Reeling in a Big One. Or a Thousand.
“Mmm…”
The sound emanated from deep in Gossamer Gleam’s throat, a rumbling of her vocal chords. It was a neutral, thoughtful sound, a wordless expression of “Well, this is adequate” as she looked at her reflection.
The purple unicorn wore a glittery lilac gown, layered skirt billowing around her hips and obscuring her legs. The broad, open neckline framed her modest bosom with a thin line of cleavage running down the center. Had she worn a veil she would have resembled a bride-to-be, albeit one lacking any of the delighted enthusiasm that such a position was expected to entail. Her expression was dour and flat, her lips forming a thin line along her muzzle, and her eyes were half-lidded, as if bored.
She finished cinching up the back of the dress, pulling it tight around her abdomen. The color of her fur bled faintly through the fabric, as did the arcane markings that were inscribed in black upon her stomach.
Silently satisfied with her appearance, Gossamer Gleam turned and walked out of her bedroom. It was past twilight, and there were no lights on inside the parlor; in the pale silver glow of the moon and stars, the furnishings were cast in grey and black, boxy, hunched masses that lay upon the floor in prayer. There were the two cushy chairs that stood caddy-corner to each other, where her father and mother had spent most of their time sitting when they had lived in this house, and would spend most of their time sitting there whenever they came to visit her. Her business was not in here, only some lingering nostalgia.
The back of the room led into the kitchen, but in the corner there was an opening for a stairway that led upward. In most households, this would lead to a second floor, or to an attic, but this house on a high hill in the already elevated city of Canterlot was home to something special. At the top of the stairs, the mare came to a hatch that was fitted into the ceiling, and as she pushed it open with a soft grunt she felt a chill air fall upon her. The observatory was also unlit, but the balcony windows allowed for far greater illumination to enter, shining upon the great metallic tubing and surrounding skeletal structure that made up her father’s telescope, which before had belonged to his father, and his father’s father before that; it was an old thing, older than the house itself, but it worked as well as it needed to. Her father had brought her here many times to tell her about the wonders of the universe, the worlds so far beyond them in the darkness of space. “Gossy” he would always call her affectionately as he got wound up in these stories. His intent of course had been to coax her into the joys of astronomy over the course of her fillyhood, to follow in their family’s hoofsteps, but it had never quite caught her interest.
Or, at least, not in the way either of them had likely anticipated.
Though she fondly traced her hand over the seat that stood at the bottom of the telescope and the eyepiece which hung over it, her business was not with this either. Wordlessly, almost soundlessly, she drifted ghostlike across the room, opening one of the windows so she could pass through to the balcony. A breeze ran across her shoulders, tossing about her purple mane, and the golden band that tied it together bounced against her back. She stood against the cold iron railing that ran around the perimeter of the balcony, and she reached out toward the open air.
To an untrained eye, it would have looked like she was blindly fumbling at nothing, but her fingers grasped around something that was there and was not there. It was an ephemeral strand of light, a silk string so thin as to be nearly invisible, hardly more than a silver twinkle that stretched out through the air. One end of it was attached to the railing, and the line extended out far beyond her field of visibility, into the night sky, toward the stars (and it was fortunate that these weren’t truly physical, otherwise pegasi and zeppelins flying over Canterlot would be at risk of falling victim to a nasty surprise). Wherever they ended, Gossamer Gleam herself wasn’t certain – she had merely cast them to the heavens as far as she could make them go.
The mare went around the circumference of the observatory, and one by one she checked on the ethereal tethers. She plucked at them as if they were the strings of some vast harp, feeling them still tight, though they were silent to all but her, a note that was beyond any conventional pony music. To her growing dismay, however, all of them were turning up cold, the beacons having gone unnoticed since she set them up this morning.
“Mmm…”
It was more of a grumble now, more guttural, grinding in her throat. Disappointed.
