Kophis and the Bull of Heaven
Miffed by some hard-to-impress Minoans, Kophis takes matters into their own hands and turns theirself into a divine bull. Explicit.
Kophis sat on a hill that hadn’t been there yesterday with their chin propped against their hand and a scowl on their snout. Down below the chalky limestone outcropping where they sat, the settlement of Tira glimmered with firelight. The breeze that rolled in off the wine-dark sea carried the scent of food freshly cooked for the sake of some festival or another. It was all Linear A to Kophis; one festival was just as good as any other for their usual scam: show up claiming to be a deity, score some free festival food in the form of ‘offerings’, and spend the night transforming humans consequence-free.
Usually humans were easy to impress. Make a flashy entrance, show off with a spell or two, and they’d be tripping over their own sandals trying to ply Kophis’s favor with offerings. Sometimes just having the head of a fox did the trick. But the people of this backwater island clearly didn’t know a god when they saw one. Or when they saw a trickster pretending to be a god. Either way. One of them had even asked if they were a jackal, of all things.
With a dismissive snort Kophis rose from their seat and trudged back up the hill to the sanctuary at its peak, which, like the hill itself, also hadn’t been there yesterday. The ‘hill’ was less of a hill and more of a mobile island that could blend in with its surroundings wherever it was placed. Though it wasn’t exactly an island, and it wasn’t entirely not a hill either.
In any event, they could easily have picked their island-hill up, sanctuary and all, and moved it somewhere more receptive to their deception. But that wasn’t the point any more. The people of Tira had scoffed at their entrance, refused to believe their claims of godhood, and worst of all, they had called Kophis ‘petty’.
Now it was personal. The thought that they might overreact to some minor slight was preposterous. They’d show the people of Tira how un-’petty’ they were—and they had just the tool to do it, too.
In much the same way that their island had disguised itself as a hill, the sanctuary at its peak had adapted itself to the local style. Past the front door, top-heavy columns painted in red and dark gray ringed an open courtyard. The walls behind them bore colorful frescoes of floral patterns and fantastic animals. A reflecting pool sat in the middle, open to the night sky and filled with water as black as the space between the stars. It was fed by a mystic spring beneath their sanctuary from which flowed the very waters of creation.
In a pinch, it also made a handy mirror.
Kophis sat down at the edge of the pool, leaned over the water, and studied their reflection briefly. Their appearance was as impeccable and ageless as ever, maintained by several bits of magic working in concert. There was no way they could look more perfect than perfect, so it couldn’t have been the guise itself the humans had taken issue with.
While they pondered how best to pander to the sensibilities of mortals, the reflection of the moon in the pool caught their eye. Its image was framed by their tall ears and its light glinted off the edges of their silver earrings. It called to mind some of the gods they’d ran afoul of down in Wꜣst who’d worn the sun itself as a crown. It was a brazen show of power, one they couldn’t match with trickery alone. The mystic waters of creation weren’t a trick, though. Surely no one would mind if they ‘borrowed’ the moon for one night, just for the bit. The cosmic order wasn’t that fragile.
They’d need a new guise to suit the look of a powerful celestial deity though. Having plausible deniability wouldn’t hurt either. Something big and boisterous, but also something the people of Tira would readily accept as a god. Humans were always fond of livestock, and these ones seemed especially into cattle. And the horns would make wearing the moon even easier...
So, it was decided—they’d spend the night as a bull god. That was the tricky part. Now they just had to make theirself a god.
Kophis closed their eyes and focused their thoughts on the idea of a bovine deity. Once it was firmly established in their mind, they lowered their hands into the reflecting pool, scooped up a handful of the mystic waters, and splashed it across their face. The moisture lingered as dark droplets on their silvery fur for only a moment or two before seeping into their skin. A second later, their pelt was perfectly dry. Left behind was a quivering, twitching sensation that washed over their cheeks and along the bridge of their nose as their facial structure shifted. Their thoughts guided the changes and the water fueled them. Another handful splashed across their snout encouraged their muzzle to widen and their nose to grow broader and flatter. Two more rounded off the tips of their canine ears and shifted them down to either side of their head. Just from being dipped in the pool several times, the tips of their fingers were blunted and hoof-like.
Pausing for a moment, they sat up, cocked their ears back, and glanced over their shoulder. They were about to engage in some self-indulgence and didn’t want to be interrupted by a hapless human stumbling into their sanctuary at an inopportune moment.
Kophis bent down low over the reflecting pool, keeping their snout level as they dipped their face into the water from the bottom of their nose to the back of their jaw. In spite of muscles twinging and joints popping and bone shifting, their tail swished eagerly behind their back. They took pride in putting extra oomph into faces whenever they could. In the back of their mind they counted down from ten, then lifted their head out of the water. A few stray drops dripped from their handsomely defined jawline and firm glossy black lower lip. The rippling surface of the pool stilled so Kophis could take a moment to admire the chiseled snout they’d crafted.
