Torren awoke to see his mother bending over, sweeping the ashes back from the fireside coals, and adding some twigs. Her tail swished and her hooves stomped lightly as she worked on getting her blood pumping and our fire going. He felt one of his sisters stir next to him and her bleary eyes lifted to look at him.

“Morning, Sis,” he said, struggling to get his legs pulled under him and then to stand. He stifled his own instinct to swish his own tail, as his oldest sister lay sleeping behind him. If he hit her she would surely inflict tongue lashing on him. Getting up in the morning was always a tricky maneuver, avoiding all dozen of his siblings, who lay around him piled up against each other.

He finally pushed himself up and had room to stamp and swish his tail. While he stamped, using his hoof pads to force blood through his near nerveless legs, he watched Nan, one of the twins, trot over to their mother. After chasing her back and forth in front of the fire for a few seconds, Nan finally caught Mother’s left breast and begin nursing. Her brother, Nesd, was still asleep near the fire, and Mother and Nan had to tread carefully not to step on him. He never was an early riser, Nesd.

Torren looked around to see the rest of his siblings beginning to stir. His Father and Mother always got up a few minutes before the rest of his family, but Centaurs (outside of Nesd) were not known for rising late. Of course, there was hardly room in the house for anyone to work with all of the siblings sleeping on the floor. The house was barely large enough for that.

Finally his legs seemed workable, and he walked to the door and pulled his bow and quiver from beside the door. He had no sooner strung the bow and was about to go out when his mother called him over. “Sacrifice, Torren,” she said, and squirted a few drops of milk into his outstretched hand.

Carefully holding the milk, he opened the door and and walked past his father’s blacksmith shop  to  the beautiful carved poles of Ashteroth, the goddess of motherhood. There he spilled the drops at its base, mumbling a quick prayer for his mother, his siblings, and his future wife. Then he trotted off into the forest, quickly finding a tree to lift his leg against.

“Morning, Torren!” a deep voice said, and he turned to see Father himself, his sledge behind him, and Drazd, one of his younger brothers.

“Good morning, my Father,” Torren said. “I go to hunt.”

“Hunt well,” Father replied, and he and Drazd moved off into the forest in pursuit of firewood. Soon the rest of his siblings would be dispersing into the forest in search of roots, berries, and the like.

Torren was the best hunter of the family, a task he enjoyed and a skill he had worked hard to perfect. There would be no game near his house, so he cantered quietly through the dense forest toward another hill, an area he hadn’t hunted in a while.

After few minutes of steady cantering he dropped back into a walk. He was at least three miles from his house, so there was some hope of game here, preferably a pig. They had just finished smoking a load of fish, so even a small pig would be wonderful to smoke and add to the larder.

He heard a rustling noise in some bushes and turned, raising his bow. But the shape was too tall for a pig so, guessing, he quickly shifted into standard form and called out, “Hello?” He was rewarded with a quick ‘whoosh’ of transformation and the sight of a slightly younger boy stepping from the bushes.

“Torren!” the boy said, even as Torren recognized his friend Grengin. His current form was just barely shorter than Torren’s  but with the same two-hands, two-legs, hoof-less feet, fur-less and tail-less backside. But where Torren wore dark leather overalls, Grengin wore a soft, light, pair of breeches.

Torren spat on his hand and then shook Grengin’s equally spit-covered hand. Being good friends they didn’t bother to hold standard form longer than through the greetings, so they quickly reverted: their clothes merging back into their body as their shapes changed.

In his normal, faun, shape, Gregin was a good two feet shorter than Torren was. It was one thing Torren liked about being a centaur: even at his age he was taller than most other boys or even men.

Gregin’s fur was gorgeous, from his head to the top of his perpetually moving long tail. Centaurs, on the other hand, weren’t known for their beauty. Only Dwarfs and Giants were uglier.

“Got anything yet?” Grengin asked, indicating Torren’s bow, as they turned together and moved off through the forest.

