The room was large and fairly bare, with a painted concrete slab floor, and a few antiquated shop-lights, the kind with a broad ceramic brim. There were a few counters, all bare and clean. The room had a slightly antiseptic smell, as if the janitor had just been through, but from the windows on one side Sebastian could smell freshly mown hay, surprisingly rich. He could see the massive house of the owner, up the driveway, and the equally massive barn below it, it's keystone proudly bearing the date "1839."
He stood there a long time, waiting, and finally sat down on one of the counters, though he knew this was probably forbidden. After a while a woman entered, and he quickly stood up. She was very short, no more than five feet, and wore her blonde hair back in a neat, short, ponytail. She wore hayseed overalls and a white T-shirt, and rubber work boots which were a slightly too big for her, and made squashing noises as she walked. She was cute, thought Sebastian, in a harmless, chipmunk kind of way.
"Good morning." He said. She walked over to him, smiled brightly, and stuck a taser into his stomach. He crumpled to the floor like a burst balloon, gagging on a scream. The pain seemed to go through him instantly, to be everywhere in his body at once, and got worse, not better, as he lay on the floor trying to breathe.
"Good morning." She said in a cheery, cute-chipmunk voice. "I'm Emily, and I'm the head groom. Get up."
"What?"
"Get up."
She reached down a hand, and helped him up to his feet. When he let go, she jabbed him with the taser again, and this time he wailed with pain as fell, curling up into a ball. The tears flowed down his cheeks in a torrent.
"No!" He spluttered. "Why?"
"Your name is Sebastian Anderson, right? Now please get up again." She said, ignoring him, "And follow all my instructions very carefully, and you won't get another shock this morning, ok?"
I can't do this, he thought. I can't even be here. I can't get up, I can't follow any instructions, I need to go home.
He got up, standing in a doubled-over hunch, like a cave man. Emily looked him up and down, smiling, as if she had just met an old friend and was admiring her dress.
"Strip, Sebastian." She said. As he began to take off his shirt, she hoisted herself up onto the counter where he had been sitting. Her feet dangled well off the ground, she was so tiny. "All the way, of course."
He set his shirt on another counter, and then unbuttoned and lowered his pants. Finally, with a moment's hesitation, he slid down his boxers. Sebastian was always excited at that moment, naked before a new woman, but he was too churned up to get an erection. All the same, a tiny drop of crystal glistened at the end of his cock.
"There." He said.
"Very nice. Now, for a man, you're naked." This seemed elementary. "But not for a pony. This morning I am going to change the way you think about being naked. And I hope you'll cooperate, or it will take longer, and be more difficult." She enunciated difficult, as if it was a word she especially liked, a word that made her hungry. She might have been saying "We wouldn't want any more chocolate, would we?"
"Now then. Come over here and turn around. Yes, face the windows. Now then, put your hands behind your back."
"Like this?"
"Yes, but you don't need to cross them. That's it." She quickly locked his wrists with fairly loose, light metal shackles. He could still twist them about freely. I could probably even work these under my legs, jump-rope style. If I have a chance.
Emily hopped down from the counter and began taking measurements of his feet, sorting through several pairs of boots in the cupboards below the counters.
"So," she said chattily, "you're probably a bit anxious, that's normal. That's human. But soon you'll be a pony, and you won't have to have any anxieties."
"Sounds great." He said sardonically.
"I don't know. Ponies have fear, of course, and they have pain and discomfort. Lots of it. Although it isn't too bad if they're obedient and if they compete well. But it's a difficult trade-off. Why did you make it?"
"We were breaking up. My lover wanted to sell me."
"Yes," Emily scooted him back up on a counter, and started buckling him into one of the boots. "But surely you could have said no at one point or another. What was the attraction?"
"A challenge, I suppose. To lose control. To be free of…free will."
"Maybe." Emily nodded. "And we take it on for you, the grooms. Trust me. And I take it on double, for all of the grooms." She sighed, buckling the other boot. "Every night the ponies sleep without any anxiety, and the grooms toss and turn: is Dolly eating enough? Does Minka need more discipline? And I don't get to sleep at all, because I am worrying about the grooms." She rose to face Sebastian, bright-eyed, and he could not believe, looking at her fresh cheeks, that this young woman had just mercilessly stuck him with a taser twice. "It's conservation of anxiety, yes? Conservation of free will."
