I release another blast from my horn, but the battle is over. The Messengers lie broken, their blubbery mouths held open in expressions of shock, their gelatinous bodies slowly dissolving in their own foul secretions. One grasps at me with a wet tentacle as I trot by. Its grip is too weak to hold me, but it looks at me, pleading, and I pause.

“Do not fight us!” it slurs. “We offer you glory, glory! The glory that we yearn for, the glory that we have been denied, the glory of feeding the Eater!”

I shrug the slimy thing off in disgust and rush past. We hurry towards the lake. Already it’s strangely silent. The birds have gone. Silver lines flash on its surface. We draw closer, and I see they are thousands of dead fish, bobbing on waves this lake should not have.

Out in the center of the lake the waters stir. Huge bubbles, glistening oily black, surface and break, belching foul sulfurous gases that spread a fine yellow-green mist over the lake. The water rises and pushes, a great green wave surges and sweeps forward and yet still rises and rises behind, rising like a tower, turning blacker as it rises, until the wave breaks and reveals the dark lugubrious glory of the Eater.

We were wrong. We were fools. It Is.

Suddenly I’m covered in sweat. Why am I here? What is there to do but run? We are less than insects before it.

I try to turn away, but can’t take my eyes off of the shimmering spirals of its formless black protoplasm as it oozes and pulses through our reality like gobs of oil dropped in water, taking and discarding the shapes of strange alien organs. It has no shape, and all shapes. Every conceivable form and thought, and many inconceivable, would eventually show themselves to one who waited and watched.

It shifts, and the black blaze of light reflecting off its glittering carapace hits me like a wave of heat. I raise a hoof to ward it off, and I see eight great white oval discs in rows on its side, with black circles growing in their centers, and I have only a moment to think Its eyes, don’t look, I’m not worthy—

and it. Looks. At. Me.

I am panting. How long have I stood here? Is it possible that I have had its Eye, even one of its Eyes, upon me? Is it possible I could be found worthy of feeding it?

I thirst for just one drop of the viscous black ambergris I know coils within its hidden intestines. I thirst to taste, and be tasted, and trade my inflexible solid solitary soul to be one infinitesimal piece of the bilious Infinite.

Up above, a sky-blue gnat buzzes about before the god’s face. It darts forward and strikes at its squamous hide. Momentarily some tree-like tentacle will swat it out of the air.

Something shouts at the back of my mind, shouts the folly that this matters somehow, when the black gates, the Eater’s horrible glorious jaws, beckon. I shamble towards them, barely able to control my legs. Soon its Eyes will fall upon me, its jaws will open for me!

But instead the Eyes, pits that pull in my gaze and return nothing, turn slowly towards the blue speck. They stop and focus on it, and I follow Its gaze obediently.

In the sky I see a pony like me, blue, with wings. It—the pegasus—she—has too many colors in her head and tail, colors that seem obscene out here in the open, instead of hidden decently within the black intestines of the Eater.

She seems vaguely familiar.

The Eater is still looking at her, and I worry It will forget me. No! Take me! She isn’t worthy!

I see the tiny creature hovering before the god with her forelegs crossed, and half of me laughs and half of me cries and half of me screams in silent terror.

Something is wrong about how she moves. It is—not in tune with the Eater. She moves unbidden. She—defies—the Eater. I shake my head, trying to understand.

I look down at the hooves beneath me, and wonder. I think a thought, a small one, and receive a small miracle in return: the hooves move. My hooves. I feel the path from me to my body again, coming to life like a vine in the spring. I look up.

The vast mouth of the Eater moves, forming words that blast the insolent pegasus backwards, though they rumble out slow and unhurried as elephants.

WHO.

ARE.

YOU.

I feel magic flowing within me. I reach back inside myself, full of wonder, to touch it.

The pegasus leans back in mid-air, raises one eyebrow, and throws her puny voice against the god:

“Who wants to know?”

Author's Notes:

From the write-off "Famous Last Words" (titled "...but whose?") Thanks to many people for comments. Also thanks to Steven Utley, whose 1976 SF story "Upstart" I ripped off the basic idea from.

daisymare's original drawing is better, but was just a dark smudge when resized to 100x100.