“Shame,” Gossamer Gleam thought with a sigh as she finished checking on the last of the lines, with naught a hint of a nibble on any one of them. Her expression remained impassive all the while, hardly changed in the slightest despite her displeasure. She passed her hands along her stomach as she looked down at her form and her dress, having gone to such trouble to look presentable. At least if she undid the lace a little, it would be a suitable dress for lying upon her bed and wistfully staring up at the ceiling until Luna’s sleep came to her.
She turned back the way she had come. Her fingers touched upon the telescope once more, automatically, as she went by. Leaning over, she pulled open the trap door for the stairs again.
MMM…
She didn’t hear it. She felt it, rumbling through her, hot and heavy. Her loins flared.
It was dark on the other side of the hatch – darker than it had been before she came up. No, not dark. Black. Void.
The stairs were there, clear as day, but the walls were gone. The interior of the house was gone. It was just stairs, descending steadily downward.
Gossamer Gleam’s eyes widened, just a little, but it was out of surprise, not fear.
She had gotten something’s attention after all.
Hesitation held onto her for the briefest of moments. Perhaps it was the tugging of some subconscious part of her that was still rational. Still normal.
She brought her hoof down upon the first step, and then the next, one by one, her gown trailing around her, catching briefly on the opening before slipping past. She did not hear the door closing behind her, but she would have already known that simply turning back the way she came was not an option.
The stairs went down for quite some time, what certainly would have been into the depths of Mount Canter were she not certain that she wasn’t in Equestria at all anymore. At some point they had ceased to be made of the wood of her family home and were instead a flaky pale red stone, a trail of indents left by her hooves marked in the material. She wouldn’t have dared to try looking over the sides, over the abyss, to see what, if anything this narrow structure was supported by, though she wasn’t especially curious anyway.
Her stomach was already lurching. The path in front of her continued ahead at just the same trajectory as ever, but that brief sense of vertigo overtook her when she put a hoof forward and felt it sink through open air further than it should have. The geometries of reality were warping around her; she imagined that she could have lifted an arm up in front of herself and seen it bend as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. It was to Gossamer Gleam’s immeasurable fortune that she was a calm and stoic pony, or else her psyche would have snapped like a twig a long time ago. The droning measure “One…two…one…two…” repeated in her mind in time with her steps like a metronome. Her mane and tail bobbed heavily with her descent, the golden bangles bouncing against her back and her legs.
The path seemed to keep going on just as far as it ever had, but all of a sudden the mare felt herself come up against a wall. It was clammy and she felt it cling to her, but it was not something altogether solid, something gooey like caramel or taffy, which was fortunate or else she might have smashed her nuzzle and horn against it. She hardly allowed herself to stop for more than a second before she pushed onward, undaunted, quite literally as she forced herself into the invisible barrier. She closed her eyes before she could feel the field of gunk could get into them. It pressed all around her, turning into a mold of her shape as it conformed and stretched. Then, like a larva emerging from its egg sac, she felt the membrane tear around her, and she was on the other side, somewhere else. A few scraps of her dress had been torn off, caught on the way through the veil.
It was hot; she could immediately feel that she was sweating, the fur over her brow and cheeks matting against her skin. The earth beneath her was like that of the stairs, brittle red stone that crunched underneath her hooves like terracotta, adding to the dust that billowed along in a stiff sulfuric breeze. Behind her, there was a sheer cliff that loomed some hundreds of feet above her (with nothing to indicate the spot she had emerged from), the peak vanishing into the soupy, swirling muddy brown clouds above, flashes of lightning blooming within them, and dotted across the plain before her were spindly, branching black spires like trees that looked to be just as feeble as the rock they grew from.
MMM…
The earth trembled. Far in the distance, something that looked like a mountain was moving, its craggy ridges shifting like carapace plates. Oh, how the mere sight of it made Gossamer Gleam’s heart flutter and ache, but she knew that it was not what had called for her.
The purple mare trudged forward, just as steadily as she had before. She may not have had the slightest idea of what exactly her destination was, all she needed to know was that she was supposed to press onward. Even in the most chaotic and bizarre and hostile of worlds, there was always room for rules, rules which she had been careful to set in place for herself – so long as she didn’t stray from her path, there should be nothing to worry about.