"Maybe so. Can I try out my boots?" He said eagerly, for they seemed to fit very snugly, and were perversely appealing. A symbol of this new thing, this new life.
"Not yet. Lie down on the counter, and spread your legs."
He did, and now his cock started to unfurl itself. Emily just smiled. She took a can of shaving cream out of a drawer, and squirted a large pile of it on his cock, until it vanished in the cool foam.
"You're going to shave my pubic hair?"
"Yes, and the hair on your legs. So hold still."
She worked the shaving cream all over his lower body, and then began very carefully applying a battery razor, wiping up one piece at a time with a hand towel. She was meticulous, and slow.
"Your usual groom," she said, "Is going to be Hannah. She's a disciplinarian, but I think you'll find she has a heart of gold. Everyone falls in love with Hannah eventually, the ponies and the grooms. But don't let that get you jealous. We have no use for jealous ponies."
"How many ponies are there?"
"Twelve, right now. Mostly Dakota Striders, that's what you'll be soon, is a Dakota Strider. It's a good breed. We just sold Pleides, and we had to retire Draco. That was very sad. He hurt his knee, and we had to send him back to being a human. He'd been with us for a long time, too." Hannah looked genuinely depressed to be talking about this. "I hear his knee's better, but it's no good coming back once you've been human again. You can only be a pony once, that's the consortium's rule. And it's a good one. Otherwise, all the ponies would think you can go back and forth, and that ruins your pony-mind. But you'll understand all of this in a week or two, without my lecturing you, either." She sighed. "Do you have any other questions?"
"Thousands." He said, laughing a bit for the first time since he had arrived.
"Ok, I'll answer three." She said. "And you should know that I'll be totally honest with you every time you ask me a question." She smiled impishly.
"All right." What to ask? He did have thousands of questions, but they were all so specific, little specific details in a fetish which is infinitely detailed. What was the big picture he wanted to know about? "How long will I be here?" But he didn't want to ask that, or know the answer. "Will I be allowed to speak?" Somehow, of all the possible tortures that could lie waiting for him in the barns, silence seemed by far the most unbearable.
"You're allowed to speak, yes. You're allowed to do whatever you want-ponies don't have to follow a set of rules, they just need to please the grooms. But by the time you've become a Dakota Strider, you won't be able to speak." He started, and she instantly lifted the razor with a practiced defensiveness. She stroked his leg, a calming gesture. "You are still welcome to communicate with your eyes, or scratching letters in the dirt - most ponies try that - but I think you'll find that the most eloquent language is your posture, and your gracefulness, and your obedience."
"So it's all bullshit," he said, drily, "about your answering questions honestly, because I won't get to ask them."
"No, it's not bullshit." She said. "I will always answer you honestly. Only you won't, indeed, be able to ask me many other questions. Just one more, I believe."
"Wait, are you telling me…" He checked himself, realizing that his growing panic was making him stupid. "No, no, that's not a question. All right. Let me think." She nodded as if to say that that was a good idea, and finished shaving him. She rubbed him down with brandy, which felt wonderfully odd over such a large area. He looked at his cock and balls, bare and erect, a streamer glistening at the tip of his penis. This is what she means by 'a new kind of naked,' or whatever. She shook a pair of piercing hemostats out of a plastic bag. He had his question.
"Will I ever get to come?"
"Aha!" Emily waved the hemostats happily. "A very good final question. Because the answer isn't so simple. It depends on how well you please your groom, for starters. If you're obedient, and perform well, Hannah might let you come fairly often. Not so often as Tomas would - he's the softy - and not so rarely as Ingrid would. Ingrid feels that her ponyboys behave better with their seed inside them, and I think she has a point. But if you misbehave, then no, you won't get to come much at all. Stick out your tongue."
He did, and she examined it for a moment.
"Any last words?"
Panic clutched at him. He stared at this tiny woman with her hemostats and cotton balls. "I think you're beautiful." He whispered.
