The natural world is filled with unique and fascinating things, and no end of joy can be found in exploring it. But, as anyone with worldly experience will tell you, care must often be taken so as to avoid unexpected consequences. There are simple rules for such things: let someone know where you're going, stick to known paths, don't eat anything you can't identify, and so on.
'Don't touch powerful fertility charms from eldritch realms beyond comprehension' should probably be one of those rules, but 'beyond comprehension' and 'rules' are famously incompatible.
How unfortunate.
-----
"Ooh! Tingly!"
Silverstream reached out her fin and poked the strange object a second time, giggling as a pleasant, shivery jolt ran up her foreleg and all the way to the tip of her tail. The glint of something shiny had caught the seapony's eye purely by chance and, thanks to her natural fascination with anything new or interesting, needed only the briefest moment to catch her total and undivided attention as well.
Formed from some kind of glossy stone or metal and vaguely resembling a hoofball in size, the object nestled in the stony sand of the ocean shallows along an otherwise unremarkable stretch of beach. Its surface was at first glance a deep midnight blue, but became oddly incandescent when viewed at an angle. It appeared to glimmer waveringly, both under the afternoon sun and the area where the seapony's shadow fell upon its surface. It was as if the strange object were gently but inconsistently illuminated from within, though it emitted no visible light. Intricate patterns, far too precise to be natural, crisscrossed its entire surface in finely carved channels, like inverse roots or perhaps abstract veins. Their uniformity faintly suggested an intentional pattern, though what - if anything - they might represent remained abstract.
The object was like nothing Silverstream had ever seen. Naturally, that made it utterly captivating. Compelled to learn more about her discovery, she fluttered the long, wing-shaped fins behind her shoulders and rested her delphine body on the sea floor to afford her forelegs some leverage. With eagerness born of boundless curiosity she dug at the sand surrounding the object to free it from the ocean bed, amused by the pleasant, mildly electrical feelings she got whenever she nudged its glassy surface.
Though it rested deeply in the sand, the shape of the object became clearer as the seapony pushed away the silt, hoof-sized clam shells and general ocean debris surrounding it. Her work soon uncovered shapes emerging from the otherwise round body - at one end a fishlike tail, and at the other, the head and upper body of a smiling mare. She blinked, taking in the sight with momentary bafflement. Her find was clearly a statuette modelled after some seapony or another, but not one she recognized. No seapony Silverstream had ever heard of wore an intricate diadem like the mare depicted; even her aunt Queen Novo was more modest. And Novo didn't have anywhere near so many sharply pointed teeth, nor was her smile so mischievous. Perhaps the statuette represented a figure of myth, or a stylized depiction of somepony no longer living. It certainly didn't seem made to flatter them; the statuette was completely disproportionate - cartoonishly so. Between the head and the end of the tail, its rotund body implied a belly so absurdly large that its owner would struggle to swim if she even possessed such an ability at all.
Silverstream giggled at the thought; a seapony princess so gluttonous that a mischievous sculptor had thought to render her as a near-literal orb? A mystery for someone with an attention span to ponder. More to the point though, this find was clearly of some value. Its pristine quality and strange, unique appearance gave Silverstream one clear and immediate idea: take it home to Seaquestria and show it off to everyone.
She had come across the curious find on a leisurely swim a few miles up the Arisian coast. Last time she checked, Mount Aris had still been clearly visible on the near horizon above the water, and so even weighed down by her discovery Silverstream didn't anticipate a long trip home. Grasping the statuette with both forefins and bucking her powerful tail to lift it, however, revealed that it was heavy; massively, shockingly, impossibly so. Though barely the size of her head, it didn't budge an inch. The unfortunate seapony found herself flopping tail over snout for the attempt, her own effort sending her tumbling facefirst into the soft sand.
