“Your company truly is a pleasure, by the way,” the green-coated spider-pony said with his strangely not-harsh hissing accent. The [i]S[/i] sounds in Glowstick’s voice tended to catch in his teeth.

“You’re just saying that for my ass,” Allen replied nonetheless, a little cheekily. The horse-taur’s lower chest was down to the ground, but his rump was propped up a ways in the air while the spider-pony mounted him, spearing his donut with his own prodigious shaft. (It looked like a dick, but functioned as an ovipositor, so the metaphorical term was the one that Glowstick had settled on.)

“No, no!” Glowstick protested—then was betrayed right afterward with another egg’s widening both of their sensitive locations at once. “I really do—[i]nnff...[/i] I really do enjoy your company for its own sake. You’re a joy of a conversational partner, and I love every time you are here, not just this one.”

“If you insist.” Allen’s orange tail, turned up over his white coat by the spider-pony currently laying eggs into him, flicked and whapped the latter semi-equine’s face. “Though I’m not the only one who’s nice to talk to.”

“Oh, you [i]tease[/i].” Glowstick lowered his chest to the small of Allen’s lower back and hugged him with his forelegs, along with the small second and third pairs of legs usually folded between fore and hind. “I do insist, though, come back anytime. My door is always open to you.”

Allen looked back over his shoulder and smiled in confirmation. He swore the arachnequine said that every time. “This time, though, you just about finished?”

“...Perhaps.” Glowstick tried to buck and hump a couple times more, his spider’s tail—the pony’s own term for it, though it was really more of a second abdomen—waving up and down as he did. A pause, as he thought over his own sensations. “Yes, I think that would be all of them.”

Allen lowered his rump a ways, enough for Glowstick to find proper footing and begin to pull back. His flare caught in the horse’s rump for a second, then [i]popped[/i] out along with an overpressured spurt of lubricant that had come along with the eggs, before Allen’s donut closed tight once more.

“By the way,” Glowstick continued, “when it comes time for your metallurgical project, you are free to enter the little mine I own, but do give me a rap on the door so that I know you’re here. I’d hate to leave you without any tea and crumpets.” The strange little creature smiled, a golden mirth in all four of his eyes.

“Will do.” Allen stood up with a grunt as the weight of the eggs now inside him made itself felt. “And if you need a host for another batch,” he rubbed his now-overfull belly with a forehoof, “just give me a holler. Least I could do for you. Well,” he paused for a moment, “let me finish with this one first.”

The eggs had of course been in Glowstick’s belly before they had been in Allen’s, and in fact had filled him up so much he was getting to have trouble moving about his own little cottage. In fact, they had had to get a bit creative fitting Glowstick’s shaft into Allen’s rump in the beginning. Allen laughed to think of it for a second.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Allen shook his head. “It’s been nice being here. Next time we’ll just talk, same as usual. I promise.”

Glowstick nodded his head, then sidled up to the horse-taur’s bulging belly. Speaking to his eggs, he muttered, “You’re under a good coat. Da’s seen to it,” then nuzzled his brood one more time. Then he adopted his usual proper bearing once again and escorted his guest to the door.

As Allen stepped out into the cold, the crisp breeze blowing about his mane, Glowstick offered some parting words. “Do take care going down. You don’t have,” he wiggled his spider’s tail, “my rappelling gear, and even were it not for my personal stake, I would hate to hear you hurt.”

“You worry too much,” Allen answered.

“I suppose I do,” Glowstick said in turn. “Take care,” and with that, he closed the door, and Allen began his trek down the mountainside.

It would have been in the heat of the afternoon, were this any season other than winter. But winter it was, and the only grace of this time of day was that the season’s fangs sank slightly shallower into him. It didn’t worry him—his winter pelt saw well enough to that—but it was still enough to notice, and he was thankful it wasn’t too long a hike back to shelter and a better-traveled road.

Halfway down the slope now, he held his arm aloft for a moment to appreciate the afternoon sun, to feel the beams upon his—

He stopped and looked about. His arm cast no shadow on the barren ground. Nor did the rest of him. Perhaps he was in the shadow of the mountain itself?

He looked about to the other peaks in view and the forest below. A couple of the more distant mounts glowed with the sun’s beam, but the miles nearest him were all in uniform shade.

He looked up and back. What blocked the sun?

Allen froze.

A towering front of dark, angry, boiling things too monstrous to be rightly called clouds rose over the mountain peak. As he watched, the peak itself disappeared beneath their furious payload.

He couldn’t run down the mountainside. With terrain as scree-strewn as this, and especially with a belly this heavy—that he was still unused to, to boot—that would be suicide. But thick as his pelt was, there was no way at all he was going to survive a blizzard like this unsheltered.