"Oh, that's so sweet." She said. She swabbed his tongue and gripped it in the hemostats. The pressure was intense. With a small needle, she deftly poked a hole through his tongue, quite far back, and he shook with pain. Tears welled in his eyes again, and she dabbed at them with more cotton balls, not removing the needle.
"Now, what I've said so far is true of the regular stallions," she said. "But if you're quite exceptional, someday you might be chosen as a stud, like Orion. And then you'll get to cover the fillies and come until your dick is sore. It's every stallion's dream. You'll see. Once you have a pony-mind, you'll have pony-dreams. You won't want to fuck a girl, you'll want to cover a filly. It's part of the change you go through." She withdrew the needle, making him wince again, and daubed his tongue with some kind of sour antiseptic.
"If you're exceptional in other ways, we might have to make you a gelding, like Chessy. We do that with an ecraseur, sort of like this, but for your cock." She held something up, but at the angle she was holding his tongue, he couldn't see it. "And then, of course, you would never get to come anymore, after that."
With a smile, she inserted the tongue-stud, and then snapped the two halves of it together with a pair of pliers. It was like no tongue ring Sebastian had ever seen or heard of, and his hands clutched together behind him in sheer terror. Each half of it, above and below his tongue, was a round ball of rubber or something like rubber. The lower one, which sat just below the tip of his tongue, seemed to be about the size a marble. The upper one was much larger-the size of a walnut, perhaps. But everything feels big in your mouth, right? Right? Together they seemed to fill his mouth. He could not guess how big they were, but clearly there was little room left to chew, let alone speak.
"There!" Said Emily, beatifically happy. "Now you have a pony body. Soon you'll have a pony-mind, too, but the body is what lets it all happen. Stand up!"
He got to his feet. His tongue felt swollen, and he felt that he could not close his mouth, although it was, he realized, closed. He was salivating profusely, and kept swallowing his spit. The boots, which he had almost forgotten, were huge, heavy things. They started just below his knees and gradually widened, so that there was no sign of his heels. He was on tiptoe inside the boots, and this made him stand at an unaccustomed angle. With his arms cuffed behind his back, he had to keep quite a steady posture to avoid losing balance. The boots ended, of course, in metal horseshoes, which made a slight jingling sound on the concrete floor.
Now Sebastian began to panic. His mouth filled, balancing in these heavy boots, his wrists twitching against their bonds - he could not bear it for a moment longer. He couldn't. He needed to get out.
Emily clapped her hands together, gleeful. "Oh, wait until Hannah sees you. You're almost perfect. Now listen carefully. You are a naked pony. Do you understand? Nod if you understand me." Her voice had changed somewhat, as if she were talking to a child, or an animal. He nodded. "Ponies get to wear lots of other things too, sometimes. Especially when they've been very good or very bad. But this is how they look naked. Your tongue will always be a pony tongue. Your arms will always be bound behind you, although often your groom will want to bind your elbows, too, which makes you more elegant. And you will always wear your horseshoes, although we will have to re-shoe you from time to time. Nod if you understand me."
Sebastian nodded, and something like "Ruurrk." A tear ran down the side of his nose, and onto his lip. Emily cocked her head and looked at him lugubriously. "We usually punish ponies if they cry in the day for no reason. We let them cry at night. But that's a matter for your groom to deal with. Now, come along this way, and we'll finish the job."
He hobbled after her, mincing in these strange new boots. A string of drool trickled from one corner of his lips, and he was horrified that he could not wipe it up. She led him out into the yard, and in through the mowing gates of the huge barn, which was built into the hillside. Before his eyes adjusted, he almost stumbled on the exposed nails of the threshing floor, and Emily caught him, laughing.
"Down these steps."
She led him down to a lower threshing floor. On one side there were two rows of stables, and more stables behind those. A dozen bridled, bitted faces were peering at Sebastian, curiously. Another man and woman, in work clothes, came up to join Emily. The woman had a bridle which she fitted around Sebastian's head - a bosal bridle, someone called it. It consisted of two loops of leather - one ran over his forehead and behind his ears, and the other looped around his chin and just below his nose. They were connected with little buckling straps. This added pressure on his jaws made him drool all the more, as his mouth protested its new adornment.
