"You must at least try to return me to my rightful form," Ed insisted. "Else I shall lie awake each night wondering what might have been, and how close I came to reclaiming my humanity!" He gave a glance back at his hindquarters. "Among other things."
"Just get him to stop talking away," said Audrey sourly by way of agreement.
"Alright, fine," Mika reluctantly agreed, "but I'm warning you it might not work, so don't blame me if you end up even worse off." He walked up to Ed and laid his hands on the horse's flank. The wizard began to chant words of power, concentrating on Ed's true form, trying to break the chains and free the human inside the horse that was embedded in his core and imprinted on his essence. But he could feel the magic of the Stone fighting back, pushing against his spell, trying to drag Ed back to being a horse in body and mind. Mika couldn't let that happen! His chanting got louder and more forceful as he fought against the Stone with all his magical strength, his magic and the Stone's pushing back and forth in a magical tug of war until finally there was a flash of light that briefly blinded Mika and sent him flying back across the room.
When his vision finally cleared up and he saw Ed, or the creature that was standing where Ed had been, he thought that he had failed. He still saw the body of a horse, although it was a different body: bigger, stronger, and more muscular, like a warhorse, with the same dappled hide that Ed had had before. It at least had a prodigious endowment worthy of any stallion, so Mika had succeeded with that one part of Ed's request. But instead of a horse's head, coming out of the top front of the horse's body was the torso of a very large and muscular human with hair (and a prodigious amount of it too) matching the horse hide's shade of brown. Mika had changed Ed into a centaur!
"Wh... what happened to me?" Ed asked in shock as he felt up his new body with thick powerful hands, while also trying out his legs and tail.
"Yeah, Mika, what the hell did you do?" Audrey demanded. "And what was that explosion about? My eyes still hurt."
"I could feel whatever spell the Stone cast fighting back against my spell, and apparently something gave," Mika explained, confused as any of them. "I guess the two spells sort of cancelled out, or maybe fused together. Fortunately for Ed it looks like the magic decided to put him in an existing, recognizable form; I was afraid it was going to turn him into some sort of half-horse freak."
"He IS a half-horse freak," countered Audrey, skeptically.
"That's a terrible thing to say, centaurs are a proud and noble people as fine as any," Mika replied irately, having met a few centaurs who came to the wizards of the city for one reason or another over the years. "And anyway, he can hear you, he's right here."
But Ed didn't actually seem to hear either of them, so busy was he exploring his new body. Finally, he turned to the few still-humans, peering down at them from his newfound height with his strangely strong and gruff face, and spoke.