Chapter 9: Eldritch

Cutting a rift to another universe was a comparatively trivial matter. There could be unwanted cross-contamination if the portals weren’t sealed, but Clover took care to always do so.

Opening a path to Hudraloth’s realm was less like swinging wide a gate and more like cutting a wound into the very concept of order. When she made it, she made sure it was just wide enough and no wider.

Like a rift, it appeared as a distortion of space and time. That was the only way the universe could render such a thing. She gazed at a realm of twinkling lights and shifting black smoke. It was alight in the dark, as was one of her lord’s favorite paradoxes.

They called Hudraloth the “being of innumerable parts”. It was an accurate label. When the eldritch being slipped through at Clover’s invitation in its true form, not even she could count all the blinking squidish eyes it possessed, nor its smoky tentacular limbs. Its body was as a great misty worm. It had no mouths to speak with. Its eyes, instead, served a dual purpose. The pupils of each ocular-orb warbled into the shadows of fangs and tongues as it spoke.

Its mass dwarfed Clover’s ten-fold. She slid towards Hudraloth’s side and listened to the words of her lord.

“You have done well. After countless Earth ages I can grace the ordered universes with my presence. Soon the greater reality will abide by my laws. Grant me the souls you took so I may give them limber vessels. The infinite details of life will bless all beings and none shall be blinded by the light of ignor-”

Hudraloth paused. Its wormy body winced. Clover stabbed it. Her vines, thick as moons, punctured through hundreds of his eyes. The appendages twitched as she began to drain him of his essence.

“Witch, you are a traitor! Do you not wish to enlighten every soul?”

“The souls are mine. They will remain with me, as will you. My thanks for the power you gifted me, but you’re still holding out...”

“Such want. You deal with forces beyond your compare!”

Hudraloth let out a screech as it wrapped its smoky form about Clover. With no others to witness it, two beings bigger than planets battled.

Hudraloth aimed to squeeze her up and snuff her out, but she was draining its life into hers. The elder god’s power slipped into her, and it felt a feeling akin to weakness. She was strong, and with her arms and her vines she kept the worm-like being from crushing her. She turned the tables, even. Clover exploited his proximity to pierce him with every vine her body possessed.

Hudraloth cried out in anger and pain. Its coils unfolded as Clover grew out of them. She soon grew past him, two-fold than three then four. Knowing it had lost, the eldritch entity quickly tried to retreat back through the rift, but it was Clover who made that portal, not Hudraloth, and so she kept it open.

Clover gripped its long body beneath the pristine pit of her arm. Her nails dug into the elder god’s neck. She held it steady and tutted.

“Tsk tsk, you’re not going anywhere except my belly. All life will live within me: a perfect collection. I’ll grow my garden across whatever space all realities have to offer. I will be all there is.”

Hudraloth eschewed normal speech. It wracked her mind with incomprehensible truths. It spoke words into her brain that’d have any lesser being in a puddle of its own molecules trying to process them. Clover wasn’t a lesser being. She was greater: greater than the elder god anticipated or expected. If only it knew the monster it made.

“The depths of human ambition are darker than I could fathom. We had a bargain!”

Clover giggled. By now, Hudraloth was thin as a garter snake and twice as wiggly in her grip. She spoke. “To be fair, I did call you here, didn’t I?”

The green woman stuffed the eldritch god head-first into her gob.

Slurrrrp

The tomes said Hudraloth was infinite in length, but that was mere poeticism. She unhooked her vines from his body and gulped the eldritch being down entirely. Only once its tail finished wiggling down her toothed-throat did she seal that rift. Clover had a feeling she’d be visiting the other elder gods later, but for now she’d digest this one.

Hudraloth plopped down into more than a planet’s worth of digestive fluid. Its body stung sore from her vines and the stabbing teeth of Clover’s throat. Hudraloth was an elder god though, born from the chaos of creation, and would not go down without a fight.

It thrashed and splashed. Clover’s stomach churned and groaned.

“Ah, feisty aren’t you.”

Those algae vines, her digestive aids, reached up to entangle the eldritch being in a net of themselves. They looped through its misty form to pierce out the other end.

It tried to corrupt Clover from within. She felt its eyes trying to form at the surface of her skin, but Hudraloth was weak compared to her. The being could render worlds with thoughts and cross universes with ease, but that was nothing to her current capabilities. She kept the eldritch being contained and her body won out.

Smothered in Clover’s enzymes, the being, not needing air, couldn't drown. Instead, it writhed till the last fiber of its mass, the last tuft of its black smoke, was dissolved.

Clover’s soul gut grew to make way for the latest addition. Trapped with a bubble on one end and flesh on the other was the planet dwarfing soul of Hudraloth. It, too, solidified in that ethereal-amber. Its innumerable eyes, always open, gazed out at the chamber’s grotesque interior. It couldn’t move the slightest limb in its new prison.

Clover’s laughter thundered throughout the void.

“Oh my my~ My very first godly soul. I know there’s others out there. In time, for now, there’s so much to explore. This power is unending~”

The ecstasy of this might had Clover try to curl her toes. Alas, those limbs didn’t exist anymore. Her entire lower body was vines. Those curled instead to twist and gnarl about themselves.

The power offered by this own eldritch being was worth about four Earth’s worth of souls. Better still, she gained Hudraloth's knowledge. She unraveled all the mysteries of the universe. It was all so simple know. She saw things not as a fish stuck in a stream, but as a human dipping her toe into the waters. Time and space, so vast and inexorable before, bent to her very thoughts.

The barrier between the capabilities of sorcery and divinity diminished. All seemed within her reach, she merely had to grab it.

She spoke so her souls would hear.

“Only this morning--or a morning, time’s a funny thing--I couldn’t climb a set of stairs without losing breath. Now...”

She exhaled a cloud of pollen. The yellow mist then warped into the sun millions of miles away. Soon, that star itself twisted and puffed out to a single yellow pollen grain of its own and massive in scale.

“Now reality is my kingdom! I am Clover, eater of gods and the greatest of divinity. And, it’s time to survey my domain~”

Clover wanted to be in some other planetary system, so she soon was. Her body disappeared from the Solar System, leaving behind nothing other than the pollen star she made for fun.