Should.
There was not very much to see for a while. The plain stretched out in all directions, open and barren, with nothing to be seen scurrying across the red rock. Amidst the rivulets of the tree spires, though, she could see a glistening movement, something dark and oily. Perhaps it was just a kind of sap. Perhaps they were slithering serpentine beasts – scavengers or predators or parasites. She gave a wide berth to one tree that stood in her path, not particularly eager to find out what the answer was.
Then the way ahead came to a quite abrupt halt. The ground gave way into another sheer drop, down to a pit that looked roughly circular and as large as a stadium. About twenty feet down she saw its contents: something red and orange and yellow and black, bubbling and inchoate, like lava. A volcanic crater? If the trail ended here, then it could only mean this was her destination, but even though she was of reasonable certainty that the presence which had summoned her was not hostile she did not feel any particular desire to leap in.
There was a shrill screech accompanied by a flapping of wings as a crow swooped overhead and alighted upon a tree branch.
Except it wasn’t really a crow – that was just her closest approximation thereof. It had three pairs of narrow, slitted red eyes, and instead of a beak it had a long, thin proboscis. Its body seemed like a mix of a lizard and a balloon and exhibited a strange radial symmetry, with three legs and three wings. Its dark feathers were sharp, she could tell.
And, of course, the tree wasn’t really a tree either.
It looked about erratically, in her direction but never quite looking at the mare directly. Then it said, “Little mote, you should bow, are you not aware that you stand in the presence of royalty?”
Gossamer Gleam stared back pointedly. Sweat had bled through her dress, matted her hair, but she was still a lady of Canterlot, and she stood tall and rigid. “I was not aware that a bird was the ruler of this realm,” she called back, raising her volume just slightly above its normal register for the sake of audibility, but her tone was still dull and flat, a droll sarcasm.
The crow-thing gave a series of buzzing warbles that might have approximated laughter. “Not I, you blind fool, down there,” it then went on, jerking its head toward the pit.
She looked down again, at the conflagrant mass. Nothing immediately stuck out to her.
“You carbonates, always so dense,” it groused with the same buzzing. It hopped along the branch, to the edge, which was held aloft over the edge of the pit. “Look closely, and you will see them, in the boiling, the motion.”
The purple pony knelt down now and just barely leaned over the edge. The warm glow bathed across her face like the rays of the sun.
“Mmm…”
And indeed she saw them. What she had before assumed to be a more or less uniform surface she now realized was actually far lumpier, misshapen. Much like she would have expected the cliff wall to look like as she was pressing out from it, it was like figures bulging up against the underside of the lava, washed over and buried, writhing and wriggling against their confines. Their shapes were many and varied, no two alike, and whenever she looked back to one she had seen before she felt that it had changed in some way, making her vision blur together.
“Their names are many,” the crow-thing explained, buzzing as it inflated its chest, “they gathered from across the folds of reality, but together they are Molten. They are lords of heat and life and chaos, bearers of the primordial fire that birthed the universe. They are a thousand in number, and their forms number higher still, for they are not bound by the limits of physicality.”
“They are in pain,” Gossamer Gleam murmured plainly as she looked down at the mass of the Molten. The wriggling, agonized bodies would have been a sure enough sign for a pony of Equestria, but she was cognizant enough to know that that was not necessarily a universal thing. It was in the heat that she felt it, a pulsation that echoed like screams.
“Yes, for they are dying,” it said, solemnly, at least partially – a third, perhaps, but the other two thirds were still heavy in jest. “Their own mutability is betraying them, breaking down at last after so many eons. It is only through their contiguity that they are able to maintain their existence. Soon they will disintegrate into nothing, and their fire will be lost to the ether.” All was silent, until a moment later it added, “Of course, that is why you have come, little mote, is it not?”
She didn’t turn to address it again, but she silently nodded her head.
The crow-thing’s laughter buzzed in her ears. “Yes, rebirth would allow them to escape their fate, but that requires a willing vessel. You are one crazy carbonate to think you handle their raw power.”