Shaking herself off with a little pout of frustration, Silverstream stared down her would-be prize. The statuette stared blankly back, its toothy carven grin appearing oddly smug all of a sudden - as if the odd object were taunting her for thinking she could simply pick it up and swim away. As if it knew something important that she didn't, and was quite happy to keep the secret to itself for the moment.
Silverstream's forefins tingled. It had started when she first touched the statuette, but now that she had grabbed the thing with some force the feeling persisted even after letting go. The sensation wasn't painful; in fact it was quite pleasant. Fuzzy, almost warm, like brushing up against thick dry wool. Odd, but less interesting than the mystery she had discovered. The bemused seapony swam in a slow circle around her find, pondering what to do next - though she needn't have bothered. Stimulated by repeated contact, the magic sealed deep inside the statuette had begun to awaken, taking root in the most obvious recipient. The situation was now well outside her control.
With a blink, Silverstream paused in her swimming; the tingling feeling was moving, travelling steadily up her forelegs. In seconds it passed her shoulders, pooling and intensifying in her chest before sinking steadily towards her stomach. Belatedly she realised her mistake and turned to get some distance from what was clearly a completely unknown - and now obviously rather active - magical artifact, but the sensation was quickly spreading. Warmer, more intense, deeper and deeper into the very core of her body.
The time for caution, Silverstream realized, had probably been several minutes ago. Her ears drooped dejectedly. "Aw, shrimp."
Whatever strange enchantment she had triggered wasted no time in taking effect. Tingling softly from snout to tailtip, with magic simmering deep in her gut, Silverstream began to feel... full. Like she'd just eaten. Like she'd just eaten a lot. The guilty, lethargy-inducing sort of fullness that tends to follow a meal slightly too large for the stomach. But it wasn't in her stomach; it was lower than that. Twisting over in the water onto her back, she felt - and moments later unmistakably saw - her belly beginning to swell. Seaponies are slim and streamlined by nature; even a little extra roundness doesn't take long to stand out.
Silverstream bit her lip, her heart pounding and her mind racing. She was obviously out of her depth here - to say that whatever was happening weirded her out would be an understatement. Getting away from the statuette would be a good idea... unless the magic was of the kind that might react badly to her fighting it. Bury the statuette in the sand? That would mean touching it, which might just set it off again. Another option would be to simply let the spell run its course - it didn't hurt (quite the opposite, really), but who knows where it might end, or what else it might do? And as seconds of nervous indecision ticked by she could only stare, almost mesmerized, as the slim pink silhouette of her midsection turned increasingly convex.
More than that - the sensation of fullness quickly took on an equally potent sense of warm, pleasant weight. She wasn't filling up so much as filling out, a constant, warm sensation of rising internal pressure growing steadily more intense. Touching her expanding middle made her fins tingle, but also elicited a nervous, guilty giggle of pleasant susprise. Her belly was sensitive to the touch, firm and warm and - somewhere deep inside, faintly, slowly moving.
Though commonly known as a bit of an airhead, Silverstream had paid attention back at friendship school. She'd also paid attention back at college (that is, an actual school), and was intuitive enough to put two and two together. Recognizing the nature of her newfound roundness, Silverstream fixed the statuette - clearly some form of powerful fertility idol - with accusatory eyes.
"Hey! That's not how making babies works!"
For its part the statuette seemed not to care, so Silverstream quickly turned her attention back to the more immediate problem: she was pregnant. Suddenly, magically, impossibly pregnant. Sure she'd thought about it in the past, and Gallus was eager to try; they'd even made plans! But this was hardly how she'd expected it to happen. Too sudden, too fast, too- weirdly, frustratingly enjoyable? Like her first thought was, against all reason, to simply accept it as good and perfectly normal? Her tail and fins twitched with agitation and stimulation in equal measure. Thankfully, the prickly tingling left in the magic's wake had stared to gradually fade. So too was the visible growth; over a few long seconds it slowed, then stopped entirely, leaving the bemused seapony to try and wrap her mind around what had just happened to her.