“Nice,” they said to theirself. Hmm. Their typically sly and subtle voice didn’t suit their new appearance, and sharp canine fangs looked out of place in a bovine mouth. Both were easily fixed, though—they just needed to fetch a cup from their naos.
With the clay cup in hand, they knelt back down in front of the pool and drew a cupful from its dark waters. They raised the cup to their lips and drank it down in a few large gulps. It tasted almost but not quite like mineral water. In fact, it tasted ‘almost like’ whatever you thought it would taste like, but the margin of error was considerably worse for stronger flavors.
After finishing off the cup, a lump of pressure pushed back up toward Kophis’s throat, as if they’d swallowed some air along with the water. But instead of continuing upwards, the pressure pushed outwards instead. A strained grunt slipped out of their mouth, squeezed between their neck bloating with muscle and their pectorals bulging big enough to pull the front of their dress taut. Their shoulders had to stretch wider just to compensate for the thickening of their chest. They let out a deepening groan between their clenched teeth. The tighter their jaw squeezed, the broader and blunter their teeth became, like turning needles into grindstones.
Kophis relaxed their aching jaw and took in a deep breath. A couple of joints popped as they shifted into new positions. With a body like this, it was hard not to puff their chest out. It was also hard to keep quiet when everything they said came with a pleasant reverberating rumble. “Mmm. That’s more like it,” they said. “So, what next? Saving the horns for last, obviously...”
Deciding to finish out their upper body, Kophis drew another cupful of mystic water from the pool and held out their left arm. They held the cup over it and let the water pour out over their arm, moving from their shoulder down to their wrist and back again. As it flowed around their arm it mimicked the rippling forms of muscles; as it moved on, it left the form behind, molding their forearm and biceps into the shape the water had taken. The sudden swelling of muscle mass was even enough to strain their silver armbands. They had enchanted both their armbands and their anklets to fit at any size, but had also made sure that past a certain size they would start struggling to stay in one piece. A bit of extra fun to help sell the bigness of being big, without the hassle of finding new accessories for every new form. After an experimental flex to test their arm’s new strength and size, they refilled the cup and repeated the process with their right arm.
That covered everything from the chest up—aside from the horns, which were the big finale. Kophis now considered how to tackle their lower body. They had planned to take it all slowly, to ensure they were doing just enough to sell the new look without stepping on the toes of any actual deities who might be watching. Normally they found that kind of patience difficult, but worth it for the control over their changes and the time they got to appreciate them all.
But right now, having to wait sounded almost unbearable. There was a warm rumble in their chest and the sounds and scents of a festival in full spring, of all the fun they could be having, wafting in on the breeze.
This was what made using the waters of creation tricky. They weren’t trickster magic, they were the raw stuff of creation. They didn’t make illusions or disguises, they made reality. Kophis was not just pretending to be a bull god, they were becoming one, and along with that came a bull-god’s urges, and a bull-god’s impulse control. They could tell they felt hornier, hungrier, and more impatient than usual, but knowing why they felt that way did nothing to stop the actual feelings.
Kophis closed their eyes and steadied their breathing. Okay. They had finished their face, and that was always the fiddliest part. The lower half of their body didn’t really need fine-grained control. A quick dip in the reflecting pool would do a good enough job in a fraction of the time. It meant less control, sure, but there was a raw, chaotic energy to abandoning caution and plunging into a change head-first that they could appreciate.
Or in this case, plunging in feet-first.
Kophis hopped over the edge of the pool and slipped into the black waters up to the bottom of their chest. To avoid hitting their arms again, they folded their hoof-tipped hands back behind their head and leaned their shoulders against the edge. The cool touch of the water complemented the warm glow that rose up inside of them as the changes, guided by their subtly shifting subconscious desires, picked up the pace.
Beneath the surface of the water firm abdominals tightened across their midsection, accompanied by fresh muscle rippling down either side of their torso. Their back broadened to support their burly shoulders, wringing a few more satisfying pops out of their spine. To compensate for the steady growth adding to their height, they had to shift their stance every so often: legs a bit wider, leaning back a bit further. Their heels no longer touched the bottom of the pool; the weight rested on the balls of their feet instead and was still shifting forward. The tassel at the tip of their thinning tail swished back and forth through the water while a rising bulge between their thick thighs pushed the front of their ill-fitting dress aside.
Kophis didn’t want to get distracted by their growing erection, but it had been a while since they’d bothered putting one together and their bullish side seemed to interpret that as an unbearably long dry spell. At this point, it would be more distracting if they didn’t do something about it. So they dipped their hand into the water and groped around briefly before fitting their fingers around the base their erection.