The horse-taur looked back up the mountainside. By this point, Glowstick’s cabin was a mere speck dug into the mountain’s rocky facade, due to disappear under the blizzard any second. Heading back up towards it would be worse than futile.

He looked down the mountainside.

The woods were closer.

He looked back up to the squall line bearing down on him.

He had no time to lose.

He made his way down the mountain more carefully than he wanted to. As much as he would otherwise be enjoying their presence, these eggs, throwing their weight around in terrain as unsteady as this, were at the moment far more trouble than they were worth. After a few minutes’ tense, frustrated scrabbling down the mountainside, kicking pebbles and finding scarce footing on slabs of long-buried granite, he looked back up, all too aware of the hourglass running low.

He judged he had maybe a minute left, and the nearest copse of trees was maybe two minutes away.

What he saw nonetheless returned hope to his heart.

Up to this point he had always taken a longer, more circuitous route up and down the mountainside—longer, yes, but easier on the hooves and back, especially when he was laden with heavy ores or—he thought of his belly—with something else whose weight needed reckoning with. However, time was of the essence, so he had taken a shorter, straighter, if somewhat more treacherous path, which he had never traversed before.

When he looked back, he saw the clear opening to a cave, maybe two hundred yards out.

Lightning flashed in the storm not a mile off. He had no time to wonder.

The subsequent thunderclap served as his starting pistol. Madly he scrambled up the mountainside, pebbles scratching and clattering off the rocks as they scattered beneath his shod hooves. It wasn’t anywhere near the fastest Allen had galloped. But it was perhaps the most desperate sprint he’d ever done.

He was seconds too late. The front’s full force slammed into him not forty yards from the cavern’s mouth. He had to brace against the wind and stinging snow, crystals a million icy spikes, as he leaned into the gale, turned his head and took step after halting step toward the inviting dark opening, now a blur in a sea of white static. By the time he shoved himself into the cave, the storm had sapped much of the heat from him, and he took a moment in the calm inside the mountain now to simply calm his breath, slow his heartbeat, and shiver.

His moment’s peace was interrupted by a voice from deeper in the cavern. “Who’s there?” was the question, deep and booming, its tone clearly not to be trifled with, but not yet hostile either.

“Uhhhhm...” Allen’s storm-chilled brain struggled for a moment to reply. “I got caught in the blizzard outside and I found this cave; I hope you don’t mind...”

Allen could feel as much as hear something heavy slowly padding toward him. His breath shallowed as it approached; he thought he could see its massive silhouette as it came closer.

Then what little sunlight passed through the storm outside caught the creature’s face. He was a bear. A big one, with a bleary expression that revealed someone just aroused from sleep. The bear looked at Allen for a moment, then up past him to the howling gale beyond.

“Makes sense,” he said, slowly. “Come in if you want to.”

Allen smiled weakly. “Yeah, I’d like that a lot.”

Feral-form though he was, the bear’s forepaws were nimble as he pumped and struck a gas-lamp for his guest, and its warm, orange-white glow illuminated the main cavern space. It wasn’t too big, but it was furnished: a thick rug in the center of the floor, where the bear had presumably been sleeping, and a bookshelf with a small number of tomes. The gas lamp had a crevice above that Allen presumed served as a flue. It seemed a nice enough place for a bear to spend the winter.

“Well,” the bear said, padding himself back down in the center, “while you have me awake, what’s a hoss like you doing halfway up a mountain in a blizzard? Doesn’t seem the best-advised of ideas.”

Allen lowered himself next to the bear and began to snuggle against his fur, enticed by his innate warmth. “Oh, I was meeting my friend up the mountain—”

“Glowstick?” the bear interrupted.

“Yeah, you know him?”

“Not really. I know what he looks like. We’ve talked a couple times, passing one another up and down the trail. Not much more than that.” The bear yawned. “What possesses you to try to meet him during a blizzard?” Before Allen could begin to formulate a reply, though, one of the bear’s forepaws reached back and began to rub the horse-taur’s lower belly, holding it, and Allen, to his own side. “Actually, I can make a guess.”

Allen paused for a moment, then let himself accept the rubs and sink into the bear’s fur. “Your guess is...?”

“Every couple months or so, Glowstick’s belly fills up with something or another, makes him huge. Asked him about it once and he said it’s eggs, which... makes as much sense as everything else I know about him. Then he has somebody or another over, and the somebody comes back down the mountain with a smile on his lips and a clutch in his overfull gut. Seems it’s your turn.”

