Chapter 12: Garden

Clover’s divine form was surrounded by these portals of hers. Each led to a universe, and each was just big enough for her to slide her vines into. The twisting, gnarling appendages got to work soon as they crested into their target cosmos. They grew forward and to the side. They branched out and sprouted all sorts of flowers that spread deadly pollen or morphed into fanged maws dripping with corrosive nectar.

Their speed of growth was unmatched. They traveled by growing, and did so at speeds exceeding light billions of times over. In the span of fractions of seconds her growths consumed entire universes. Galaxies, planets and even other large though lesser beings one might call ‘gods’. Many such beings were somewhat like her: humanoid and gigantic. Some even had wings. She relished those meals the best. Those treats were planet or star sized entities who also sought everything. Some even just wanted to watch over their domains, content with their lots.

They were slower than her with their apotheoses, that or less ruthless. Fools, she thought of them. Now they were souls for her: sources of power sequestered in her divine form for all time. Many at least had the souls from their prized planets and civilizations imprisoned nearby. They could watch their flocks, also frozen in horror, within those ethereal-amber cages deep in Clover’s body.

Soon as the red-headed divine finished a rift, she closed it up than opened another. She made more and more vines, sprouting them off almost every inch of her gigaparsecs of green flesh.

“No use, they are infinite, I need a better method.”, she mused.

She thought back to what Hudraloth told her back when she was a frail and pale speckling on her antiquated Earth. Universes were ‘infinite in number’ yet ‘none insurmountable.’

Clover had a moment of grand insight. There may be infinite universes, but one couldn’t have ‘half’ a universe, nor a quarter of one nor a square-root of a universe. They were infinite but countable. She just needed a way to bundle them up so as to swallow them in one big metaphysical gulp.

“But I cannot clump up all reality from within it. I must get beyond it, to look upon it as the frail little thing it is.” She fluttered her wings and kicked her feet in her empty universe, thinking. She looked around, not a single star was left here: she had consumed them all. She was the only source of light. Then it hit her.

“A starless void, how nostalgic of my studies. Ah of course, I’ll journey to the unreality of chaos. There, I can make the infinite universes my meal.”

Like when she summoned Hudraloth universe, Clover reached out the veil which separated the ordered cosmoses from the homes of the elder gods. This time, she tore a wound as wide as she could. She tore it so much that all the individual realms of the elder gods faded away and merged into one great chaotic plane.

The normal rules of physics didn’t apply to the eldritch plane. Reality itself held little sway here. It was something else, an ‘unreality’. Clover could hover a few feet and appear light years away due to the instability of how this space worked. It wasn’t an empty void like normal space, but a realm of immense scale and ineffable colors.

The beings in here were plentiful and large. Most dwarfed planets, many dwarfed stars. When Clover arrived to the eldritch plane she took her place as a megalithic invader. This unreality tried to reject her presence and contort her into naught. Failing that, it tried to make her an elder god in her own right.

Clover bent to no will but her own, however. In fact, it was this primordial chaos that was corrupted by her. Every warble of the realm against her vast being had it recoiling and erupting with vines and blossoming flowers.

All the elder gods scattered before her. They were worms at best, mere mites even or lesser still. Some were new to her, but still she recognized many from her dark studies: Nabothoke the Lord of Beasts with its ten thousand tails; Rhudaegug Singer of Sins, crooning constantly in unworldly tones; and Urhollli of Gnashing Teeth who clamored its millions of teeth together across the bulbous blob of its body. She even sensed Holzokrar the World Render with its myriad tentacles and claws. Some World Render it was: it couldn’t even scratch her toe now, though it certainly tried.

She was beyond them--beyond all! She would prove it and become mistress of all order and chaos. Mistress of everything.

They and millions of other elder gods scattered. Only the less-sane of the beings sought to attack her, and those were the first she ate.

“You cannot run from me! I am everywhere! I am everything! My presence eclipses your comprehension a hundred fold. How’s it feel to be the specks for once?”

