Chapter 23: Megafauna Problems

Being big changed everything except the things that mattered.

Andy discovered this on his first morning as a full-sized magical horse, when he tried to enter the lean-to shelter and got his head and shoulders inside before his hips informed him, through the medium of structural resistance, that the rest of him was not invited.

“I am stuck,” Andy thought, his front half inside the lean-to and his rear half outside it and his horn’s moonlight glow illuminating the interior of a shelter that he could no longer use. “I am a full-sized magical horse stuck in a lean-to that was built for a creature a third my size and the metaphor is not lost on me. My body has outgrown my circumstances. My body has been outgrowing my circumstances since I was a cell. The circumstances never catch up.”

The fox, who had followed him into the lean-to through the generous gap between his belly and the ground, sent an impression of such concentrated, silent amusement that her tail vibrated.

Andy extracted himself (a process that took longer and made more noise and destroyed more structural integrity than he preferred to admit) and stood in the clearing in the pre-dawn darkness, one hundred and fifty-five centimeters of horse that did not fit in its own house, and began the process of learning what it meant to be big.

Big meant his hooves left deep, single-toed craters that any tracker (any ranger, any freckled, book-carrying, apple-bringing ranger) could follow without effort. Subtlety had never been his strong suit. The horn had been advertising his position since Tier 2, and now his hooves were doing it too.

Big meant the speed trials needed recalibrating. The obstacle course that had been a technical challenge for a dog-sized body was an exercise in restraint for a horse-sized body. Turns too tight. Gaps too narrow. Fallen logs he stepped over without breaking stride. His ninety-six-percent efficiency at his old size translated to approximately forty percent at his new size.

[GALLOP EFFICIENCY: 41%]

[NOTE: RECALIBRATION IN PROGRESS. YOUR BODY HAS TRIPLED IN SIZE. COORDINATION ADJUSTMENTS ARE EXPECTED.]

Forty-one percent. Back to basics. Back to falling over and figuring out legs, except this time the falling over (twice in the first day, once on a turn and once on a downhill he misjudged) was a significantly more dramatic event at one fifty-five than it had been at fifty-five. The impact zone was larger, the thud was louder, the ego damage was proportionally unchanged because pride does not scale with body size.

Big meant he had an ecological presence.

He noticed this first with the deer-analogs. The creatures his proto-form had classified as “approximately my size, faster than me” were now significantly smaller than him, and their behavior had changed from “ignoring a fellow herbivore” to deference. They saw him and yielded, the instinctive spatial concession that prey animals make to creatures they perceive as dominant, and the dominance was based not on aggression but on the cumulative signal of his magical presence: the horn’s moonlight glow, the Purity Affinity’s calming aura, the life magic radiating in a fifteen-meter sphere (up from five at Tier 4).

Other creatures deferred too. Predators gave his territory wider berth. The amphibians (his former peers, the frogs where he had once been a nine-centimeter horned amphibian headbutting grubs) gave him the space that large, magical creatures command through the simple physics of being large and magical in a space that was mostly neither.

[TERRITORIAL INFLUENCE: EXPANDING]

[YOUR MAGICAL SIGNATURE IS CREATING A ZONE OF ENHANCED LIFE MAGIC WITHIN YOUR TERRITORY. FLORA GROWTH: ACCELERATED. FAUNA HEALTH: IMPROVED. AMBIENT CORRUPTION RESISTANCE: MODERATE.]

He was improving the forest by existing in it. The grass in his clearing was greener, the trees taller, and there were flowers now, small, white, luminous, growing in a ring around the spot where he slept that expanded slightly each night. They opened at moonrise as though the moonlight in his horn had called them.

He was terraforming the forest. Not deliberately. He was existing in a space and the space was responding to his existence by becoming more alive. His horn was making everything around it grow and flourish. His horn had always had that effect on things it was pointed at, but now the range was fifteen meters and the results were botanical.

“I’m a gardener,” Andy thought, surveying the ring of luminous white flowers that had appeared around his sleeping spot for the fifth morning in a row. “An involuntary, unconscious, horn-powered gardener. My ecological impact statement would be fascinating. ‘How does the magical horse affect its environment?’ ‘By existing near things. The things then become better at being things. The mechanism is unclear but the results are statistically significant and also very pretty.'”

The horn at Tier 5 was a different instrument than at any previous tier. The spiraling crystal structure continued to develop, ridges deepening, channels widening, the overall length increasing by millimeters each day. The moonlight luminescence was constant now, visible at a hundred meters in daylight and considerably farther at night, and the glow had a quality Andy processed not as light but as attention: the horn’s light made you want to look. Made you want to trust. Made you want to reach out and touch it. As usual, his horn was the most compelling thing in any room, except the room was an entire forest.

New abilities were manifesting. The healing aura had expanded to fifteen meters. The purification blast recharged in two hours. His precision with focused healing had improved to high under the hawk’s relentless coaching.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And there was something new: Truth Sense.

[NEW ABILITY: TRUTH SENSE]

[YOUR HORN CAN DETECT DECEPTION IN THE EMOTIONAL SIGNATURES OF NEARBY ORGANISMS. RANGE: 10M. ACCURACY: MODERATE. NOTE: THIS ABILITY FUNCTIONS THROUGH LIFE MAGIC RESONANCE AND IS NOT TELEPATHY.]

He discovered it during an interaction with the freed feline, which had been recovering in the clearing and had begun, cautiously, to interact with the party. The feline (Tier 5, amber eyes, battered but healing) had approached Andy one morning, and Andy’s horn had responded to its emotional state and produced a readout: the feline was being honest. Body language matched emotional signature. Genuinely cautious, genuinely grateful, genuinely uncertain.

The truth sense was not mind-reading. It provided authentication: a yes or no against the question “is this creature’s outward expression consistent with its inner state?” The answer for the hawk’s grudging tolerance of the feline: yes (grudge real, tolerance real). The answer for the fox’s amused indifference: mostly yes (amusement real; indifference slightly performed; the fox was more curious about the feline than she was letting on).

And the answer, the next time the ranger visited and looked at Andy with that expression, the expression that was wonder and belief and the thing he would not name, the answer was: yes. Completely yes. No deception, no performance. Her emotional signature was everything Andy had hoped it was and more than he had dared to believe.

He filed this information under “things I did not need to know because now I can’t un-know them.” His horn had basically just confirmed that a woman had feelings for him and he was a horse. The truth sense was a gift. The truth sense was also a curse. The truth sense was his horn being too perceptive for his own good, which tracked, because his horn had never once in five tiers been anything less than maximally, inconveniently sensitive.

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