Author's Note

Many thanks to ZeroTaste for commissioning Silver Speck to stay at Hotel Nightshade!

Silver Speck

Withania’s garden continued to produce a colourful array of plants that resembled her signature creation, but all bore a unique shade or style that alluded to the pony hibernating within. It was more work than ever to maintain but Withania never tired of it, enjoying both the tranquillity of such a happy relationship and also the powertrip of being in control of these ponies whilst they were under her care. She talked aloud to her plants, complementing their progress, teasing their predicament, or humming soothing notes as each guest of her strange hotel would appreciate.

She thought she was imagining things when a small voice replied with, “Excuse me!” Her plants did not talk, but she suddenly became aware that she was alone in her garden and more or less talking to herself, and so she worked on in silence.

“Excuse me!” squeaked the voice again. Withania looked around in confusion - had someone slipped through the garden gate without her noticing? Or maybe a customer at the back door? Or even, she thought with a sudden panic, a guest plant had bloomed without her being ready for it! She whirled around to patrol the garden in search of the disembodied voice when a huge colourful moth landed on her nose. Only it wasn’t a moth, it was - a breezie? A powder-blue body with silvery wings and antennae balanced with ease at the cross of Withania’s eyes, looking up at her with a mixture of nerves and determination.

“Oh! Hello, I didn’t expect - are you a breezie?” she asked. She leaned back, but of course, this did nothing since he was perched on her snout.

“Umm! Yes! M-my name is Silver Speck. Are you Withania?”

“I am, yes… What brings you here? It’s a bit early for breezie season isn’t it?”

Silver Speck floated backwards off of Withania and landed on the closed bud of a tall flower. He was so light he barely had to flap his wings, the meagre breeze in the garden being enough to carry him. “Actually I’m wandering away from my people, I wanted to see more of this world, but… it’s hard to find safe ways to experience it for somepony as small as me.”

“I bet,” said Withania, “I’ve always been told to leave you little guys well alone when you come on by.”

“Yes, the ponies are very gentle with us. But you see… I’ve been sort of curious about other wild animals and the uh… food chain. And I’ve noticed that you ah, seem to have a knack for sharing in such things with others… and… umm…”

“Wait, you’re here for the hotel? You want to try out getting eaten?” said Withania incredulously. Silver Speck was galvanised at hearing this said aloud, but nodded stiffly as if he couldn’t trust himself to admit it in words. Withania didn’t look convinced, but there was a familiar look on his little face that reminded her of herself. At first, predation seemed scary and uncertain, while also holding an alluring tug at some odd desire deep inside. It never seemed right to ask or to go willingly, yet on the inside, she would be begging for it to happen. Having the right pony to give in to was important.

“I uh, don’t have any money but-” said Silver.

“Oh Silver,” she cut in, “I don’t do this for money. Come inside a moment.” She inclined her head toward him, and he floated over to ride on her tousled mane as she walked into her kitchen. “Now, normally I have a form that ponies fill out, like a permission slip, but I don’t exactly have it in breezie-size. So how about we have a safety word instead? I’ll talk you through everything, and if you feel uncomfortable at any point, you say ‘kumquat’ and I’ll stop okay?”

“Does… does that still work after you umm… swallow me?”

“Well, no. There’s a point of no return. But I promise you won’t come to any harm.” Withania realised that this wasn’t exactly confidence-boosting, so she set him down on the kitchen table and took a seat, leaning in so her face filled his vision. “Let’s go through it from start to finish. Remember the safety word if you want me to stop?”

Silver Speck nodded, gazing up at her big eyes and jawline. As he nodded she licked her lips, most likely to moisten them before talking, but it was such a quick dart of the tongue in almost a practised motion that the green mare suddenly looked incredibly predatory.

“So then,” she said, speaking softly as he was a mere few inches from her face, “I like to start with a few licks, to moisten you up so you’re not too dry in my mouth. It’ll also get you past any reactions to getting slimy and gross, just by getting that over with immediately. Then I’ll lean in real close like this-”

Here she leaned even closer, nudging Silver Speck back onto his rump with the tip of her nose, close enough that he could reach out and touch her teeth if she bared them. She opened her mouth between each sentence, so he could clearly see into her green maw. A sweet smell emanated, tempting, while strands of golden nectar glistened alluringly.

“And snap you up into my mouth. You’ll be laying on my tongue in a puddle of my saliva, and I’ll press you against the roof of my mouth, and into my cheeks, and maybe under my tongue. You can try moving about. Maybe you’ll curl up, or maybe you’ll like to spread out - I think the latter will be more fun. After a little mouth-play, I’ll move you to the back of my mouth, and I’ll swallow. My throat will open up and you’ll slip into my esophagus - but only a little way. The first swallow will wrap you up in the spongy walls of my throat, and then it’ll be a slow descent as my gullet’s undulations squeeze you tightly down to my chest. The bulge you make will disappear, and no one will be able to tell that I’ve eaten you. It’ll be between you and me after that.”

