“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

This one is an old faded blue mare. She has her mane tied up in a tight bun, drawing smooth the sagging, wrinkled skin around her face. Her dark dress puffs out all around her, making her seem like some bulbous flower more than a pony. She dabs lightly at the corners of her eyes and sniffles.

Gossamer Gleam tries in vain to remember her face, to place a name upon her. Someone her mother knew. An old mentor or boss.

And despite speaking to her, the mare scarcely offers the dignity of maintaining eye contact with her. Gossamer senses that this sorrow is not for her. It is not truly even for her parents. It is for them. They’re so sorry that they didn’t spend more time with her parents, that they’re gone from the world, that they will never contribute more to it.

So once again, having lost count of how many times she’s had to do this, she mutters quietly “Thank you” and listens to the mare’s story, how much time she spent with her mother, she always loved my parties you know, oh those were the good old days. She looks past her and sees two stallions standing on the periphery of the scene, waiting to come up and be the next to offer their condolences. She ponders leaving, fleeing to some other part of the garden, but she thinks it is futile, they will find her again eventually. She is the most important living person at the event, and everypony wants to have the opportunity to speak with her, it is the only way to fill the void in their hearts.

Her parents always told her that she needed to make an effort to be sociable, to interact with others, to open up. She tries so hard, yet it proves an insurmountable task. All these ponies she doesn’t know, friends and associates of her parents, their faces blending together, masks of anguish and lament concealing contempt. She can’t hope to pick out a single one of them. They are anathema.

Except for their eyes. The way they shimmer and water with tears waiting to spill over their cheeks.

Why does she not feel that way?

= = = = =

Gossamer Gleam wakes up in her bedroom in the house that now legally belongs to her. The faces of mourning ponies are still painted across the backs of her eyelids even though the funeral ceremony was more than a week ago. Even after it’s ended, they can’t leave her alone.

It’s time for a new day, for what little difference that makes. She gets out of bed and puts on a meager purple dress. She looks into her reflection while she brushes her amethyst mane, her expression which might be described as neutral or serene or bored depending on how charitable one is willing to be, the complexion which her parents called charming and beautiful but other ponies always seemed to find off-putting. She’s starting to run out of fresh food, forced to go through the cans and preserved jars in the pantry and cellar. A couple times, somepony came by and knocked on the door, and when she didn’t respond they left behind a basket full of baked goods. Until all of that runs out, she doesn’t have to worry about leaving the house to get groceries. Since the probate lawyer left after reading the will to her, she hasn’t had anypony to converse with, and without that she hardly has any reason to speak; she almost doesn’t remember the sound of her own voice.

She spends the day doing much the same that she would any other day. She picks out a book from the library to read—it feels strange to look at any of her parents’ books, even knowing that they would have allowed it, even knowing that she now owns all of them. She roves through the mansion’s rooms, looking for anything out of place, dusting and scrubbing as needed. In the evening, she goes up to the observatory to check the telescope, make sure that it’s in working order, but she never actually uses it, can’t bring herself to look through its lens. In the first few days, she would occasionally walk through the gardens, but she stopped when she noticed that there were ponies skulking on the fringes of the estate, reporters looking to speak with her. She knows that she ought to call the police on the trespassers, but that in itself would require interacting with somepony else, so she has to abide with the occasional rustling in the brush outside.

There’s little that she can focus on for long. Inevitably, after a few minutes she will find her attention drifting, thinking of other things. Other ponies. No, never her parents, as much as she misses them, as much as she wishes she could have them for advice—cruel fate, she can’t have her parents to console her over them no longer being with her because they are no longer with her. It’s always them, the guests from the funeral, their faces blending together into an amalgam of eyes and muzzles, melting and twisting and abstracting.

Why do they care?

What do they know?

She neither wants nor needs them.

But she is still so empty.

Gossamer sits in her father’s armchair in the drawing room, curled up and holding her knees to herself. She would sit like this in her father’s lap when she was a filly, and he’d tell her all about the stars. It’s the only thing that can hold her attention for long anymore, running down the list one by one.

Rigel.

Sirius.

Betelgeuse.

Arcturus.

Cygni.

Polaris.

Algol.

= = = = =

The door groans open.

“Father?” she mutters blearily, eyelids fluttering open.

Confusion gnaws at her, and she’s certain that she must have been sleeping, but she can clearly hear the creaking of the doorway, followed by hooves thudding across the floor.

It’s only the voice calling to her that rouses her from her stupor, gently calling, “Gossy?”

All at once she leaps from the chair to her hooves and dashes toward the foyer. “Father?” she cries, “Mother?”

“Gossy? Gossy?”

The front door is swept inward, casting a dull red-orange light from the opening on the other side, casting long shadows across the floor.

She feels like the corners of her mouth ache, muscles grinding and flexing, and it takes a moment to realize that she’s smiling, grinning ear to ear.

“Father! Mother!”

Then they emerge from behind the door, tracking mud on their hooves over the shaggy rug just on the other side, garbed in a suit and dress far more dirty and ragged than anything they ever would have worn, their faces warped, jaws hanging open and eye sockets vacant, fur faded and greying, shambling shells of their former selves.

Her smile fades.

“Gossy?” The word hisses from her father’s gaping mouth and they start shuffling forward.

She takes a step backward only to trip over her hooves, a breathless gasp squealing from her as she falls, only to land with a world-shattering thud.

Gossamer opens her eyes. She’s sitting in her father’s armchair. The light filtering through the blinds over the windows is a dim orange. The air is stale and dry. She doesn’t feel much relieved. There’s a pounding in her skull, an angry ache thudding repeatedly.

After caressing her brow and horn for a few seconds, however, she realizes that the noise isn’t just in her head. It’s a knock on the door, steadily hammering away in a continuous rhythm. Her reaction to visitors for the past few days has always been to ignore them, but this time, as the seconds tick past, it seems as if there’s no end to the knocking, gradually beating down the front door. This time, Gossamer is already too wound up, too imbalanced, to just let it slip by.

Drowsiness clings to her, tries to hold her back, but she stumbles to her hooves and strides out to the foyer once again. Memories of scattered dreams, fragments of nightmares, urge her to stop, to no avail. It’s not because she’s too agitated to consider that, or that her rational side denies the possibility of some kind of deadly premonition. This time, she just can’t put it off any longer. Whatever this is, she needs to face it.

In one swoop, she reaches the knob, twisting it and hardly waiting at all for the bolt to clear before yanking the door open.

There’s nopony standing on the other side.

With the knocking gone, she’s left with the pounding of her heart once again.

Gossamer looks down along the paved path to the winding mountain street, out to the sides where the trees and bushes are starting to look overgrown, even up to the sky, but there’s no sign of anypony. Could it have been a unicorn who teleported away? It seems like the only possibility, yet she’s sure that even the most skilled mage wouldn’t have been able to disappear so quickly and without leaving even a trace of their magical signature in the air. The last knock had been almost the instant she started opening the door, that’s not enough time to pull off that kind of vanishing act. And why would such a pony be going around playing pranks on grieving heiresses?

Because ponies can be cruel if they desire, she reminds herself.

Then she looks straight down, and on the mat in front of the door there’s a basket containing a bundle swaddled in orange cloth. Despite the occurrences of gifts left on her doorstep, she’s struck with the sense that there’s something different about this. She finds herself thinking not of breads or pastries or fruits or roast entrees, but of foals left behind by their parents. It’s a sentiment which feels strangely personal to her.

When she picks up the basket, though, it becomes clear that this couldn’t be a foal; the bundle is far too small, and there’s a clear enough shape discernible through the cloth to tell that it’s not even the right shape, too round and featureless to bear any equine anatomy. Still, she feels her breath catching in her throat as she peels away the orange veil.

It’s an egg. Or, rather, some kind of ornate sculpture in the shape of an egg, ovoid and tapering at one end. It seems made of wood, painted and glossy, a dark surface with scattered fragments of color along its sloping curves. She takes it out of the basket and it rests heavily in the palm of her hand, just large enough that she can’t quite close her fingers around it.

She holds the egg close to herself, stealing another furtive glance around the yard before pulling back into the house with her prize (and a moment later she reappears to snatch the basket and cloth, not wanting to leave any evidence of this encounter).

