Metamorphoses

XXIII

The light through the tall windows was diffused and grey, like it always was in early spring at Medwardine School—a kind of Anglican penitence made visible. The carpet in the senior dorm corridor still smelled of rugby boots and lavender disinfectant. Maxxie lay sideways across his narrow bed: the king of Rothenia, hiding from his subjects beneath a navy blanket

Leo sat cross-legged at the foot, picking absentmindedly at a loose thread in his school jumper. His hair had grown longer this term, flicking up boyishly behind his ears. He looked younger than fifteen when he smiled, but he wasn’t smiling now.

‘I liked Fiona,’ Maxxie said into the pillow, muffled. ‘I didn’t even kiss her. Just gave her a lift in the limo after the environmental prize thing and we had a good laugh. That was it. Handshake. Said she was brave for studying physics. And now it’s, like—‘he told me I was the queen of his quantum heart.’ Fucking quantum heart, Leo.’

‘She said that?’ Leo blinked.

‘Urggh. I wish I was making it up.’

There was a pause, broken only by the creak of the radiator pipes and the distant caw of crows outside.

‘They want to destroy me,’ Maxxie added.

Leo sighed and leaned back against the wall, knees drawn up. ‘They want to own you, and they can’t, so they shit all over you instead.’

‘Cheers for the eloquence.’

‘It’s a family trait.’

Another silence. Maxxie’s foot twitched under the blanket. Leo nudged it with his sock.

‘You’re not destroyed, big bro.’

‘I’m exhausted.’

‘I know.’ Leo reached for the mug of lukewarm tea on the bedside table, sipped, grimaced. ‘Look. We’ve got time out of school coming up. I’ve sorted something. We’re busting out.’

Maxxie peeled the blanket off one eye. ‘Meaning?’

‘Lake District. Tent. Boots. Me. You. No phones. No glares. No one giving you the side-eye over your jam spoon.’

‘You hate camping.’

‘I hate school more at the moment. And right now I hate what the world’s doing to you.’

Maxxie blinked, throat tight.

Leo leaned in, grinning suddenly. ‘We need to get away to fuck up without hostile comment. It’s a boy’s inalienable right.’

There was a beat—and then Maxxie barked a laugh. He reached out, tousled Leo’s hair in that affectionate, annoying way he’d done since they were small kids.

‘Alright. But I’m not carrying the stove. You nearly set fire to Styria last time we dared pack it.’

‘Terms of the royal truce accepted,’ Leo said grandly, with a bow from the waist. ‘Now get dressed. We’re raiding the tuck cupboard before chapel. I require flapjack to fuel my revolution.’

***

The Medwardine Under 18 XV were somewhere on the A65 in a coach that smelled of liniment, mint gum, and wet polyester. Maxxie had his forehead pressed against the cold windowpane, watching the dry-stone walls scroll past. His boots still had frozen mud caked on the soles.

Leo slouched beside him, one foot on the armrest of the seat ahead, flipping a half-eaten Twix between his fingers like a baton. ‘So,’ Leo said quietly, ‘we play Giggleswick. We shower. We nod gravely at their headmaster who tremulously addresses you as ‘Your Majesty’. Then we vanish.’

Maxxie raised an eyebrow. ‘To where?’

‘Craven House. Edmund says we’re expected.’

Maxxie blinked. ‘His Grace the 7th Duke?’

‘For now, just Edmund Fitz-James, our second cousin once removed. Who keeps a boot room the size of Medwardine’s chapel and thinks Blackadder Goes Forth is a documentary.’

Maxxie couldn’t help it—he smiled. ‘And he’s willing to smuggle royalty across county lines?’

Leo grinned. ‘He says it’ll be his most useful act of rebellion to date. Which is saying something, because in Year 10 he shaved FUCK BREXIT into the lawns at Ampleforth.’

Maxxie laughed for the first time in days. ‘Alright. Let’s do it.’

Leo offered him the rest of the Twix. ‘For Rothenia?’

‘For getting the hell away,’ Maxxie said, and bit into sweet caramel and shortbread.

***

The whistle blew sharp through the damp air, and the match was over. Medwardine’s under-18 XV had clawed their way to a brutal 19—14 win on a pitch churned to soup. Maxxie, caked from thigh to brow in wet North Riding turf, staggered out of a scrum like a creature reborn in mud. He bared his teeth and whooped, bloodied lip splitting wider in a grin. Leo trotted up behind him from the under-16 pitch, already peeling his jersey off one shoulder.

‘You looked like a prehistoric bear in that last maul.’

Maxxie spat mud. ‘You’re welcome.’ He clapped his brother’s back—then paused, alert.

A silver-blue coupe idled behind the stone wall beyond the rugby field, impossible not to notice. It looked like a Jaguar XK150, though too sleek to be original. The boy leaning on its bonnet wore driving gloves, oxblood trousers, and the louche grin of someone who’d grown up with money, horses, and no particular affection for authority.

‘Edmund,’ Maxxie said. ‘You’re not naked. What a surprise.’

