The Golden Goose Who Gave Too Much

A king who died and was reborn as a golden goose, remembering his past life fondly, flew each year to visit the wife and daughters he had left behind, now living in poverty. Each visit, out of love rather than obligation, he plucked out and gave them a single golden feather to sell, enough to keep them comfortable until his next visit.

For years this worked well, and the family lived modestly but happily on his gifts. But eventually the mother, growing impatient and greedy, decided that if one feather a year brought comfort, plucking every feather at once would surely bring them wealth beyond measure.

The next time the golden goose visited, she seized him and plucked every single feather from his body in one cruel motion. But the magic that made his feathers gold worked only when plucked naturally, one at a time, out of genuine love — torn out all at once in greed, they grew back only as plain, ordinary white feathers, worthless. The goose, injured and heartbroken by his own family's betrayal, flew away and never returned, and the family who might have had a lifetime of golden feathers were left with nothing at all.