Fiona yawned and stretched her arms as she rolled onto her back, her legs stretching out dozens of miles into the Pacific Ocean where her toes softly played with the cool sand. She took care to move her hands around the west coast metropolises that remained standing near her, though they had long since been evacuated. Sometimes she looked in on the cities, imagined herself walking through the streets. It gave her a kind of nostalgia to think about that, but she knew she had a higher purpose now.
When she first ascended (the term her goddess used) she was afraid people would never understand. In a manner of minutes, she grew so large that her whole body could only be seen from space. She took every precaution, even paying someone to take her far out in the ocean so her growth wouldn’t disturb the populations on land. Naturally, the navy was after her as soon as they saw her, but without a single hint of anger in her voice, she let them exhaust their weapons ineffectively on her ankles and thighs. She calmly stated the facts: the planet was dying, and it needed a savior. By chance, or by divine intervention, that savior was her. Eventually, the world caught up and stopped firing.
She told the world governments their tasks, a temporary evacuation would be necessary while she gathered her strength. Though immense, she only needed the coastal regions to be evacuated, preferring to wait in the ocean and only sleeping on land. She told them of a benevolent universal force that would restore the planet’s health.
It had been a year since the initial growth, and world governments kept a watchful eye on Fiona as they waited for her next move. She would tell them time after time that her goddess would soon initiate the next steps, but things took time on a cosmological scale. As suddenly as the first growth spurt had been, it was nothing compared to what was to come.
As Fiona soaked in the sunlight, a low rumbling began in her stomach. She quickly stood up and felt herself growing upwards, faster and faster. The clouds played at her toes, before long she couldn’t tell the difference between the clouds and the ground. The blue sky turned black around her as space filled her lungs. To her surprise, she could breathe it in just fine, it left a cool impression in her throat. Her body left the Earth, floating higher and higher as her gravity grew stronger. Her fingers let go one by one, her last hold on the Earth gone. When she was a safe distance away from the planet, she let the growth accelerate.
When she was done, Earth was about the size a person had been to her before. It could slip under her fingernail, never to be seen again as her soft flesh shielded it. If she turned carelessly, she could knock it out of its new orbit around her, destroying countless lives in the process. It was for these reasons that she floated as still as possible, the distant small planets of the solar system slowly making their way into new orbits around the new center of the solar system.
Her new position felt wonderful to Fiona. Though the rays of the sun were no longer meaningfully affecting her, a new warmth quickly rose inside her, an aftereffect of her goddess rewarding her worship with new size. Jupiter danced at her toes, microscopic Mars floated in front of her left eye, Venus narrowly avoiding collision with strands of hair exerting powerful gravitational pull. The Earth floated around her stomach, in front of a belly button that could fit one million Earths inside it. Time seemed to stop for Fiona as she watched with awe. At some point, a message from her goddess rang in her head.
All over the universe, the goddess was finding worthy worshippers and growing them in exchange for one shared task. The natural environment of space was harsh; cold and uncaring, it made no difference to the workings of the universe if a gamma ray blew open a star system which was home to trillions, or if a black hole ripped apart loved ones across space. The goddess was privy to all these happenings, and it made her incredibly sad to see the cruel acts of nature. She told Fiona that there were billions like her, chosen from their native worlds to become protectors. The goddess manifested herself in different ways according to the infinite cultures across space, but she was always able to find targets with an infinite capacity to care. While Fiona received her message, she felt another strong rumbling in her stomach.
When she opened her eyes, Fiona saw a beautiful stream of stars all lined up in front of her in a spiral. All around her were stars, potentially home to life. They circled around her, the spiral arms of the galaxy all rotating as one around a new center of gravity. When she looked up from her precious galaxy, a new sight warmed her heart. Sprawling all across the nearest galaxy was a woman of similar size. While she was humanoid, this new woman wasn’t human. Fiona’s blue eyes gazed across the light years to meet her new companions’, but soon it was apparent there was so much more to see. In every direction, across all of space, millions of women of various species cradled around their home galaxies.
Fiona turned her attention back to her own body. Entire star systems floated in and out of her pores. She couldn’t see the Earth, but she felt the gratitude of its inhabitants. The blue sphere was located somewhat close to her ankle, filled with stunned astronomers making new observations about their place in the universe. Their telescopes saw flesh wherever they pointed, whether Fiona’s or another’s. Her body heat washed over the whole planet and gave rise to temperate conditions everywhere. It made no scientific sense, their planet should be boiling, and yet the people of Earth had never felt better.
The goddess had given the people of countless worlds a newfound protection. The galactic women would not age or wither, they required no sustenance of their own while providing enough materials for every living being in the universe to sustain themselves. Fiona felt the warmth of a million stars brush her cheek and smiled as she closed her eyes and drifted off into a peaceful sleep that would last millenia.