Duke Edmund of Craven saluted lazily. ‘Come, royal if somewhat argillaceous brothers. We ride.’

The drive took them north towards Lonsdale on winding country roads. Leo DJ’d from his phone, alternating between Rachmaninoff and something angry in Czech. Edmund drove like someone who’d never failed at anything and wouldn’t start with the North Yorkshire constabulary. His actual driving licence, it turned out, was still under discussion.

They pulled up in darkness beneath the ivy-strangled colonnade of Craven House, a Neo-Classical monument to ancestral egotism. The front door was already open.

‘You’re in the Blue Suite, your majesty,’ Edmund told Maxxie as he sauntered in barefoot, already tugging off his rollneck. ‘Leo, take the Queen Anne room, even though you are not in fact descended from the lady.’ Within minutes, he’d discarded the rest of his clothes and was ambling naked through the high corridors, talking casually about hunting leases and the problem of constitutional monarchy.

Leo stared. Maxxie raised a brow. ‘You forget, Leo, that the aristocracy have evolved beyond simple modesty.’

Edmund paused in front of a full-length mirror, inspecting his own arse with faint approval. ‘Hardly evolved. Just more than comfortable with what God hath made. Saw you staring, Leo love.’

The next morning brought mist and silence to a grey and damp Lonsdale. Maxxie slipped out barefoot into the dew-wet garden, tugged by something deeper than impulse. At the edge of the croquet lawn he shed his human form like a uniform worn for duty’s sake—and with the soft gasp of shifting bone, he became again what he truly wanted to be, a centaurid stallion. Chestnut flanks gleaming, wings twitching.

‘Morning,’ Edmund said, standing under a cedar tree with a coffee mug and nothing else.

Maxxie, ears flicking, froze.

Edmund smiled. ‘I’d heard rumours, but nothing compares with the reality. What a sensational cock! I do wish I was into bestiality, but the mud y’know ...’

Maxxie blinked. ‘You’re… not surprised.’

‘My mother was a foal-chaser in Tuscany. Nothing surprises me.’ He sipped. ‘Besides, the lawns love hoofprints. Aerates the soil.’

A beat passed. Leo came jogging across the grass in pyjama trousers, barefoot as usual.

Edmund gestured with his mug. ‘Take him up. The high fells are clear. Go. Run. Be.’

Maxxie turned, lowered his shoulder, and Leo climbed on like he’d done it every day of his life. Then—with a snort and a thump of power—Maxxie launched into a gallop that became a canter that became flight. Over Craven House’s pediments and slate roofs, past pine and stone, into the high, lonely hills where scandal and shame could not follow the errant king of Rothenia.

***

They arrived near dusk, when the light over the Anatolian ridges burned amber and violet, and the shadows of the pines stretched like fingers across the meadows. This was the high country above Kaçkar, where no human maps reached, guarded by spells, myths, and a ring of legendary peaks said to rise in defence when invaders came. A waterfall marked the gateway: not a magical portal, but a guarded pass known only to certain kings of men and to the race of centaurs.

King Whiteblaze stood at the path’s end, resplendent in his barded bronze peytral, though the rest of him was bare and unarmoured, glinting with oil and the sun’s farewell. Beside him, Queen Sylvie paced slowly, her flanks round once more with foal, her mane plaited with gold in the fashion of the matriarchs of the Imperial Herd. She exuded calm, authority, and the sensual glow of a mother close to term.

‘They come,’ Whiteblaze murmured, scenting the wind. And then through the trees came two walkers: King Afran of Rum, no longer in his robes of state, and his newly wedded consort Willem Martinovic, shirt open, hair unbound, a boy again in every way but his eyes. Their hands were linked. They moved like men who had shed the weight of thrones, at least for tonight.

‘Welcome,’ said Whiteblaze. ‘To the realm where our hoofmarks are our state heraldry imprinted on our ground.’

Afran bowed his head. ‘My lord of the herds.’

‘You promised us peace,’ said Willem, his eyes meeting Sylvie’s.

‘And pleasure,’ she added, her voice velvet. ‘You shall have both.’

Behind them, a ripple of laughter—Prince Oskar Oakheart emerged from a copse, his bronze hooves gleaming. He bounded forward and butted Willem gently in the chest with his brow. ‘The Sky Path awaits, Prince Willem. Get on my back. We’ll race your husband and lord mounted on my dad!’

They dined on honey-roasted graincakes, river herbs, and glistening fruits served on woven leaf platters. No servants here—only kin. The pavilion was open to the night, lit by oil lamps and the occasional phosphorescent beetle.

Willem lay stretched on silks, chest bare, a pear in his hand. Afran reclined back against him, head resting between Willem’s thighs, eyes half-shut in pleasure.

Sylvie, amused, had curled up in her centaur form like a cat at the edge of the cushions, grooming her foreleg. ‘You look like boys again.’

‘We are,’ said Willem, running his fingers through Afran’s cropped curls. ‘We never stopped.’