Back in the drawing room, Gossamer sits in her father’s chair and inspects the strange piece. She can’t identify any form of writing on it, no signature left by whatever artisan created it. Nor are there any notes left in the basket or nested in the folds of cloth. Just to be sure, she gets up and sifts through the pile of letters and scrolls she’s left unopened, skimming over them one by one, but amid the many pithy mourning condolences and bills she can observe no mention of a mysterious package which might be delivered in the future.

Grumbling in her throat, she turns her attention back to the egg. From its heft, she suspects it must be completely solid, but nonetheless she holds it up to her ear and shakes, and she doesn’t hear anything rattle inside. She turns it over and over for a while, looking for any kind of seam or mechanism that she could use to tease its secrets out, to no avail. The longer she looks at the fragmented lines of color, the faint white speckles that dot the wood grain, the more she feels there has to be a trick to this. She can discern patterns which look like they ought to line up with each other, perhaps to form some grander picture, if only the egg could twist about like some toy puzzle box, but no, its surface is completely solid and immovable all around.

This lasts for some time until she realizes that the reason she’s having a hard time seeing anything is because there’s no light, the final scant remnants of the setting sun having slipped beyond the horizon. The mansion’s interior is bathed in shadow, everything cast in dull blue and black. Furnishings turn into foreboding dark shapes, looming in the gloom. Paintings hanging along the walls depict elegantly dressed ponies with faces that seem blurry and indistinct. She could light her horn to banish the darkness, but instead she simply holds tightly to the egg, clutching it to her bosom. Its weight, its mystery, while inscrutable, feel all too real, providing her something to cling onto.

Gossamer creeps her way through the house, trying not to think about the sounds of wood creaking, the rustling of leaves, the scratching of branches, the hoofsteps which echo faintly through the halls, just enough to make it sound like there are more ponies in the building than just her. She undresses and gets into bed, setting the egg on her bedside table, and a hint of moonlight comes through the window to offer a sheen on its glossy surface.

“Goodnight,” she says aloud for reasons unknown to her.

= = = = =

“We’re so sorry for your loss.”

They wear a long, billowing dress that is not quite white. A pale shade of periwinkle. Or maybe it is lavender. Or rose.

Between their broad-brimmed hat, their voluminous and puffy raven mane, and the fan they hold up in front of themselves, their face is almost completely obscured.

And they seem to flicker, like a guttering candleflame, the edges of their outline ghostly and ephemeral.

“Your father really had quite the eye, you know.”

“How do you know my father?” Gossamer asks with a forward bluntness that is most unbecoming of a Canterlot lady.

“Oh, not very personally, We regret to say,” they reply with a rumbling, multilayered titter, “but he always admired us from afar.” Then they take a step forward, leaving a blurry afterimage in their wake. “Would you permit us the opportunity to be more intimate?”

“Yes,” she says automatically, and then, after a moment of consideration, “please.”

“Very good,” they croon as they close the distance entirely. Their flesh bears upon Gossamer’s, all-enveloping and sweltering. The fan falls away, revealing their threefold visage, teeth and tongues and blazing eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” Gossamer murmurs in a daze while the overwhelming equine leans her back over a velvety bed, grasping at her shoulders and her hips and her chest.

While descending, consuming, they at once rattle with laughter, croon contentedly, and whisper back, “You are beautiful, dear.”

= = = = =

Upon waking, Gossamer Gleam feels satisfied and well-rested in a way that she hasn’t for a long while.

Additionally, as she shifts and lifts herself, she distinctly senses a cumbersome weight upon her midsection that hadn’t been present before, and when she presses her palm to her stomach she finds that it is firm and convex, as if full of undigested food. This strikes her as odd, given that she’s hardly been eating for the past few days—last night she went to bed without even having supper. This has been in part because she hasn’t felt particularly hungry more often than not, and perhaps out of an unconscious effort to conserve her stock, to put off resupplying for as long as possible. Now, though she may not understand what’s transpiring, she knows she is at least hungry enough that she can stand to have a real breakfast.

And so, within the hour, she finds herself sitting at the dining room table with a spread of food before her. Pancakes, jam on toast, bananas and strawberries, scrambled eggs with chopped onions, bagels with cream cheese and salmon. It tastes good, she thinks, though it feels somewhat needless of her to consider it that way. The taste doesn’t matter as much as the sustenance, kindling to keep the fire burning.

Nor does it concern her much to ask the question of where all the materials came from—she is certain that she didn’t have this much to work with the day before. She actually has difficulty remembering even the process of cooking all of this for herself, particularly pressing because she’s never been an especially good chef in the first place. Surely she would have managed to cut herself at some point while handling a knife. But, after reflecting on all this, it doesn’t strike her as very surprising. She’s been going through the motions of life for days now, acting purely on impulse and only doing the bare minimum, so it doesn’t surprise her that she’d have difficulty remembering her own actions.

So the mare continues to eat, and she grows aware of a sense of gratitude from her midsection, warm and bubbly, her stomach thankful for the offerings made to it.

The morning glow shines through the kitchen windows, curtains wide open, and lands upon the dark surface of the egg, perched upon the edge of the table.

= = = = =

“Won’t you come trip the light fantastic with us?” they ask, grinning and pouting and licking their lips while they gently pull on her arm.

“I…I don’t really do dancing,” Gossamer Gleam mutters in an unconvincing manner, finding that she can’t bring herself to dig in her hooves and hold her ground. “Nopony ever…wants to dance with me.”

“No? A mare like you?” They caress her cheek and brush her mane, their burning eyes regarding her with calm passion. “Oh, but you must have suitors lining up to take your hand. Who could resist the opportunity to bask in your presence? Here, come with us, and just watch.”

They pull Gossamer close while they start to twist and cavort, rhythmically stepping and swaying to the sound of the music, quiet strings and winds echoing through the yard. She follows to the best of her ability, and even though the beat plays so clearly in her head she finds that everything seems to move in slow motion. Her partner in the shimmering dress moves with exquisite grace despite their immensity, and even with such profound bulk they never manage to knock her over with their gyrations. The grass hardly even crumples beneath their hooves as they step over it, lighter than air.

“Stay nimble,” they whisper to her with a chorus of giggles before letting go. The momentum carries her, spinning, and for a moment the starry sky spins all around her, taking her breath away from her.

Then, suddenly, she’s held within a new embrace, her face coming to rest upon something firm and silky. “Careful there,” a voice says to her in a low growl.

Gossamer opens her eyes and for a moment struggles to comprehend the glare searing into her retinas. She has to partially avert her gaze just to get a good look at the stallion whose eyes shine brighter than the sun. His grinning muzzle is long and full of sharp teeth and his grey-blue fur is thick and shaggy. He is tall and muscular but he still holds her with remarkable care while they dance—it takes her longer to realize that she never even lost the beat for a moment.

“Everyone’s watching,” he murmurs to her, “we should put on a show, don’t you think?”

She is eager to look away, breathtakingly handsome though he is. She sees the grass across the field and the mossy tombstones and the ponies who stand among them. Many of them are dancing, in groups or by themselves, some simply standing on the periphery, but all of them seem to have their bright eyes upon her.

She sighs softly as he pulls her into him, the coarse softness of his coat, a deep field of tall grass, and the moist throbbing which teases at her stomach.

= = = = =

Gossamer Gleam stops abruptly in the process of putting on her dress. The purple silk glides over her skin tantalizingly. Something about it doesn’t seem right. But no, it still comes to settle just right over her form. Even with the mass of her midsection jutting out in front of her, rendering her unable to see her hooves while standing. There’s a low hum in her throat as she touches her stomach, caressing the swollen curvature. She ate too much again, surely.

Now that she’s dressed, she steps out into the backyard. The verdure of the garden seems luminous in the sunlight, thousands of little emerald flames making up every bush and tree. The path out through the back of the property is overgrown, grass encroaching upon steppingstones and vines creeping along trellis archways. At the farthest end of the estate, a bench stands beside a tree carved with her parents’ initials, the view looking down the slopes of Mount Canter. She sits upon the bench—the old wood boards and metal frame ominously—and takes a deep breath of the crisp mountain air, a stark contrast with the interior of the manor. Even though the manor seems to have had less dust in its air, despite her not having done any cleaning recently.