The breezie sat motionless, without a sound, staring wide-eyed up into the green cavern before him. He looked daunted, yet at the same time, Withania could still see the unmistakable burn of morbid curiosity, and he had not stopped her. So she continued.

“When you reach my belly, you’ll find it full to the brim with nectar. I don’t have a regular stomach you see, it’s a reservoir. You’ll be completely submerged, it’ll get into every gap in your body until it’s in your mouth, your own belly, and then your lungs. But that’s the trick, because my body takes all the oxygen I create through photosynthesis and dumps it into my nectar. It’s so rich you can breathe it. So you’ll be suspended in the stuff, still awake and preserved. Then after a time, depending on how tough your body is, you’ll start going soft. The nectar gets you as much on the inside as on the outside, and you’ll soak it up and become soft and squishy. Your legs and wings will be first to go, they’ll dissolve into more nectar, and then the rest of you will melt away. The best part is,” Here she lowered her voice to a whisper, “It feels amazing.”

Silver Speck was trembling with anticipation now, and he swallowed to keep his mouth from watering. He had expected something quick, assuming he’d need to get it over with before he lost his nerve, however Withania had almost hypnotised him just with words. He was entirely within her thrall, ready to give himself to her.

“Now you’re a mass of my sweet nectar, still aware, but unable to move or act, and you’ll get funnelled into my gut and absorbed into my body, and you’ll experience being a soft layer of plump chub on my hips. Then after a day or so, you’ll condense back into my lower gut. You’ll be squashed and squeeze incredibly tightly, until you’re a solid seed crammed with your soul and the shoot that you’ll grow as. I’ll put you in a window-sill plant pot, I think, and you’ll make a tiny little flower that watches the world go by until you bloom as a breezie again. What do you think, Silver Speck?”

He didn’t have any words, but slowly nodded in approval of all of these things. Withania suddenly leaned forward, her huge green tongue extending out and basting Silver Speck with golden saliva. She followed up by enveloping his entire body with her mouth, pursing her lips around his waist just so he could get a feel for what her maw would be like. Alas, the sudden feel his wings brushing against her mouth and Silver twitched, one wing folding alarmingly while the others bent and an awkward angle. Withania felt his quick movement, as well as his wings shifting like a hair on her tongue and drew back rapidly.

“Aah, sorry, I wasn’t ready! I’ll try and keep my wings down!” apologies Silver Speck, stretching and folding his wings again. Withania was looking down quizzically, clearly seeing a problem here. She knew from past experiences that some reflexive actions where not easily suppressed, and could result in injury no matter how hard the players tried.

“Let me grab something that will help…” she said, turning away and crossing her kitchen to the shelves above the worktop. She reached up and grabbed a jar, holding it by a convenient leather strap designed for earth ponies to grasp with their mouths, and brought it back to the table. Opening the lid, she poured it over Silver’s head, revealing the contents to be honey. The thick goop blobbed down his back, coating his wings and effectively glueing them down. “Not that I need you to be any sweeter, but I think this will take care of things nicely!”

Silver Speck suddenly felt significantly more vulnerable now he was covered in the thick sticky honey. It wasn’t uncomfortable or binding, however he was unable to make any quick movements, and his wings could barely move at all. Stuck in place he gazed up as Withania’s open mouth descended on him once more, covering him in a hot, damp enclosure. The very air around him vibrated with her moan of pleasure, as she pressed him up against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. The large muscle was a soft cushion under his body, but one that moved and twitched and formed around his skinny frame, sampling the honey and his own flavour alike.

For his part, her own saliva diluted the honey where it dripped, thinning it into something he could swallow and enjoy. It was an odd sensation, to taste and enjoy her fluids knowing that soon his entire body would melt into the same stuff. The very thought set him stretching out on his belly, eager to cover himself as much as possible. Withania rubbed him against the roof of her mouth again, squashing and releasing him so his flavour oozed out in all directions. Just as he grew used to her movements, she shifted his body, or tilted her head, and then finally, her jaws opened enough and she shoved his flailing body into her cheek. Silver found himself up against the solid wall of her teeth. The large, flat molars were easily capable of major damage, but they moved with pinpoint precision. He braced himself against the solid enamel and pressed against her cheek, play fighting as it tried to press him back. Withania indulged this for a while, and then just to remind him who was really in control here, she suddenly opened her jaws so that Silver Speck tumbled back into the middle of her mouth, pinning him under her tongue.