An experimental swish of her tail and a slow, circling turn through the water brought the extra weight and drag of her newly bulbous shape into physical context; swimming felt dramatically different: slower, more ponderous. Her buoyancy was way down. Swimming home would be a pain in the neck. More to the point, she was pretty big. Beyond simply a little rounded now, her belly - her womb, rather - stood out from her otherwise streamlined form in a smooth, firm pink oval shape. Not only weighted down by quite a few extra pounds of mass, but broadened notably as well. There was simply no mistaking that she was pregnant. In under a minute she'd gone from flatter than wave-scoured driftwood to prominently gravid. Full of foal. Expecting - and from the look of it, soon. Probably in need of a hospital berth and a lot of rest within the week, if not immediately.
Silverstream gulped. There was no chance of hiding her misadventure or explaining it away. She started to dread the prospect of breaking the news to Gallus. Or her parents. Or her brother. Or anyone, really. Adventures and humorous shenanigans were one thing - but how exactly was she supposed to ease her friends and family into the subject of how she accidentally got herself knocked up by a weird magic statue?
The weird magic statue was not forthcoming with suggestions.
"Oh, come on - what am I supposed to do about this?" she demanded, not particularly bothered by the fact that the inanimate object would not respond. She needed someone to blame for her predicament, and the obvious culprit lay right there in front of her. It felt cathartic, at least in the moment, to look into that tiny, unfamiliar carven face and demand an answer.
There was no reply - not as such - though as a fresh wave of hot, prickling shivers suddenly rolled through her body from end to end, Silverstream could have sworn the statuette's smug, toothy grin whispered back, 'Who said I was finished?'
"Waitwaitwait I didn't even touch-" Cutting herself short, Silverstream turned tail in a bout of panic and swam for deeper water at the best speed she could manage. Getting away from the statuette before it affected her even more suddenly seemed like the only sane idea, in spite of the pleasant sensations building throughout her body and the tiny voice at the back of her mind telling her that all was well.
She didn't make it far. The fizzing, tingling, warm-turning-hot sensations of strange, powerful magic in action rapidly grew stronger still. From her snout to the end of her tail and the tip of every fin, Silverstream's body bristled with peculiar feelings that shattered what little concentration she could manage. Gasping in breathless bewilderment, she felt... good. Everything tingled and itched in ways that pleased and surprised and titillated in equal measure. Her body felt vitalized. Full of energy; full of life, even. Indeed, nowhere were the feelings more concentrated, more maddeningly intense, than within her already gravid midriff. Drifting to a stop barely a few meters from where she started, Silverstream intuited what was about to happen... and welcomed it.
Once again, her belly began to bulge. Slowly at first, but building speed just as it had tapered off before. The sense of lethargic, satisfied fullness returned with a vengeance, but also a sense of something shifting. It was different this time.
The life-affirming feelings of motion from within confirmed that she was carrying two foals. A single baby seapony couldn't account for the amount of wriggling tails and kicking forelegs buffeting her insides. No - there had to be three of them now. Actually, four. Each new-formed life was maturing quickly, hurrying to catch up with their eldest sibling's head start. Silverstream's eyes rolled back in her head with a low, breathless moan as the raw sensations of supernatural growth swiftly caused her to lose count. Limp in the water, she roved the surface of her belly with both front fins, gasping and purring as firm, smooth skin pushed solidly outward, ever outward, against them.
Though their bright colours and large fins often prompt the assumption that seaponies are fish, their hippogriff heritage means that they're actually mammals. The typical mammalian features are simply hidden beneath folds of skin so that their bodies can be streamlined for swimming. Assuming, of course, that they still fit. As Silverstream's body swelled with pregnancy now well in excess of a single foal, that could only remain the case for so long. Her womb wasn't the only thing packing on mass, only the most obvious. Beneath her belly, flush with her tail, her internal mammaries grew in fitful surges, as if desperate to keep up with the demand promised by her burgeoning new brood. Blunt, rounded teats, usually too small and neatly tucked away for anyone to notice, poked from their hiding spots as they fattened beyond all hope of hiding. Low on her belly, what had been a long, narrow divot down the center line steadily bulged into a proudly protruding outie.
