Ungula

It took some time for the hubbub to die down after that, during which Rainbow Dash explained that Now Turn Thy Gaze Ahead had simply made her imperceptible rather than actually foalnapping her and Pinkie Pie sheepishly confessed that she had known they were there since leaving the market but had been pretty sure they didn't mean any actual harm and hadn't wanted to ruin the moment.

Everypony was a bit ticked about that but ultimately agreed that it had worked out alright and they had needed a few hours to just relax together. Nopony was really about to begrudge Pinkie Pie for trusting her gut, after all.

"Okay, so don't be mad, but I might have gotten too many tacos."

Shining Armor coming home with seventy-two tacos might have also sped up the process of recovering from the scare.

"Shiny. Shining Armor. My dear husband. Shield of my heart. Why did you order seventy-two tacos?"

"Well, I asked for twenty-four crunchy meals, because there were gonna be eight ponies and I figured three tacos each seemed about right. But, uh. It turns out a crunchy meal is already three tacos."

"What part of crunchy meal made you think they were only one each???"

"A slappy meal is only one hayburger!"

"That's because a slappy meal is for foals! Did you think you were ordering from the foals menu???"

"Look, I wanted to see what toys they would come with!"

"They came with a pillow to the head, that's what!"

Twilight caught the tacos in her magic as her brother fled from the pillowy wrath of his wife. It was good to be home.

Twilight Sparkle was a mare with nine tacos on her plate and just as much curiosity. She was torn. She wanted to ask so many questions, but she also wanted to stuff nine tacos into her face hole.

Look, yes they'd had a big lunch, but it had been several hours since then and Twilight really liked tacos. It's not her fault Shining Armor got so many. Seventy-two tacos divided by eight people equals nine tacos each, this was her mathematically correct share. And she was going to eat them all. So there.

She did also really want to know about umbrum, though.

(Twilight Sparkle was now a mare with eight tacos on her plate.)

She was saved from her dilemma when Cadance, who had put only four tacos on her own plate like a sucker, started explaining of her own accord in order to head off Twilight talking with her mouth full, which it very much was.

"So. Umbrum. I learned a bit from when Umbre originally showed up, and most of the rest later from chatting with their sort-of-dead goddess, Between Starlight and Clay."

…Twilight swallowed her taco. (Yes, she had put the entire taco in her mouth.) "Okay that raises several questions."

"Yeah, I was confused too at first, but she's voluntarily not coming back all the way. Poor dear. What was the other question?" Cadance took a normal-pony-sized bite of her taco.

It was Rarity's turn to speak up, because Twilight had most of another taco in her mouth. "Umbre showed up? I knew it was originally a planet, but…" She took a fancy-pony-sized bite of one of her three tacos. She acted like she was above such base gluttony but Twilight knew she had eaten the most spaghettinoodles of any of them at lunch.

"Ohmf! I know this one." Rainbow Dash held up a hoof in a 'one sec' gesture, also having most of a taco in her mouth. Rainbow Dash had taken ten tacos. Twilight felt a small pang of envy and admiration at her friend's casual defiance of mathematical taco share allocation.

"So this was, like, thousands of years ago, right? Archaeologists aren't really sure exactly how many, there's conflicting accounts. But one day a whole planet just kind of appeared, one big chunk at a time. Nopony really knows why or where it came from. This was after Discord's Comet bucked up everything's orbits, so Luna would have already been managing things, but this was, like. A hundred times more things than she'd had to manage before, and they refused to stick together. So, that's when Luna stopped having time for ruling."

Twilight shoved another taco into her mouth, making her slightly reddened cheeks bulge. Rainbow Dash was normally a jock, but for certain subjects like meteorology and archaeology she was a big nerd, and it never failed to stoke Twilight's feelings of friendship towards her.

That knowing look Cadance just gave her didn't mean anything.

"Has it really been thousands of years…? Well, yes, it's just as Rainbow Dash said. Most of the pieces appeared over the course of a week or so, with the rest – mostly mantle and core – trickling in over the next few months. That's about all I knew at the time – I had suddenly found myself very busy, since I was the only one left who had time to actually rule."

Cadance took another normal-pony-sized bite of her taco. Beside her, Shining Armor shoved his fourth taco into his mouth. He had taken fourteen tacos, having nabbed the rest of Cadance's share.

"At the time? Ya found out more later from that ghost lady, then." Applejack said. She had taken nine tacos and somehow already finished seven of them. Twilight did not know how. She was taking normal-pony bites, but somehow she was out-eating Twilight herself.

"From Between Starlight and Clay, yes. I suppose I should start from the beginning… Okay, so Umbre was a rogue planet, without a sun of its own, inhabited by… owl people, sort of. Umbrum. And Between Starlight and Clay was their mother."

