Dominic began tilling his field with a hoe, digging up a pile of loose dirt.  The day was just beginning, and he had a long day of toil to look forward to.  It wasn’t easy by any means, and every day he went to bed with sore muscles and crusted with sweat, but it was necessary work.  Without his efforts there may not be enough food to support his village, and he might have to watch someone starve to death.  He asked for no recognition, nor did the other farmers from his village.  Happy faces and fed bellies were all the thanks they needed.

A cacophony roared from the sky, drawing his attention.  He looked up to see the sky tear open, an enormous gold border spreading in the clear blue sky.  When it stopped, there was the enormous face of a woman in the gap left by the rift.  Her skin was pallid, almost corpse-like, and her silver irises were larger than the sun she had replaced.   A maroon scar ran along the veins below her right eye to her chin, and straight black hair framed the tremendous face.  She smiled, but Dominic got the sense that it wasn’t purely out of joy.

A pale hand with long, spindly fingers joined her visage through the tear, fully outstretched.  It descended toward Dominic, and to his surprise it passed through the sky itself, sending ripples throughout the rift.  It came closer, growing larger, until the tremendous hand blotted out the sky.  The only thing he could see was the pale hand coming toward him.  Not just him, but the whole village where he lived – it was large enough that it encompassed hundreds of feet from one side to the next.  Her hand kept coming until he could see the individual whorls on her palm as trenches, and he tried to run away from the gigantic hand.

He made a run for it too late.  The edge of her palm caught him, pressing him down into the field he had been toiling in.  His body compressed beneath the extreme pressure and strength of the titanic hand, splaying him on the ground.  In an instant he burst beneath the tremendous weight as though he were nothing against it.  Slowly the mammoth hand rotated back and forth, grinding itself into the fertile soil and pulverizing the village under it.  Once everything was demolished it withdrew, leaving behind a titanic handprint in the earth.

Agatha pulled her hand back through the scrying pool, immensely satisfied that it had worked.  She loved the feeling of such tiny, insignificant things being obliterated by her magnificence.  Her power, magical as well as physical in comparison to those puny dust mites, was such that nothing could stand against her might.  Carefully she inspected her hand and spotted tiny scraps of debris amid the stark white skin and delighted in the destruction she had caused.  It was amazing what she could do with just one hand.

“Such power…” she whispered, in awe of what she had done.  “And fascinating results, too.”  With all the modifications she had made, she hadn’t expected it to be so efficient.  Every tiny fragment had come back with her, each miniscule drop of blood marked her hand.  It had perfectly preserved everything she touched, and she could see her handprint on the other side of the portal.  With the might she wielded now, she would be unstoppable.

Agatha brushed her hand against her stomach, wiping off the few scraps that were stuck to it.  They bounced off her long legs and landed soundlessly on the wooden floor where they blended in with the thin layer of dust.  There were probably a few fragments or smashed bodies stuck in the grooves of her skin, but short of burning a cantrip there wasn’t much she could do about that.  It only reinforced how powerful she felt: entire people could be lost on her and she would never know.

The scrying pool was, in all honesty, a fairly mundane magical object.  Tens of thousands of them existed in the world, and many of those had even been modified to be two-way – they were popular among thieves and assassins, and Agatha herself had used it for that purpose a few times.  However, with a few extra enchantments and some trial and error, she had turned an innocent divination device into an unstoppable weapon.  Whenever something went in from her end, it maintained its size relative to what was being viewed, and vice versa.  Zoom out far enough, whatever she sent through would annihilate whatever was on the other side.  There was only one other like it, as far as she knew, and it was being used by some queen or empress to keep tabs on her city.  What a waste.

Some movement among the still, lifeless wasteland she had created grabbed her attention.  Agatha had forgotten to turn it off.  It was miniscule, smaller than a gnat, but her supernaturally enhanced senses made it easy to pick out.  A single person had avoided her strike and was now scavenging through the wreckage in her handprint.  Her first instinct was to squash it out of existence, but she hesitated.  She licked the tip of an index finger and a sly smile tugged at the corner of her lips.  It was time for her to conduct another test.

Agatha reached her arm through the scrying pool, wetted finger extended toward the tiny person below.  She kept her sharp, silvery eyes on it, apparently unaware of the monumental finger descending in its direction.  Her shadow fell over it, tipping the puny person off, and they began running away.  Their pace was pathetic in comparison to even her careful advance, however, and she caught him easily enough.  When she made contact with the teensy body she quickly pulled her hand back, entirely unencumbered by its negligible weight.  There was a slight rippling in the pool when her arm came back through it, distorting the smashed landscape on the other side.

Marcus dropped his load when he saw the devastation where his home had been.  There was nothing left standing; not so much as one board on top of another.  Animals and people alike had been flattened, their hides practically two-dimensional with their innards on the ground beside them, also smashed flat.  An enormous crater, hundreds of feet wide, was centered where his home should have been, and five trenches split off in one direction.  It was like something had come from the sky and obliterated the town out of nowhere.