Far beyond just a cutely rounded bulge now, her steadily expanding belly was getting burdensome. Weighed down by an entire litter - one that grew more numerous by the minute - she was actually starting to sink. This fact was punctuated barely a moment later; inertia driving her slowly forwards, her teeming, increasingly sensitive tummy began to drag against the soft silt of the ocean floor. Fish scattered to make way as the now obscenely gravid seapony ground slowly to a stop amidst a bed of patchy seagrass, squealing in surprise (and unexpected delight) at the sudden stimulation.
Frantically wiggling her forelegs and wing-fins did nothing to stop Silverstream from pitching forward under her own momentum, and a moment later she found herself faceplanting in the soft ocean sand for a second time. On balance, this was the least of her concerns; for a brief, lucid moment, Silverstream wondered if she could even swim any more. The incandescent sensation of magic at work wasn't fading this time, only intensifying. Spreading. Suffusing every inch from her snout to her belly to the tip of her tail.
Silverstream turned her head this way and that, looking about for anyone or anything that might aid in her escalating predicament. Nothing stood out; minnows and clownfish circled curiously close by, barnacle-crusted boulders loomed here and there beyond her reach, and a colourful coral shelf dropped away into deeper water in the far distance. She paddled her fins and tail hard enough to achieve the bare minimum of lift, but the delightful feelings of fulfilment and growth throughout her bulbous womb kept her from maintaining it, planting her firmly back in the sand.
Silverstream scrunched her eyes shut, breathing heavily. A dubious urge told her to simply lie there idly and accept what was happening in spite of everything. To bask in her own preposterous fecundity for as long as it took her foals - her large, healthy, numerous foals - to arrive, and then go from there. The thought defied all good sense, even for the scatterbrained seapony, but it wasn't without appeal. Taking a deep breath to try and steady her thoughts against the maddening urge to rub and grind her tightly swollen belly against the sand for the rest of the day, she opened her eyes... and blinked in confusion. That boulder was nearer than it had been further away a second ago - and it was gradually getting closer.
In fact, everything around her seemed to be subtly moving. Silverstream looked left and right, then back at herself - aside from the massive, faintly trembling swell of her midsection, nothing looked different. In fact, she didn't appear any more pregnant than when she last looked, for what little that meant at this point. Even so, the fiery sensations of the statuette's odd magic persisted, no less powerful and intoxicating.
A tiny fish solved the mystery for her, through the simple act of swimming lazily past her face. If there was one thing seaponies were intimately familiar with, it was ocean fish. This one, an adult herring, was far too small; it barely measured the length of her snout. Logic and intuition clicked into place togther, and Silverstream saw the situation through a fresh perspective. Her belly wasn't growing more slowly - the warm, energetic lives within were still increasing in both size and number, apparently intent on claiming every piece of real estate her body could offer south of her ribcage. No, the rest of her was simply growing to keep up.
The growth seemed to be slowing, at least; the fiery feelings of magic-propelled growth were petering out gradually much as they had before, but it was a far more gradual process this time. Inch by inch, minute by minute, Silverstream continued to grow appreciably larger in every conceivable way, with little choice but to simply ride it out and look on the bright side of things. Finally, as her tail bumped gently against a boulder that had previously been a substantial landmark, her snout touched a second and her widening belly pressed teasingly against three more, the magic petered out entirely.
Taking a slow, shuddering breath, an attempt to calm her rattled nerves, Silverstream tapped a fin to her neck and received some good news. Her pearl shard necklace was still there, enlarged just like the rest of her. That was one less thing to worry about, at least; she still had the option of going hippogriff and walking - well, waddling - back to Aris if it came to that.