“No, I just got here,” Torren said. Fauns ate less than Centaurs so all Grengin carried was a sling for small game. Fauns tended to be fairly content with shoots and saplings for their diet, so his ‘hunting’ was less serious than Torren’s. He was more interested in the company.

“You want to try up at the meadow?” Grengin asked, an hour later, getting impatient with the forced inactivity. It wasn’t only Faun’s tails that liked to be active, so Grengin was finding the waiting hard.

“OK, “ Torren said, and Grengin dashed off. The meadow wasn’t actually very good hunting, typically, but Torren knew that Grengin really wanted to go. Faun’s, Niads, and Dryads really liked the Spirit House, always coming to the meadow, and sometimes holding their dances there. And, of the three, only Fauns would cross the threshold to the house itself.

Torren would too, of course. Centarus were a tough lot… not like Nyads and Dryads who would panic if they were separated from their tree or river and thus were panicked at the idea of getting trapped in a transformation in the Spirit House. Torren had been in the house dozens of times. Grengin and his other Faun buddies were always dragging him there. They each hoped that they would be the harbinger of the return of the true humans, or even caught in a transformation.

Torren was a few feet behind Grengin when he got to the clearing, and was still in the underbrush, so all he could really see of his friend was his darting tail and a bit of his backside. But that was enough to see him stop dead, transform, and drop to the ground, his standard-form rump sticking high up above his prostrated face.

Startled, Torren transformed himself and  hurried forward. It would never do to keep a god, even the most minor, waiting. Or, worse, to try to hide.

He kept his clothes on, however, as Grengin hadn’t removed his. Obvioiusly this couldn’t be one of those gods that liked their worshipers nude.

Then he came around the corner and my heart stopped. This was no minor deity! This was Torren-Ra, the God of Centaurs himself, and his own name-god!

Torren, too, fell on his face before the shining, crystalline, creature. In Centaur form himself (and this god was a definite him, unlike some gods which were definitely female, and a couple, such as the Faun god, whose gender was more in question. It wasn’t like you could ask them!), Torren-Ra towered over Grengin and Torren, as he would tower over his father or the tallest of his uncles.

“Rise, Torren, Son of Torren, Son of Torren,” the gods voice said in Torren’s head, and he rose, his standard-form dripping acrid sweat down its furless body. His fathers standard form could almost be said to have some fur, and even his mothers had some in the armpits and elsewhere. But the standard form for the as-yet-unchanged merely had a thick mop of fur on top and was pink and slick below. Pink, slick, and, in his extreme fear, covered in sweat.

His knees knocked as he tried his best to face his name-god eye to eye. He had been told that this god appreciated that; not that he had ever, ever, had the opportunity to know! He had been told Torren-Ra had put in a brief, dream-like, appearance at his name-sacrifice, and he had felt his presence  fairly often for their routine sacrifices. But this was a full appearance! If he lived, he would speak of this all of his life!

“Do you serve me, little one?” the great god asked Torren.

“Of course, great one,” Torren said, resisting the temptation to prostrate himself again under that powerful and dangerous gaze.

“Beware, then, The One,” he said, and Torren thought, frantically. Who was ‘The One’? But he dared not ask.

“Greatly can I reward you, if you serve me,” the god said, adding to Torren’s growing confusion. Of course he could! And greatly punish him if he didn’t!

Suddenly, behind him, Torren saw a sight which shocked him almost as much as the appearance of Torren-Ra; a sight which caused Grengin himself to cry out. The Spirit House, which had stood on this hill, unchanged, all their lives; the Spirit House, with its ring of mushrooms, its ginger bread walls and ceiling, with the unslaked fireplace sending smoke continuously into the air, the Spirit House flickered, and transformed.

Once, twice, thrice it silently flickered and changed, each time transforming instantaneously into another house. A house they  had heard of all our lives but had never seen.