It was at this moment that Silver remembered what Withania had said to him. I’ll move you to the back of my mouth, and I’ll swallow. And no sooner than her words had echoed in his mind, her tongue snatched him up once again, lolling to the back of her mouth where an undulating fleshy tunnel vanished down, carrying the echos of slick nectar and honey dribbling through its passage. In the heat of the moment, he’d forgotten why he was in this situation, and now suddenly the realisation that he was being eaten gave him pause. Withania was unaware of his moment of clarity, and shut her eyes as she swallowed hard to bring down the breezie in a single gulp.

The slick opening seemed to reach up and wrap around Silver, giving him no possibility of escape. This was the moment, his heart rushed and his lungs gasped at the hot and sweetened air around him as he was swallowed by Withania. The fleshy walls of her throat settled around him, compressing and squeezing him down - until a sudden narrowing wedged him in place. Withania’s throat compressed down on him, but he was being held in check by Withania holding her hoof to her throat. He couldn’t move, and was almost smothered, covered with the honey and nectar combined, a gooey lump in the throat of a huge predator that was toying with him.

And then Withania relaxed her throat again, sending the breezie down with a lurch. She licked her lips and swallowed the excess saliva pooled in her mouth, but other than that she felt - normal. She was so used to feeling full and stretched after eating, yet Silver Speck had been so small that she didn’t even feel him inside her. She licked her lips and smiled as she got up from the table to head outside and continue working. Business as usual, except somewhere inside her a little breezie was living out his dreams.

Silver Speck found himself within a different world. The outdoors, the light, and the fresh air around Withania’s house and garden were replaced by a dark and humid environment. The only light was the faint glow of his luminescent antenna that revealed slick green walls, while he was surrounded by deep tremors of Withania moving around, her heart beating, and the liquid gurgle of fluids in her body. He had little time to take this all in before he was dropped into a pool of thin and watery nectar, with the tube that he had arrived in clenching shut behind him to leave no air pockets at all.

The watery fluid inside Withania washed him clean of the honey that had bound his limbs together, but as a breezie he was programmed to avoid bodies of water at all costs. He thrashed around for a few moments before remembering what Withania had told him. You’ll be able to breath my nectar, she’d said. Silver Speck allowed himself to sink into the middle of her belly, weightless and unnoticed. He held his breath as long as he could, before finally blowing out a stream of tiny bubbles that quickly floated away, and upon trying to draw another breath his tiny lungs were flooded. He convulsed again, reaching for anything he could grasp and finding nothing. Then the worst was over. He breathed again, feeling the rush of liquid moving in and out of his lungs - alien in sensation, but quite able to support him. The nectar had invaded every part of him during this struggle, his ears, nose, even his nether regions were filled. Every last bubble of air had been displaced from his body and whisked away as nothing more than perhaps a hiccup to Withania.

Now he had calmed down again, Silver Speck took stock of his situation. The sounds of Withania’s body working around him were overwhelming, a soothing vibration on his body that wasn’t deafening, but penetrated him to his core. He belonged to her now, and there was no escape. If she had been a wild predator, this might have been a desperate struggle in vain that would end in a terrifying fade into darkness - but knowing that he was in the belly of a kind and protective predator soothed his nerves and calmed his mind, allowing him to focus and think about the sensations on his body.

The nectar dislodged and carried away every speck of dirt and pollen sticking to his coat, expanding and clearing the pathways inside his body down to his very pores. But as clean as this made him feel, another sensation was beginning to take hold - like spending too long in the bathtub, he felt soft and almost wrinkly. His joints were soothed and relieved of tension up to the point where he felt them moving past limits he thought possible.

Bringing his forehooves up to his face to inspect them in the dim light from his antennae, he discovered that they had become like noodles. There was no distinction between hoof and foreleg anymore, no joint, just a soft appendage that was quickly dwindling away into the liquid nectar swirling in and around his body. His hind legs weren’t doing much better, as he’d been instinctively treading the liquid to orient himself. His mane and tail had already gone, dissolved away without his notice - and then finally, he released that his lungs had become an open space in his chest, eroded away into more nectar that hollowed him out from the inside.

There was no pain at all, if anything the sensation was so alluring that he wanted nothing more than to help it along. His sense of self, the sense of his body, was no longer a solid blob of flesh, but a drop of liquid that stretched and compressed in a larger volume, able to be formed and moulded. Finally, the last of his body dissipated into this liquid mass, and he became nothing but Withania’s fluids, to be absorbed and distributed through her body.

