Hurricane #21: The Taur (Patreon)

Serrano took a slow step, then another, then another.

“Good. Good.” Sarah clapped. The faerie wolf had grown to giant size—unlike Serrano, keeping her clothes in the process—and had insisted on coaxing the newly-minted taur to walk on four legs.

“It’s not that hard once I stop thinking about how it all works.” She’d brought up a gentle warm breeze to go along with the bright sun, helping to dry their fur. It had a way to go, given just how much fur was involved, but at least she no longer felt soggy.

“Look.” Sarah pointed. “Is that our professor?”

Serrano looked, too. “Yes.” The giant snow leopard strolled toward them along the sidewalk. As he reached the courtyard, he slowed, looking Serrano up and down, both eyebrows lifting considerably. For a moment, his gaze settled on Sarah, too, but he addressed Serrano. “It would seem, Miss Layotl, you have succeeded in…channeling your storm goddess’s power.”

“I have. I guess.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with it, Professor. If Professor Irsaw’s right, and I’m getting worried they are at this point, I’m plugged into the entire world’s weather system and I don’t even know what that means, beyond that if I fuck things up the world literally ends.”

“Any sorcerer is, in a manner of speaking, plugged into the entire world’s magic system, Miss Layotl. It is far more powerful than they are, so they must first learn to control how they tap into that reserve, lest it…overwhelm them.”

“So you’re saying that if I fuck things up, it’s more likely that I’ll literally end.”

“In so many words.”

“Well,” Sarah interjected, “if you don’t learn to control it before the people trying to steal the weather system through you take enough to push the climate past the point of no return, then the world will literally end.”

Serrano groaned and ran her hands through her hair again. “Great pep talk.”

Snep looked back at the wolf appraisingly. “And may I ask who you are?”

“Sarah Wylde, Guardian of the Faerie Realm.”

“You are a Daoine Sidhe.”

“I am.”

Serrano stage-whispered, “Is that faerie for ‘badass?’”

Sarah snorted.

“Yes, Miss Layotl, it is.” Snep pursed his lips, silent for a few seconds before continuing. “I confess…a degree of uncertainty in how to proceed in offering you further assistance. Divine magic is not my purvey.”

“Sarah tells me even beings with, uh, innate magic like hers still have to learn, just like cubs need to learn to walk.”

“Be that as it may.” He paced back and forth in front of Serrano slowly. “I have been…apprised of your situation, at least in part. What is it you wish to use your newfound power for, Miss Layotl?”

Serrano spread her hands, vaguely irritated at the question. “Saving the world.”

He stopped pacing and fixed his gaze on her again. “How do you intend to save the world, Miss Layotl. From what threat, taking what steps.”

She glanced at Sarah, who glanced back, giving a fractional shrug. “The threat, uh, well, is someone named Sark in another world. A human, I guess, and probably the one behind that world having stolen technology from other branches of reality.”

“And I surmise he is taking the weather from ours.”

“The energy in our weather system, yeah.”

“To what end?”

Sarah took that one with a shrug. “We don’t know. But his world’s suffering a climate crisis brought on by industrialization, a pretty common problem across multiple realities at your stage of development. Your reality’s avoided it, possibly because of Ulohne.”

“The goddess whose power Miss Layotl now…has some level of access to.”

“I think she basically is Ulohne.”

Serrano crossed her arms, sitting back on her haunches. “Sarah, I am not a goddess.”

“Bob said—”

“If Bob was so damn smart, he wouldn’t have been wolf food.”

“What does that have to do with it? I’ve eaten plenty of smart people.”

Snep looked at Sarah, arching a brow. She gave him a defensive half-shrug.

“I just—I just don’t—” Three Lords, why was she pushing so hard against Sarah’s cheerleading? “Look, I want to learn how to use this power just enough to fix whatever the hell’s going on. But I don’t want to be a storm god, I want to be a rock star. If I’m a rock star who can do a little weather magic, too, great.” She took a deep breath and looked at Snep. “What we know is that this Sark dude somehow figured out I was connected to the weather long before I did. We know they’ve recruited people here in our world to set up weird technomagical traps to suck power out of me, and that somehow my business manager’s part of it. Maybe a big part of it.”