She let out a long, deep sigh, allowing her mind and muscles to relax a little. The situation wasn't as scary as she might have thought - unexpected and shocking, yes, but not dangerous or, strictly speaking, unpleasant. Though returning home would be far beyond awkward now. Long swim aside, she'd somehow have to explain not only how she'd gotten pregnant with an entire shoal, but also how she'd gained several meters in length and no less than a few hundred kilos in weight. At least the strange statuette was somewhere far behind her, well out of range from further shenanigans.
She glanced back at her rotund body, finally still, and silently marvelled at the sight of herself. 'Pregnant' would barely describe it: her long, nominally slender torso was swollen like a tick with foals, resting weightily on the sea floor, large enough to completely obscure any sight of her tail no matter how she moved it, firm and smooth and packed with life. A deep and primal urge took hold, and for the moment Silverstream could only gaze at herself in wonder. Surprise and circumstances be damned; part of her found it exquisitely fulfilling, giving rise to a deep, fuzzy-headed sense of satisfaction.
A particularly reckless intrusive thought suggested that she should turn around, look for the statuette and see what else it could do. That is, if she could even muster the effort to find the thing. No - no, that wouldn't do. Seriousstream won that particular mental battle without difficulty. It was time to take stock, figure out the best way to get moving, and return home to Seaquestria to get the attention of a magic specialist - and an obstetrician - before things could get any weirder. She stretched out her forelegs, placed her fins on the seafloor, and prepared to-
-and there it was again. Her eyes went wide.
Somehow, against all reason, there it was. The statuette rested face up in the sand directly beneath her muzzle, so small by comparison now that she almost missed the sight of it entirely. But no - the unusual sheen, the near-perfect round shape, and of course that damn toothy smirk on its little face, were entirely unmistakable.
In the half-second it took her to process the sight, she could have sworn it winked at her. And that was the moment where her rational mind was booted out the proverbial door on a compulsory hiatus.
Silverstream saw stars - figuratively and for a moment literally - as otherworldly magic flowed mightily through her entire being. The statuette's enchantment was well and truly done warming up, and now surged to its fullest strength with fierce new enthusiasm. Her mind overwhelmed by a great, blazing profusion of gratifying sensations, Silverstream grew. Not gradually, not subtly, but in a great pulse, as if some pressurized seal had been broken and more of her were welling up explosively from within. The boulders she'd been nestled amongst were pulverized in an instant - the first of many. The statuette disappeared from view, buried beneath her.
Silverstream's heart thundered in her chest, each beat leaving aftershocks like a minor earthquake. Her face flushed crimson, mouth hanging open in a drawn out moan of astonishment and immaculate pleasure. If seaponies could sweat, she'd be drenching herself... and she was teetering on the verge of doing so in an entirely more carnal sense. Barely even slowing after the initial surge, her rate of growth settled into a smooth curve that bordered teasingly on exponential. With each passing second she gained meters in length, tons in mass, more baby weight both overall and in proportion - and indeed, new babies.
She was barely aware of the moment her body broke the surface of the water, rising from the shallows in a tide all her own. Her tail swished furiously across the beach; her wing-fins, then her head and shoulders, lifted from the water tens of meters out to sea. Amidst it all her pregnant body swelled ever larger, a great life-bearing blimp of impossible abundance.
And in the moment, her thoughts locked in a crazed loop of 'FASTER, BIGGER, MORE,' Silverstream wouldn't have had it any other way.
-----
Hundreds of miles away, in the sleepy rural town of Ponyville, a distant tremor rippled through the earth. Alarmed little ponies looked this way and that, flowerpots tumbled from windowsills and doors rattled in their fittings. Though no damage was done, a low ripple of fear and panic rolled over the town - save for one tiny oasis of calm. A singular earth pony mare, candyfloss tail twitching uncontrollably, abruptly stopped what she was doing and donned a grin of manaical joy. "Oooooh! Party emergency!"