Allen chuckled nervously. “Haha, yeah...”

“This your first time?”

“...yeah, I haven’t done this before. We’ve been friends for a long time, but—”

“I haven’t either,” the bear interrupted, “though I’ve thought about it. But I don’t want to be tied down with a weight like that. Or a responsibility.” The bear sighed and lowered his head to the rug on the cavern floor. “Maybe if he was gettin’ ready to drop a clutch right as I was gettin’ ready to hibernate, and he didn’t have nobody else in mind. I’ll have to ask him next year.”

Allen noted something from this digression. “Oh, you swing that way?”

“If that’s how you want to put it, yes, I do like my cavortin’ partners to be endowed with a musket and a couple rounds.” The bear chuckled softly at his own poetic license. “Which, you’re a fine specimen yourself, if I may say. Though I doubt you’re interested in me, seein’ as I’m just keepin’ you out of a blizzard,” the bear finished, looking out and up toward the howling gale.

“I didn’t say that.”

The bear cocked an eyebrow.

Allen returned with a slightly mischievous smile.

The bear stretched out his back and adjusted his resting position, this time with his rump hiked up atop his heels. “Well, whatever you didn’t say, I’ll bet you’re gonna be warmer snuggled up against my rump.” He flicked up his tail, unsheathing his pucker. His sack, of course, was already up for grabs. “Considerin’ you keep eyeing it...”

Allen hesitantly approached, rounding the bear’s thigh, then pressed his front up against the bear’s rear. His hands briefly cradled and teased the bear’s balls as the latter huffed and half-instinctively clenched, then he pressed his muzzle against the soft dark pink of the bear’s pucker.

The horse-taur nuzzled and licked the bear’s rump, much to the latter’s huffing delight, and then raised his hands to the ursine butt and started to spread it open. The bear’s scent was so powerfully musky, so oddly comforting... so warm...

Allen’s hands spread the bear’s cheeks as widely as he could, and his snout pressed into and then through the bear’s anus.

The bear snorted at first, nostrils and eyes wide, pupils narrow, unsure of what was going on. But it didn’t take even a second for him to figure out. It had been a while, but he had fit others up his rump before. He was more than willing to let it happen again.

He pushed back as Allen pushed forward, and first the horse-taur’s head, then hands and arms and upper set of shoulders pressed into him. For a second he tried to buck and hump empty air, his shaft already hardened and lengthened, but there was nothing to grind against, so he instead simply pushed back further, until, pushed a little too hard too fast, Allen took a step back with each of his four hooves.

This gave the bear an idea. He stopped moving. “Hey, how about I back up so you can brace against the wall,” he said, loudly enough for Allen to hear through the fat and muscle of his rump. “That seem like a plan?”

As arousing as the following wriggles were, the bear could just keep his wits about him enough to recognize them as coming from an enthusiastic nod.

The two of them took careful, awkward, almost-synchronized steps backward, the bear looking over his shoulder, until bear and horse stopped with the horse-taur’s haunches almost up against a rock face. Allen let a hind hoof explore the wall behind him, and then was satisfied with his footing. He started to press forward again.

The bear grew ever more excited as the horse-taur entered further into him, still trying to clench and buck into empty air beneath him. Allen too humped, though his shaft found slightly better purchase against his egg-laden belly, dribbling precum into his own coat. Soon his lower, feral-form shoulders pressed up against the bear’s tailhole, and he raised first one forehoof, then another to the ursine rear entrance, wriggling and then pushing his forelegs and the beginnings of his lower half in.

This evoked a sound from the bear, loud, low, long, somewhere between a huffy sigh and a deeply satisfied but still-hungry growl. Allen pressed in further, desperate to fully enter his erstwhile partner, but something stopped him.

His belly itself. It had grown so stuffed with eggs that its very girth was blocking any further progress.

The bear was just as frustrated as Allen was, if not more. He took another step back, and Allen found purchase further up the wall. They both pushed, trying to push an eggy belly into a rump that surely could take it, it just needed a bit—more—[i]force[/i]—

It took a second, but no words, for the two of them to coordinate their thrusts. The bear pushed back as Allen pushed forward, first one press, then two, then three, the horse’s hindquarters tensing and flexing, his dick pressed up against his belly as it bulged back against and tickled the ever-so-sensitive shaft. It was so tantalizing, so near, just a bit more—

And the bit more happened. With an almighty [i]thrust[/i] and a dangerously powerful [i]heave[/i], the bear’s asshole stretched around the hosstaur’s belly, then clamped down around it and sucked it in with a [i]shlorp[/i] and then a [i]slap![/i] as dick smacked ursine taint.