"Isn't he handsome, though?" Said the new woman, a cute brunette, slightly taller and plumper than Emily.
"And that's a nice piece of equipment between his legs." Said the man, who seemed to be Latino.
"Tomas, is Maxon coming?"
"Yes, he's on the way."
"Great. Hannah, you want to check on the branding iron?"
Branding iron? No. Not right now. I need to settle down, folks, before you start branding me or putting me on the rack or whatever other medieval crap you've got.
But Hannah was saying, "Yeah, I'll get the tails, too. Has Maxon picked one out yet?"
"No, he wanted to see the colt."
"Right." Emily pulled down on the side of the bridle and fastened it, somehow, to a ring in the floor. With short lengths of leather cord, she and Tomas tied Sebastian's hooves to two more rings, so that he stood bent-over, legs spread apart. Hannah came back with a wicker basket and gave Sebastian's cock a friendly little squeeze.
"The iron's still black. I turned the damper up a bit."
Sebastian stole a frightened peak at the giant pot-bellied stove that sat near the center of the barn, its chimney snaking up into the rafters. It was piled with cast-iron pans like a sink full of dirty dishes, and the front door was open. The wooden handle of a long iron rod projected ominously. Oh god no. Not that. Not now.
"Good afternoon, good afternoon." Boomed a man's voice. "Emily, thanks for setting him up. How is he?"
"A little nervous, but he bears up well."
"Good, good." The man who was approaching wore a summer dress coat, and he carried a meerschaum pipe that seemed to be unlit, but he sucked at it anyway, as pipe-smokers do. He was almost sixty, Sebastian thought, and heavy-set but not really out of shape. He stroked his beard, betraying a sort of amusement but no real excitement at seeing his latest purchase.
"You had Kevin bust his ass on these," said Emily jovially. "Which one is it going to be?"
"Oh, you know," said the man - Maxon - as he rooted through the basket. "I like to have my options open." He held up what Sebastian first thought was a whip, but it was not a whip. It was a butt-plug, a sort of diamond-shaped phallus on a slender neck. The "whip" was hundreds of thin leather traces, dyed a chestnut brown that nearly matched Sebastian's hair. It was a tail.
"Darker." Said Emily.
"Yes." He pulled out another. The plug - which Sebastian knew would momentarily be inside him - was ominously wide at its equator. I can't do that, he thought, and the panic squirmed in his mind with the hundreds of other impossibilities that he was suddenly being swept into.
"Ok, we're ready." Hannah called from the stove.
"Just a second."
Sebastian smelled something vaguely like shoe polish, and then shuddered as Emily was massaging a cream into his anus. It was very cold, and made him gasp, spilling more drool down his chin and onto the rope that fastened his bridle to the floor.
"Here we go," said Emily. Sebastian groaned as he felt the plug widen him, open him up. His ex-lover had used him in that way, once or twice, and he knew very well how his ass would clamp down at her first try, and he would plead "just take it out for a second and try again." And then all would be smooth going. But he could not plead, now, except with his uncontrollably trembling legs. And Emily seemed impervious to that. Slowly, relentlessly, she pushed the phallus in deeper.
And then, for a split second, Sebastian felt the heat radiant against his leg, before everything exploded into a pain he could not have imagined. He felt many hands clutching him, holding him still - he heard his own screams echoing off the barn walls without remembering them leaving his lips. He felt the impossible release as the wide circumference of the plug passed into him, and yanked in the receding taper of the plug behind it. Miles away, he heard someone counting down from five. It took them years.
And then he was lying on the floor, drooling copiously, thrashing weakly against his bonds. The brand seemed to dominate his universe. Every nerve fiber in his body radiated out from that little portal. They rooted in his hooves, in his tail with its thin neck fixed in the tight grip of his surrendered anus, in the silencer in his tongue. In the wrist shackles he was straining at desperately. He wanted to black out from the agony, but he couldn't.
"What's his name?" someone breathed, respectfully.