Crazy? Maybe. Gossamer Gleam had probably been crazy all her life. She knew how not to show it.
“I am not truly certain of what I am capable in these circumstances,” she said aloud, her own voice sounding alien to her. Her knees were at the very edge of the cliff, and the rock bit into her skin, through the thin fabric of her dress. “I offered myself up to the void, and they called for me because they thought I could help them. I will give them my all, and should that not be enough, should I be extinguished, well…would that not be so bad, to meet oblivion in ecstasy?”
Her legs were clamped tightly together. The insides of her thighs were moist.
“Mmm…”
The crow-thing buzzed and cawed once, but it prophetically said, “Your lust will be your doom one day, little mote. Maybe not today, but one day.” Then it flew away with a squawk.
Gossamer Gleam stood, and she backed away from the pit without ever taking her eyes off of it.
The Molten rose in a great heaving motion, a shape forming out of the myriad bodies that made up its body. The tree that the crow-thing had perched on was smashed into shards of black glass and blacker ichor by a giant, malformed, many-fingered hand, with a second emerging beside it and two more to the mare’s right. The level of the red pool lowered as its occupants left, binding together. Each made up a piece of the whole: a bone, a digit, an eyeball, a tooth, an organ. The individual bodies were faceless, but they came together to create a face which stared down upon her. It had seven eyes as large as boulders and three mouths that could have each swallowed an Ursa Major whole.
The hulking, abominable body of fused alien flesh loomed over the pony – the little mote – as it hunched down. Its breath washed over her, charring flames. All at once her singed and torn dress sloughed off of her, pooling on the ground around her hooves before evaporating into thin air. She stood before the Molten without the slightest hint of terror for her sudden nudity, standing stoically still as the air wafted over her lilac fur, her breasts and her loins. Her cutie mark stood proudly on each of her hips, a violet heart with a spider web pattern contained within, and over her flat stomach were the protective runes that allowed her to survive, an array of circles and symbols that were already glowing brightly with indigo light.
She responded by spreading her arms wide in welcome.
The Molten opened its central mouth again, yawning wide, and a tongue came lolling out, stretching until it came loose entirely, only held on by a thin strand. The body hung in the air like a piñata as its shape changed, molding into a vaguely recognizable form, forming a body and then extremities. The body’s skin was smooth and glossy, like plastic or rubber, though the searing lava inside it still roiled.
It seemed to vaguely approximate a pony in most ways. It had two elongated arms at its shoulders, and just below there were two more pairs that were shorter, clutched around the chest. Its legs forked at the knees into two sets of feet that narrowed down to points instead of hooves. It had a jagged horn on its head and stout protrusions in place of ears and a muzzle, but no eyes or mouth to speak of. In place of a tail, the strand from the Molten’s mouth attached to the base of its spine, like a cross between an umbilical cord and a puppeteer’s string. And it bore a stallion’s genitals between its legs and a mare’s breasts over its chest, full and engorged.
The vessel drifted downward, not quite touching the ground, and it thrummed in speech to her, as did the body of the Molten.
MMM…MMM…MMM…
It was deafening. Maddening.
Her bones vibrated inside their sleeves of meat. There was a splatter on the ground around her hooves as she orgasmed before they had even touched each other. But though she felt like she was made of jelly, though her decency was long gone, she still crossed her legs and spread her arms in a curtsy.
There was a creaking noise as the hanging body moved its limbs with joints that hadn’t quite formed yet, but all the same it kneeled forward and bowed in the traditional Canterlot manner, and when it stood upright again it held out its arms toward her.
With a nearly vacant expression, a trickle of red running from one of her nostrils, Gossamer Gleam held up her hands to take those that were proffered to her, and without questioning what she was doing she kicked off from the ground with her hooves and joined the vessel in the air.