Ahh. That was nice. Kophis gave their cock a brief but firm tug to add to its length. The reflexive snort and thrust of their hips that followed added even more, and the heavy throb that followed squeezed and stretched the head of their cock into a flatter and more flared shape.
All right, they told theirself. If they had enough dick to masturbate with, they’d be ready to get out soon. It was time for the centerpiece of this whole look: the horns.
Standing up straight on their stiffening toes, Kophis used their reflection in the water to get into position. When they were standing just right, so that the moon seemed to sit atop their head like a crown, they took the cup they’d used before and filled it to the brim. They lifted it high over their head, so that its image in the water was above the moon’s, and then carefully tipped it over. The water poured out and struck the edge of the lunar disk, rolling over and around it as if spilling around a saucer, and then running down onto their scalp and along the sides of their head.
A hot, pulsing ache pressed against Kophis’s skull where the water had touched. They screwed their eyes shut and wrinkled their snout to brace against the pounding pressure inside of their head. Two heavy lumps welled up beneath their hair and spread to either side as they grew, straining against their skin. If they had wanted to, they could have skipped this part, just snapped their fingers and made it appear as though they were sporting an impressive pair of horns. But if they just gave theirself horns...
As the new horns finally burst free from their head, a shudder ran through their body and the fur along their spine bristled and stood on end. They let out the breath they’d been holding in with a loud grunt, then grasped both horns tightly around the base and tugged as hard as they could, coaxing them to grow bigger, broader, longer.
...if they just gave theirself horns, they wouldn’t get to enjoy growing them.
A chorus of creaks and groans sounded out throughout their skull under the rising weight and shifting pressure of the new additions. Their head tipped, their eyelids fluttered, and they let out a deep bovine below. That is to say, they mooed.
Under the water, Kophis now stood on surdy cloven hooves, with heels canted up like a beast’s hindlegs. Their lower half was burly enough to even out the heaviness of their upper body, and that was even if you didn’t count the slate-black bull cock jutting fully half a cubit out in front of them. (Half a cubit was somewhere around eight inches, but inches hadn’t been invented yet, and Kophis tried to avoid spoilers. You never knew who might pick up on your funny anachronisms.)
The moon no longer sat still in sky, forced to remain locked between Kophis’s horns. If they moved, it bobbed and shifted along with their head. Anyone who looked upon them would see the lunar disk perfectly framed by the bull god’s horns, no matter the angle from which they looked or how many other people were looking. It was the sort of logic-bending trick that you needed divine power to pull off, and they had plenty of that now.
“Mm. Looking good,” they told their reflection with a cocky grin. They took a moment to to fuss with their hair, ensuring the magic that kept it perfectly combed would compensate for their impressive new ivory- and-moonlight crown. Now this was a deity the humans down in Tira would appreciate. They could say they were a fertility god, or a storm god or whatever. Maybe they’d just let their divine radiance do the talking.
Honestly, the nicest part of this all wasn’t so much the body but the confidence that had come with it. It had the satisfying ‘click’ of settling into a new archetype combined with the excitement of unleashed potential. They could cause so much more chaos like this—sure, they had only one night to do it in, but a god could get a lot done in one night.
No time to waste, then. Kophis planted their hands on the edge of the pool, ready to heave themselves back out. Except they didn’t do that. Instead they stood there, cock awkwardly wedged up against the wall and hands gripping the edge, unable to pull theirself out.
They didn’t have to stay in the water any longer. They were brimming with divine energy, more than powerful enough to turn the festival in Tira into a mythological event. They didn’t need to take it any further.
But they could.
And they definitely wanted to. It wasn’t like they could make things worse for themselves—they were already going to be in trouble if any of the stuffier pantheons caught word of what they were doing. It wasn’t like you could smite someone more, smiting was kind of a yes/no thing. So there wasn’t anyone holding them back from indulging fully but their own self-consciousness.
They had just the thing for that, too.
Kophis let go of the edge of the pool and leaned back into the dark waters. As they did, they dragged the moon with them, lower and lower in the sky, until they slipped beneath the surface of the pool and the moon dipped out of sight below the horizon. Fully immersing theirself in the waters of creation felt like slipping into a dream, like a feedback loop from a megaphone held up to their subconscious mind.
The surface of the pool reflected the stars in the moonless sky. The ripples along its surface faded unnaturally quickly and for a few moments, everything was still. Even the distant sounds of the festival in Tira had gone quiet; it was hard to miss that the moon had suddenly gone missing.
With a low rumble, the water’s surface began to churn and roil like the coils of a snake or a mass of writhing eels. Then the head of an obsidian black bull-cock burst from the surface of the water, a full cubit in length and wider across than the span of a human hand. It throbbed several times, spilling trails of cirrus clouds into the sky, and then swung forward as Kophis rose from the water. His firm, chiseled snout and jutting black lip broke the water first, followed by his horns, now twice as thick and curling high above his head, clutching the lunar disk between them.