She rubs at her belly, where the smooth round globe meets with her torso. Her skin tingles faintly even without making any effort to stimulate herself. She has to spread her legs to make room for the heavy bulk, and with it hanging out in front of her she can feel it pulling, yearning for something solid to rest upon. After the walk, hardly a couple minutes, her hooves ache and her back is sore, but she feels the need to maintain her dignified posture.

Then she holds up the egg (where was she carrying it?).

For a while she fiddles with the mysterious object, turning it around and around and around in her hands. She can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t merely a gift, something to set on a shelf and admire like so many other sculptures hoarded in wealthy Canterlot homes. No, there must be some kind of purpose behind this. It must be significant, and it’s of the utmost importance that she deduces why.

Surely if she just…presses…squeezes…twists…

Now Gossamer’s jaw starts to ache from the way she has her teeth clenched, a most undignified expression as her exasperation gets the better of her.

Then she clasps and all of a sudden the egg snaps apart in her hands. The pieces fall, bouncing off of her stomach and tumbling to the ground. She sees something black and ichorous pooling on the grass, sizzling, amid the fragments.

A loud, thunderous CRACK echoes in the distance.

She looks up and sees the sprawling landscape of Equestria, the color draining out of it, creeping in from across the horizon, while the sky deepens into a darkness blacker than night, utterly devoid of stars, and the ground rumbles beneath her.

She can only bring herself to stare in awe as the world crumbles into oblivion, a swathe of destruction racing up toward the mountain to meet with her and—

CRACK

A yelp as gravity abruptly yanks on her, and then Gossamer finds herself lying in a pile of broken wood, splinters digging into her back while her gut rests on top of her. Now she’s very sore.

After a few minutes of recomposing and catching her breath, she grunts as she fights with herself to sit up, an ordinary action that is now so much more tedious for her. Once she is upright and able to look beyond the encroaching mountain of her midsection, she sees that there is nothing amiss, no apocalyptic destruction, Equestria just as bright and lush as ever.

Then, unconsciously, she brushes her hand through the wood debris, and she touches something smooth and round and painted. She picks up the egg and finds that it, too, is undamaged. A weary sigh escapes her.

= = = = =

“Will you tolerate being by yourself while We take a moment to orbit around the refreshments table?” There is a low sound within their form, rumbling like tectonic plates grinding together. No, something bigger than that.

“I’ll be fine,” Gossamer Gleam mutters quietly, trying not to feel patronized.

“We know you will,” the bright pony chortles before turning away, though one facet of their face remains glancing in her direction before they slip into the crowd.

The unicorn avoids looking at anypony in particular. She’s used to blending into groups, evading attention. Not so easy when she still feels that everypony is looking at her, fixated on her. The only easy solution is to look down at her hooves and let her bangs fall over her eyes.

It’s still more in line with the kind of experience which she’s accustomed to, and with that she feels some semblance of familiarity breaking through the surreality that has occluded her awareness.

How long has this been going on? She feels like this afterparty has lasted a lifetime. The sky overhead is still shrouded in night. It doesn’t feel especially dark, though, with the presence of all the bright ponies around her. There aren’t even any lights set up in the garden, no lanterns or candles. She feels…dull, with her pale and dark purples.

And yet she is also conscious of the indecency which lurks in her memory. When she looks at one of those strange ponies, the embarrassment she feels is not the shame of social anxiety; it’s a warm bubbling in her heart that comes from being in the presence of a lover. Their touch lingers upon her even while they are separate, clutching at her form, leaving imprints of hands and lips and shafts and appendages she doesn’t recognize. She tugs on her dress, feeling that she recalls with some certainty the sensation of the cloth pulling apart around her, melting away, exposing her to open air, yet here it is, completely intact.

She absentmindedly rubs her stomach in slow circles, lingering over the lower reaches, just above the pubic region, and her jaws open in a quiet gasp.

“The little one is concerned for her spawn.”

Twin voices, speaking in unison, float to her ears. She looks about, but she cannot discern the source of the sound, no ponies addressing her directly.

“She is unaware of the burden upon her.”

Wings flap, wafting in the air, so she looks up. At first, it is still difficult to see them, for though their forms are white, purer than fresh snow, they are relatively dull in their brightness, drowned out by the glare around them. They seem huge as they drift down to her, floating on great feathery wings, yet Gossamer thinks that they seem like children—a colt and a filly—with long and graceful forms. Their lustrous golden eyes shine with unfathomable and ancient knowledge.

“Do you know why all of this is happening?” she implores.

They giggle while twisting around her. “What is there to know? It is all so simple to understand. You will never know with your nose in the dirt.”

Then they swoop in and grab her by the shoulders, not with their hands but their hooves—except they’re not hooves, they’re the webbed talons of waterfowl. They pull on her, lifting her up into the air, but with none of the rhythmic ebb and flow that accompanies the flight of a bird or pegasus, just rising skyward at a steadily accelerating rate. Gossamer looks up, and she sees dozens of white pinpricks high above, not stars, for they are moving around in languid circles, and as they approach it becomes clear that they are more winged ponies.

The flock surrounds her, and their feathers caress her, but before she can lose sight of herself their chorus speaks to her, “Behold.”

Gossamer looks down, and past the flapping white wings she sees the gardens, the whole of Mount Canter spread out before her. Despite being bathed in a mantle of darkness, there is a sea of lights spread across the slopes. It’s not the city, though, she understands that they’re flying over her family’s estate, farther out along the mountainside—all the better to be able to see the stars. Yet now the stars are not in the sky, they are residing upon the earth itself. They have all come here.

= = = = =

Standing in the bathroom doorway, Gossamer Gleam groans agonizingly. She hopes that if she just stops and catches her breath, the nausea will subside. She can’t remember exactly when it started, which makes it feel like it has been the entirety of her existence. Her stomach continues to toss and turn no matter how much she strokes it, and she doesn’t want to lie down in case the discomfort suddenly becomes unbearable and she needs to run to kneel in front of the toilet.

But the problem isn’t actually her stomach, she realizes as she takes stock of her myriad discomforts. There’s a distinct sensation of tightness that she hasn’t had any prior point of comparison to. It’s in her chest. In her nipples. Pressure like a dam about to burst.

So instead, she lumbers over and kneels beside the bathtub. Easier said than done with the way her rounded gut fills her lap and pushes against the tiled counter which the tub is set into. She groans as she settles into the position and then pulls off her dress and the bra underneath. Another groan, high and heated, as she touches her bosom, cradling the pert mounds. She feels like she remembers them being slight enough that she could easily cup her palms over them, yet now they hardly fit within the span of her fingers, each nearly as large as her skull. The skin feels taut too, reducing their pliancy. And when she touches her nipples, just brushing lightly on them, a tingle of electricity along her nerves prompts her to gasp aloud.

Leaning forward as far as she can, she points the tips of the purple caps into the tub and squeezes on them. Her eyes go unfocused as the stimulation spikes through her brain, a moan stifled within her throat. She feels herself leaking and something splashes on the side of the tub, pooling along the basin. The pressure diminishes, just a little, but at this point the discomfort no longer matters; she’s hardly even conscious of the nausea anymore. The mind-numbing arousal is what matters to her. As she continues to tease and tug at herself, she dimly senses that she’s also drooling from between her legs, dampening her underwear.

After a while, long after Gossamer actually stopped producing any more than a trickle, she tires from the effort of milking, her flesh raw and overworked. She gasps for breath as she leans over the tub, and she truly takes in what has happened. The tub has a shallow layer of fluid covering its base, bubbly, opaque, its pale surface standing apart from the white of the porcelain. She reaches into the pool, stirring around with her fingers, producing waves that rock back and forth in the miniature lake, and then takes her digits out to lap up the fluid sticking to her fur. Sweet, tangy, lingering in her throat.

And there’s something lying in the milk, half-submerged, its dark color standing out even more starkly.

She takes out the egg and the milk slides off of it, eager to be rid of the offensive object.

Just looking at it makes her sick.

No, wait, that’s the nausea coming back with a vengeance, doing somersaults inside her gut and hammering at her esophagus.

She groans again as she hurriedly shuffles on her knees over to the other corner of the bathroom where the toilet is, dimly thinking it would be faster if she could just roll around everywhere.

