Chapter 5: Rift

Every petite step of hers was a disaster. Her feet crushed entire blocks. Vines thick as tree trunks coiled around her green ankles to lash out at any stragglers who survived ruinous foot falls. The army was called in again, but they refused to attack her. The great green witch-monster that loomed above their skyline was unstoppable, and they knew it.

Her corpse-born pet could claim dozens at a time, and her dandelion zombies were spreading through the cities upper-class districts mobs at a time. Still, such devastation still failed in comparison to a single one of her steps.

Yet, when it came to leveling London, even her footfalls weren’t fast enough for her tastes. Clover was creative and inventive. She would please Hudraloth and make use of their gifts.

As she strutted across the city, sowing destruction and reaping souls, she shimmied her hips from side to side. Though licentious at a glance, her goal was otherwise. From beneath the rim of her flower-dress-skirt came a rain of pollen. Like before, it spread her zombie infestation to anything it trailed upon. Yet, several flakes of the dusty substance were infused with her sap.

If that sap-‘blessed’ powder reached a person, they’d mutate into some horrid minion--forfeiting their soul in the process. If it instead landed on some inorganic matter, it would take root as a fleshy toothed plant. These would lash tendrillic vines at passersby, all the while spreading their flesh moss along whatever buildings and roads dwelled nearby. Soon, these plants would blossom into those dandelion tufts much as the zombies did.

Being underneath Clover as her pollen fell proved a frightful affair. Though any ‘lucky’ eyes would get a glimpse at her uncovered thighs and more within, they’d also see how the inside of her ‘dress’ was now lined with stamen: the plant stems from which pollen falls. In-between those filaments lurked more vines. They gazed up at this horrifying plant-like flesh as the yellow powder fell from above to blot out the sky and condemn their bodies to unfortunate ends.

With a wave of her hand, the green giant dispersed some gray clouds overhead to hog more of the afternoon sun for herself. Its warmth enriched her. Once again, it occurred to her how massive she was, and she laughed. What else could she do at this situation? She was overjoyed and overpowered.

There was a clock tower that only in the past decade finished construction. ‘Big Ben’ they called it. She saw it, and wanted to feel it break.

Clover waltzed over towards it, spreading her pollen all the while with shakes of her hips. Along the way, she stepped on that pet she made from those soldier bodies. Unfortunate, but it came up to less than her ankle now. It cried out as her heel flattened it. The impact of her foot had it to burst into a cloud of more pollen and pappi.

The redheaded titaness kicked up her other foot on its heel and curled her toes around the grand clocktower’s spire. A flex of the digits and she snapped the thin spire like a twig.

“Ah~” she said. Her body shivered at this raw sense of power. She couldn’t resist for long and slammed her foot down just as the clock struck 1PM with it’s loud bonging chime.

The top was iron, she could tell from how it felt against her skin. Once her foot burst through the roof like paper, the structure felt more dusty as it collapsed. Fine brickwork of course. She twisted her foot in the mess and relished her size, her power: everything.

The city was almost done. She used her magic for the rest. A twirl of her finger and some profane words had the clouds turn dark black and shout bolts of lightning below. The witch had done elemental spells before, but only trivial things like lighting a candle. This was the power of the gods now.

She blew a kiss in the direction of a mob, hundreds of feet away, and enchanted half of them to maul and rip at the other half. The sky flooded with crackling lighting and was aglow with thousands of light blue souls all wafting towards her. She took them in wherever they went: her arms, ankles, through the plant-like flesh of her dress and many she even inhaled past pursed lips.

She had done it. London had fallen. Only a few stragglers remained, and her minions were rapidly sussing them out. She found herself at a loss though. Her flesh rippled with souls. Hundreds of thousands of spirits lined her body. More haunted the myriad blister-like cages of her soul-gut than any cemetery or battlefield in the world.

Yet, despite all that, despite these sorceries of legend being as easy as a wave of her hand, she still didn’t feel any closer to freeing Hudraloth. Sequestered within their own claustrophobic realm, they waited for her to rip open the veil. Yet she couldn't do it. Not yet at least.

Clover didn’t know how to proceed. So, she decided to do what she did back when she was mundane: contact her lord. Though easier than the ceremony she performed at Oliver’s wedding, it still required a blood sacrifice. Back when human-sized and human-fleshed with her human limitations it was a most tedious chore to find some poor soul, set up the circle, cover up their demise and so forth.

Now? It would be easy. The only difficulty was finding someone still living. Perhaps one of her zombies would work, perhaps not, but why take them from their work to find out?

The floating white pappi of her zombie dandelion stalks could sense the blood of the living, and so could she. To her senses it was a flood though, hard to sift down to a precise location. So, she put her plant-like flesh to use and sprouted some of those tufty white stalks on her palm. A big exhale and off they went, floating through the breeze in a myriad of directions. She followed one in particular, which took her to a shivering man hiding behind a half-collapsed pillar of a courthouse.

As she stepped close to him, the quakes of her gigantic steps collapsed the pillar all the way. He was crushed by the falling masonry. His soul flew into her and she laughed at her gaff.

“Ha, what was I thinking. My fellow citizens are scarcely a tenth of an inch to me. How brazen to think I’d be able to just pick one of you up. No, I need precision~”

She followed another tuft far out. Trusting it and her senses, she found a vast swath of people. Once in sight, she plucked the floating pappus from the sky, crushed it, then lashed out a thick vine that had coiled around her arm till now.