The yellow pegasus she'd been talking to cowered fearfully in concern, even as she hovered to escape the trembling ground. "P-p-party emergency?"
The twitchy mare brought her forehooves together with a loud clap, her smile only spreading. "Mm-hmm. Biggest. Foal shower. Ever! We're gonna need a whole battery of party cannons for this one!"
"O-oh. Oh dear..."
-----
On the southern coast, Silverstream's rapid embiggening continued unabated. Her sheer weight - a torrent of ever-expanding pink flesh - bore down with tectonic force, crushing and displacing the soft coastal sand and earth as she grew ever larger. Equestria's southern coast was in the process of gaining an entire new bay (though less charitable souls might accurately call it a crater), a conspiracy between gravity and the kaiju-scale seapony mushrooming outwards from the shallows.
Her teats' productivity surged, briefly overtaking their ability to contain the vast quantities her body expected the foals to need. Great geysers of milk churned and clouded the ocean water in a tremendous display of lewd excess, eliciting a deep-throated cry of pleasure that carried for miles. Larger, more fertile, stuffed all the way to the proverbial gills with lives to bring into the world and cherish as her own - she wanted this glorious experience never to end - or at least for it to continue as long as it possibly could. And so it did.
All notions of rational thought had fled from her mind; all Silverstream could think of, all that she could ever want in that moment, was bountiful growth on a glorious, gargantuan scale. Time ceased to matter; location and intent were scrubbed from her thoughts. For a few blindingly gratifying minutes, her mental world consisted of nothing but the sense of touch, her ever more vast and swollen body, and the breathtakingly erotic sensations emerging from their every little interaction.
Milk wasn't the only thing she flooded the ocean with that afternoon.
-----
Silverstream's return to lucidity was gradual, like stirring from a long and pleasant slumber. She stretched out her various fins and flukes, blinked exhaustion from her eyes, and propped her upper body up with both forelimbs before letting out a long and gratifying yawn. It was like waking up from the best, longest and most intense dream she'd ever had.
That thought lasted for all of five seconds, until reality firmly reasserted itself.
Silverstream blinked in slow, dawning realization as her senses finally returned in full. With clouds tickling her neck and entire flocks of seafowl noisily circling in her long, broad shadow, she looked down. That was Mount Aris below her. And she certainly wasn't flying. Rather, the spire of Vetera Tower - ancient sanctum of the hippogriffs, fourth wonder of the world and the very height of the mountain's peak - barely challenged the level of her shoulders. Tiny and fragile-looking, yet so close that she could reach out and touch it with ease. The question of how to get home was moot now; her sheer scale trivialized the distance. Hippogriffs so small they could be mistaken for ants at a glance gathered in the streets and on the coastline, staring in dumbstruck awe at the sight now dominating the western shore and sky.
Face paling with awkward embarassment, Silverstream could only imagine how she looked to the onlookers: a pink-and-blue behemoth on truly titanic scale. Her wing-fins rose from her shoulders like vast sails, scraping the stratosphere. Her gravid middle alone, simultaneously resting upon many square miles of ocean bed and rising high into the sky, easily dwarfed their ancient mountain home countless times over. The impossible multitude of unborn foals within, leviathans now in their own right, squirmed in eager restlessness, as if eager to draw just that little bit more attention to their mother-to-be by quaking the surface of her colossal womb. That small movement alone propagated ripples through the ocean in every direction, the coastal waters as shallow as a puddle compared to the seapony's inconceivably expanded bulk.
Sheepishly, Silverstream raised a fin (the mere motion setting off a minor tidal surge far below) and waved to her family and friends. "Hi everygriff! I can, uh- explain...?"
No explanation would ever suffice, of course. Though they'd at least appreciate that she tried.
