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Next to the centaurs, and sometimes on their backs, were women. And—Divina inhaled sharply—little centaurs and human children.
She recalled immediately the words Andros had rumbled into her ear the night before. About the future he saw in her eyes.
A family.
Babies to love.
Oh gods! How she yearned for it!
She’d never wanted anything so fiercely as she did the vision he described to her. She’d never even thought about wanting such things.
Dragons didn’t have babies, right? Dragons were born of magic from eggs.
But…
If she were human, if she stayed human, here in this place and time…could she have this with him?
Just having Andros would be enough, Divina accepted with utmost gratitude. But the dream of having little centaurs who looked just like him… or fillies who had her multi-colored hair…
She wanted that dream so badly she ached.
He’d better win this Challenge, gods damn it! Divina would accept no other outcome.
And then, from the shadows of the giant cavern that was carved into the side of the mountain, the incumbent centaur ruler emerged.
Divina hardly noticed when Andros transferred her bodily into Sorin’s arms, who situated her before him on his gelding like he did before. She was transfixed and quite frankly scared shitless by the massive centaur warrior that confronted her male. She felt light-headed from all the blood that drained rapidly from her face.
Andros was the tallest centaur Divina had ever seen, but Ixion was the biggest, and almost as tall. He looked like he was made of boulders and iron rather than flesh and blood.
His entire body was brown, light on top where he was man, dark on bottom where he was animal. His hair was a coarse, coal-black, as was his thick, tangled tail.
His hooves were the size and likely weight of anvils, and when he stomped them as he approached, Divina felt the earth veritably quiver and shake.
But what scared her wasn’t his size or his obvious godly strength, but the bloodlust and savagery in his pitch-black eyes.
He wore a leering sneer on his scarred, bearded face. Objectively, Ixion was a magnificent specimen of a male, but the evil in his eyes, in his soul, made him hideous to Divina.
Where was the nobility that all centaurs had? Where was the purity and freedom of spirit?
Ixion was an abomination to his own Kind. He had to be stopped.
“Well,” the usurper boomed in his deep, thunderous voice, “if it isn’t the little prince returning to the fold.”
Andros stepped away from the group and faced Ixion head on, his body already bracing for the battle to come.
“I return to claim what is rightfully mine,” he said in his low, even baritone, his voice carrying clearly despite the quietness.
“I Challenge you, Ixion, son of Ares, for the rule of the centaurs. Here and now.”
There was a breathless pause, when time seemed to stop.
And then—Ixion threw back his head and laughed.
Maniacally. Uncontrollably.
Louder and louder his thunderous voice boomed, until the skies overhead churned black with foreboding, white clouds shifting to ominous gray.
Lightning flashed within the gathering storm. As if Zeus himself threw down a thunderbolt, one fiery vein reached from the heavens to split apart a jutting boulder from the mountainside, crushing it into a hail of rocks.