The plant-like tentacle was far thicker than a tree: it was like a tunnel, only no open face. Its tip was pointed; its color red with green tints. The mob tried to flee but she was faster. The vine launched at the front of the fleeing mass and smothered the quickest and most brazen of the humans there.

The thick appendage circled around them once and penned them in beneath the shadow of its coils like some great building-sized serpent. And, like a snake, it arced its head up and back into the sky. The tip morphed to a great pink flower with long orchid-like petals and a plethora of stamen far taller and wider than any human.

The flower pounced on them, shadowing them in its petals as they closed up. No pollen coated the stamen stalks within; instead, a sticky nectar did. Sweet smelling and stickier than any glue, the substance held them tight and snug as they were brought before the leviathanian woman’s gaze.

The petals unfurled and her eye peered down on the hundreds of them. They fidgeted, stuck like flies in a pitcher plant. The comparison was not lost on her.

Chuckling, “Oh what a harvest this is. Enough to nourish this vine whole. What luck too, as I only need the one of you to contact my lord~”

From that arm came thinner vines. They wrapped around the ‘lucky’ sacrifice: a thin woman about Clover’s age. She was delicately held firm thousands of feet above open air.

The others were still stuck in that sticky nectar. Clover licked her lips and their flower prison shifted. The petals shivered and molded together. Their pink became red and fleshy on the interior side. The once plant-like blossom now shifted and slickened as any mouth would.

The stamen that all the people were stuck to twisted and morphed to a baneful and visceral tune. The filaments became as tongues: not thick as the one in Clover’s mouth, but thin like tendrils. Nevertheless, they were pink and coated with all the tasting papillae of the more traditional muscles.

The sticky safety of that gluing nectar was gone, and just in time for the base of the ‘flower’ to open towards a dark, hollow, writhing tunnel beneath them. The vine had was ready to swallow them. Oh how they wished they were still stuck. Now, they were slick with the drool of these tongues, and they slid down the bumpy pink flesh, tasted and savored, till they fell into the dim abyss below

The vine worked much as her actual throat. Clover was adaptive and dynamic, and the vessel wasn’t lined with sap as the others. Like her own throat, it was lined with teeth. Here the things were useless though: these morsels were far too small to be mashed by the dentition. All the better as they’d live to reach her stomach.

Pulsing, squeezing, the vine brought them into her body through her arm. There, in amber glow of her gut, they fell into a lake’s worth of digestive fluids. The red-green walls undulated, but her stomach had changed since before. The fluid they fell into wasn’t thin now, but thick like syrup. The golden yellow goo drew them deeper with every movement till they were inundated, drowning, then melting.

One man was smart enough to think he’d survive if he flopped on his back in the stuff. That brought him more time, but Clover’s body was eager for any bit of protein. Algae tentacles rose from the depths to drag him under. They squeezed his bones to dust as a forced penance for his attempted trickery.

Clover sighed. Her sweet humid breath enveloped the sole survivor: the sacrifice needed to talk to her lord.

“Ah yes, let’s begin!” she said, whispering so as to not speak the poor woman’s head off.

Clover produced a vine so comparatively thin she felt it more than saw it. It pricked at the woman’s restrained arm and sucked up a liter of blood. The giant plant-witch worked the appendage to paint a rune circle on the surface of her palm. It was another very precise affair. That done, she set the sacrifice at the center. She spoke some magic words. More harsh syllables rung out: dark and wet to the ear.

As the speech finished, she clenched the constricting vines to rip the sacrifice apart. A red sphere roughly the size of a building hovered in front of Clover’s chest. Its crimson light pierced corners to illuminate the shadows therein.

“Why have you called upon me?” it spoke. Its voice as deep and strange as back in Oliver’s dance hall.

“Hudraloth, this city is nearly plucked clean. I feel thousands upon thousands squirm inside me. Their power indulges me, but its not enough.” she spoke.

“There is not enough here. You must look elsewhere.”

“Where else can I look my lord?” she asked.

“Piercing the veil of reality itself is a high task. You need more souls than this planet can presently provide.”

“Presently provide... do you mean I should go to the future?”

“Yes and no. This Earth is at a dead end for your current strength, but there are more. There are other universes.”

“More? Other Earths? Other Universes? How many?”

“They are innumerable, infinite, but not even one is insurmountable. Your vision is still so limited. You cannot yet fully see the fragility of the connections. Perhaps you can feel them? Reach out with your power and pick any one. Time is not synchronized among them.”

Now go, and continue on your path with haste. You shall bear the fruit of my arrival, after all.”

The green giant watched as the light sphere faded away. Limited vision? Time not synchronized? Connections...

She did as Hudraloth said and reached out with her mind. Eyes closed, she focused not on the fabric of reality, but the connections between cosmoses.

She felt them. They were as little bubbles nearby in an astral ether. As she stared with her mind’s eye and gleamed a bit of information on them. Snapshots. She found one: a snapshot of London but with big square buildings with many windows and frames of steel instead of iron. It seemed far enough into the future, and searching for more as she was now was tiring.

Clover reached out towards this bubble and, like the bubble it was, poked at it. She dug in and ripped open a path.

Opening her eyes, she gazed at a great rift in front of her. It was wide and tall enough for her massive form. She stepped through it.