Pinkamena Diane Pie trotted down the streets of Ponyville in a half daze.

Not bounced, not pronked, not hopped, but trotted... and quickly. She received the occasional 'hello' and 'how do you do' from the townsfolk, but in a rare show of unfriendliness, she completely ignored them.

It wasn't the regular ponies of Ponyville that she needed to worry about, but the ones who could feel it... the ones who could sense it.

She could see it in many of the ponies she passed by. The path She had cut through town was obvious in the way that Pinkie could hear the ones who had felt Her touch and responded, both consciously and subconsciously.

She heard it in the hushed, worried whispers, saw it in the nervous, directionless glances that belied a secret, forbidden, and probably confusing want, the ones that would simply sit there staring into space, lost to the world around them.

Pinkamena Diane Pie had watched for all these things and more. She was nervous, she was excited, she was terrified, she was ecstatic.

She didn't quite know how to feel at the moment.

After all, Her Goddess—the true Goddess had finally decided to bless Equus with Her presence after so many countless ages of waiting. The tales had been true, and the promised advent of the Dead Goddess had finally come to pass.

For generations upon generations, the story of the Dead Goddess and the Last Pie had been passed down in the Pie Family line, so that none forgot just who, and what they owed the continuation of their own lineage to.

For it was told in her family that through dark, desperate, and mysterious means, a deal was struck between the Dead Goddess and Onyx Pie, the last living member of the Pie Family at the time, many, many millennia ago.

The stallion had been getting on in years, and during a time of great upheaval in Equestria, he sought to keep his bloodline alive by any means necessary.

The stallion was completely sterile and could not produce an heir, so in his desperation he thought to bargain with a being beyond even Celestia's power.

And so it was that he summoned the Dead Goddess herself, but not before being fatally wounded when war had finally reached his hometown.

As he lay dying in his own home, the vision of the Goddess came to him. He explained his plight to the Goddess and it was said that the Goddess took pity on the stallion, granting him his final wish... for a price.

Though Pinkie had no idea how the heir was produced or the full extent of what that price was, Granny Pie had always loved to tell Pinkie and her sisters the story of Onyx Pie when they were foals.

'Our family tree will continue to bear fruit so long as we keep the memory of Our Goddess alive', her Granny Pie had said countless times, 'nopony else is to know of Her existence but us Pies, not until the time is right'.

Until now, it had been the Pie Family's most well kept secret. So well kept was it that not even the millennia's old Princess of the Sun knew... but she would, if she didn't already.

It was said that the Goddess had not seen fit to grace Equus upon first contact, but rather spoke to the Last Pie from beyond the Veil of Darkness.

Her presence was not felt by Celestia then... but now...

Now that she was here and given flesh, things would change. Pinkie Pie didn't know exactly how things would change—nopony in her family did—but she had been told to expect Equus to undergo a new age of... something.

Again, the details weren't clear, but that didn't matter to Pinkie.

She had also been told from a very young age that she had a gift. She was told the gift was a blessing from the Dead Goddess Herself, and that her own birth signaled Her return.

If Pinkie was being completely honest, she had a hard time believing everything she was told, and when she finally moved from her farm to Ponyville, she had put the whole idea of the Goddess out of her mind entirely.

It wasn't like she hated the Goddess or despised her family's worship of her. It was more that she found the whole idea outlandish and... well... more than a little bit silly.

She hadn't taken their faith seriously, and merely wrote off her gift—something she had decided to call her 'Pinkie Sense'—as some kind of... well, she didn't know, but it certainly couldn't have been because of some otherworldly, eldritch Goddess of Death!

That was just silly!

But no... no it wasn't.

The Dead Goddess was very real, and She had returned to walk the earth, just like Granny Pie always said She would.

She had been told many things about the Goddess, but for all the lore passed down in the Pie Family, the Goddess was still very much a mystery.

She hadn't felt it until she was right in front of her, but when she met that lavender pony, she knew. Something deep within her resonated strongly, and she knew it was Her.

She had arrived so suddenly, that Pinkie was completely caught off guard. The fact that she was caught off guard caught her off guard.

Pinkie Pie was never caught off guard.

She didn't know how to react, and in her shock, she had said something horrible to the very being she was supposed to be worshipping. The very being to whom her family owed it's continued existence.

She was scared, but at the same time—as she moved about town, following her Pinkie Sense to the local library—she began to wonder about the Goddess, and the mare herself.