She snapped her fingers and bent space to her will. All directions now led to her. No matter how the elder gods wiggled or warp through this realm, they ended up closer to Clover’s clutches.

“Such magnificent, delicious looking horrors you are.”

Clover’s entire face shifted. Slits formed from the top and then diagonally from the bottom left and right corners of her face. Her entire head opened up to expose a floral, triangular maw. This construct of hers was lined with teeth and red flesh which dripped corrosive nectar. Vines writhed on the sides and a great big stamen-like tongue slithered out stems to pierce her prizes.

Once stabbed with the vines, only the strongest of the elder gods avoided a complete draining before she ingested them. This horrific head maw of hers sucked them all down. In her gut, they melted to nothing: souls absorbed as any other. Her head and face reformed shortly after back to her beautiful visage.

“Yum.” She said. “And now, for this plane itself. You can’t hide your awareness from me. Raw chaos tends towards some semblance of order. Enough monkeys typing randomly with enough time can write Shakespeare. You’re aware enough to know I’m a threat. I felt you trying to twist me to your will. Your borrowed time is up!”

The chaos around her shrunk as she willed it too. It collapsed down and into Clover’s body. Through it her skin, it was absorbed like any other meal. The realm’s own essence--its soul--was solidified in her being.

Her soul gut now held an entire unreality. She stuffed that special morsel deep within her, as any mortal soul looking upon its immense chaotic spirit would go mad. She didn’t want that. The souls entertained her this whole time with their suffering: humans, aliens, gods. Their potential madness would threaten that. She could fix it should it happen, but that seemed a chore.

Clover was now in nothing. There was no space around here. Unreality was no more. Still, she existed nonetheless. Nothing mattered except what she deemed to. Rules and concepts melted when they tried to affect even a single micrometer of her skin.

A thought and she surrounded herself in a white void. A workshop of her own. Here she’d consume the last of reality. She willed the infinite universes to appear before her as a grape-sized clump of void-dark and starlight.

She pinched it up and held it to her eyes. A bit of pressure from her fingers and its shape gave a bit.

“Such power, such ecstasy. Mine for eternity~”

She let all those souls know their fate. They saw it all from every angle when she set them on her moist tongue. Strands of saliva dripped over the cosmoses. Taste buds ripped super clusters to shreds as they rubbed themselves into the morsels. Galaxies were less than crumbs to Clover now and she didn’t spill a single one.

She felt it when they dissolved: the death of reality itself. There was no reality, nor unreality, only the redheaded green-skinned god and the void she made for herself.

But, Clover’s mind was vast, and she knew there were souls missing. Beings who died before she appeared, or would have come into being had she not interfered. She didn’t like that idea, that some souls would escape her. A god was mistress of everything, even the past and the potential. So, she worked time as putty to produce all those permutations of universes. She feasted on the past and all potential futures.

It was then that she held true dominion over all, and it was time to do as a god does and create.

The white void disappeared in a flash. There was now a garden, stretching into eternity.

The grass felt velvet soft against against her bare green feet. Though scale mattered only to her, a single blade of that grass would’ve dwarfed a universe a million fold if such constructs still existed.

There were shrubs, beautiful flowers and trees that came up just below the tip of Clover’s wings. She walked up to one such tree and plucked one of its many strange and alluring fruits.

She created that fruit herself: all these treats and pleasures were hers. She shared one one-millionth of its sublime flavor with the souls stuck within her form. They would have wept if they could. It was so delicious, so forever out of their reach. She drank up their envy like the finest nectar.

Laughing, she erased their memory of even that fraction of its flavor. They remembered only that they had tasted a fragment of something wonderful and divine, and that she stole even that from them.

“No no~” she said into the very core of those innumerable souls. “This garden is mine. All the pleasures are mine. You should be content to suffer for my joy.”

Clover laid on the grass which meant, in a sense, she laid upon herself. The suffering of the old and the splendor of her new pleased her so.

The light she made warmed her body in her paradise. She’d have fun here. Eternal pleasures evermore.

Fin