Tessa Quickstep

They call me Tessa Quickstep. Not because I run fast—though I love to—but because my hooves click against the cobbles like punctuation in a language of their own. I like it that way.

I’m small for my kind. You’d know the second you saw me. Most centaurs tower over the humans around them. Here the humans look me straight in the face without craning their necks. Some find that disarming. Others, endearing. Truth is, my small stature does more than just set me apart. It frees me.

And stars above, I’m grateful for it. While the others spend half their years nuzzling newborns and weaving lullabies into the rustling branches, I’m free to wander. I sleep where I want. Sometimes it’s a stable in the artisan’s ward, sometimes the velvet couch of a friend who doesn’t mind hooves on the floorboards.

In the city, I’ve got friends. Human ones. Kind ones. A few—more than a few, if I’m honest—I’ve shared body heat with on winter nights, curled together like anything else in nature that seeks warmth and pleasure.

The arbor mares gossip about that. That I consort with humans. That I let them touch me, kiss me, breathless in the quiet hours before dawn. Let them whisper. Their world is cradle and canopy. Mine is perfume and poetry and tea steeping in cups.

No one knows why I’m small.

I was born like all the others—slick with birthglow and swaddled in moss, under the watchful hush of the arbor boughs. The elders pressed their palms to my brow and declared me healthy.

My mother nuzzled me just the same. I drank the same milk, slept in the same creche woven from gloweed and sap-lace. But while the other foals began to stretch tall and sure, their limbs lengthening with the seasons, I remained… compact. My hooves stayed dainty.

They said I might catch up. Then they said I was simply a late bloomer. Later still, they stopped saying much at all, just letting me drift toward the edges of things, until one day, the canopy thinned, the forest gave way, and I found the city.

What a strange wonder it was: walls in place of bark, windows instead of leaves, door chimes instead of birdsong. But most of all: the bookstores.

Oh, the bookstores. Endless aisles, narrow and tall, carved into old townhouses or tucked behind cafés. I taught myself how to read—staring at signs, sounding out words, asking questions until I puzzled out tales of desert expeditions, shipwrecks, lost loves, dragon feasts, or dry treaties that turn unexpectedly thrilling after midnight.

My two favorite humans are booksellers.

One is Mira, a lovely older woman whose hands always smell faintly of rose lotion and parchment. Her spine curves gently, like the old birch trees back home, and though she no longer stands tall, her presence fills the shop like soft candlelight. She hums when she works—and often calls me “darling hoof-girl” when asking for help. I don’t mind.

I reach the high shelves for her, reshelving volumes of poetry or philosophy where she can’t anymore. In exchange, she reads to me sometimes. Her voice is slow and deliberate, full of weathered joy.

The other is Elias. He’s younger than me in years, probably, but wise in the ways of ink and paper. The shop belonged to his grandfather, who passed it to his father, who passed it to him. There are photographs on the back wall: three men with the same eyes, the same hands smudged with charcoal and ink.

Elias lives for stories—not just to read them, but to make them. He’s teaching me how to write. At first, I thought I’d be no good at it. I stumbled over grammar, mixed up my tenses. But he only smiles and corrects me gently… you don’t need this comma, here’s a word that might fit better, try getting closer to the emotion of the moment.

“You’ve got stories in you,” he said once, tapping a finger against my ribs. “I can hear them echo.” I smiled because I was learning that he was right about me—and because it tickled.

He runs a small press from the back of the shop. Most of the writers he publishes come from the writers’ circle that meets on Thursdays. I sit in sometimes, listening, learning. Mira says writing will take me farther than my hooves can, and I believe her.

I never intended to fall in love. Love is a thing mothers share with their fouls. Love is a thing that romantics fill pages with.

At first, it was the kind—loyalty, quiet devotion—you feel for someone who believes in you when you’re still fumbling, when your sentences wobble and your punctuation doesn’t know where to land. Sees your efforts and calls them stories. Listens, never interrupting, never assuming.

And the nights. Not always, but enough. The ones where he invited me, not with words, but how his eyes lingered at closing time. We wouldn’t talk much. I’d stretch myself out across the soft rug in his attic room, and he’d curl against me, head nestled in the crook of my forelegs.

The first time he did it, I barely breathed. My body knew before my mind did. I told myself it was enough. That the feel of his cheek on my hide, the slow rise and fall of his breathing as it synchronized with mine, the shared meals and laughter, were all I needed. I told myself I was content.

But the truth began to bloom inside me—quiet and fierce. It started in my chest, where my human heart beat, and spread into my equine body like heat through the earth. I was in love with Elias.

But there’s no path from my world to his, not one that ends in the kind of love we both understand. I am not shaped for his arms. The thought of intimacy—of physical love—between us is as impossible as it is maddening. I have four hooves and the gait of a forest born. He has soft human hands and eyes that see beyond merely being, that guide intimacy in small ways.

And I wonder… can a story hold love that doesn’t touch in the usual way. If hearts, not hands, can reach across the divide. If this slow, impossible thing between us could become something new. Something neither forest nor city has ever named.

Then a rival came quietly, like a winter mist creeping into the city’s edge.

At first it was just a name passed in conversation—Caldus Books & Bindery, some sleek new outfit opening across town, backed by money and ambition and gleaming brass. Their storefront was polished wood and glass, with posters in gold-leaf frames boasting “Stories that Circle the World.”

Writers started drifting in, drawn by talk of translations, of foreign publishers eager for new voices. Promises flowed like honey: distribution overseas, grand readings in far-off cities, reviews in continental journals with embossed covers.

Elias didn’t react at first. He offered quiet congratulations to the first two authors who left, though I saw his hand tighten ever so slightly around the tea mug. He even visited the new shop once, came back with a strange smile and said nothing.