“See that you serve me!” Torren-ra roared, and vanished. Torren looked at Grengin who looked back, mouth badly agape. Their whole lives had just changed and neither had any idea into what.

“What… what should we do?” Grengin asked. “Did you see the house?”

“Yes, and I saw the god!” Torren said. “But I have no idea what he meant. What ‘one’?”

“I dunno. But the house!”

Torren sighed. Fauns were so obsessed about the Spirit House. “What about it? What do you want to do?”

“Can we go up and see?”

“Sure, Grengin,” Torren said. Here they had had a visitation, a manifestation, a full-blown appearance, from Torren-Ra and all Grengin could talk about was the Spirit House.

The two trotted up the hill to the house, and Grengin rushed in, trotting from room to room, and stopping, every few seconds, to peer out the window. “Anything changed?” Torren asked him, after he had made a complete circuit about twelve times.

“No, no, everything seems about the same. And nobody else seems to have noticed!”

Torren understood why his friend was excited. Every Faun wanted to be the one who was present at the return of the true humans… not to be part of a group of excited onlookers. While few creatures alive had ever seen then, true humans were rumored to have all sorts of exciting and new things to trade. His own mother had some jewlery, passed down to her, from a long ago trade with a true human.

“No, they don’t,” Torren agreed, looking out the window himself, looking back at the meadow, back toward Torren-Ra had appeared.

“Don’t tell anyone, will you, Torren? About the house transforming? Please?”

“You mean, except for my mother, father, and all my siblings?”

“Yeah, except for them,” Grengin said, dismissively. What kind of son wouldn’t share such news with his father and family?

“I’ll have to tell about the visitation, too,” Torren said. His heart was still racing. Torren-Ra, himself? Who didn’t get a visitation, or even a visit, from one of the little flower goddesses? Or a stream god? Not a river god, of course, that was much more rare. But Torren remember one rainy day when he had spent three whole hours chatting with a stream god, the god of a very temporary stream that had only existed for those three hours, created by the rain and dying at the end.

The silly thing had mostly talked about the jealousies among the gods, and all about how those gods were sleeping with various other gods… in some pattern which made this god very jealous, although Torren hadn’t understood it at all. Like most centaurs his parents tended to be pretty stay-at-home types so he never really understood all of the various jealousies and adulteries.

“Yeah, sure, that was awesome! That was Torren-Ra, wasn’t it?”

“Uh huh.”

“I only get to see Pan at the midwinter dance,” Grengin said. “Of course, I’ve seen Grengin-Ra a lot more than that.”

Torren nodded. Fauns tended to name their children after plants, and the Grengin-berry bush was a fairly rare bush, thus Grengin-Ra tended to pay a lot of attention to its particular worshipers and name-sakes. Torren remembered one time when Grengin-Ra had frozen Grengin’s tail for a whole week as punishment for some sin that Grengin had never told him about. It wasn’t all that rare for Grengin and Torren to see Grengin-Ra while out hunting together, especially after Grengin had made a blood sacrifice at one of his bushes.

“Don’t you tell about that, either!” Torren said. Grengin didn’t  see his parents for a week or so at a time, but he was an inveterate gossip, so he would tend to tell everyone else pretty much everything. Torren figured that was why Faun mothers weren’t worried to death about their kids… the faun gossip network probably brought her news every five minutes.

“Aw, Torren…” Grengin whined. Giving up talking about the switching of the house was his own idea, his own secret, but giving up talking about Torren-ra was something else.

“They’re probably related,” Torren said, and saw his friend’s face get studious (as studious as Faun’s get, which isn’t very).

“You could be right,” he said. “It would be a big coincidence, otherwise.”

“So, no talking about Torren-Ra!” Torren insisted.

“Ok,” he said, reluctantly.

“I need to get something for us to eat,” Torren said. “My family needs the meat.”

“Ok,” Grengin replied and, with many a backward look, the two went, together, off into the forest.