The touch on her skin was gentle. The heat inside was unfathomable, as if a pane of glass was all that kept her from being immolated by the sun. When she was entered, it was like being impaled by a hot iron skewer, and lightning coursed along her spine. She opened her mouth as if to moan, but the breath caught silently in her throat, and her eyes remained dull, glassy, and neutral. She threw her arms around the body’s back and pulled herself tightly against it, letting their bosoms touch, and though it had no lips she still fervently kissed its muzzle. Its glossy skin left a taste like licking meat juices off of a plate.
The mare was hungry. She had not had the opportunity to experience passion like this for some time. The Molten had not known affection of any form for millennia. When she held it, it returned the gesture in kind, clasping around her, and it began to ride against her nethers. They did an undulating dance in the open air, bucking back and forth into each other rhythmically. The vessel seemed to make no reaction all the while, but the mass of the Molten rumbled distantly.
When Gossamer Gleam came again, it was with no leaking of fluids from her insides, as if she was completely sealed up by the alien meat inside her. When the Molten came, it was not with an eruption of lava from its own approximation of testicles. The cord connecting it to the central mass bulged as something came traveling down it and into the vessel, and from there into her. She had to choke back another outcry as she felt like a tree was being crammed into her, pelvis be damned. The markings on her abdomen glowed fervently, willing her to adapt to the need for additional capacity.
Despite all this strain upon her, when she felt that this had finally ended, so suddenly that it was as if the pressure had never been there, her form hardly seemed altered at all. There was naught but the slightest hint of firm convexity added to the surface of her stomach.
“Mmm…”
That was one, she knew. One soul. One of many. One of a thousand.
And the rest were on the way.
But as one became two, then three, then four, Gossamer Gleam never thought for an instant to beg for this to stop. Her loins were aching, her legs threatening to fall apart, her very being splitting in twain, pumped in surging repetition. Her lavender form remained glued to the vessel, clinging tightly, wracked in ecstasy that kept her locked in place, and as her stomach filled with life, she only felt her conviction redouble upon itself more and more. At the same time, the Molten was shrinking as its constituent building blocks were taken out from under it.
The vessel’s lower hands clutched at her stomach, which now no longer looked remotely as trim as her figure had been at the start of this endeavor. After a dozen injections she already looked like she was several months into a pregnancy, a dome jutting out from her torso and rolling past her waist, her navel popped out into a rounded button. The firm mass stood awkwardly in between her and her lover, but they remained attached to each other all the same. It seemed to have caught on to her behavior somewhat by now, and despite not being able to truly kiss it still made the motions of doing so, forcing its stubby snout against her lips and tongue. But at no point did Gossamer Gleam allow her composure to be broken, her countenance remaining cool and placid.
As she developed what would have been a pot belly, the magenta glow of the magical runes intensified further. She was becoming more than a mere prim and proper resident of high society Canterlot, and that required certain additions. Her breasts swelled, rounded mounds creeping over the upper slopes of her stomach as they inflated dramatically; what had once been modest handfuls suddenly were the size of her skull. Such storage tanks were necessary in order to deliver sustenance to the young – whether in this case that would turn out to be a mare’s milk or liquid fire remained to be seen. Her thighs thickened, squeezing all the tighter around the waist of the glassy vessel and the hot length inside her, and her buttocks plumped up, growing perkier as they jutted out behind her. This would provide added stability for her gravid frame, and the weight, though currently she couldn’t feel any of it, was only mounting higher and higher, just like the pressure of her tightening frame.
“Gossy.”
She often relived this memory during these moments. She remembered where all of this began, so long ago.
Gossamer Gleam had been something of a late bloomer, in the way that ponies knew it. Puberty had come to her just as readily as any other filly, but she was into her teens and had yet to acquire a cutie mark. She had proven to be astonishingly antisocial, lacking the slightest investment in interacting with any of her peers. Her parents almost thought her to be catatonic at times, for how little emotion or liveliness she displayed.
And so her father would show her to the observatory, to stoke some enthusiasm into her life. He would prattle on about the stars and constellations, nebulae, galaxies, worlds far beyond Equestria that were of infinite possibility, never imagining how close to their eyes and fingertips they could potentially be. He would smile at her, but whenever she looked at him she wouldn’t be able to see his face – this time she saw him as the mottled reds of the Molten’s featureless vessel.
