Til The Cows Come

A private story from my vaults, made public for the first time. Hope you enjoy!

***

Some thousands of years ago, the Domain had eaten a forest, swallowed whole the untamed wilderness of a world brimming with natural magic that had otherwise died off. The fires at the edges of the transplanted forest burned for months on end, remnants of an apocalypse the wood had been lucky to escape. Even when they finally burned out, nothing on that half-mile wide staggered circle of black ash would ever grow again.

But inside that borderline...

The Witchwood had come with its own coterie of inhabitants, survivors of the end of the world in the shape of elves, dryads, all manner of natural spirit. They had welcomed the people of their new world with open arms; new trade for the traders, new forms of magic for the mages, a new life waiting to be taken.

New prey for the predators too, but that went without saying. Such were the cycles of wild life.

Of such things were the cooperative societies of the Domain forged, and the Witchwood of today was nothing at all like the patch of unburned land that had escaped the conflagration. It had become a plane unto itself, for one, growing and growing outward, away from the preexisting land and into the limitless ur-space of the gaps between dimensions. Once at a size that satisfied the inscrutable mind that powered the forest, the land lay fit to be cultivated and communed with. It had been an extremely beneficial partnership.

The Cretan meadows lay on an otherwise unassuming plot of the Witchwood, where the landscape lay flat and the thickest of foliage abated just enough for the herd to settle in. After a period of adjustment and replanting, they and the forest had come to an understanding, of sorts. The flowering plants bloomed in a riot of color across much of the field that had resulted, large trees spreading boughs laden with fruit to shade them. Arable soil, tilled and sowed, grew small but lush crops of wheat in a near endless variety of strains, species, and oftentimes, colors. One patch, separated from the others by a short but necessary fence line, grew a violent shade of purple, and tended occasionally to bark.

All of this, natural and farmland both, was tended to by the patchwork of cow and bullfolk that formed the Cretan herd. They came from many worlds, and had been called many things, but in the herd they were among comrades, and in the Domain they had taken on a set of umbrella names for ease of communication: Minotaur, and Holstaur.

Sunlight shone unimpeded upon the herd's farmland, in which a scattering of tall, muscular shapes worked, towering over the stalks that were their livelihood. Horns adorned every head, of sizes and shapes too varied to list. They dragged metal plows through unseeded fields, carried away sheaves of wheat larger than a human body over one arm, broke up rocks under well-shod hooves. The benefit of cultivating crops from all over the multiverse was that there was never a lean season to be found. If you did it right, every day was harvest day.

The one responsible for that feat of planning and scheduling now looked out over the fields from the top of a stone tower erected on the other side of a dirt road formed by many days of heavy hoof beats upon the ground, some ways away from the cluster of farmhouses that contained the rest of the herd. Her window offered a perfect bird's eye view of the situation on the ground, making accounting for the crops and the needs of the environment a... well, not an easy task exactly, but certainly more manageable.

Cinnamon had not wanted the wizard's tower, of course; it had seemed to her a needless extravagance, no matter her new position within the herd. She would have been perfectly fine dispensing her duties from the ground floor workhouses like everyone else, but the bulls and the maids wouldn't hear of it. If she was to practice magic, it was the feeling of their great horned consensus that she should do so in an appropriate setting.

And so above her (admittedly half-hearted) objections, a team of hardy minotaurs, their strongest men and women, had spent a day dragging Agrashan-worked stone blocks from where they had been bought, into the vacant plot on the wheat fields. By the time the sun had set on that same day the tower rose three stories high and was thick enough around to comprise several rooms on each. A roof of thickly woven thatch was placed atop it the morning of the next, created by the deftly practiced fingers of holstaur maids and put into place by those same maids, giggling as they were raised up to do so by the tall, tall minotaurs responsible for the walls.

Cinn's act of christening the place as her own had also been her first true spell: a construction cant to persuade the stones to retain their collaborative shape, and the thatch to shelter her from the elements. Though her magic had been rough and her wording clumsy, Cinn had felt the rumbling, lackadaisical song of the fundamental rock answer her back, the pieces of the world assenting to her will for as long as she required.