= = = = =

“She is a beautiful specimen, that is for certain,” states a tall, broad mare with a lambent red aura playing around her, “but is she sufficiently skilled?” She speaks with a casual disregard for the presence of the pony in question. Perhaps she cannot be blamed for this; with her sheer size, many things must be beneath her notice.

“Of course, she takes after her father,” the dark pony in the luminous dress remarks blithely, chortling all the while. They reach around Gossamer Gleam, clutching one shoulder, to hold her close, and within their bulk and warmth she does not feel so small and insignificant.

“I like…reading,” she mutters sheepishly.

“Hmm.” The giant mare takes a big bite out of something. Some meaty shelled thing. Glowing juice spills over her chin while she chews. “Knowledge is valuable, but it also enforces rigidity. You must be able to adapt or else the pressure will obliterate you.”

“She’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” the dark pony speaks for her. They nod, two times, while also snarling vehemently. “Don’t mind her,” they murmur in a half-tone, slipping into Gossamer’s ear, while turning them all and walking away, “she’s so used to being the largest in the room.”

“What do you want from me?” Gossamer asks wearily.

“Oh, sweetie.” They turn themselves around, facing Gossamer and holding her tightly. Their three smiles overlap each other. “We don’t want anything from you.” They caress her muzzle and stroke her mane, gently brushing at her ears and horn. “We just want you to be safe.”

“Safe?” she repeats skeptically, “From what?”

They seem reluctant to answer at first before a third of them blurts out, “Don’t turn around.”

She turns around.

The garden is gone, replaced with a floor of grey stone that recedes into gloom.

The guests are gone, and in their place there is only a dark figure lurking in the shadows, shifting orange pinpricks piercing through the murk.

Gossamer looks ahead again, but the world she knew has vanished, leaving only a gaping dark passage before her, and immediately she hears something with too many legs scrabbling across the stone, rapidly approaching.

“It is close now.”

= = = = =

“Whoa, hey!”

She knows when she sees them that they are the right ones for her: a trio of greasy stallions skulking in a back alley. Canterlot is not a city like many others in Equestria, largely inhabited by the wealthy elite of pony society, and with the scrutiny of the royal guard upon the streets there is relatively little in the way of open crime, the bulk of it instead taking place in more private venues. Still, there are a handful of delinquents roaming the ritzy boulevards, children of nobles and merchants who think they have an easy out in the event that they get caught up in some trouble. These stallions with their manes slicked back look tough, but one familiar with the local fashion brands will recognize that their clothes are outside the budget of the typical street thug.

And they look surprised when they see her walking toward them, out of the shadows, maybe a little on edge, but not displeased. That’s good, exactly what she wants.

So Gossamer Gleam throws open the lapels of her robe and lets it slide from her shoulders and arms. The cold, grimy air seeps into her skin immediately, all across her bare belly and breasts. She represses the urge to clamp up and shiver, to close her legs together.

The stallions whisper and bicker to each other: “Holy shit dude, is this really happening?” “Shut up, don’t scare her off!” “Look at the size of her!” “What should we do?” “She’s gotta be a loony, walking around like that.”

Eventually, one of them walks over to her, cautious, expecting some kind of trick, and he gruffly asks, “What’s this about?”

She looks into his eyes, holds his gaze in hers, just for a moment before looking down again, detaching herself from their interaction. It takes all her focus just to maintain a neutral posture while burdened with the weight of her gut. She’s able to keep herself muted even as he takes hold of her chest, groping one heavy tit, thumb over her nipple.

Then all three of them are upon her and having their way with her. They squeeze and pull on her flesh, whinnying with ecstatic laughter. They take turns pressing their muzzles, stinking of alcohol, upon her face, sometimes eager enough to do so that they cram together, not seeming to care about getting their slobber on each other in the process. Before long, their belts come undone and their pants shimmy down, and their hot members prod against her, into her. She makes no attempt at resistance no matter where they put them—she’d welcome them plugging her up three different ways all at once, but they don’t seem to have the coordination to do that in their present frenzy. Only every now and then is there a calming reminder when she feels a palm caressing the side of her gut with a tenderness that offsets the surrounding debauchery.

“How many is it?” someone asks.

Gossamer can’t think of how to respond. She’d lowball the number in the triple digits.

Her body cries out, awash in an inferno of stimulation. She is already so burdened from her taut, heavy womb, now the rigorous physical activity is stealing the breath from her—what little she can hold during the time that her mouth is plugged up. This is a defilement, she thinks, of the purity which she once knew, the innocent mare her parents thought her to be. And yet, she feels nothing, her focus never clearer than it has been at this moment while the stallions rut her.

It doesn’t mean anything.

“Hey, what’s that?” One of the stallions seizes her by the wrist, the wrist of a hand which is clenched tight around something hard and wooden.

No, she pleads distantly inside her skull, unable to muster the strength to respond, for it is too late to resist.

He holds her still and grabs the egg, and as soon as he does it erupts in a wave of inky blackness which envelops him, and then the rest of the stallions, consumed entirely.

The roiling dark surrounds Gossamer, lying prone, alone, in the gloom of the alleyway, numbing ice spreading across her skin.

= = = = =

The shutters on the observatory grind open one by one, opening the chamber of brass and iron framework to the stars. Gossamer Gleam walks in a circle around the perimeter of the room, looking out over the roof of the manor and the estate beyond, bathed in cool blue moonlight, before orbiting closer to the telescope in the center. She traces her fingers along the gleaming metal fixtures, the long optical tube and the arms which support it. It was her father’s pride and joy, so she makes sure to keep it in good working condition even though she doesn’t often feel the need to make use of it herself.

This is going to be one of those odd exceptions.

She settles into the seat on the lower end of the telescope and peers into the eyepiece. Space, black, dotted with pinpricks of light, clouds of glittering dust, bright shining stars. Without looking, without moving her head, she twists on the dials which control the angle of the scope, and she pulls levers which move the whole apparatus around. It takes careful, minute motions, slight corrections to determine just the right position. She tries not to think about her physical presence, the body hunched over the eyepiece and clamping blindly on the controls. If she focuses, she can imagine herself drifting weightlessly through the night, unmoored from the constraints of her material existence. She isn’t turning the telescope, she’s swinging herself around, willing her consciousness toward a new vector.

“What am I doing?” she idly asks herself. She isn’t sure why she came here; she simply felt the need to do so. Is it nostalgia? Purely a need to reminisce on the way her father would bring her up here to look at the sky? She doesn’t think she ought to pretend. Those days are long gone.

Then the telescope’s view comes to settle upon something. It’s a star like so many others, but it’s familiar to her. No, not because she’s seen it before, or because her father told her about it when she was young. The flickering reddish light, dancing around itself, is one—or three, rather—she has had intimate experience with.

“I know you,” she whispers.

“We know you,” they call back.

Gossamer flinches. She tries to pull away from the telescope, but she isn’t sitting in front of it. She never was. She’s been in space, hurtling through the void, and now she can’t do anything to stop herself. Gravity envelops her like an icy blanket, pulling toward a nebulous definition of “down” while stars go whizzing past in streaks of light through the black.

Finally it stops, and she’s basking in their glow. The stars blaze with cosmic fire—two of them circling close together and a third orbiting around them. They are impossibly immense, so much greater than anything Gossamer has ever known, bigger than Mount Canter, than Equestria, than all of Equus. She is but a speck compared to them.

Yet they called to her.

They came to her.

“Algol,” she says.

Their surfaces churn and grind and ripple. Their plasma washes over her, soothing her just as much as she feels it singe. It forms into wispy apparitions, swirling appendages, and with these they caress her, exercising the utmost of care not to obliterate her with the slightest flex of their stellar might. Flares erupt across the stars, and she can almost interpret them as eyes affixed upon her.

“Your flesh,” they murmur to her, a sound which reverberates through disparate particles to echo in her skull, “it is sublime.”

Gossamer only now, dimly, comes to the realization that she is naked, completely exposed, but that is an insignificant detail—she has already borne herself to the stars.

“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” she gasps.

They turn and whirl, fires crackling with laughter. “Your skull has held together thus far, as has your womb.”

A pang in her stomach, and she feels trepidation as she clutches at herself and looks down, but her form is flat and slender and she can even see her legs.

