded for the night, was mostly quiet—some dozing under wings, some whispering, some letting the fire lull them into the half-trance of those newly sinking into unconscioussness. The stallions on guard at the perimeter still in equine shape stamped restlessly, watching the firelight with unreadable eyes.
But among the human-formed—the ones who had once walked as boys at SIS, who now wore no more than their own skin and wings—heat took other forms. Jules lay close to the edge of the light. He was relaxed, naked, glowing slightly with the after-flush of flight. His thighs were parted just enough, the arch of his back just pronounced enough, that nothing about his posture was accidental.
When Stefan came to him, he made no sound. He stood for a moment above the smaller youth, casting a long, shadow. Then, wordlessly, he let the cloak fall from his shoulders.
Jules rolled onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow. His eyes, dark and half-lidded, flicked downward—then back up with a grin. “Oh, I remember that,” he murmured.
Stefan only raised an eyebrow. His centaurid cock—long, thick, dark-veined—stood proud between his flanks, the same awe-inspiring piece Jules had spied over a year ago in the SIS changing rooms, when he was still all knees and curiosity, sneaking glances from the corner of his towel.
“Biggest in Year Twelve,” Jules said softly, as if reading a sacred line from scripture.
“You were always staring,” Stefan said.
“I had good taste.”
There was no rush. Stefan knelt behind him, tracing one hand along the rise of Jules’s back, down the groove of his spine to the small of it, where skin met tailbone in a neat hollow. Jules arched into the touch, eyes fluttering closed.
“I don’t mind being used,” Jules whispered.
Stefan leaned in, voice rough with restraint. “I don’t use. I take.” And he did.
Slow at first—his hands firm, his weight steady—he pressed forward, lining himself with a practised motion. Jules inhaled sharply as Stefan slid inside him, stretching him open with exquisite, deliberate force, and he kept entering for a longer time than any human dick had entered Jules before. There was no pain, only pressure, mounting heat, the ache of being filled, and then—
“Oh fuck,” Jules gasped, his voice a shiver in the night.
Stefan gave him no mercy. He held Jules by the hips, buried himself deep, and began to move with the rhythm of someone who had waited years for this. And Jules, moaning softly with every thrust, welcomed it—rocked into it—his fingers clutching at the dry earth, his tail twitching with each impact.
Somewhere beyond the circle of firelight, another pair of recruits stirred and moved—drawn perhaps by sound, or scent, or the permission implicit in the prince’s silence. But no one interrupted. No one watched openly. The only witness staring down on them was the moon.
And Jules, by the end, was breathless and undone, his chest against the moss, his body trembling, his voice hoarse with satisfaction. When Stefan withdrew, he ran a gentle hand down Jules’s back, as if to remind them both that this had not been conquest.
Jules, face turned to the stars, murmured: “God, I’ve missed school.”
Stefan chuckled, lying beside him in the dirt and pulling his discarded cloak over them both. “It’s not school anymore.”
“No,” Jules agreed, curling into his warmth. “It’s way better. So, baby. You and me. Are we a thing, Steffie?”
“I think so, Jules Kral. You may not be the sort of partner I dreamed of, but you are so sexy when you move on me. So until we’re licenced to take mares, this is it for the time being.”
Jules sniggered. “Not the most romantic proposal I’ve ever had, but a lot more flattering than most of the ones in my AllmyFans period”
***
It began, as such things often do, with a border incursion cloaked in denial. A flurry of communiqués from the Sassanid High Command claimed “policing action” in the upper Diyala basin. But within days, the truth bled through like oil from a split pipeline: the Shahinshah’s mobile infantry was crossing the Khor al-Zubair, and artillery had lit the skies above Mosul. The war for the Tigris valley had begun.
The Persian Empire had waited long, biding its time through the years of diplomacy and covert rearmament. Now it struck with all the fury of a state reborn. Three full army groups—codenamed Ashura, Varak, and Setareh—descended from the Zagros in coordinated arcs. Supported by drone squadrons, orbital jammers, and as the core of their strike force, their armoured cataphracts. The Persian thrust through Kirkuk had the precision of a scalpel and the momentum of a scythe.
Kurdistan reeled. But it was not the Kurds alone who stood in their way. To the west, across the fractured plain, the Oecumene stirred. Not with shock—for the attack had been foreseen—but with grim determination. What the allied polities lacked in numbers they would have to make up in unity, steel, and sacrifice.
The Oecumenical Defence Compact had been thinly stretched even before the Tigris crisis. Most of its strength had been committed to stabilising the Black Sea corridor and safeguarding the line from Anatolia to the Levant. Now, under sudden pressure from the east, it was forced to pivot hard—too hard—towards a front for which it had not yet fully prepared.
At Sardis and Nicaea, commands were restructured overnight. Reserves from Thessaly and Transdanubia were recalled. Field Marshal Cornish—Viceroy of Thrace, now raised to Supreme Commander by joint consent of the Oecumenical Council—was placed in overall control of the southern theatre. From his mobile command in Harran, he coordinated what he could with grim economy: four regiments of regular Rothenian infantry and as many of dragoons were all his reserve. There were wings of scouting pegasids under the Order of Centaurids, and their own untested Centaurid battle wings, not numerous but formidable to see. A small number of armoured human units trained for desert warfare were screening the Oecumene’s dispositions from the Sassanian juggernaut bearing down on them. They would face an adversary with nearly five times their strength.
Among the allies, it was Rum who answered first. Queen Rozhin of the Kurds, as ever unbending, refused to dispatch forces by proxy. She rode to the front herself, with her son King Afran at her side and three thousand of her finest under the twin banners of the Nine Stars and the Mountain Rose. Their contingent, highland-trained and experienced, formed the southern arm of Cornish’s improvised counter-line.
Afran, as yet in his early twenties, bore his crown as lightly as he bore his sabre. But he did not ride into battle as a figurehead. For all his youth, he was a seasoned commander having fought skirmishes in Crimea and along the Armenian frontier the previous winter with his own Rumish guards. His mother’s presence beside him was both shield and signal: Rum would not be ruled from afar, and its fate would not be decided in council chambers.
Back at base, the Consort Will Martinovic remained in the north, tasked with the not inconsiderable burden of liaising between the Elphberg Oecumene, the Armenian states and the Ukrainian Grand Principality. He chafed at his rear-line role, though Cornish had insisted that someone of his temperament and significance was needed in reserve—in case, the general had said grimly, the front collapsed altogether. For collapse was possible.
The Persian hammer was immense, its vanguard bristling with platoons of martyr-commandos engineered for single-use high-altitude assault. Their general, Vahram Shah-Viran, had fought in the Shadow Wars of Makran and was known to care nothing for terrain or cost. Rumour said he had promised the Shah the heads of three kings before the equinox.
But Cornish had weathered worse storms. On the third day of the war, as the Sassanid lead elements reached the southern banks of the Tigris and began their pontoon crossing under drone cover, he sent a single encoded phrase across the entire Oecumenical network,
“Line must hold.” And across the ridges, valleys, and stony hills of eastern Mesopotamia, the Oecumene’s scattered legions dug in and bared their teeth. The sky above the Tigris filled with dark shapes. War had returned. And the sky offered a new and dramatic sight. For the Order of Centaurids had returned out of a legendary past.
Copyright © 2025 Michael Arram
Posted 22 October 2025