"Sirius." Said Maxon.
Once, it seemed like ages ago, Turquoise had been a human. A girl. Her name had been Karen Bennett. She had lived in a very small apartment with two housemates, one of whom chain-smoked, and she worked in the office of an advertising firm, where her job was to index sounds. She knew this, she remembered it, and yet it seemed completely absurd to her, a fantasy of a kind of life that no one would willingly live. She had been a ponygirl for so long, and on so many different farms, that that seemed to be the whole of her world. She was not born in Brooklyn with two snotty brothers, nearly thirty years ago. No: it seemed more accurate to say that she had been born in the barn at Lazy K, eight years ago, the eleventh in a family of beautiful ponies, all under the loving, sadistic care of Dr. Brooks.
Every stable made ponies in its own way, and the Doctor's method was distinctive. He did not like the two-legged, bound-armed method that most of his peers used. "It is too human," he would gripe, "and anyway it is a waste of perfectly good limbs." He fitted his ponies with heavy boots on their feet, as everyone did. But he also laced their fore-arms into boots on the end of short stilts - fourteen inches, in Turquoise' case. Much heavier boots, too, to keep their hooves from getting any ideas about being hands. Thus his creations were true quadrupeds, and after exhausting and painful training, they had learned the real gaits that only a quadruped can master: the trot, the canter, and the gallop.
Each of the doctor's ponies was also fitted with a tight, broad, belt, which was never removed. Once a year, Turquoise had been re-shoed, an experience she found more frightening every time. She did not like to see her fingers and toes, useless and helpless little things, without any grace. But the belt never came off. From it, just below her navel, there hung two chains which reached down to her knees, to the very tops of her boots. These chains helped prevent her from arching her back, which in a quadruped with a human's spine is a recipe for disaster. But equally importantly, they prevented her and her stable-mates from ever standing upright. Their four-hooved gait was not simply a hard-won ability: it was a necessity. And all the bipedal ponies she met saw this, and she could read the respect in their eyes, for she was more truly a beast than they were.
That was not the end of the Doctor's now-famous design. She had also been silenced - not with the rubber balls above and below the tongue, but rather with a plate of cushioned metal, fixed through her cheeks with four little studs. It was quite large enough to prevent any hope of speech, or even of closing her jaws all the way, but it left room for the addition of a bit whenever her master or mistress chose to use one.
When the Doctor finally sold her to Thurim Ranch, she had had paroxysms of jealousy and self-righteous self-pity. There she saw dozens of other ponies, most of whom could stand upright. Only she and one of the studs, Ramses, were quadrupeds. The other ponygirls were sometimes even allowed to use their hands, and most of them could talk when they weren't bitted and the grooms weren't listening. They were in awe of her, and they made fun of her, and she found herself both despising them - they were not, after all, real ponies like her - and also wanting terribly to be one of them, to be given back her hands and her voice, to stand head-high on her hind feet.
Finally she decided to ignore her frivolous stable-mates, and turn all her energy into practicing for the games. She placed third in her category at the St. Angelique race in '98, and also performed very well in the long jump. Shortly after the race, a Dutch buyer purchased her at auction, for a price that made her proud.
Then a terrible time had begun for Turquoise. There was an interminable sea voyage, where she was locked up in a pitch-black room, tossing and turning in straw she had already fouled. When they arrived, the Dutchman's estate was tiny - an old, stately house in the suburbs, with a high wall for privacy but nowhere to run, no pasture to graze in. He was not often there, either. She spent most of her time in the stable, looking forward to the days when she would be covered by a stud, which the groom marked on the calendar in little blue Xs.
And when that day came, she would paw the ground impatiently all morning, and had usually been whipped for orneriness once or twice before the stallion arrived. Usually he was a two-hooved beast, but once they brought her a lusty four-hooved stud, a Greek stallion with bronze skin and a cock as hard as bronze. He had opened her wide, almost knocking her down onto the floor where her ankles were fettered, crying out his pleasure. When the grooms dragged him off her, she felt her sopping cunt implode with longing, as if he had sucked out its purpose when he left. And then he had kicked aside the grooms, and mounted her a second time as they whipped him and shouted. She thought she would die with happiness.