“Just a little longer.” They pull her closer, into the gravitational maelstrom that binds them together, into the blistering embrace. “Just a little longer and you will be prepared to face the Empty One.”

“The…what?” Her lungs are tightening, and the glare of the triple corona makes it nearly impossible to keep her eyes open. Yet she finds that she doesn’t care much to look away into the abyss of space either.

“We have one more blessing to bestow upon you. Care for it well.”

The heat is unbearable, searing through her, igniting her from the inside out. It caresses her, wrapping around her form. It penetrates her, winding in between her legs. It brushes on her cheek and muzzle, and although she shivers and spasms with convulsions of confused distress, she tries to work her lips into the motions of a kiss.

The fire washes over her like the tidal wave of a great stellar ocean, tossing her about, but still she holds on, clinging to what little semblance of sanity she has left.

= = = = =

“Gossy?”

A low groan.

“Gossamer, are you sure you don’t want to come?”

Gossamer Gleam rolls over and blearily opens her eyes. Her father is hovering over her bedside. Worry is etched across his wrinkled, greying face.

“I’ll be fine,” she mutters plainly.

“I’m sure you will, honey,” he says with a wry smile, “it’s just…well, you know…”

“I know you want me to come with you,” she says bluntly, “but I can’t keep hiding behind you and Mother.”

(She’s also just too tired to get out of bed, as it happens; her dreams have been particularly strange lately, keeping her up at night.)

“Gossamer, going on a family vacation doesn’t preclude you from being an independent adult,” he says, with just a hint of jest but still stern and serious and sincere.

“Dusty!” Her mother’s voice echoes up the stairs alongside approaching hoofsteps. “The carriage is going to leave without us!”

“I know, I know!” he calls back, his raised voice ringing in Gossamer’s ears even while he’s turned away.

“Don’t tell me you’re trying to change Gossamer’s mind!” Then she’s coming into the room in a hurry and a huff, always so much more concerned whenever it comes to schedules and deadlines. “If she wants to stay, that’s up to her, we need to let her make her own life choices.”

“That’s exactly what I said,” she mutters into the blankets, scarcely audible.

“If she stays home, then that means she’s free to go into town and do whatever she wants,” the older mare then says as she walks over to ruffle Gossamer’s mane, “you know there are plenty of establishments where we’re known. Just tell them you’re Lustrous’s daughter and they’ll let you in.”

She doesn’t say that, although she doesn’t know what she’s going to do, mingling with the Canterlot night life isn’t a very high priority.

“Now come on, Dusty, we’ve got to get going!”

“Yes, dear, alright.”

He sighs and then they both lean over Gossamer’s bed to give her a kiss.

“Goodbye, Gossy,” he whispers.

“Bye,” she mumbles back, ready to close her eyes.

Their hoofsteps plod away, out of the room at a steady pace and down through the mansion, farther and farther away.

(“It is close now.”)

No, wait.

She turns back over and looks at the open, empty doorway—looks past the egg which is sitting on her nightstand.

“Wait,” she blurts out.

Gossamer fights to get out of bed, tangled in blankets, heaving up all around her, and between that and her exhaustion she can’t keep from rolling off the mattress and onto the floor with a thud that shakes everything in the room.

“Wait!”

But the hoofsteps are still receding, farther and farther away.

With her face down on the carpet, her legs are still elevated in the air. She’s propped up by something underneath her midsection, like a giant yoga ball. No, it is her midsection, huge and firm and taut. She tries to push back, to roll onto her hooves, but instead she flips over onto her back, and the crushing weight of her gut piles upon her as it points straight up into the air. Not the case for her breasts, which flop back over her face. She grunts and sputters, but still she struggles, propping up with her elbows until she can get her legs curled underneath her and then push into an upright posture.

“Mother!”

Her belly is insistent on remaining in contact with the floor; even while standing, it hangs down past her knees while jutting farther than her arms can reach. She trembles and stumbles, her balance precarious, and her front-heavy bulk threatens to throw her back to the ground, but in this moment, when she desperately needs to move, it helps in giving her momentum. She feels like she’s made of glass while simultaneously carrying a wrecking ball within her, and the slightest wrong move will throw off her equilibrium, falling over or knocking into something, and then she will shatter to pieces. Yet she still hurtles across the bedroom, legs kicking into her swollen womb with every step, more alacrity than she has exerted in a long while despite her engorged proportions. This is no time to exercise caution.

There is no response, but still she hears the hoofsteps.

She can still catch up with them.

“Fa—!”

This surge of adrenaline abruptly comes to a stop when she finds herself stuck in place, clinging around the sides of her gut. The doorway to her bedroom is too small for her, wedging her in. She has difficulty even getting her hands on the frame to pull herself through with her bosom standing in the way, arms pressing into the heaving mounds. The faint trickle of milk leaking out of her is a distant afterthought, compounding with the sweat which is starting to mat her fur. She twists and shoves and pulls and tugs, wrenching at her bloated bulk, squeezing inch by inch through the narrow opening, feeling like she might pop at any moment, until finally she comes free, and if her hands hadn’t already been on the frame then she might have thrown herself forward and collapsed.

Racing through the halls, mane and tail unkempt from sleep, buck naked, impossibly gravid, Gossamer feels as if the mansion is constricting around her. Architecture which she is used to thinking of as capacious now barely leaves any room for her to move. She staggers to one side and bumps into something, a display table with some ancestral pottery which topples over and explodes into a shower of ceramic shards. Down the staircase, she’s all too conscious of the banisters brushing against her on either side, bumping and dragging if she veers too far, interfering with her perilous gait as she hurtles as fast as her hooves can carry her, an ill-advised tactic when she can’t even see the steps, but miraculously she manages once more not to fall.

The hoofsteps are so distant that she can scarcely hear them over the gasping intake of her own breath.

The sound is outside the house, beyond the front door.

“Please!” she wails as she continues desperately onward, and she reaches past herself to take the door handles—at least this is a double door so there is more than enough space for her to get through—and throw the entrance open.

But there’s nopony there, standing on the path or down by the street. The sound of hoofsteps is gone, and in its place she hears the trundling of a carriage going down the mountain road, away from the house. Her parents are gone.

It’s just like the last day she saw them, before they went on a vacation that they never returned home from.

She falls to her knees, a motion that dovetails into her sprawling onto her swollen midsection, belly spread over the coarse stone pavement. It is a mixture of comfortable and not, a mattress taut and firm but with her chest making for soft pillows, but that is of little concern to her anymore. All she feels is the crushing emptiness of the knowledge that her parents are gone, a part of her world forever cut off from her, and nothing will ever bring it back.

And still she can’t cry.

All she feels is numb.

“Why am I like this?” she whispers over the thumping of her heartbeat, pounding in her skull. “Why can’t I just be a normal pony?” It’s the question she asked herself any time her parents tried to cajole her into making friends—her father patiently urging between school days and her mother bringing her to social events and hoping that she’d find somepony to latch onto. No matter what, she always found that she just couldn’t open up to anypony else. She never understood their emotions, their faces, the way they laughed or bellowed or smiled or cried. They were always just masks of indifference.

No, that’s not right.

The reality is that she had always been the one wearing the mask.

After an indeterminate span of time, slumped over herself, her fingers flex around something solid, and she’s not surprised at all to see the egg when she brings it up before her. Its dark surface, with its inscrutable patterns, taunts her. She doesn’t care about it anymore. She’s clutches it in her grasp, prepared to smash it on the stone, no concern for whatever cataclysm it contains, ready to let it devour her.

But, instead, her pulse gradually slowing, she just stares at it, thumb stroking the painted surface, and she mutters, “There is no secret. It doesn’t mean anything.”

A deathly silence overtakes the world.

“Ah…!” Gossamer gasps weakly at the pang she feels in the very bowels of her gut. Shortly afterward, dampness trickles from her nethers and down the insides of her thighs. “Oh, Celestia, it’s happening…!” she mutters weakly, clutching at her stomach as her innards churn. Something is moving inside her. Multiple somethings, surely, if the enormity of her womb is any indication, the quantity of appendages which she feels pressing into the inner walls of her flesh. And yet it could just as easily simply be one gigantic something beyond her comprehension. That question will have to wait, though, because she’s about to give birth right on her front steps with nopony to bear witness to her, let alone assist her.

