Chapter 20: Growing Pains

Andy was growing, and the growing was making things complicated.

Not biologically complicated. Socially complicated. Emotionally complicated. Complicated in the way things get complicated when a proto-horse that is secretly a person is getting visibly bigger and more magical in front of a woman who is running out of categories to put it in.

Fifty-three centimeters at the shoulder, as of this morning’s System update. Up from forty-nine at the magical beast specialization. Four centimeters in ten days, which didn’t sound like much until you were standing next to a woman who had been tracking your measurements with a professional’s attention to detail and whose eyebrows climbed a millimeter higher each time she noticed you were taller than you’d been the day before.

The ranger (he still didn’t know her name; she talked to him for hours every day and he couldn’t understand a single word) had started measuring him against the boulder. A mark on the stone, refreshed daily, the kind of thing a parent does with a child on a kitchen doorframe. The marks were climbing and the ranger’s expression was changing, adding anticipation to the wonder. She hadn’t prepared for this. That much was obvious. She was tracking the growth of his body and his horn with equal attention, and Andy was choosing not to think about which one she measured more carefully.

His magic was growing faster than his body. The life magic in his horn was deepening, developing capabilities Andy discovered in moments of instinct rather than intention.

The healing aura was the first surprise. He had known about it (passive healing, five-meter range, allies only), but knowing and experiencing were different. A warmth that extended from his horn in a sphere, radiating vitality constantly, automatically, without effort.

The fox healed faster when she was near him. A scratch on her flank from a bramble closed in hours instead of days. The hawk, who perched in his clearing often now (the branch was his branch, the branch was sacred, woe betide any bird that attempted to land on the hawk’s branch), had a bend in one tail feather that straightened over the course of a week, the damaged quill rebuilding itself in the ambient life magic of Andy’s proximity.

Even Barnacle seemed shinier.

But active healing required intention, focus, directing life magic through his horn at a specific target. The hawk (self-appointed coach, unfireable) helped him develop precision through exercises that involved channeling life magic at increasingly specific targets. Learning to aim his horn with precision rather than just waving it around. The metaphor was not lost on him.

“Smaller,” the hawk sent, from his branch, while Andy attempted to direct a focused pulse of healing energy at a single damaged leaf on a nearby bush. “You are healing the entire bush. I said the LEAF. One leaf. The rest of the bush does not require your assistance.”

“The bush doesn’t mind,” Andy sent.

“The bush is not the point. Precision is the point. Your magic is broad when it should be narrow. You broadcast when you should whisper. Your horn has the throughput of a river and the targeting of a shotgun. FOCUS.”

Andy focused. The golden-blue energy narrowed, the broad warmth contracting into a tighter beam that his awareness guided toward the damaged leaf, and the leaf unfurled its curled edge and turned green and whole under the targeted attention of a horn that had been a calcium spike on a bacterium four tiers ago.

[ACTIVE HEALING: PRECISION IMPROVED. CURRENT RATING: MODERATE.]

“Moderate,” the hawk sent. “Acceptable. Again.”

Andy healed leaves for an hour. Then moss. Then a small fungus the hawk identified as “slightly degraded” that responded to his focused healing by producing a new fruiting body overnight. The hawk acknowledged this with a single, short impression: adequate. The highest praise the hawk had ever given. Andy glowed.

[XP: 437/1000]

Growth was making him stronger. Not superhero-strong, but proportionally: muscles denser, bones harder, hooves gripping the earth with a sureness that translated, during speed trials, into numbers the hawk approved of.

[GALLOP EFFICIENCY: 94%]

[SPEED: FAST (WITHIN TIER)]

[ENDURANCE: HIGH]

Ninety-four percent. His gallop was nearly optimized, the coordinated four-beat rhythm so natural now that running felt less like an activity and more like a state of being.

On day forty-five, it hit him: he was actually a horse. Not a proto-horse. Not a rough draft. A horse (a magical beast horse with a glowing horn and golden eyes and a Purity Affinity that was twenty-three percent virginity, but a horse nonetheless), and the horse was capable and the horse was growing and the horn on its forehead was growing with it, lengthening by perceptible fractions each week, the golden-blue glow intensifying. Everything about him was getting bigger and more impressive. Except the part that would let him talk to a woman. That part was still six hundred XP away.

* * *

The ranger cut her hand on day forty-seven.

It was an accident, the kind of small, stupid injury that happens when a person is carving a joint in a new section of lean-to frame (she was expanding the shelter as Andy grew, the original structure no longer adequate for a creature that was fifty-four centimeters and counting) and the blade slipped. The cut was shallow, a diagonal line across her left palm that began bleeding immediately, and she made a sound that Andy’s consciousness translated as: ow.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Andy was standing three meters away, watching her work. He watched her work often. Hands were the thing he missed most, and watching hers was a complicated pleasure he chose not to examine.

She held her palm up, looked at the cut, reached for the cloth tucked in her belt. Standard field procedure.

Andy moved before the procedure was automatic.

He didn’t decide to move. The decision was made somewhere deeper than decision, in the place where instinct and magic and compassion converged and produced action without thought. He closed the three meters. His head lowered. His horn oriented toward her palm with a precision the hawk would have approved of, and the life magic, the focused, targeted healing he had spent the last week practicing on leaves and moss and slightly degraded fungi, pulsed outward.

The golden-blue light touched her skin.

The cut closed. Not slowly, not gradually. The cut closed the way a zipper closes: smoothly, completely, the edges drawing together and sealing, leaving behind clean, unbroken skin.

The blood was still wet on her palm. The cut was gone.