The first thing I notice is that I have hooves.
Not in the way you notice something you've forgotten — a name, a wallet, the fact that you left the oven on. In the way you notice something that is so fundamentally wrong with the current state of the universe that your brain stalls out at the entrance and simply refuses to let you proceed further until you've acknowledged it in full.
Hooves.
I have four of them.
I lie there in the hay for approximately thirty seconds. I don't move. This is not a shock — I am not, as a rule, the kind of person who freezes under stress. This is data collection. When you encounter a situation that contradicts your working model of reality, the correct first move is stillness. You let the data come to you.
The data comes.
The hay smells like old grass, something fermented, and underneath that a low chemical note I don't have a human word for — mana, I'll learn later, trace amounts wicking up from the soil. The air is cold. Barn-cold. The kind that seeps through wood walls and settles at ankle level, which is currently where all of me is, because I am approximately the height of a boot. The darkness is not actually dark. I can see. Not well — there's no direct light source — but the shapes in the stall have edges, and the edges are clear enough.
I catalog, methodically, starting from the ground up.
Legs: four. Each ending in a hoof. The hooves are small, which means I am small, which is consistent with the overall size data I'm pulling from proprioception. My center of mass is somewhere above my front legs. My spine is horizontal. My head is — I turn it, and there's a brief moment of vertigo as a field of vision I was not expecting registers — positioned at the end of a neck that extends forward from my body.
I have horns. One of them, anyway. I feel its weight as a new gravitational anchor point. One horn, which means I am young or this species runs asymmetrically, and I'm going to have to figure out which.
Eyes: sides of the head. My peripheral vision is enormous and my depth perception is functionally different from what I'm used to. The world is wider. Things I would have had to turn to see are simply visible. I made a note to track this.
Tail: present. It wiggles when I think about it. I stop thinking about it.
Body: covered in short black fur. Small. Alarmingly small. I estimate, based on the proportional relationship between my body and the boards of the stall, that I weigh somewhere between ten and fifteen kilograms. I used to weigh eighty-one.
I take stock of what I remember.
My name: Kael Ardenne. I am thirty-four years old. Mechanical engineer, structural specialty — I spent fifteen years designing load-bearing systems for large-scale construction projects, the kind where the engineer's job is to make sure the thing you're building doesn't become the thing that kills you. I was good at it. I had, by most measurable standards, a functional life.
My death: yes. I remember that too. I don't linger on it. I process a thing and I move on — this is either a virtue or a pathology and I have never been sufficiently motivated to determine which. The point is that it's done and this is what's next, and what's next is a barn, four legs, and a mana affinity the local wildlife seems to find alarming even when they can't see it yet.
I make myself get up. Or I try.
Here is what I expected: some difficulty, some adjustment period, a brief recalibration.
Here is what actually happens: I extend my front legs, push off from the floor, my weight immediately transfers wrong, I overcorrect backward, my back legs collapse at the knee, I tip sideways, and I put my face directly into the hay.
The hay is, objectively, not the worst thing to fall into. It's soft. It smells bad. It doesn't judge me. These are three qualities I can work with.
I lay there for a moment.
Four-legged locomotion, I note, operates on different principles than two-legged locomotion. The center of mass must be distributed over a wider base. All four contact points must be engaged simultaneously. Retry.
I will try again.
Fall again.
Third try. Better — I get my front legs under me and hold them there, weight forward. The back legs come up. I'm standing for approximately one second before the forward lean is too much and I go down again.
Fourth try. I pay attention to each leg as an independent element this time, the way you think about each pillar of a structure. Front-left. Front-right. Rear-left. Rear-right. Equal load distribution. Slow.
I'm standing.
My legs are shaking. My dignity has sustained what I categorize as significant damage. The brown goat in the far corner of the stall — there is a brown goat in the far corner of the stall, I noticed her for the first time because she's been watching me this whole time — has the expression of a creature watching something deeply predictable unfold exactly as she expected.
I hold the stand. Thirty seconds. A minute. The shaking slows.
Day one, I note internally. Locomotion: in progress.
The system notification was there before I looked for it. That's how I know it's not something I imagined — I didn't reach for it, didn't ask, didn't have a frame of reference for it. It simply appeared in the upper right of my vision, translucent against the dark barn wall, patient in the way that only things that have no deadline can afford to be patient.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION] New entity detected. Species: Black Horned Goat (Uncommon). Tier: 1. Mana Core: Active. Status: Anomalous. Human consciousness detected in the beast body. Parameters — updating.
There's a pause. The kind of pause that suggests something is happening behind an interface I can't see, which is fine. I wait.
[VOID AFFINITY DETECTED — Classification: [REDACTED]. The system is not displaying this result at this time. The system will explain later.]
I read that twice.
"Later" is not "never." That distinction is either reassuring or a sign of something I should be more worried about than I currently am. I file it under pending and keep reading.
[QUEST UNLOCKED — The First Step] Reach Tier 2 before the world notices what you are. Reward: Evolution Window. Time Limit: None specified. The system recommends urgency.