Autumn. It crept up on her, as it always did. Red and gold bled into the leaves and now, overnight, the season descended, bringing with it white mists that shrouded a sad, silent landscape. Blazing trees shed their trappings, pouring them over the ground to colour it once more before the advance of Winter. Great damp drifts, swept up by the wind, lay against broken walls, filling yawning doorways and piled up against
Her.
She was the gently curving mountain range that held a dead city against her body. Fractured, lofty spires and mutilated streets lay in her shadow, swaddled in the pale morning haze. Hushed. Empty.
Until a sigh ruffled those leaves, sending them shivering along avenues speckled with dew, stripping the fog away from the deathly streets.
There was sound then: the sound of her body in motion.
Eyes still closed, she commenced her morning ritual. Her fingers dislodging plumes of grit and dust to reach, as they always reached, for the empty space beside her. And, as ever, they sank down through nothingness to pat the absence at her side. No warmth there: only the hard texture of the ground. Cold. Damp. That chill on her fingers reminding her of the very first time, Autumn, like this, when he had not returned to her.
Her hand closed, raking through the earth and leaves, piling it up into a mass of soft loam. Despair sank down on the one who dared to hope that her missing half would lie with her again.
She opened her eyes.
The scene of calculated desolation was familiar. Yet unfamiliar. Her shade fell over the dead city, pooling darkness into her own ancient prints that cratered the landscape. Or were they his? It didn't matter. They were old. The fires long smouldered. Once, they had danced together atop this metropolis, entwined and naked, kissing away the apocalypse, caressing. And now all was dead.
She had known their names once. They had forced her to memorise every place and landmark. Like they mattered. Like their peaks of glass and steel were anything more than mulch.
When she'd grown they became her list. Gleefully reducing proud capitals to so much dust. And he! He had found her. Loved her. Held her hands and kissed her lips, reshaping and renaming the specks that scattered from their feet. It was a game. Armageddon. Love, lust and..
Hunger drove them to it. Shifting from god to mortal to scavenge the ruins. Sometimes they lived a while. Walking amongst those specks. Greeting them, smiling at them. Tasting their wares.. or trading stories. A warm bed was a luxury of the quiet times. Where she'd laugh into those dark eyes of his, and giggle over genocide. Hand in hand, tracing fingers over the same curves that sundered nations, living on stolen money, nuzzling affection while they watched their own atrocities play out as snippets into all those little lives on the news.
News. That was another thing she missed.
A second sigh disturbed leaves that had settled their wild dance upon her breath. Fingers braced and knuckles whitened as building sized muscles eased her into the sky, cutting an awe inspiring figure across the horizon. The quiet city took on a more familiar guise, it's contours aligning with some memory that brought a soft curve to her lips.
Yes. She knew this place. Every road bore the marks of their touch. Now only birds nested here. Crows, startled, scolded her from some wildened park, leaping from thatch to untidy thatch. The wind and they her only companions.
Once there had been people. They filled every room and flooded the streets like water. And when she trod.. they splashed like water too. Staining their feet with murder. She pined for the days when he had gifted them to her. Trussed and frightened, pinned between tongues. Their kisses were death. Love and death. Lips that wrapped each other, wrestling with screaming motes that fought them. Fought! Hah! Mere trifles. She evoked the taste of his lips and the warmth of his body, clutching her like all the world could never part them.
But hunger drove them to shrink. And they took him from her.
Once there had been people, now there were only beasts.
Her figure, outlined against the dawn, brought a fresh tumult as she stepped out. Each footfall ringing thunder over the ground. Suburbs, entangled under their own gardens, vanished beneath her impression. The history of lives ground into dirt. The sensation was familiar, yet brought her no pleasure. How often had they bothered with such meagre play? And, alone, there was nothing for her here.
But! North they said and North she headed. Seeking out some last stronghold she was yet to prise apart in search of her consort. Something she had missed. Something that had escaped her wrath when they stole him. Dared to confine a-
A bus, rusted. The paint flaking away. Yellowed plants staking a claim to this intrusion, sprouting from every crevasse. It was mangled, twisted. That was not unusual. She had seen hundreds more in such a state. No. What drew her was it's position. Wedged straight into the facade of some towering structure, stabbed through a festering wound of glass and concrete. None left who'd bother to heal it.
He had brought it to her. She remembered.
Her mind showed her a different city to this hollow echo of civilisation. A scene where two colossi stood hand in hand before their latest conquest. A hive of swarming humanity. And the sound! Oh, the sound. They cried and screamed and shouted in unison. Their fear touched her. And that bus, skittering away from them like a terrified rodent scurrying for its burrow.
Didn't we tell you not to move?
Those words. Growled in a voice of cool, deep anger. That's what it had been. Disobedience. Panic overruling sense. And his monstrous fingers had plucked the little vehicle from the earth, tipping those living motes from one end to the other of it.