But at some point or another, he left her, called away by mother or some such. In that time she absentmindedly looked through the telescope, scanning across the heavens, the many distant specks that dotted the infinite black canvas.
Then all of a sudden, she happened to catch sight of something unusual. Before her very eyes, she witnessed a star become blotted out by a shape that moved in front of it, a thing so unfathomably vast that in the lens’ view she could only catch a glimpse of its face, jaws full of teeth, abyssal eyes. She promptly tumbled out of the seat and landed on the floor, breathing heavily as if winded from a long run. Then, as her father came back upstairs to see what had happened, she felt a tingling course through her as her cutie mark manifested upon her flank.
And some years later she and that creature that had sparked her passions would get to meet directly, but that was a different memory.
But suddenly everything stopped. The passion, the lovemaking, the embrace, the heat. Not the insertion, though, the molded penis remained firmly in place. The pressure hadn’t ceased either; her skin was stretched taut over a globe of a stomach that now sprawled out before her, as if she was pregnant with a fully grown pony. Her breathing was as labored as it had been in her flashback.
Her eyes focused on her surroundings again, and she looked ahead of herself to see the vessel staring back. She actually had to look down considerably (over the twin horizons of her chest and the rising midriff mountain beyond), because at this point the girth of her midsection was such that it posed a significant obstacle in the two of them remaining in close contact with each other while still being joined at the groins. The vessel’s inner light was dimmer now, the churning magma slowed noticeably. The Molten behind it had also become noticeably smaller over the course of their time together. Two of its eyes (in as much as they had been “eyes”) were gone now, the shape of its head shifted to account for the loss of anatomy, and one of its arms had become a stump on the side of its shoulder.
The vessel regarded her cautiously with its long arms reaching around her midsection to hold her sides. Though it had no face, she could feel the apprehension that came from it. Concern…worry?
She thought briefly of what must have happened while she was reminiscing. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself riding the fiery, plastic-coated flesh, rigorously shaking as the essence of the Molten was pumped into her. Her expression must have been dull and empty, her eyes listless. It would have been like she was a corpse. And in that moment she found herself laughing – only a little, a chuckle (as it made her stomach lurch and ache).
“You don’t understand…” she murmured, shaking her head, and she allowed a smile to form on her face, “the irony of it all. Just keep going at it, dear; we’ve still got a long way to go.”
The vessel stared at her a while longer, perhaps in disbelief. Eventually, it nodded its head. It didn’t continue though before it had leaned forward, stretching enough to bring their muzzles together one more time.
Mmm…
The pumping resumed with renewed vigor all over again. The vessel was now positioned perpendicular to her, coming up against the underside of her swelling belly with each heaving motion. It was as if she was lying upon an invisible bed and it was standing beside the edge, looming over her. Its arms hugged around her engorged midsection while the smaller appendages clung to her legs, keeping them in place around its own torso.
The raw energy filled Gossamer Gleam like a faucet turned to full blast. She almost couldn’t feel the pressure of entry anymore, only the pressure of her flesh, distended far beyond any capacity it should have been capable of. She could lose herself in the sensation of her rapidly expanding form, everything spreading out far beyond her reach. The light gradually faded as the Molten disappeared into her waiting womb, the wasted world around them receding into darkness.
= = = = =
It is the natural way of things that the sound of one going down stairs is louder than the sound of going up, as the weight comes bearing down heavily on each step.
Regardless, as the sound of Gossamer Gleam descending the stairway from the observatory began to ring out in the silent halls of the house, it was very distinctly louder than the noise that had been created by her ascent. The gentle plodding hoofsteps had turned into a slow rhythm of heaving tromps, echoing down the stairwell. Each of these was accompanied by a low wincing groan of a grunt, heavy with discomfort, however restrained.