That, finally, was more than enough for the both of them. As the horse-taur’s haunches hung from the bear’s fat rump, he slid penis against perineum with evanescent but powerful vigor, and then with one powerful push and a groan, he came. Spooge spurted from his spear and dribbled down across the bear’s undercarriage, dripping off his balls and pooling on the floor beneath.

The bear barely noticed. He too fired—and fired was the word: he shot pressurized streams of cream a short distance across the cavern floor, where they splattered and stained the fur of his chest and now-stallion-filled belly.

The two twitched and spurted for a minute, one full of spider-pony’s eggs, the other full of the one, riding the simultaneous mind-bombing high. Eventually, though, even that must end, and the two of them settled down and reluctantly gathered a hold on their faculties.

“Well,” the bear said, still panting from the exertion, “that was something, wasn’t it.”

The horse wriggled and squirmed inside the bear’s rump.

Then his hooves lightly tapped the bear’s calves.

“Right, let’s get you all tucked in,” the bear said, and then carefully began to lower himself to a seat. It took a moment’s work—the horse’s hips were still something to reckon with, even if nothing compared to the prior work of stuffing in that belly—but soon enough they too disappeared, and then hind legs and tail, and then hooves, pulled in with one last clench as the bear stood up and let the horse’s weight fall under him.

The bear did a little bit of cleanup work, wiping down his and his partner’s stains with a towel before setting it aside to clean later. (As evidenced by his waking up earlier, hibernation wasn’t one long thing: he woke up every couple of days, took care of whatever business needed doing, and then fell back asleep. He’d have time to properly launder that. The time just wasn’t now.)

Then he put out his lamp, settled back down onto his rug, and curled up around his belly, now full of horse-taur. “You comfortable?”

“Mhmmm, yeah...” was the barely-audible muffled reply.

“Well, wake me up when you’re ready to leave. You know how to get to me,” the bear said, chuckling at his obvious remark. He listened to the howling wind outside for a second, still strong as it had been. Then he nuzzled his own belly, yawned, and lowered his head and closed his eyes. “Pleasant dreams.”

-----

Glowstick did not like being unfamiliar with his own home mountainside. All of his points of reference were gone, their appearances buried and scents deadened by the all-consuming blanket of ice. That said, while it was the most irksome thing he encountered this morning, it was perhaps the least important. If it were all he had to concern himself with, he would have stayed comfortable in his cabin. The snowfall, in a sense, was why he was out.

Allen had left Glowstick’s abode about half an hour before the horrible line of storms had struck. That, if Glowstick’s memory did not fail him, was about as long as it took to get from his house to the trees.

That storm had arrived suddenly, with near to no forewarning.

Allen could have found shelter. Or Allen could have become stranded under the branches of a pine. Or Allen could have fallen prey to the ice itself. Glowstick needed to know, both for his clutch’s sake and for his friend’s.

The arachnequine wore his peppermint kit, he called it: almost identical to his normal winter excursion gear, but for a few equipment changes and—much more notably—a complete alteration of the color scheme. Most of the spider-pony’s raiment was either in neutral, natural tones or else in a deep, vibrant green matching his coat. This wasn’t. Everything was either a bleached white or a brilliantly shining red, alchemically treated to glint even brighter than it otherwise should in daylight. The sock around his spider’s tail, for instance, was white with three red rings about it. Hence “peppermint kit”.

The outfit was designed to be seen, because it was designed to search for and rescue others lost in the snow, and if a rescuee can see you, a rescuee can know to get [i]your[/i] attention specifically. (That and getting lost yourself while trying to help others is both embarrassing and outright dangerous.)

At the moment, though, so far as Glowstick could tell, there was no purpose to his getup. On his trek down the snow-covered rock face, he saw no sign of Allen—or anyone else, for that matter. He was not yet sure whether to be concerned.

He paused over a short ridge and looked down a shallow rivulet scratched into the mountain. Near its bottom, a few minutes’ walk away, was a second mound not unlike the one Glowstick currently stood atop—not unlike it from this side anyway. There was a small cave underneath it, Glowstick remembered.

Glowstick remembered too the resident of that cave, one Boston by name, with whom he had traded casual but pleasant enough conversation perhaps half a dozen times. Perhaps he would have seen something.

Perhaps, if he was lucky, Allen was sheltering in there.

When he got to the entrance after a thankfully uneventful trudge across a uniformly sloped ice sheet, Glowstick had to enter the cave vertically. The cave mouth had caught a pile of snow in its eddy, so it was even taller there than on the rest of the mountainside. He descended on a short line as it unspooled from his spinneret, landed as silently as he always did, and then his spinneret closed and cut the strand, which remained hanging in cold space.