Except she’s not on her front steps anymore, not on her lawn, not in her home or anywhere near it. She’s in a dark place, the floor rough stone, harsh and cold in a way that the paved path she’s familiar with wasn’t. There’s no source of illumination, yet her immediate surroundings are cast in a faint luminescence that wards off the gloom and offers a modicum of visibility, like an ethereal spotlight bringing a meager sliver of familiar reality along with her.

And she’s not alone either.

A shape looms over her in the darkness, its scope beyond her ability to perceive. Its flickering orange eyes stare upon her with an impassive, evaluating glare. Dimly, she is aware that it is reaching toward her, its touch numbing, the iciness of a vacuum, eager to sap the very life from her. Only the ghostly aura of light holds it at bay for now.

She doesn’t want to be here, anywhere but here. This time, though, her attempt to stand falls flat, her legs turning rubbery when she leverages them beneath her. Instead of going upright, she tilts back onto her rear, and now the weight is starting to pile on her again, threatening to push her over completely. Her breath is heavy and haggard.

The figure in the shadows moves, lumbering forward. Gossamer grunts and gasps as she hauls herself back, her efforts to maintain distance in vain. She expects some huge monstrous face with a gaping maw that will open wide to devour her whole, a horror unlike any known to Equestria. Instead, however, as the nightmare steps into the light, its form seems to telescope, contracting on itself. What finally appears is a thing that is unsettlingly approachable.

The figure—which could charitably be described as a pony—wears a long ashen gown that covers it from its shoulders all the way down to the floor, hanging so uniformly that it doesn’t betray a single hint of the body underneath, with long sleeves and gloves on its hands. Even as it walks, gliding across the stone, there is no discernible movement beneath the ghostly veil, nor are there hoofsteps, only a series of tiny clicks and clacks, tapping away at Gossamer’s brain. The actual skin of its face is paler still, the white of sun-bleached bone, stretched tight around sinew and skull, creating a severe expression, the outlines of its teeth and jaws visible through its lips. It has a stout horn jutting from its forehead, no mane, and no visible ears, and as it stares at her with its four orange eyes, perfectly head-on, with a magnetic intensity that makes it impossible to look away, she senses something wrong about its skull—too thin, and not merely because of its proportions, rather appearing as if the sides of it have been shaved away, creating smooth outlines—but she can’t entirely identify the full scope of the thing at this angle.

“It is with us now,” it says in a pitiless voice like the grinding of stone in a cavernous pit, a distant echo in the dark depths of the earth, “it has come to accept the inevitability of all things to return to the nothing from which they were birthed. Is it prepared, we wonder, to welcome the truest of sensations, the embrace of the void within the very hollow of its being?” A low grumbling noise reverberates within its form while it clacks its teeth together. “In time, it shall understand, for time is the implacable millstone of all existence.”

Gossamer can barely listen to any of its ramblings. She can hardly even hear her own thoughts. She tries in vain to crawl away, but the pangs of labor get the better of her once more, and she falls over, crying out as her belly pins her in place, trapped like a turtle flipped on its back. No longer can she muster the strength to move her legs in spite of the adrenaline pumping through her, forced to spread them far apart. It feels like she’s splitting apart, right down the middle, explosive pressure building in her loins. She lacks the strength to resist, lacks the concentration even to pray.

“What reason does it have to persist?” The void-thing—which she can now only scarcely see past the lilac hill rising in front of her—grimaces at her, condescending yet almost pitying. “It has known suffering all its life, has been made to play to the whims of those in its orbit. The stars have made it their plaything, and it shall be coddled by them for all eternity, tugged this way and that. Here, in the dark, there is no confusion, for all is quiet. Here, in the cold, there is no pain, for all is still. Here, in the halls of our tenebrous chapel, it shall know peace at long last.” It starts to recede from view, seemingly bending over to kneel before Gossamer’s mountainous middle, but not before she sees it remove one of its gloves, revealing a gnarled hand with too many digits, splitting apart as they unfold and unfurl.

“No…w-wait!” Her protestations turn into a guttural wail as the contractions of her loins stab through her. She can’t move at all, can’t escape, and she’s completely exposed and vulnerable. She can’t see the void-thing, but she can feel its presence, exuding a baleful numbing aura more foreboding than any aspect of its physicality. She doesn’t want it anywhere near her, but to know that it is so close to her groin, her vulva, her innards, evokes a terror most primal. It does not speak to her, but she hears its grumbling, and she interprets it as the multitudinous hum of a thousand hungry insects, an all-consuming locust swarm.

Her legs gape apart and the cold seeps into her, like a pocket of freezing air forced into the birth canal. The numbing ice seems as if it’s supposed to dull her senses, some form of anesthetic, but her nerves are already so frayed to begin with. What is she really supposed to feel at a time such as this? Should she be relieved by the idea that salvation is soon to be visited upon her? Should she be indignant that the void-thing is acting against her wishes? Should she cry, shout, cringe, or laugh? She doesn’t know.

Gossamer Gleam doesn’t know what it means to feel.

What she does know is that she wants to feel.

Through the haze, she reflects on the past days, weeks, months, a span of time smeared across her memory. She has lived experiences which she doubts many other ponies could claim to have shared. She has grown intimate with the intensity of flesh, strained to its limits. She has felt the embrace of the stars. She has grappled with the pain of loss.

It hurts so much and she’d never think of giving it away for a moment.

Gossamer has had enough of the void within herself, now all she wants is to be full of life, squirming and writhing within her, aching to emerge into the world.

“No.”

With one heaving effort she hauls herself backward on her hands and elbows.

“NO!”

Gossamer finds the strength in herself tuck her legs together again, coiled like a spring beneath her belly, and with all her might she kicks with both hooves. She hits something solid and there’s a dull cracking noise and a snap, but she has to wince as the contact with its frigid core spreads freezing lances through her nervous system. Her legs go limp, but she still has enough left in her to rise back into a sitting posture. She sees the void-thing lying crumpled on the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut, cruel eyes staring listlessly, and she sees straight through its head, a hole hollowed all the way through one side to the other. Though still she continues to crawl weakly away, keeping as much distance as she can.

“I’m not…giving myself up…for this,” she snarls through clenched teeth with an intensity alien to her, the primal zeal which only a parent guarding their offspring can muster. The anger is what bubbles to the surface, but it carries with it a profound yearning to care for that which is close to her. She feels the drive for self-preservation, the instinct for survival. Her life has meaning, and there are lives which depend upon her. This can’t be where it all ends.

The void-thing rattles, twitching, and then limply it slides away into the shadows—only faintly can Gossamer discern the way the dull light ripples, forming an outline of some huge limb which takes hold of the body and pulls it out of sight.

“It is not prepared to accept the cold embrace of our truth,” rumbles an even deeper voice, its presence booming and foreboding, yet carrying a subtle undertone of lament, “what a shame.”

And then in the span of her eyes blinking, the dark place is gone. She sees the green of her front lawn, and the stone path beneath her is warm instead of cold. There’s a pop in her ears before she begins to hear the quiet ambience of nature, the whistling mountain breeze and distant birdsong. The prickling of her fur settles, and a great relief washes over her, allowing her to breathe out a heavy sigh, a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding in. Then she laughs, the sound rolling out so easily from her, laughing while sprawled out naked in front of her home for anypony passing by to see. She laughs even as she feels pain in her face, the creasing of the edges of her mouth along her muzzle and cheeks. She laughs even as she feels something damp trickling from the corners of her eyes. She laughs even as she starts to collapse, toppling over, the adrenaline rush spent, poised to land harshly on the ground.

Something catches her.

Immaterial, ephemeral, vaporous, appendages of hot plasma that cradle and caress her.

Then she shudders and they’re hands made of flesh and blood, or something sufficiently close in approximation. She weakly shakes her head and blinks away the glare in her eyes, but it doesn’t help much. It’s not just the sun; numerous bright figures are looming over her. One of them is the ghostly dark image of Algol. Their faces betray a multitude of amalgamated emotions, far more than just three at once, but relief seems to be most prominent.

“You rose to the task after all,” they admit.

“We deemed you not strong enough to stand in the face of the void,” Sirius explains.

“We were prepared to make a great sacrifice for you,” the Cygni sing.