The weight in itself was one thing, dragging down on her back as her midsection yearned to make contact with the floor. The worse part was the bobbing motion that was produced as she took each step downward, yanking further and then bouncing momentarily – had she been on flat ground, the underside actually would have brushed against the floor. She had to wait until this oscillation had come to a complete stop, the strain of her flesh returning to a relatively comfortable middle ground, before she could bring herself to continue further, and the process would begin all over again. The fact that she couldn’t even see the stairs beneath her, blindly reaching with her hooves at every step, didn’t help matters in the slightest either.
The slender and elegant physique of the lavender pony had become grossly overgrown, swollen around the edges beyond any reasonable degree. A pony viewing her from the front would have only just seen her hooves underneath the eclipsing enormity of her belly, a distended globe of furred flesh that sprawled in front of her, with engorged breasts that rested heavily upon it, splayed out to the sides, nipples protruding pert and full, with her face (just as unperturbed as ever, minus a hard clenching of the jaw) peeking out above and her arms out to the sides as they gripped the railings. Of course, looking up at her from the bottom of the stairway would have yielded even less: the maternal wall of her midsection and mammaries filled the passage nearly from one wall to the other, a pale purple planet with two moons perched on top. All this did something of a disservice to her legs, lusciously curvaceous along her calves and thighs up to her broad hips and rounded buttocks, wobbling gently and grinding together as she walked, columns of flesh to support the rotundity of her frame.
It was fortunate that this path, these motions, were something that the mare had grown quite accustomed to by now. The severity of the pregnancy varied from one instance to the next, but she knew how to carry herself under these circumstances. At least she was able to see over her bosom, though she was aware that the fleshy bags, sloshing audibly, were not nearly full at present.
And the swelling would only increase with time.
At the next pause in her shuffling descent, she stopped to let her hand rest upon the side of her stomach. She felt the surface of it, taut as a drum, and rubbed across it (as much as she could reach, anyway, which was hardly halfway along its circumference). She felt the interior churning, slowly but surely, grating against the inner lining of her womb, a thousand souls swirling as one. It was a strain, and yet oddly soothing. The magenta glow of the markings over her stomach was coupled with an orange light that welled up from beneath her skin, and this combined illumination filled the gloom of the parlor as she reached the bottom of the stairs, the front of her form emerging long before her central body did.
“Gossy.”
Her parents were sitting in their favored seats. Her father was reading from a book and her mother was knitting, just as they were often wont to do when she was a filly. They were garbed in old, well-worn clothes, a far cry from their daugher’s present nudity.
“Are you bringing home some grandchildren, dear?” her father asked nonchalantly.
“A few,” Gossamer Gleam replied without hesitation. It was a bit of an understatement.
He chuckled as he turned the yellowed pages of his book.
“I just wish you’d hook up with somepony normal one of these days,” her mother commented, shaking her head, “wouldn’t you rather not have a ball of tentacles wriggling around inside you?”
On the contrary, the thought alone was enough to make her loins quiver anew, but she instead replied, “There are hardly any hauntings in Canterlot though, and most of them are gross old stallions who only care about their money.”
“You know I didn’t mean a ghost, that’s not normal either,” her mother scoffed back with indignant exasperation.
Gossamer Gleam snickered and smirked. “You don’t really have a lot of room to talk there.”
She sighed. “I’ll never understand how this happened to you.”
“Well I’m exhausted now, in any event,” the mare then said, giving out a long sigh for emphasis, and she rubbed at her stomach again while the other hand pressed against the small of her back, “I need to get this weight off my hooves and close my eyes.”
“Sleep well, Gossy,” her father called gently.
She lumbered into her bedroom, squeezing her gravid belly through the doorway before closing it behind her, leaving the room to only be left in the pale green light of the flaming skulls that stood in place of her father and mother’s heads, until they too faded into the night.
Author's Note
This was primarily done to get something preg-related done before the end of Mayternity, and it also serves to give an example of the things my character Gossamer Gleam does. Managed to squeeze out an astonishing (for me) 4000 words on this in a single day. For whatever worth that has.