Even months later she still cherished the experience, of having spoken to the Domain and receiving a pleasant answer in response. Cinnamon had not been born in the world of her ancestors, but from what she had learned, their previous home had not always been so welcoming. Like many of the folks who now lived here, she felt a duty to be a good steward to the land that had taken her kind in.

Her bedroom at the top of her tower afforded Cinnamon plenty of opportunities to inspect the crops as she began her day, looking over the segmented fields while attending to the laborious process of brushing out her long, voluminous hair. As the sun rose above them, the Waking Red stalks began to stir, coiling around one another in a writhing mass that pulled toward the center of their field, though never enough to pull out their roots.

Cinn rolled her eyes and laid down her heat resistant comb, making a note in the book that never left her side. It was a good thing that the Reds were so lively, it meant that they were close to ready for harvest, but somebody would have to go out there and untangle them. She returned her attention to her hair.

It really was a bother, but when errant knots tended to smoke and carelessly made braiding tended to burst into flame, it was better to take the time each morning to untangle herself before starting her day. Cinn didn't know how her father had managed his equally volatile mane, recollected to her only through dim early childhood memories, but she had come to gather that, as a full blooded fire demon he had somewhat more control over the flames that were his nature.

The genetic lottery for half-breeds was rarely so... convenient.

So she needed special combs to brush her hair, and no pair of scissors in the world could get near it without melting. So it glowed softly in the dark and washing it extinguished the ends away when it got past a certain length. So what? Other than those red and yellow candle-locks she had up there, Cinnamon was just like any other holstaur.

Well, that and the magic.

A knock at the door below, the sound resounding and insistent, heralded the intrusion of that part of her life into her morning. Cinnamon laid down her comb again, craned her neck to inspect the job she had done in her mirror, and decided that it would have to do. She got dressed quickly but without rushing, enduring a second and third further knocks before beginning to make her way down to the ground floor. Minotaurs were never really ones for knocking politely, if they saw a point to it at all; the whole idea was to be heard, after all?

What better way than to pound hard enough to leave dents in the woodwork after?

There were two of the bull men at the door this morning, though they were so different it was hard to consider them so. Knox, the taller of the two, was a recent transplant to the Domain, and a half-demon like Cinnamon, though his parentage had been of demons from another world entirely. As a result his tail was a long and heavy club of bone that extended from exposed vertebrae that sat at the base of his spine like polished gems. Its tip was bell-shaped, and adorned with the spikes common to the demonic side of his family tree, but this was the only sign of it he had inherited; the rest was tall, well-muscled bullflesh, a handsome young man of dark brown skin mottled with white shades along the trunk of his body. The nose at the end of his snout was a rather disarming shade of pink, the only part of him that was not outwardly, obviously serious and, thus, deeply adorable.

Beside him was Strawberry, thin and lithe, substantially shorter than either Knox or Cinn. A full-blooded minotaur of the same herd as Cinnamon herself, his body was light gray, spotted darker in random clusters, horns rising above a plume of vibrant pink hair that swept to one side. Owning a rather prominent tail, its thick gray length was almost as long as his legs, ending in a tuft of pink even larger than the tuft of fiery red at the end of Cinnamon's. This was the only outwardly masculine thing about Strawberry; the rest of him was slender and soft, willowy where his fellow minotaurs were muscled and bulky.

In herd lingo, Strawberry was a field pillow. Not a bad position to hold at all, just... something the larger boys and girls, stressed from the rigors of farm work, might need to lean their weight against, for a time. Something Strawberry himself accepted with aplomb.

It was nice to be appreciated at work, after all.

'Wait, you two got sent together?' Cinnamon cocked her head to one side, once she had taken in the two of them adequately. She did so with care: the wooden frame of her door was adorned with a few scorch marks already.

'It's a rota, Cinn.' Knox shrugged. 'We get paired up the way we get paired up.'

'Not that he minds,' Strawberry elbowed the taller minotaur lightly, grinning. 'He gets to hang out with me without spending most of the day elbow deep in hay? That's a bargain, as far as I'm concerned.'

'I'm always concerned when you're around, Berry.' There was no indication that Knox was telling a joke, just the endless patience that one tended to get when talking to him.