He continued in his characteristic strange quiet for a minute, until he remembered that Boston probably needed some waking up if he and Glowstick were to converse. So instead he adopted an intentionally exaggerated jaunty trot, his hooves clopping against the rock beneath. “I do beg your pardon, Boston,” he stage-yelled as he entered, “but I am in dire need of your assistance.”

It was much darker inside the cave than outside, of course, so that Glowstick had to remove his four-eyepiece snow goggles and leave them hanging around his neck. But there was still enough light for him to see—at least, to see well enough to identify the dark-ish mass in the cave’s center as [i]probably[/i] a bear just stirring from sleep on a rug.

The bear’s eyes opened slowly, blearily. “...yeah, what do you want.”

“Oh, good, you’re awake. I’m looking for a friend of mine, Allen by name, a horse-taur with a white coat and bright orange mane—”

“Pregnant?”

Glowstick was taken aback a bit by the interruption. “...Yes. He passed by this way?”

After a bit of hesitation, the bear, Boston, answered: “No, not exactly.”

“Oh,” Glowstick muttered. Then his dejection turned to puzzlement: “...What do you mean by ‘not exactly’?”

“Well, he [i]came[/i] by this way, but...” The bear rolled over on his side a ways, now showing off his belly—indeed, rubbing it with a free hand. Even given Boston’s stature, and the weight accompanying a bear in winter, his belly was noticeably full, round, with something filling out and stretching it from the inside, perhaps enough to make it hard for Boston to even walk on all fours. “He didn’t exactly leave.”

Glowstick froze up for a moment at this revelation. “...Is he alright?”

“Last I checked. Sound asleep, for now, like I was, until you... barged in...” The bear was hesitant with those last few words, looking down across himself, one hand on his belly. “...Actually,” he finally continued, “he might just tell you—” The bear huffed as, without really thinking, he rolled over onto all fours and stretched, then lowered himself again, but with his rump resting on his heels.

Right then, Glowstick saw Allen’s snout, and then the rest of his head, push out of the bear’s rump. As he emerged, the bear half-involuntarily clenched and bucked as his own shaft started to harden.

Allen blinked away the clouds of sleep from his eyes and looked around a bit from his strange perch. “...hey,” he groggily asked, “why am I flipping over?”

Boston couldn’t be bothered to answer. He was still huffing through the stimulation.

Glowstick couldn’t either. He was still frozen in embarrassment.

“Oh, hey, Glowstick, nice getup!”

As he finished waking up, Allen explained his situation to Glowstick in small conversation while he extracted his shoulders from Boston’s rump (much to the bear’s continued enjoyment). Glowstick tried to follow along carefully. He knew he couldn’t follow along well. He was no stranger to such odd situations as these, but the matter still caught him off guard. Nonetheless, the summary was brief, so, distracted as he was, Glowstick was pretty sure he had gotten the gist.

“Well,” he said once Allen was done, “I’m glad you’re alright. You do look... quite comfortable.” That was an appropriately non-committal way to put it. “That said, since I now know you [i]are[/i] alright...” Glowstick looked back over his shoulder, past his spider’s tail, to the mouth of the cave. “I should best keep moving, down to the the road, see if any others are in need of my assistance.” The arachnequine gave a courteous bow, then turned to leave. “You two have fun!”

Before Glowstick could take two steps, Boston cut in: “Before you go, actually... when do you expect to be all... eggy again?”

“It usually takes about ten weeks before the next clutch is ready. Why?”

“Just curious. That and I might be available.” The bear smiled inscrutably.

“If you’re willing...”

The bear continued his silent smirk.

“...I’ll think about it,” Glowstick finally said. And with that, the arachnequine slung a second line and disappeared up over the cave’s mouth to put his peppermint kit to use.

Boston was first to break the resulting silence. “Well, he’s an odd one.”

“A bit,” Allen answered. “Smart, though. And fills up a belly real good.”

“Speaking of—” The bear clenched around Allen a bit, wriggling his hips, his dick swaying. “I can still feel that belly of yours, and you got me all riled up now that we’re both awake.”

“Hm.”

Allen looked downward, from the bear’s rump to his other fun bits.

He could maybe reach down and play with ursine balls a bit if he reached forward, but...

Allen pushed a foreleg forward into the underside of the bear’s belly. The resulting subtle bulge pressed right into the bear’s sensitive shaft. Boston clenched and huffed when he did so, and Allen could feel his own arousal beginning to press against the overfilled belly of his own.

“Yeah, I think we can make this work.”