Kophis gripped the edge of the pool again and heaved himself bodily out of the waters to land firmly planted on his hooves. The force of the the impact sent a shudder rippling through the earth, while the moon was hoisted back into the sky, larger than before, dragging with it a high tide that crashed against the shores of Tira, leaving boats beached and docks splintered.
With a low rumble of satisfaction, Kophis admired the form he’d ended up with. His dress had given up entirely on governing his chest, leaving his dark nipples bare. From his biceps as thick as boulders down to his knuckles, the dark waters seemed to have clung to his arms, forming into a glossy black skin-tight skein. Matching stocking ran from his thighs down to just above his heavy hooves. With his thoughts almost as bullish and lumbering as his body, he couldn’t quite puzzle out the magical interaction that must have happened between his enchanted jewelry and the mystic waters, but he didn’t need to strain his thoughts to appreciate the way they made the moonlight run like silver across his rippling frame.
The shaft hanging between his legs had hardly slackened, but in the aftermath of his celestial orgasm, the weight of its own girth beat its stiffness, so instead of sticking up it mostly stuck out. The remainder of his dress, now more of a loincloth than anything, could do nothing to conceal it; it was like trying to hide a column behind a handcloth. Luckily, the last thing anyone would expect from a bull god was modesty, and that went for both senses of the word.
In a voice that threatened to set the ground beneath his hooves trembling again, he said, “Now this is my kind of divine bull.”
The sanctuary, tied as it was to Kophis’s nature, had even made accommodations for Kophis’s new form. The walls and columns had grown more monumental, doubling in scale just to ensure he’d be able to walk through the doors without having to stoop down. The frescoes painted on the walls had been revised to include scenes of lavish offerings and acrobatic rituals that were already giving him some fun ideas. Several side rooms had even sprouted up, complete with curtained doors and large beds made ready, as if the sanctuary was anticipating a couple of one-night-consorts. Well, if it was offering, maybe he would invite some of the humans back to his place.
But for now, he had a festival to crash, mortals to mess with, and some fun new myths to seed. With a stride that sent the moon swaggering from side to side in the sky, Kophis set off down the hill that hadn’t been there yesterday and toward Tira, leaving behind a track of huge hoof-prints embedded straight into the rock itself.
While the festival fires still burned bright and the air was still rich with the smells of fried food and freely-flowing drink, the revelry had come to an abrupt halt. The moon falling out of the sky was a bad enough omen on its own, but then it had reappeared, alongside an earthquake that made the ground tremble and a tidal wave that had slammed the shores of the island. An impromptu council, consisting of three of the least-drunk townspeople, had gathered in a corner of the central square to discuss what should be done.
“Clouds like these are supposed to presage storms,” said Kitanetos, who’d been apprenticed to an soothsayer in Kunisu and took every opportunity he could to mention it. “We should get everyone to high ground.”
Apiera rolled her eyes at the know-it-all oracle-boy. “I know this is the Bronze Age but we’ve heard of volcanoes before. What we need to do is to start evacuating.”
“Sure, but how many of the ships are in splinters?” Ekero said. He was fighting off a headache from all the wine he’d had, and mostly wanted to ensure the other two didn’t start a panic. “Let’s be real. No one’s going anywhere until the morning. At least wait until it gets light out—”
All at once the streets erupted in blazing silver moonlight and a voice even deeper than the rumbling earth bellowed, “Greetings, mortals! Don’t mind me, I’m just the Bull of Heaven himself, stopping by to grace your festival, in my honor, with my divine presence!”
“—befuhhh,” Ekero groaned. His legs felt weird, and when he looked down he found he was kneeling on the ground and the biggest erection he’d ever seen was poking from the front of his kilt. “Uhh...something’s... happening,” he said blearily, before snorting and swiping at his shifting nose.
“We should...go?” Apiera said. It felt like her head had been stuffed with wool. Rivulets of milk leaked from her swollen nipples and ran down the front of her open-chested dress. She tugged on Ekero’s shoulder. “Hey. We need to go.”
For once Ekero was speechless. He stared open-mouthed at the radiant bull-god standing at the head of the square, eyes glassy as his growing horns gradually weighed down his head, and let out a long moo.
Kophis planted his hands on his hips and let out a proud snort. This was going much better than the first time around. Many of the humans had fallen to their knees at the sight of him. Several had already sprouted horns or hooves, or were scrambling to disrobe before their clothes became soaked with their own milk, seed, or in some cases, both at once.
“Let’s get this festival started! Who’s up for hands-on bull-jumping rituals?”