Midnight at the Well of Souls

palms a slightly lighter color but seemingly made of a tougher skin. I’ve got pointy ears, she thought, seeing them revealed by the brushed-back hair. And they were pointed, the insides a soft pink. Although not really large, she realized that they would probably protrude slightly if she stood perfectly erect. On some sort of impulse, she tried to wiggle her ears—and they moved noticeably!

Then she looked down at her body. At the waist the very light down that began just below her breast thickened into hair of the same color as her skin. Her eyes moved down to two stocky legs that ended in large, flat hooves.

That’s strange, she thought. Hooves and pointed ears that wiggle.

For no reason in particular she turned her body at the waist almost halfway around, and looked in back of her. A long, sturdy-looking equine body supported by two hind legs was clearly visible—and a tail! A big, brushy tail she found she could wiggle.

What am I? she thought in sudden fear. Where is this?

She tried to remember, but could not.

It’s as if I was just born, she thought. I can’t remember anything. Not my name, not anything.

The reflection and the body looked totally strange to her.

I remember the words, she thought. I know that this is a stream and that is a waterfall and that that person in the water is a reflection of me, and I’m a young girl.

She hadn’t even realized she was a girl until then.

There was a term for this, she thought, and she tried to remember it. Amnesia, that was it. People who couldn’t remember their past. Somehow she felt that she had never been to this place before, and that something was different about her, but she couldn’t think of what. She just stood there by the edge of the stream for several minutes in stunned silence, not knowing what else to do. Several insects buzzed around her rear, and with an automatic motion she brushed them away with her tail.

Suddenly her ears picked up the sound of laughing—a girl and a boy, she thought. They were coming down the trail! Quickly, almost in panic, she looked around for a place to hide, but found none before the pair came trotting down the path. They look like the top half of people stuck onto the bodies of working ponies, her mind thought. Her face turned quizzically at the thought. What were people anyway, if not these? And what were ponies?

The two beings were not really large, but the boy was almost a head taller and proportionately larger than the girl. The male was a golden color, with silver-white hair down to his shoulders and a full beard, neatly trimmed, of the same color. The girl, curiously, was a mottled gray mixed with large black spots, and this coloration extended to her upper torso. Her hair was a mixed gray and black, her gray breasts much fuller than the amnesiac onlooker’s.

No navels, she thought inanely. We don’t have navels.

The pair saw her and stopped almost in midlaugh. They surveyed her curiously, but without any trace of hostility or alarm. “Hello!” called the boy—he looked no more than fourteen or fifteen, the girl about the same. The voice was a pleasant tenor, with a slight, indefinable accent. “I don’t think we’ve seen you here before.”

She hesitated a moment, then replied hesitantly, “I—I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. I—I just don’t know.” Tears welled in her eyes.

The two centaurs saw that she was in some distress and rushed up to her.

“What’s the matter?” the girl asked in a high-pitched adolescent voice.

She started to cry. “I don’t know, I can’t remember anything,” she sobbed.

“There, there,” the boy crooned, and began to stroke her back. “Get it all out, then tell us what’s going on.”

The stroking had a calming effect, and she straightened up and wiped her eyes with her hand.

“I don’t know,” she managed, coughing a little. “I—I just woke up down the trail and I can’t remember anything—who I am, where I am, even what I am.”

The boy, who was even larger in comparison to her than he was to his companion, examined her face and head, and felt the skull.

“Does it hurt anywhere when I do this?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “Tickles a little all over, that’s all.”

He lifted up her face and stared hard into her eyes.

“No glaze,” he commented, mostly to himself. “No sign of injury. Fascinating.”

“Aw, come on, Jol, what’d you expect to find?” his companion asked.

“Some sign of injury or shock,” he responded, almost in a clinical tone. “Here, girl, stick out your tongue. No, I mean it. Stick it out.”

She did, feeling somewhat foolish, and he examined it. It was a big tongue, flat and broad, and a gray-pink in color.

“All right, you can stick it back in now,” he told her. “No coating, either. If you’d have had some kind of shock or disease, it’d show.”

“Maybe she’s been witched, Jol,” the spotted gray centaur suggested, and drew back a little.

“Maybe,” he conceded, “but, if so, it’s nothin’ to concern us.”

“What d’you think we oughta do?” his girlfriend asked.

Jol turned and for the first time Julee saw he had some kind of saddlebag strapped around his waist.

“First we take our shower,” he answered, removing an irregular bar of what must have been soap, some cloths, and towels from the bag, then unstrapping it and letting it fall to the ground. “Then we’ll take our mystery girl here to the village and let somebody smarter than we are take over.”

And they proceeded to do just that. After some more hesitation, she joined them, following their actions and sharing a towel.

“You don’t have to get too dry,” the girl, whose name was Dal, told her. “You’ll air-dry pretty good.”

Together the three of them set off back down the trail.

As they left the forest the village and lands beyond came into view.

It was a beautiful land, she thought. The stream flowed out of majestic, snow-capped mountains which spread out on both sides to reveal a rich valley and gently rolling hills.

The village—a collection of rough but sturdy log buildings by the side of a blue-green lake—bustled with activity. The fields were properly plowed and planted, and she saw a few centaurs checking and tending between stalks of unknown grain.

The whole place didn’t seem as if it could support, or had, more than a few hundred people, she thought and commented on that to her companions.

Jol laughed. “That proves you must be from down-lake,” he said. “Some pretty big communities down there. Actually, there’s close to a thousand in the valley, here, but we’re spread out all over the landscape. Only fifty or sixty live in town all the time.”

The main street was broad and maintained much like the trails, of which she had seen quite a few, a thick covering of sawdust making the paving.

Most of the buildings had an open side facing the street. The largest building was the first one they reached. It contained a huge forge on which several male and female centaurs worked hot metal. She saw with curiosity one woman lift a hind leg while a brawny male, wearing a protective bib, hammered something on her foot, apparently painlessly.

Other buildings proved to be stores selling farm implements, seed, and the like. There was even a barbershop and a bar, closed at the moment but unmistakable in its huge kegs and large steins.

“Is it always this warm and humid here?” she asked Jol.

He chuckled again in that friendly way he had about him. “No, this is a four-season hex,” he explained enigmatically. “Then we all get out our gammot fur coats and hats and gloves and romp in the cold snow.”

A gammot , she discovered, was one of the large rodents she had spied down by the stream.

“It must be a huge coat,” she remarked, and Dal and Jol both laughed.

“You really do have amnesia!” Dal responded. “The hair on our bodies and a nice, thick layer of fat put on in summer and fall are pretty good insulators. Only our hairless parts need