She may have been terrified when she first realized just who she had run into, but she could also see that the mare—not the Goddess, but the mare, was just as scared as Pinkie herself was, if not more.

Why was that?

Was there some kind of dissonance between the mare and the Goddess? A conflict of the spirit perhaps? Pinkie's Sense could tell her a lot, and while it couldn't tell her everything, she did understand that something was wrong.

That something hadn't... mixed right when the Goddess arrived. The only conclusion Pinkie could draw was that there had been some kind of disturbance when the Goddess had taken her host, but she wasn't even sure of that.

Now, as she slammed the door open and entered the as-of-now empty library, her uncharacteristically pensive expression turned slightly more hopeful.

She had been expecting some kind of horrible retribution for not following the tenets of worship that her family did, as well as her outburst from when she and the mare first met... but maybe that wasn't going to be the case?

The mare didn't seem to recognize her at all, and again, there was that odd unbridled fear in her eyes when she spoke.

Maybe... just maybe, she and the mare could be friends. Pinkie Pie loved making new friends after all, and she was supposed to herald the coming of the Goddess herself.

She had never figured out what that meant, but maybe this was it.

Pinkie Pie looked around the main room of the library, her smile returning in full force. She wasn't sure why the mare was so scared of her, but she wouldn't let that stop her from trying to befriend the mare, and by extension, Her Goddess.

She needed to prepare something grand, something spectacular, something Ponyville had never seen before, but that could wait for now.

If there was one thing Pinkie remembered about the Dead Goddess, it was that her very presence affected living beings in different and sometimes odd ways.

Pinkie was taught to see the signs of Her return, and she indeed saw them everywhere she went. Some of the ponies—ponies she had grown to know and like all over Ponyville, weren't acting like themselves.

They were distracted, distant, and worried.

Normally, Pinkie would've just chalked this up to them having an off day or something of the like, but through her Pinkie Sense—which itself seemed to have heightened since the mare's arrival in town—she could tell they were touched by Her Goddess's presence in one way or another.

She was going to throw the biggest 'Welcome-to-Equus' party Her Goddess had ever seen, and she'd get the mare to warm up to her no matter what it took.

They themselves might not have known it, but the ponies who'd been affected by Her presence would eventually seek her out for their own reasons—or at least, reasons they thought were their own.

By inviting those ponies to her party, all Pinkie would be doing is speeding the process along.

It didn't matter how wary, nervous, or creeped out they were by her presence. They would all flock to Her eventually. They couldn't not, for the mare was the Goddess after all—a real Goddess, unlike Celestia.

Celestia was an ancient, immortal and powerful being in her own right, but she was still ultimately a being of the White Dimension—a peaceful realm of light, life, and magic.

The Goddess resided in the Black Dimension—a place normally anathema to this plane of existence. Even at her most powerful, Celestia couldn't hold a candle to any being from the Black Dimension, let alone the Dead Goddess.

Or so Pinkie had been told anyway. She had no idea if that was actually true or not, and didn't really want to find out if she could help it.

Pinkie didn't know much about the Black Dimension aside from the fact that the beings that lived there were unlike anything this world had ever seen.

That was another thing that had bothered Pinkie about her family's worship of the Dead Goddess. Whenever she would ask about where She came from or what made Her so almighty, all she got were vague answers that didn't explain anything.

Why worship a deity you knew nothing about?

The details on how the Goddess had been able to make it into this realm were lost on Pinkie, but she was certain it had something to do with the lavender mare.

What little she did know about the Goddess, and the other beings of the Black Dimension, was that they couldn't directly inhabit this plane without help, and She was probably only able to exist through the mare... somehow.

Still, now that she knew the Goddess actually existed, she wanted to find out more. This party she had planned on throwing would be the perfect opportunity to sate her curiosity.

She knew, through her Pinkie Sense, that the mare would be coming to the library, and soon.

The party would give her a chance to not only gain a new friend, but to pick the mare's brain as well. Hopefully she'd get more answers than her family was willing to provide, and she'd get to do what she loved at the same time.

It was perfect!

With her plan in place, Pinkie nodded in satisfaction and left the library to obtain her supplies and hoof out the invites. She pronked out the door with a big smile on her face, her usual cheer once more at the forefront, much to the delight of the citizens around her.

Whatever happened in the end, Pinkie knew this was going to be one Summer Sun Celebration nopony would forget any time soon.