He didn’t chase after the defectors. “It’s just a wave,” he told me, late one night. “They’ll be back when they miss the ink under their nails.” But the wave didn’t stop.

More left. Some with apologies, others with nothing but a hurried farewell. Soon the Thursday writers’ circle was no longer full of chaotic voices and laughter—the energy was gone. The stillness was suffocating.

That’s when I saw it in his eyes. The devastation. Not loud or dramatic. His world was shrinking. The stories he loved, the writers he mentored, the rhythm of creation—it was all slipping away. And he had no words for the grief.

And then came the day the rival found him—cornered him, really—in the public square, in front of the fountain with the winged lion. He laughed. Not a cruel laugh, but worse—a condescending one. “You have hands that live in the present,” he mocked. “I have eyes that see into a future you’ll never reach.”

After Elias stormed off, humiliation burning behind his eyes., the rival turned to me, saying, “You’ve talent. A gift, truly. But only through me will you become known. I have the networks. The influence. The gates of the world.”

He showed me the money. Glittering, folding, clean. It smelled of praise and power. “This could ease your friend’s hunger,” he said. “He’s working himself to the bone for something that can’t bloom.”

I looked at the money. Then I looked at the man. And I said, very simply, “No.”

He blinked. “No?” he repeated, as if the word itself offended him.

“You see paper,” I said. “Elias sees me.” I left before he could say anything else.

It was Mira who stepped in.

We were alone in the shop, the scent of old pages wrapping around us like a shawl. She set aside a fragile volume of fairy tales and looked at me with eyes that had seen decades pass, and thousands of stories find their homes.

“All these years,” she said softly, “I’ve worked slowly and carefully. I saved every spare coin, tucked them away like acorns before frost. I kept quiet so people wouldn’t rob me. Kept my prices gentle, so no one would fear my shelves or feel unworthy of the stories on them.”

She took my hand in hers—those wrinkled, ink-smudged hands that had reshelved generations of books with reverence, hands that cradled stories like they were newborn birds.

“I watched Elias grow,” she said. “Felt a kinship with him. He reminded me of myself, long ago. I never told him. I never told you. But I’ve watched him wilt these past months, and that brings me sorrow.” She looked at our twined hands and gave me a sad smile.

“Here is the thing,” she whispered, her eyes tearing slightly. “I don’t like ‘Mister Papermoney.’ I don’t trust him. I don’t carry his books—even though some of the authors are dear friends.”

There was a moment’s pause. “And over these many years,” she continued, “I have amassed a considerable stash. Modest, but sharp. Quiet, but keen. I have enough.”

“Enough for what?” I asked, barely above a breath.

“To buy him out,” she said. “To run him out of business. To take the root of his empire using his own greed. He’ll take the money and believe he’s bested me. But we’ll know better.”

Her fingers tightened just slightly around mine. “For you, my dear,” she said. “Because I see the love in your eyes. The way you can’t bear to see him hurting. That is what I will do.”

I am so glad I’m small. It meant I could fold into Mira’s arms, nestle my head against her shoulder, and give her a hug that lasted longer than time, longer than sorrow, longer than any language we knew.

She hugged me back—soft, strong, full of knowing.

“I want this to be a secret,” she murmured in my ear, her breath warm with resolve. “Never tell Elias. Don’t let him know why his rival was suddenly willing to walk away. Let him believe that it was his belief in stories, in people, in you—that it was enough. Because, truly, that is what I see in him, in you, in the way you interact.”

Tears were streaming down my cheeks. They soaked into the strands of my hair and clung to the fringe of Mira’s shawl. But she only smoothed my locks, then called for tea, as if it were just another chapter in her careful, patient life.

Later that afternoon, she summoned one of her longtime associates—an elegant man with gloves made of soft leather and a ledger tucked under one arm. She gave him the details, crisp and quiet. He nodded, his eyes gleaming with something like admiration. He bowed low, promised discretion, and departed.

Within the day, it was done. The rival’s shop closed with hardly a whisper. No announcement, no clearance sale. Just shuttered windows.

And for the first time in many seasons, Elias smiled without grief behind his eyes.

Elias and I are still together. We are older now—he with his snowy beard and soft, ink-stained fingers, and I with my slower steps and weathered back—but time has only gentled what we have, not diminished it.

Though intimacy of the physical kind is not possible—our bodies never built to mirror each other’s needs—we share a tenderness that runs deeper than love, older than desire. We share mornings in silence, evenings with laughter, dreams whispered into candlelight. Our hearts long since learned the contours of each other.

Mira passed away some winters ago. She faded from our lives like smoke curling up into the rafters of her little shop, silent and warm and full of scent. We lit candles every night for a month, and I keep her shawl folded on the shelf above our hearth, even though it no longer smells of lavender.

Elias never asked why the rival shop had failed. And I—through all the years, through all the books and birthdays and brittle autumns—kept the promise I made so long ago to Mira. I never told him. Not once.

And then, one night—when the wind moved differently, and the stars felt especially far—a large centaur mare stepped from the edge of the forest, her mane streaked with silver, her eyes catching the moonlight like polished obsidian. She stood still for a long while, just looking at me.

Then she called my name—"Tessa. I am your mother.” Her voice was deep but rich, like earth after rain.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that your size never mattered. Not to me. Not to any that watched from our grove. It is your huge heart, your trust, your willingness to love without condition—that is what makes you beautiful. You… born of the arbor, have softened the city, have taken it as your home and created a family of your own.”

I could not speak. I could only weep, and feel, for the first time, what it means to be seen. Though I may have been the size of a pony, the height of a man, the look of a spirited child, I understood her words—that I have earned the right to love.