But the Greek stud never returned, and her life became a dull tedium of giving the occasional guest two turns around the barnyard, or making a mess in order to get the attention of a whipping. When the Dutchman sold her back to Thurim Ranch, she was so grateful she did not mind the weeks of darkness at sea.
Then there had been Gigi's Place, where she began to learn new kinds of discipline. Gigi demanded the utmost from all her ponies, and made sure she got it. It was Gigi's grooms who first began milking Turquoise, as they did all her ponygirls, to make the cashcaval cheese that sold, in certain places, for $1000 a pound. She was milked daily for years after that, until the consortium decided to seal her nipples with heavy steel rings. It was Gigi who changed Turquoise' rubber tail-phallus for one with a sliding lead weight inside: a two-pound slug of metal in oil, that made the rod thrust inside her whenever she moved. It was Gigi who re-trained Turquoise to canter and gallop to the beat of this internal metronome. And most of all, it was Gigi who once punished Turquoise by blindfolding her for a hundred days. In that time she had eaten and slept and been trained, she had run races and been covered by studs, without even the shuttered slit of the world that normal blinkers allowed. In that dark torture, she had realized that parts of her were still human. Even though she had given up her hands and tongue and eyes, and given up control over all the rest of her - her welted flanks and occupied ass; her public cunt; her breasts which surrendered bowls of milk every morning - she still had a human mind, in part, and a human heart. And she tried to give them up, into the darkness behind the blindfold, but she was never sure if she had.
And then there had been the giant, sprawling stables of San Rafael, on the white beaches of Baja California, and lots of racing. Racing and studs to her hearts content. She had won the St. Angelique endurance race in '02, racing against half a dozen of the fastest and toughest ponies, and everyone in the world wanted to buy her. But fame was fleeting. In the next season, the market was flooded with dragon-girls from Asia, and no one seemed interested in ponies for a while. Miserable with a stomach virus, she placed fifth in her category at St. Angelique, and Maxon had bought her for only six figures.
Canada was quiet, and cold, after the immensity of San Rafael, where the consortium owned almost eighty ponies at one time, and assorted other beasts of the underworld besides. There had been centaurs and mermaids there, and for a while Turquoise was sad in her heart that she had not become a mermaid. But she was pony, a good pony, and here in Broken Oak there was no need for anything but ponies.
Eight years, her papers said. And for that, she had the body and mind and soul of a pony, as perfect as any beast in the stable. She had memories like dreams, and they were tied together for her only by the chance comments of stable-hands and grooms, buyers and sellers, and the sequence of brands on her right flank. The Doctor's Lazy K. The four little balls of Thurim. The Dutchman's tattooed coat-of-arms, too ornate for a branding iron. A pair of interlocking, lower-case "g"s. San Rafael's enigmatic spiral. And now the stylized tree of Broken Oak. Without that line of scars, she would no doubt have forgotten what order it all happened in.
She liked Broken Oak. There were no talking ponies; no humans dressed up as horses. The newcomers, like Sirius, were indecisive, but their indecisiveness was poignantly doomed under Emily's firm guidance. She liked to watch Sirius's beautiful brown eyes in the morning. He would wake up mostly human, bewildered, looking for some human thing like a bed or a "bagel," which the grooms sometimes ate. (Turq did not remember the taste bagels. They looked to her like teething rings, or ring gags, only they were too big and soft.) And then, each morning, his eyes would go wide and sad, and he would strain his neck, as if he had just been booted and collared and he were being broken anew. By the time Hannah had been through to clean out his stable and wash him, he would be a perfect image of a happy pony. Turquoise would watch him, then, and his concerns were pony concerns: would he be whipped? Would Hannah masturbate him after his evening rub-down, as she very occasionally did? Would he ever be allowed to cover…Turquoise did not finish her own thought.
There were other nice things about Broken Oak. Even though most of the ponies were bipeds, Emily did not run them on their hands and knees, a pose that Turquoise found ridiculous. Only the true quadrupeds - Turquoise, Jasper, Coral, and Minka - were run that way.