“We gave you our spawn, so that their strength might be yours,” Betelgeuse grumbles.

“And after all your trials and tribulations, you were able to resist the temptation of the void.” Algol smiles while they caress Gossamer’s cheek. “We are eternally grateful for your courage, little pony.”

Gossamer can’t bring herself to speak more than quiet choked gasps, and she doesn’t know what to say anyway. All she can do is smile, now because she’s so glad for their presence. She wants to hug Algol and all the rest for the rest of time. She wants to know what the love of a star feels like.

But she can hardly move, hardly think. With the excitement and terror past, the pangs of her loins are overpowering everything else, blinding her senses.

Time passes in a blur. Powerful arms—or maybe magical levitation; it’s impossible for her to tell—lift her, and then she’s reclining on a far softer surface. Their hands stroke her taut flesh and grip her gently, spreading her legs. Heat seeps into her and she feels her fur mat with sweat. They whisper to her reassuringly.

“Push!”

Her whole body clenches, and the wail within her chest is joined by another as the first of many comes into the world.

= = = = =

The moon hangs huge and full in the sky overhead.

No, not the moon. Gossamer Gleam blinks a few times, but it’s apparent that the great globe overhead isn’t pale and shining, rather a mix of blue and green and brown and white, and it’s far too large as well. It’s Equus, she understands immediately. There have been artistic impressions of what the planet must look like, but nopony has ever seen the whole thing. Not outside of dreams, anyway.

Her gaze drifts lower, and she looks around herself. She stands on a dark stone dais surrounded by gardens of luminous blue flowers. Out beyond the platform, past a banister that rings around the whole space, she sees a vast cityscape of black towers, steepled rooftops and minarets. Even farther beyond, the dark architecture gives way to a dull grey landscape, ashen deserts and squat barren mountains. She thinks she recognizes certain star configurations in the sky, but their positions are all wrong; her perspective is flipped. The air feels thin as she pulls it into her lungs, and it leaves a stale taste in her mouth. She turns until she sees the building which the elevated garden is attached to, a foreboding obsidian castle that looms above the rest of the city, clawing at the stars above. It’s eerily quiet, save for her hoofsteps as she starts forward, approaching and entering the castle.

The interior is just as gloomy as the exterior would lead one to imagine. Dim light only filters in through the tall windows, leaving rooms swathed in shadow, the full extent of their cavernous dimensions impossible to gauge. There are braziers scattered about, standing on plinths or mounted on the walls or hanging from the ceiling, but all of them are unlit. Gossamer thinks that she could try igniting her horn, but she finds that nothing seems to happen, and she can’t be sure what the reason is, whether her magic is blocked or if something in her horn isn’t connecting properly, or maybe because she must be dreaming and that means the rules of the waking world don’t apply.

She finds herself thinking of Canterlot as she blindly explores the abyssal halls—a Canterlot cast in the darkness of night which makes shadows seem so much larger than they really are. And this castle would be the equivalent of Princess Celestia’s palace, which she has visited on occasion, when her parents brought her to social gatherings taking place there. She would usually try to find some corner to get away from the thronging crowds. Here, though, there are distinctly no ponies at all. There aren’t even any guards standing watch over the paintings and sculptures and statues and other decorations which are placed here and there.

Between the gloom and her meandering but steady path, Gossamer only catches the details on a few of these pieces. A mural slashed across with splashes of red. A statue that appears to be two mares, embraced and melding into each other. A vast assemblage of golden metal that hangs in the center of a circular hall with stairs spiraling around it.

She continues to hear nothing but her own hoofsteps, clopping loudly on stone, and shallow breathing, though with how the noise echoes through the empty passages, it could be easy to mistake for multiple sets matching with hers.

And eventually, she finds herself walking up the steps of a huge throne room, towering pillars flanking the path on either side. The whole place is expansive enough that there could be an army of attendants and guards and supplicants packed in here. The throne at the back of the chamber, a tall and ornately carved structure adorned with ivory and sapphires that twinkle faintly, is just as vacant as everything else in the castle. Past the throne, however, there is an open doorway, and from this emanates a faint trickle of illumination that chases away the shadows, a cool blue color.

There’s a tad more urgency in Gossamer’s gait as she strides toward this entrance, and on the other side she finds a cozier room than any other in the castle thus far. The proportions are spacious, but none too much for a mare who grew up in a mansion. She sees bookshelves and chairs and a short table upon which a lantern with a flickering cerulean flame is placed. There’s a door across from her, closed, and very wide.

But before she can approach anything for closer inspection, a voice speaks to her.

“Ah. ‘Tis thee.”

Low, rumbling, resonant, and implicitly commanding. She turns away from the lantern’s light, and she sees on the other side of the room a huge shadowy shape. Immediately she is reminded of the dark place and the void-thing, but after an initial shock she feels no lingering dread. This figure is one she can at least identify: a huge black mass, reclined upon something like a sofa. And though most of that side of the room is black, there is a faint hint of illumination which hangs around their head, a swirling cloud of blue mist with a swathe of stars dotted within it, an ethereal mane which highlights a long black horn and icy, predatory eyes.

“Thou art the one whom the stars hath been chattering about so jubilantly,” the dark queen mutters with a veneer of disinterest. She only deigns to cast her gaze upon the unicorn with a sidelong glance.

Gossamer thinks of Algol and all the others. She has difficulty remembering what happened while she was last awake other than the warmth of their embrace. “What do they say about me?” she asks.

The mare scoffs, and their glow highlights a hint of pearly white teeth revealed by their sneer. “They say that thy loins be most tight and pleasurable.”

“O-oh.” Heat blooms in Gossamer’s cheeks. Yet, despite the embarrassment which is coded into her, she feels a bubbling of strange and inexplicable pride.

“They also say,” she continues in a more level tone, and now she regards Gossamer coolly, curious, “that thou art most brave, exhibiting a fortitude beyond the ken of mortal ponies.”

“Oh…I see,” she replies quietly, somehow even less certain what to think of this statement. Her, brave? It feels hard to believe. In her dream, she only dimly recalls the sensations of the waking world, the memory of her resistance against the void-thing. In that moment, she had known strength. She touches her stomach, and she feels that it is flat once again, and without the occupants of her womb she doubts her ability to muster the same kind of power.

“Seeing thee with our own eyes…” she then says, and there’s a vague hint of movement on her lower body, a limb tracing along her central bulk. “The reason for all this is quite clear to us.”

“What do you mean?” Gossamer asks.

There’s a low hum, reverberating in the mare’s throat, before she says, “‘Tis thy calm demeanor…the vacuous tranquility within thee. The very thing which attracted the Empty One—” (though as she utters this name, her lips do not quite match the sounds coming from her mouth) “—to thee was also what protected thee from its baneful corruption. Thou art more durable than thou realize. Thou wouldst not have been able to bear the brood of the stars otherwise.”

“Why did they do all this?” she asks next, the question which has been lingering at the back of her mind this whole time. “Why did they want to protect me? Was it all…just because…” She goes quiet, still holding her palm over herself, clasped just above her groin.

“‘Tis no small gesture to place something as precious as a child within a sinking ship, little pony,” the mare murmurs, “and the stars are seldom able to give birth. It takes a particular breed of vessel to carry their spawn. They saw potential in thee, and perhaps deemed it a necessary risk to keep thee alive, and thou succeeded in paying off their gamble. The stars are indebted to thee for that. And…so are we.” Her stern composure loosens, just slightly, and she nods her head in a bow of assent.

Gossamer feels some inclination to bow as well as she responds, “Thank you.”

The dark mare then grunts as she shifts on the sofa, leaning from one side to the other, and her flesh heaves about in a great arc. For a moment, the black mass eclipses her face. She seems to settle into a position reclining on her side, great globes sprawled out before her. Gossamer takes a step to the side so that she can see past the immense mounds of her bosom, splayed on top of each other. Her enormous gut, which seems like it must be broader than she is tall, voluminous enough to contain a couple dozen adult ponies, rests upon the floor. In the dim light, Gossamer only faintly observes the hint of movement beneath the distended skin—some squirming boneless appendage.