'He's right to be, you know,' Strawberry answered, nodding sagely. 'Now, you gonna let us in so we can let you turn us into frogs, Cinn, or are we, like, doing that at your front door? I don't mind either way, keeps the mess off of your nice floors, but your boy Knox might want some privacy.'

'Yes, all right...'

Holstaurs did not naturally come by magic. Oh, they were magical beings, certainly, entities for whom the formation of their souls had come about by a supernatural motivating force, but in terms of actually practicing magic, it was a rarity indeed. Some species can't fly, some can't swim, and the Holstaur races of the multiverse did not, as a fact of biology, have the capability to control the arcane. Which was what made Cinnamon's ability to do so something precious, that the Cretan herd wished to foster.

But how is one taught magic among a species that cannot do it? The Witchwood was stocked with many other friendly communities that could teach the basics, no problem there. How does one practice, though?

The herd, thoroughly practical, had added it to their work rotations.

'No frogs today, unfortunately,' Cinnamon said, leading the two boys to an open space on the ground floor that had not been paved over with flooring, a large circle of fresh earth, inscribed by a borderline of glossy black stones. 'I'm working on the basics of healing magic, actually. Life manipulation, stuff like that. Things that would be useful to the herd.'

'Very sensible,' Knox nodded, seating himself at the edge of that soil circle.

'Certainly something the elders would approve of, sure,' Strawberry shrugged, doing the same on the opposite side. 'And is it what you would like to do with your gifts, Cinn?'

'Would I like to help my clan after everything they've done to encourage me? Yes.' Hair tracing luminous paths through the morning, Cinnamon came to rest between her two practice subjects, letting her heels dig into the earth as she sat. The great earthly intelligence that she had communed with to make her tower sang in lower, quieter tones through the rich darkness below her, a chorus of no words at all, just a resonant drone of quiet life. The song of the common clay, just an octave lower than her own preferred element of fire.

All of the elemental aspects were connected to one another in some way; the link between the earth and the flame happened to be where Cinnamon did her best work. All the universe sung together, and all one had to do was find the right spot in the melody in which to harmonize.

'Berry, you're smaller, come here,' she said, scooting along the floor until the two of them were close enough to touch. 'I'm going to try connecting myself to your nerves for a moment, see if I can get a feel for it. It won't hurt or anything, so try to relax.'

'Usually I'd have you buy me dinner first,' Strawberry smirked. 'But I'm already at your place so... just don't tell my friends, okay?'

'Also, we all have irrefutable proof that that is a lie, Berry,' Knox deadpanned, glaring. There was work that he could be doing while instead he was here listening to the farm troublemaker mouth off.

'All very cute, gentlebulls, but I've got a job to do here, so just sit still...' Huffing, Cinn undid the top few buttons on Strawberry's shirt, pulling the simple linen away from his collarbone and exposing the bare gray shoulder beneath. She ran two fingers along the line there, her eyes screwed closed, her mind at attention. She could feel... the beat of a heart, the iron in his blood, okay, good start.

The solid, dense matter of bone, the slippery complexity of sinew, and... there!

A brighter, scintillating sensation, jagging and jinking along prescribed paths in the beautiful chaos of his body. Drawing her attention and magic tight as an arrow nocked in a bow, Cinnamon cast herself forward toward those signals, electrical impulses pulsing along the vital lines of his form. Some part of her, small and tentative but still stronger than it had been when she had first started out, hooked onto them and was swept away with the signals of his nervous system.

Down his shoulder she raced, as she risked opening her eyes and holding both the real world and the vast inner one she had entered in her head at the same time. Fast as the speed of feeling, she reached his fingertips, lingered for the scantest moment in the soft tissues there, before rebounding back up toward nerve clusters in the neck, the grand trunk of the spine her highway to his brain and, hence, everywhere else.

From here one might begin to hear the low ur-words of the host's thoughts, things that brewed in the gray matter, just outside of the nerve conduits now inhabited. It would be simplicity itself to expand her reach and grasp them, to be in Strawberry's mind, perhaps even to nudge his thinking elsewhere, but... that was not what Cinnamon had come in for. She had a job to do.