Cadance took another normal-pony bite. Twilight matched it with most of another taco. Pinkie Pie escalated, shoving two into her mouth at once. Twilight couldn't beat that.

"I should clarify, any gendered terms for umbrum are essentially arbitrary, they're hermaphroditic and their own language doesn't even have a concept of gender. So it's mostly based on presentation and, like, vibes. And Between Starlight and Clay's vibes are very much those of a mother goddess."

Rainbow Dash swallowed her taco. "So does that mean every umbrum is gay and trans?"

"Yes," Cadance deadpanned. "Yes it does. Anyway, one day Umbre was dragged into a hell dimension, because it turns out that's something that tends to happen to planets that aren't near a sun."

Well if anypony present didn't already appreciate Celestia's work keeping the sun from exploding, they sure did now. Twilight, for one, liked not being dragged into hell dimensions.

"Define 'hell dimension', please," Fluttershy spoke up. She had taken a respectable six tacos.

Cadance took a bite – and another, taking a long moment to collect her words. "The Void is kind of like space but it hates you."

Twilight swallowed. That was half her tacos gone, now. "Doesn't space already kind of hate you?"

Cadance shook her head. "Space is indifferent towards you. The Void hates you. Anything with a magical field, it wants to essentially swallow and digest it."

Twilight imagined Equus in the position of the taco she had just shoved in her mouth. Poor taco.

"So, there they were, being digested. The Void isn't empty, it's less than empty, and anything inside just gets… eroded away. So, uh. A lot of them died over the first couple months."

"They musta got out of there right quick, then, if there are any of em left at all." Applejack had finished all nine of her tacos. Her unnatural consumptive speed had been her undoing.

"Nooooooo. No, they, uh. Didn't. Small stuff like a starship can slip in and out, but as best they ever figured out, the more gravity stuff is going on the harder it is to make the transition either way. Which is why suns and solar systems make planets safer from falling in – that's a lot of extra gravity stuff going on. But it's a lot easier to fall in than to climb out, and to get a whole planet out……"

"So they weref stufck." Twilight swallowed. "How'd they survive, then?"

"The Halo, they called it. An artificial ring around the planet. The last great work they undertook as a unified race. It took years to construct, during which Between Starlight and Clay took the entire burden of shielding the umbrum upon herself, and then… It wasn't actually light that it shed, exactly. It was undark. I don't quite understand the theory, but that was important, light doesn't stop the erosion but undark does."

"Sounds like bullshit. Fascinating. I want to know everything about it." Twilight punctuated her statement by shoving her seventh taco into her mouth.

"I thought you might, sorry I don't understand that bit better. The thing is, though, the Void really hates you. And usually it just digests you, but if it can't, it slowly twists you."

"O-oh. So that's why they look like, er, that…?" Rarity was on her second of three tacos, because she was too fancy to eat nine tacos.

"Eventually, yeah, their bodies became… malleable. They all look different, though it seems like now they're here a lot of them have modeled their bodies after Ungulan races. But that wasn't the big problem, the minds were. It was… it couldn't get them all at once, it preyed on negativity and isolation. And the ones whose minds it twisted…"

Cadance took another bite, collected herself. She was on the third of her four tacos, and her face was mournful. "Vantumbrum, some called them. Blacker than the dark between stars for which Umbre was named. Unknowing slaves of the Void. And they were still her children."

Twilight swallowed. She didn't know what to say to that.

"Things fell apart. It wasn't an all-or-nothing thing, they were all twisted up a bit. And the bonds between them were twisted just as much. Not broken, never broken – but twisted. The only bonds it couldn't touch were from Between Starlight and Clay to her children. She was the only one seeing clearly as her children descended into infighting, explored more and more depraved magics… Fell further and further."

Twilight hadn't taken another bite.

"She doesn't know exactly how long it was, there weren't any stars or anything to easily tell the passage of time by, but it was centuries at least. The malleable body thing got rid of, y'know, aging. So they were all festering in there for a long time. Eventually, Between Starlight and Clay made a desperate gambit. She repurposed the Halo."

"But wouldn't that mean…?"

"Yes. If it didn't work, they would all be digested. She… judged that better than letting her children fall even further."

"Oh."

It was a very soft 'oh'. Twilight understood full well the sheer gravity of a mother goddess taking the ultimate mercy upon her children.

There was a moment of silence. After a long few seconds, Cadance continued.

"She turned it from undark to ungravity. The more gravity, the harder it is to make the transition – so she negated the planet's gravity. The Halo shattered, Umbre flew apart – but it worked. She got them out of the Void."

Shining Armor laid a hoof upon Cadance's shoulder. He had heard the story before, and knew what was coming.

"They killed her for it. And she let them."