His mass drifted on a tiny current to the back of her stomach, where he was drawn into another tube as an amorphous shape of thicker nectar and slowly carried deeper into her gut. The walls here stroked him, brushing away at him like cloth. His mass was sticking to the walls as it went, where it passed through the plant-flesh and was absorbed. Silver felt his consciousness fade as his body was eroded away into nothing, a peaceful dream-like state taking hold and pulling his attention away from reality.

He fell into a stupor of not really knowing where, who, or even what he was anymore. There was a soft warmth, a spreading feeling of smooth curves. He felt bigger, as if he had been squashed flat and spread over a large surface, yet he could also feel depth to the strange form he had become. He did not move of his own free will, but a coordinated and rhythmic movement stretched and squashed him in turn, filling his foggy consciousness with an overwhelming sense of pleasure.

Withania pottered around her garden as she had started out her day. Silver Speck had left no more impression on her body than a slice of toast would have, but she smiled to herself all afternoon, thinking about the lewd drama taking place inside her body. It was hours later when she sat down on her work stool in the greenhouse and felt a strange tingle from her hips.

She stood up again, and the sensation flared up once again. Not a touch, nor a physical effect, but a strange emotional warmth. She stretched her hind legs luxuriously, looking down the curve of her flanks, and then sat down again heavily, watching her cutie marks squash slightly under the pudge of her hips.

“Hello there, Silver, I see you’ve arrived in the softest room I have to offer…” she murmured. She knew that Silver Speck wouldn’t be able to hear her, but she did know that every little movement of her soft flanks would now be his entire world. The idea excited her as much as the warming feeling, having another creature absorbed into her body in such a way. They were fully under her control, part of her, and entirely at the mercy of her own body’s emotions and hormones. And boy, would they be getting the most of it. It was times like this that she envied her own guests. She only hoped that she could pleasure him enough without him passing out too soon.

Her body often had its own ideas on how long to keep her guests, and she figured that a breezie wouldn’t exactly have a schedule to keep - so rather than deliberately condition her body to turn Silver Speck into a seed, Withania decided to wait for one to form of its own accord. Although two days later she was still waiting, which was unusual. She shrugged as she got up to find no seed in her bed or sense of fullness that indicated the imminent passing of one, and turned on the shower. Sighing under the stream of water, she didn’t even notice as a speck of something glanced off of her hind leg and was quickly washed down the drain.

The sensation of Silver Speck being held in her hip-pudge was gone, but Withania knew that he might just be forming into a seed still. She wasn’t even sure if this would happen as normal. Her pony-seeds would be larger than his entire body, so how exactly was this even going to work? Maybe he’d end up as a giant breezie. That would be neat in itself, she thought.

On the third day, Withania saddled up her bags to travel into town. Outside her garden’s rear gate was a small field of scrub that served as a border around this corner of town, and the first thing she noticed as she pulled the gate shut was a strange little blue flower in the sea of pale green grass.

“Is that…” she said aloud to herself, “Wait how did you get there?”

The flower was unmistakably a tegmen hybrid, her own species that reformed her guests - but they didn’t grow wild, the only ones where her own seeds she planted in the garden or in pots within her house. Unless this was a long-stay guest who had gotten lost, but then it was much too small. She trotted over to investigate. For a plant that was supposed to make a flower big enough to contain a pony, this little specimen was far too small - it was more like the size of the original Tegmen Flower she’d discovered and cultivated over a year ago that had started all this madness.

Withania glanced back up at her house, looking at the rear window where the bathroom would be. A pipe lead out from this room and down the side of the house - the wastewater pipe. At this end of town, Ponyville’s plumbing was less established. Her shower and sinks flowed into a pipe that carried the water off of her property to a soakaway, which was essentially an underground pit filled with rocks and stones to sink a large amount of water. It must’ve been directly under her hooves right now - Silver Speck’s seed had already come and gone without her notice, and must’ve washed away in the shower!

“Oh horsetail!” muttered Withania, bustling back into her garden to fetch a plant pot and a trowel.

Silver Speck opened his eyes blearily. He was laying curled up in the centre of a flower, soft and bobbing gently under his weight. The room around him came into focus, unfamiliar at first before he remembered that this was Withania’s kitchen. He leaned over the edge of the flowerhead and saw a terracotta plant pot below, and the dining room table. Relief set in. He had the strangest dream, first he’d been eaten, and then digested, and he’d been absorbed and become part of a full-sized pony, big and powerful. But then somehow he was being washed away, tumbling through water and down pipes into a cold blackness.

But he had regrown, as a flower he’d worked his way back up to the surface, and now he was back in Withania’s house, where it was quiet and safe. The plant pony herself was nowhere in sight, but Silver Speck didn’t mind. He could sit here a little longer, safe in his flower.