Whiteblaze stood watch beside the pool, silent, his eyes on the moonlit hills.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you may ride with us to the Stone Circle. The mares are in heat.’

Afran raised an eyebrow. ‘And tonight?’

Whiteblaze turned, slow and warm. ‘Tonight. Here. You belong to each other.’

The Centaurids had prepared a lover’s bower in the glade, woven from living willow and perfumed grasses. It was private, warm, soft beneath. The spring night hummed with frogsong and the rustle of unseen bodies in the woods. Willem lay on his side, naked, skin gleaming with sweat. Afran knelt behind him, cupping his flank.

‘No guards?’ Willem whispered.

‘No need,’ Afran replied. ‘Nothing here would harm you.’

Their kisses were long and wordless. When Afran entered him it was slow, reverent. No conquest, no theatre—only the ache of being wholly known and wanted. Later, entwined, they lay under woven blankets, breathing the grass-sweet air. Somewhere nearby, a stallion cried out in passion or pain. Willem pressed his lips to Afran’s shoulder. ‘Could we stay?’ he murmured.

‘Not forever, obviously’ Afran replied. ‘But long enough for us to become part of this mythic place, and take it out with us into our more mundane realm. Rum must be different from other earlier Turkish kingdoms, more worthy to be part of the Oecumene. The Centaurids give us that.’

***

The walls of the old Ottoman wing breathed secrets. Mosaics blinked in the candlelight. The Bosphorus glimmered beyond the shuttered windows, a silver line between continents and centuries. Henry Atwood stood alone before a carved cedar door. No guards. No chamberlain. Only a scent of almond oil and something wilder—hay, musk, dry mountain air.

The door opened inward without a sound.

She stood within. Brunhild, Empress of the Equine Imperium, wore no diadem tonight. Her mane was loose over one shoulder, grey-shot and bound in gold. She was no common horse; for one thing, she spoke. There was weight in her voice and a twitch of her nostrils as Henry entered.

‘Minister Atwood,’ she said, in rather good Rothenian.

‘Your Imperial Majesty.’ He bowed, while she inclined her head, eyes sharp.

‘Shall we dispense with titles, great Seraph, Prince of Heaven?’ she suggested.

‘As you say, ma’am.’

They stationed themselves opposite one another, a brazier flickering between them. Neither touched the figs and wine set out on a low table. ‘You wanted to know our intent,’ said Brunhild.

‘I always know your intent, great lady’ said Henry softly. ‘I wanted to hear your method.’

She smiled. Not kindly. ‘The Oecumene prides itself on being post-national. Trans-human. But at its root, it is still patriarchal. Still humanocentric, though the age of the Petakhij has come. And it is still suspicious of the wild.’

‘And you mean to change that.’

Brunhild snorted. ‘We already have. You’ve seen our Centaurid children. The mares in

Beyşehir, the colts in Kurdistan. We no longer have to wait for mutation or miracles. The births are viable. And the centaurid phenotype, once mythic, is now heritable.’

Henry did not blink. ‘You're seeding bloodlines for the world to come, a world you somehow know better than does Mendamero.’

‘We equines are grafting an equine species onto terrestrial history. Carefully. Through choice. Through seduction. Through beauty. For the equines will be needed.’

‘Why so, great lady?’

‘That is an answer a person of your depth may reach without the help of the Seers of the Dead. Try.’

Henry pondered. ‘Why introduce another imperium into the Universe while the Human Oecumene is yet in its infancy? A powerful ally perhaps, but no, it’s more complex than that.’ His eyes widened, ‘It’s diversity. A human imperium growing without a partner in dialogue, in exclusive power, would stultify and decay. It needs a mirror to see itself, its weaknesses particularly. The Petakhij offer humans a form of evolution but equines offer more, a powerful way of life that is not human-derived, but is based on foundations not the least material, scientific and industrial. That’s what the centaurids are, a first clue for us that magic and wildness has a future as much as structured civilisation.’ He tilted his head. ‘You think the Oecumene will accept a hybrid civilisation grown within its cities?’

‘They already have. Jules Kral’s son eats roses from palace gardens to the delight of Rothenia. Kral himself has mated as a Centaurid with a mare and survived with his charm intact. It’s a charm his little son Wildmane possesses too, and wields to great effect. If it was on offer, every pre-teen child in Rothenia would now adopt his shape. Maxxie can become whatever he chooses—you know what, whether Petakh or Centaurid. And the people will still love him.’

Henry exhaled, slow and long. ‘So this is a form of conquest, for which you don’t need armies.’

Brunhild smiled. ‘We never did. We have hooves. And we have dangerously charming boys.’

Then Henry said, quietly, ‘And when the time comes?’

‘We won’t conquer,’ she said. ‘We’ll arrive and you will open your eyes, humans, Petakhij and seraphs all.’

Far below, the Bosphorus whispered between Europe and Asia, old and sly. But something new was coming. A distant sound of hooves, with the sweep of wings. With a colt’s laughter echoing in the morning breeze.

Copyright © 2025 Michael Arram