'Okay, I think I've...' The cow-girl trailed off for a moment, devoting her attention instead to righting the momentary wobble that attempting to speak had introduced. She tried again in time, going notably slower: 'You should start feeling a soft, warm pressure on your shoulder, Berry. That's me.'

'I do!' Strawberry nodded, reveling in the ghostly change from what had, prior, been quite a cool morning. 'It feels like... Uh, well...' Reddening slightly, the minotaur turned his gaze away, but Cinnamon would have had to have been a fool not to see where he had been looking.

Holstaurs were busty by nature, it was in the genes; the cow magic of their whole thing centralized in the breasts. Holstaur milk was plentiful, nourishing, and vaguely magical on its own in ways that made it a wonderful liquid base for arcane potions and materiel. For better or worse herd culture had learned to embrace this aspect of their women, treating it with a sort of pleasant nonchalance most of the time; no shortage of beautiful, well-endowed women was only as shameful as your society wanted to make it, after all.

Cinnamon herself had always been at the more exaggerated end of that spectrum and, as one might have intuited from her name, she had been born with the expectation of growing up into the softer castes of the herd, as a breeder, or an artisan. Nothing in where she had been destined to go, nor where she had ended up instead because of her magic troubled Cinnamon in the least, but there were certain... facts about the way she looked that she was deeply familiar with. Men and women outside the herd had eroticized her ever since her adulthood, and within the herd she was... well, Cinnamon knew she could go to bed with pretty much any of her herdmates that she wanted.

So, yes, when it was her instigating soft, warm feelings in pretty young men, there were specific places the mind went. Places on Cinnamon's body. It only made sense, really; they were always ahead of her, no matter where she went. Cinnamon smiled and rolled her eyes, ratcheting up the pressure with her mind.

'Alright, alright,' she chided. 'You should be feeling it more now, okay? Harder?'

'Y-yes,' Strawberry stammered, and Cinnamon found herself enjoying this quite a bit. It was really a difference from the mouthy young man who had come into her chambers just a few moments ago.

She might have put this fun to rest right now in favor of working more seriously on her magic, gods' knew that's what Cinnamon should have been doing, but she couldn't help herself. If anything, what she did next was experimenting: retaining the soft, heated texture of the sensation, Cinnamon began to move it, sliding it slowly down Strawberry's arm, brushing the side of his hip before locating it, ultimately, in his lap.

The pretty, feminine bull gasped, his eyes wide and staring. Smirking, Cinn adjusted her glasses and allowed the phantom sensation of her tits pressing between his legs to linger just a few moments longer, before allowing it to dissipate. A great deal of tension left Strawberry's body all at once... but not everywhere. Something decidedly lumpen was now pushing the fabric of his shorts.

'I think that works, don't you?' She said, removing her hands from him for long enough to stretch her fingers. Though she was nonchalant and Strawberry was surprisingly buttoned up, Cinnamon could see that Knox was looking at them closely, now, his brow furrowed. She supposed quiet was rather strange for Berry.

'Yes,' the femboy bull said eventually, slowly. 'Yes I do. But maybe you should try it again, just to be sure it wasn't a fluke?'

The hopeful tone in Strawberry's voice was unmistakable and shameless, but that was okay; sex was sort of his business the way magic was becoming hers. Cinnamon shrugged, regained the connection between the two of them. Once forged, it was so much easier to take back, the mind remembered how to link up. Maybe it was just her, Cinnamon supposed she would never really be able to know, but it made experimentation so much easier...

Envisioning what she wanted, recalling the wet warmth of a hot bath, the soft pressure of lips, this time Cinn attempted to draw a specific sensation into her partner's body, beyond the generic, thoughtless weight she had conjured thus far. The twofold weight of breasts in his lap once more, paired with the trailing of a tongue beneath Strawberry's shirt, traveling along the length of his abs before rolling around first one nipple, then the other.

Shivering, Strawberry's mouth opened, breath coming out hard. His eyes never left the young mage, starting out her day with a more intimate type of magic than he was used to. Nobody had even thrown a fireball yet...