Christoph was never a particularly big fan of horses. He didn't hate them per say, but the fact that if one stepped wrong he'd lose a foot was enough to put him off. It wasn't usually his job to do anything with the horse on the farm anyway, but the twins had been sent on an errand in town so he was the one who had to hitch the plowshare to Jo, Farmer Keldor's aging draft horse, and till the newest field the farmer had purchased from his neighbor.
He was already sweating through his shirt from spending the morning finding all the big rocks and hauling them off to the border, making a little wall no more than a foot high to mark off the new land while he was at it, and the sun was beating down with a particular harshness as it crawled towards its zenith, so he was mostly just following the horse as it pulled the plowshare through the rich soil, leaning a little too hard on the handles when he heard the squeal of metal on stone.
"Ah hell," he muttered as he stopped, crouching down to look for the rock he must have missed, "Kaldor's gonna have my ass if I wrecked his plow..." But it seemed there was no rock, at least not where he could see it.
It must be below the topsoil, he thought, carefully lifting the heavy plowshare and urging the horse to move further forward and out of the way, setting the whole thing down before going back to the spot.
Sure enough, a stone lay just beneath the surface, where a dozy plowman could scratch it. Happily, it would have only impeded crops, so Christopher counted himself lucky for finding it and immediately set to work digging it out of the ground.
It took some doing, as it turned out to be almost two feet across, but the round stone was flat and relatively light, so he managed to pry it out relatively easily, only to discover that there was a hollow beneath it lined with smaller stones. Inside the hollow was a little stone statue.
"What's this?" he muttered to himself as he lifted it from the hollow, surprised at how light it was. Almost two feet long and apparently made of grey granite, it barely felt heavier than a small river rock, but its size to weight ratio was hardly the most interesting thing about the figure. While vague and simplistic, part of it was recognizable as a man, or at least the upper body of a man. Where the hips would normally begin, the statue instead stretched out backwards in an oblong shape, with four spindly looking legs coming down from it. The strangest part though was between the legs, a long tubular bulge of a shape that reached from the back almost to the front.
It took maybe a moment's thought for him to realize this was some kind of fertility idol in the shape of a centaur.
"What's this thing doing under a field?" he asked Jo, who snorted at him.
"Ah, what do you know?" he said, holding the statue to his ear and giving it a few taps, trying to see if it was hollow.
Muttering to himself some more, he tucked the little statue beneath one of the straps on the horse's harness and got back to work removing every little stone from the hollow and filling it with dirt.
Hours later, the tilling done at last, he was leading Jo back to the barn to drop the harness and rub him down for the night, having quite forgotten the weird little statue he'd found in the field. At least, until it slipped out from where he's stashed it and smashed on the ground.
"Aw nuts," he said, crouching down even as Jo shied away from the noise. Picking up the pieces, Christoph saw that it had been hollow, the horse-body completely empty. Oddly enough, he couldn't remember any seams in the stone, and it hadn't been clay... "Maybe I can fix it?"
He didn't have much hope however, picking up the many pieces. He was never terribly good at puzzles. Instead he simply got all the pieces he could find and tossed them into the rubbish cart at the back of the stable, to be taken and tossed in the morning, and went back to getting Jo all settled for the night.
He managed to get the horse penned into his stall before the dizzy spell hit him, making him lean against the post that edged the wall that divided Jo's stall with the empty one next to it.
"Whoa..." he mumbled, rubbing his eyes as he stood up again, only to be hit with another wave of vertigo, far worse than the last, that actually knocked him off balance and sent him tumbling into the empty stall, hanging off the door and pulling it shut before falling, the back of his head cracking against an upturned bucket and the world went dark.
*~*~*
Waking up, Christoph found himself in a cramped room, with a headache the size of a mountain and a backache that would knock a horse down.
"Oh good, you're up!" a cheery voice answered his low groan, revealing itself to be one of Keldor's brood. Even though one was a boy and the other a girl, they still looked identical from the neck up, with long blond hair, big blue eyes, and lips that could get any man's blood running hot. They even had the same teasing voices. Even after living with them for most of a year, Christoph couldn't figure out which he was looking at now.
"What time is it?"
"An hour after a sunset," the blonde said. "Dad saw you bring Jo in hours ago but you never came in for dinner so when me and Kella-" Ah, so it was Keldan, the brother. "-came back he had us check on you. Good thing too, you probably shouldn't be alone right now."
"Why's that?"
"Try standing up."
"Why do I need..." Even as he questioned, Christoph moved to rise, except it wasn't a movement he was used to. There was far too much mass, and too many limbs that he didn't remember having.
Looking down at himself, he screamed to find a horse where his legs should be, or at least most of a horse. Where the withers would normally transfer to a horse's neck, he found his waist instead. He tried to get up again, to get away from the nightmarish vision, only to see long, dainty legs and hard hooves flailing for purchase, kicking out at the wooden walls of the stall he suddenly filled when normally he would barely be able to touch both sides with his arms outstretched.