“Thou wouldst do well to nurture the gifts thou bear, lest those of lesser minds try to shame thee for them,” she remarks amidst labored huffs of breath. “Thou art of a character most noble and virtuous, and let no fool tell thee otherwise.” After a pause, she forlornly adds, “It matters little at this point, but we wish to believe that thou wouldst have been one of our adherents in ages long past.” She rubs her stomach and it trembles again. Gossamer almost thinks she hears something from it this time, a muffled burble.

Then something is happening. The mare and her sofa are slipping farther away. That whole side of the room is receding from Gossamer. The room stretches and distorts and she feels like she’s falling.

“It appears that our time together hath come to an end,” she calls back to the unicorn, echoing from farther and farther away as she, even with her gargantuan girth, becomes nearly impossible to discern from the gloom. “Fare thee well, young mother of stars. May we meet again, face to face.”

Gossamer tries to call back to her, to ask her how they could hope to meet when she doesn’t even know the other pony’s name, but the dream is already falling apart at the seams, color bleeding and thinning into nothing, and it swallows up her voice.

Moments before waking, however, it occurs to her that she does know her name.

She’s always known the name of the mare in the moon.

= = = = =

The mountain breeze wafts over Gossamer Gleam, tossing her mane so that the golden bangle tying it at the end thumps on her shoulder. She looks far out into the distance where the sky is blackening and long shadows creep over the landscape of Equestria. There’s no apocalyptic devastation; all is in order. Even the bench is perfectly intact (she had been prepared to look into repairing it, but it was already fixed when she came to inspect the damage).

She absentmindedly places her palm upon her stomach, pressing through the fabric of her dress. Her midsection is flat and smooth, not sprawling over her lap, and she only feels the pumping of her own blood vessels under the surface. Her chest isn’t quite the same size it had been before all this began, though, and nor are her hips. There are no bra straps concealed beneath her dress; she’ll need to look into acquiring more of those the next time she goes shopping for supplies. There’s a feeling of sliminess under the cloth as well on account of the lotion lathered into her fur all along her midriff, an attempt to ease the lingering strain in her skin.

Normalcy has returned to her life, except in many ways nothing is the same as it once was, and it never will be again.

But then, Gossamer has never entirely known what “normal” means.

The light of the sun continues to fade, color sapping away to black, but the sky is not completely devoid of illumination. They soon appear, one by one, opening their eyes and gazing down upon the landscape, countless in their multitudes. They are impossibly distant, farther away than a pony could walk, than the swiftest pegasus could fly, in their entire lifetime. And yet, all the same, they are so close. She can name them; she can remember them; she can feel them.

“Mother always lamented that I didn’t spend more time with other ponies,” she says quietly to the night sky, “she worried that I spent too much time in the observatory with Father. He wanted me to open up more too, but he just couldn’t help himself when it came to gushing about the stars.”

“Do you resent them for their actions?”

“No.” She finds herself smiling as she imagines Stardust Cover showing her his astronomy textbooks, pointing out the diagrams and carefully explaining what they depicted. Lustrous Gleam might look on warily at times, but she never openly discouraged it, and sometimes she would settle in on the opposite side of Gossamer and listen as well. In her memory, they still seem so much grander than her, tall, immaculate despite their wrinkles and greying hair and tired eyes. That’s the way she wants to remember them, not for the way they walked away from the house, from her, out of her life forever. It wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t with them. Now she’s able to feel the tears running over her cheeks, but instead of sobbing she hiccups with laughter, her smile widening.

“I suppose they just didn’t understand,” she says while she turns to the side, “I was plenty capable of opening up to others. I just needed a different kind of company.”

Algol chuckles, a threefold rattling in their throat. “We estimate that you opened up quite a lot. At least once to every stellar body on this arm of the galaxy.”

“Don’t tell me that you wish you had kept me all to yourselves,” she remarks with a smirk as she rests her hand on Algol’s shoulder, cosmic heat radiating through her.

But her focus strays, and she sees the bundle swaddled in cloth held over the star-pony’s bosom. Algol takes notice of this and tenderly raises the bundle so that she can see more closely, while also holding a finger up to their muzzles. Gossamer has some difficulty keeping to that warning when she sees the small face peeking out of the cloth, the short muzzle and closed eyes and horn poking from a scant layer of fur, a lavender color that seems faintly iridescent in what little light lingers around them. Gossamer takes the foal in her arms, holding carefully to herself; she’s so small, so light, and yet she’s the greatest and most important thing she’s ever carried in her life.

“What’s her name?” she whispers.

“Is it not the tradition of your astronomers that the pony who discovers a star has the privilege of naming it?” Algol replies with a smirk. They add in an aside, “Well, We were the ones to find her amid all the spawn crammed in your womb.”

Gossamer remembers her father often reiterating that he would name a star after her if he ever found one, and she shudders. The foal stirs, burbling dreamily, and her eyes open—one cool blue and the other fiery orange. She looks up at her mother and offers a thin, calm smile, which Gossamer returns.

“Stheno,” she murmurs.

The foal’s face alights with a crackle of laughter.

“Hmm, it will suffice,” Algol remarks, teeth twinkling in their grin as they take the child back. They’re able to rock the bundle while simultaneously stroking her, and gradually she stills and returns to slumber. “You should know, by the way,” they then say, “that news of your deeds has been spreading through the cosmos.”

“Really?” She supposes that even stars must gossip. She wonders if they have tabloid magazines too.

“Your service is one which is highly sought after.” Algol places a hand on Gossamer’s hip, and she feels heat well up in her flesh, a pulse of warmth in her cutie mark, the heart inscribed with a spiderweb which she has failed to understand for so long. “We have heard that there is one in particular who is interested in meeting you. He claims that you and he experienced the formation of a bond some years ago.”

For a moment, Gossamer is uncertain of what this means, before she remembers the circumstances in which she gained her cutie mark, a moment which has lingered half-forgotten in the murky depths of her subconscious. She remembers looking into her father’s telescope and seeing something that wasn’t a star—something that moved, something that looked back at her across the expanse of space. She never understood what had happened, only that she had experienced a profound yearning that bloomed in the core of her being. Now, she thinks, it suddenly makes so much sense.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing him,” she replies. There’s a hint of bashfulness in her smile. She can’t repress the way her thighs clench together in anticipation.

“Are you certain?” Algol betrays a hint of uncharacteristic concern amidst all their glib banter. “You should be aware that he is…quite imposing. We do not believe that he will be interested in exhibiting restraint.”

“Is that supposed to intimidate me?”

They bark in laughter. Gossamer joins in. Even Stheno wakes and gurgles merrily.

= = = = =

Sometimes, Gossamer still remembers the offer of the Empty One.

They would meet again, and they came to a compromise and made amends; it turned out that even the nothingness between spaces has desires in need of fulfilling.

Yet still it is a tempting thought when times are harsh and difficult.

But even when she struggles—when ponies whisper hurtful things about her, when she can barely stand, when the house is in danger of falling apart, when she is violently ill, when she feels like she’s splitting at the seams, when her flesh burns, when she remembers the loss of her parents—she knows that it is all worth it.

Gossamer Gleam wants to feel alive more than anything else.

Author's Note

Not so last-minute this time, motherfucker.

The implementation of Gossamer Gleam gradually morphs over time as she becomes less of a ~~Maud knockoff~~ one-note gimmick. In some ways, her character has developed in parallel to my own life experiences, and so this ended up being yet another dump for my emotional baggage, oops. Initially going into this I was taking inspiration from Hellraiser, hence the spooky puzzle, and I thought playing with that idea of pain and pleasure would be suitable for Gossamer, but that ended up being sort of downplayed compared to the stars plot.

I felt myself grappling with the ramifications of the pregnancy fetish in a way that I haven't in a long time while writing this. Initially there was going to be some more overt abortion imagery present in the scene with the void-thing, and in looking back on that idea it had very "cis white man patting himself on the back for being so clever" energy. I realized that what I was doing was creating a scenario that demonized abortion and I really didn't want to give off that implication even for some stupid fetish story, not when the right to have an abortion is under fire so much more today than it was when I first started writing Gossamer Gleam stories in 2019. Pregnancy as a fetish is largely escapism in nature just like any other fetish, but I still feel it's something that should be treated with a certain level of care.

Also subtly tying in to ~~and retconning~~ The Stars' Aid.

I've wanted to reclaim the name Algol for a while.

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