“And they know we know,” Sarah added. “They’re going to keep coming at us until we stop them. The two advantages we have are that they don’t really know how powerful I am…and they don’t know how powerful Serrano is now.”

“They may well understand what Miss Layotl’s potential is, Miss Wylde, possibly better than any of us do. Your end goal must be to not just break the connection Sark has to this world, but to ensure a new connection cannot be made.”

Serrano frowned. “I suppose just stomping Sarge and Ward won’t be enough, will it, no.”

Snep arched a brow again.

“The connections have to go through Faerie, though, don’t they?” She looked at Sarah. “Can’t your queen block them? Without pruning that branch?”

The wolf started to nod, then stopped at the second question. “Oh. Hmm.”

“Are you really telling me that her only power is pressing the history eraser button?”

“It’s not even your branch. You’re very sentimental for an immortal.”

“I’m not a goddamn—”

“I believe, then,” Snep cut in with uncharacteristic sharpness, “that given that their goal is to take power through you, a logical defense is for you to learn how to prevent them from doing so. If it becomes impossible for them to leech it from you, then the threat is effectively ended.”

Serrano’s ears lifted. “That’s good. Yes.” She swished her tail. “How do I do that?”

“We have circled back to where we started, Miss Layotl. You learn control.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “So you’ll, uh, teach me that, Professor?”

“I will assist when I can, but the burden must primarily fall on you and Miss Wylde.”

“Great.”

“Show some control now. Return to your normal form.”

The coyote-taur blinked. “Um.” Well, she’d done it before, hadn’t she? In a storm, granted, and according to Sarah and the late Bob, she’d been literally struck by lightning doing it. And actually: “The last time it happened, I asked Ulohne to do it.”

Sarah grinned. “Ask yourself, then.”

She narrowed her eyes at the wolf, then closed them, muttering. All right, she could just…just what? Manipulating the weather a few moments ago came almost disturbingly naturally, but shapeshifting wasn’t like that at all. Was it?

Quieting herself, she focused on her small—normal—form. No dice; she didn’t feel any glimmer of movement, any hint of change. All right, wrong tactic. What was the analogy to summoning the rain and then dispersing it? Hmm. She focused on how that size felt, how the world looked from that height, how the ground felt under those paws rather than her current ones.

Still nothing.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she finally groaned.

“You’ve barely given it a try, Miss Layotl. You have the power.”

“Nothing about weather control has anything to do with transforming the way I look!”

“Your current form tells us otherwise.”

“It…” Okay, he was right, but what the hell good did that do her? She transformed when she started focusing on the weather, on using the power flowing through her. Clearly she didn’t transform back just by not focusing on it.

But maybe she could…let go of it.

Closing her eyes again, she tried to visualize the power as lightning, as—no, as a river. As the raging river of her nightmares, but now she wasn’t in it, wasn’t being swept away. She was bigger than the river, astride it, guiding it—and letting it return to calm, to gentle flow. She could just step away. She could stand on dry ground, safe, feel the light breeze through her fur.

When she opened her eyes, she half expected to be standing on the river’s bank, back to her normal bipedal shape and size. She was still in the campus courtyard, but she was right about her form. And height.

“Well done, Miss Layotl,” Snep’s voice came from above.

She looked up at the two towering giants. “Now what?” she called up.

“Now you learn how to hold on to that power against forces trying to take it from you. I, however, must depart for my work, leaving you in Miss Wylde’s presumably capable hands.” He nodded down. “Avoid damaging any campus buildings.”

The coyote gave him a weak thumbs-up. “Got it.”

As he walked off, Sarah dropped into a crouch. Serrano couldn’t help but scramble back; it was like having an attractive wolf-shaped building come down in front of her. “So we have a challenge.”

“How do I train against something that only the bad guys seem capable of doing before I have to go up against them.”

The giantess nodded. “Exactly.”

“Well.” She spread her hands. “You’re the supernatural warrior, not me. How would you handle that?”

“Try to catch the weakest ones I could by surprise.” She sighed. “I’m not sure how to apply that here, though. Until our encounter with Bob, all of your encounters have been dream-walking, but sending you back to your apartment to sleep might be asking for a lot of trouble. They know we’re on to them, and the next time they go after you, they’re going to go hard.”

Serrano nodded. “So, the weakest ones in the waking world.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I might have a plan.”