Her fingers stroked the curve of one breast, absently. They had spent time there. She knew the cool metal. The soft vibration of the engine. The screams. Most of all his body against hers, wrapping that toy in an embrace filled with warmth. Had they kissed? Or merely pinned it between them, covering all those windows with endless skin? It had faded, yet she still saw as clear as truth the moment he drove that vehicle into the building, plumes of dust surging out from it. And those terrified faces within.
She touched the angular metal, chipping away at the rusted shell. He'd promised to return for the passengers, hadn't he? Yet they never had. What had happened to them? Had they hung there until they starved, watching them both make play of their lives? Or crawled into the ravaged building? Made their way out bravely, only to perish some other time. A cruel fate indeed.
Her feet sank into her ancient prints, reopening old wounds in the dead city. Renewing ancient cracks in the tarmac. Her fingertips traced where they had traced before, bringing a silent rampage back to where it had once visited. His prints ran alongside hers, churning through a hundred gutted skyscrapers. His body a ghostly figure in her thoughts. They had ran here, cleaving through a landscape like the apocalypse itself. A plume of dust and choking debris rising in their wake. How the earth had trembled! How the crawling masses had shrieked their coming!
He'd cheated. An entire swathe of city lay in utter ruin. Flattened completely. The bricks and steel pressed so deep into the earth even the foundations had shattered. And, in the time since, the winds and rain had carried fresh earth into the hollow she made. A immense garden of lush green grasses and late blooming wildflowers, patchy where great thrusting spars of concrete lay as man-made islands. Such a quiet, peaceful scene: a strange monument to the violent clamour she made falling here. Where he had shoved her, and her body had blasted offices and homes, bearing them down beneath her weight.
Any other time he might have dived upon her there. Doubling the ruin while greedy fingers dragged screaming hoards to perish between them.
This time, the game was more important. That mischievous grin sweeping back to her as he claimed his prize. The curved skyscraper that had been the butt of so many jokes. Phallic. She'd claimed it, but he'd stolen it. And here.. her fingertips touched the gaping hole in it. Punched through the floors, exposing glittering wires and offices. She had growled in mock fury while he smeared his fluids over the glass, letting the screams engorge him. That crumbling grind as he pressed through structure and mankind alike, mocking their pride in their creation. The glass shattering and rippling when he pressed through it.
Her smile turned downward.
Mud. By the riverside there was brown mud. Mud dimpled and spotted with oval pools. She knew what it was. The peaceful landscape marked with the vile feet of those beasts. North they had told her. North they were. Where there were stories of a giant figure bound. Stolen. Lost. Soon to be found.
Her growl thundered through a landscape that hadn't heard voice in ages. Let alone hers. A sound that any fresh, sparkling, distant spires would soon hear filling their streets.
And a million souls, more or less, to add to the payment of daring to steal from her.
Her massive figure moved. Not sadly, but with purpose, striding through city and suburb, her toes eclipsing the prints of multitudes upon the ground. But diminishing in stature. From awe inspiring presence to monster, to silent, lonely figure. Leaving the city to its quiet decomposition once more.
A nervous convoy, bringing in supplies traded from some other hidden place, might have found they had an extra member among their rank, had they bothered to check.. but they were edgy and hasty. Besides, who ever looked for a giantess amongst them?
Night fell and city streets rose around her. Unlike those she remembered. They were dark for one, and silent. The convoy lit only by moonlight. It felt oppressive, every arch and window hiding imaginary enemies. Strange, distasteful even, to bumble through the pale blue light amongst her bitter foe. With buildings, for once, towering above.
Their voices washed over her. A mumble of inane sound. Ignored. They might as well have spoken another language.
But then.. here were the words that condemned them. All of them. Hadn't they ever been taught that loose lips sink ships? But that was from another world or another time. Here a simple joke about a buried giant was enough. Quickly hushed.
Not quick enough.
Of course they had taken him underground. Keeping the surface scoured free of life and her attention. She cursed her idiocy. She might have walked above a hundred times, and he was buried here, all along, beneath her feet.
Buried.
She shivered. An unpleasant thought.
She took her chance, slipping away into the shadows. Becoming a patch of venomous black, creeping through the tunnels like a lowly beast. Shrinking from sight when guards passed and bearing the indignity of their thunderous tread beside her. Listening, following. Down. Always down. Beyond the freshness of air. A bitter place to trap a god. But
The door was unmistakable. Oversized. Over-armoured. A guard still, after all this time?
His skull left a red flower on the tarnished metal. His keys pilfered by shaking fingers slippery with his thoughts.
The room within was pitch. A shroud of darkness invaded by the rectangle of light.
Something moved. A word breathed into the darkness as tears burst forth. A thousand years of bitterness transformed to euphoria. The warmth of one body in her arms healing what a million million lives could not.
Later there would be retribution.
Fire. Fury. Vengeance.
But this, would be her last Autumn alone.
Giantess World