He crawled through the wreckage, looking for anyone alive, even mortally wounded, or at least a keepsake to carry when he went on to the next village.  Clearly, his life here was over.  While he sifted through the wooden shards of a market stall, however, a gigantic shadow overtook him.  Marcus ran, but it was completely in vain.  His legs could not carry him fast enough, and in only a few seconds he found himself affixed to the tip of an enormous finger, held fast by a thick, gooey layer of saliva.

A meteoric ascent miles into the air left him light-headed, and when it stopped he must have been hallucinating.  He was suspended in front of a face the size of a moon and twice as bright when full, filling his entire field of view.  It was feminine, but that made it no less terrifying.  Her lips were like a mountain range at the bottom with a vast plain up top, covered by a waterfall of fine, straight black hair.  Silver eyes larger than his whole village were focused on him, or at least in his general direction, and he could see every minute flare of her ginormous nose’s nostrils while she breathed.  There was a long red scar running down her right cheek like a canyon, and he found that it was impossible to focus on all of it at once.

Agatha still could not discern any features of the tiny person aside from the fact that it was, in fact, a person.  It was a fraction of a fraction of an inch tall, nothing compared to her.  If it weren’t a tiny blemish on her alabaster skin she’d have no idea it was even there, and even then, if she hadn’t picked it up herself it’d be doubtful.  In comparison to her it was so insignificant that she could scarcely even believe they could both be called human.

Her natural impulse was to rub her fingers together and eviscerate it like the rest of its kin, or lick her finger clean of the filth.  Before she brought her fingers together or stuck her tongue out, however, she got a better idea.  This miniscule, teensy person must see her as the goddess she aspired to be.  She lowered her finger to the floor and scraped the tip against a wooden plank by her right shoe, gradually rolling it against a ridge in the grain.  Either it would be squished without a sign or dislodged to fall at her feet.  To her, it scarcely mattered.

Marcus’s stomach jumped from his feet up to his head when Agatha’s finger plummeted downward, the wind of his rapid descent making his clothes ripple behind him.  He saw the floor rapidly approaching and closed his eyes, ready to be dashed against the floorboard.  It was no different than his friends and family had gotten, after all.  The thud of tons of meat slapping against the ground struck his ears, and he expected it to be over.  Instead, he continued to feel the warm air of the tower on his skin, and he forced his eyes open.  The world was turning over, rotating fast enough that he could feel it, and he was faced with the faded surface of an unfinished hard wood floor.

A ridge on the floorboard scraped him off the edge of her finger, depositing him onto the ground.  The whole ordeal disoriented him and he got up slowly, unsteady even on his hands and knees.  When he was able to stand he was still fairly dizzy, but he could not attribute what he saw to a mere trick of the mind.  He gazed up at a gray wall almost eight times his height before it broke, giving way to an absolutely insurmountable dark purple wall above that.  It was hundreds of feet up before he even laid eyes on her porcelain skin, then he saw the tremendous bulge of her ankle.  Escape would be hopeless through any means aside from her own negligence.

“Hello down there, tiny person,” Agatha boomed.  She wasn’t sure whether they were even alive, or if they were if they could understand her, but she decided to hedge her bets.  “I am Agatha, though you may know me as Agatha the Black-Hearted.  You are in my domain now, because I willed it.  I am the one who destroyed your village, and can easily do the same to you.  Bow down to me as your goddess, and I will spare your pitiful life so that you may serve my ascension.  Refuse, and become dust on my floor.”

Marcus heard a terrifying rumbling come from above, and it took a moment for him to realize it was someone speaking in a language he could understand, just said by someone millions of times his size.  He did not catch every word since it was more of a primordial roar to him than anything, but he got the gist of it.  His faith had never been particularly strong toward his gods, and in this very moment Agatha posted much more of a threat to him than the distant deities who had allowed his village to be pulverized.  Without hesitation he bowed down to her, offering whatever prayers he could think of.  For all he could tell, he was at the feet of a goddess.

Agatha had no way of knowing whether he had complied if he yet lived, and she would have acted no differently if he hadn’t.  She simply went back to her research, preparing for the next experiment involving the scrying pool.

Agatha spent a while considering where she wanted to strike next.  It couldn’t be too conspicuous, because then she’d have to deal with the annoyance of adventurers showing up to stop her.  She did want it to be noticeable, though.  For over an hour she had been viewing towns and cities, watching the tiny specks going about their routines, licking her lips while she considered whether or not to reach through.  Each one was tempting, but she had to pass. 

At last, she found the perfect target.  A small town on the far edge of the continent with only one road going through it and very little outside stable space.  Very few people outside of its residents would notice if it went missing, and it shouldn’t take too long to scoop up.  They probably didn’t speak a common language, but there were ways around that.  Besides, power transcended all words, especially the amount she wielded.

With a command word she activated the transportation properties of the portal, making it momentarily glimmer silver.  All the little dots stopped moving to stare up at the hole in the sky, and a faint screech reached her when it resolved to her face.  Almost simultaneously they began scattering, running to all four corners from her titanic face.  She smiled and let out a chuckle, causing a tremendous rumble to filter down to the town.  No matter how far they ran, they wouldn’t be able to escape her.

Agatha put her palms together and thrust them through the portal, and they came out enormous on the other side.  She cupped them like a spade and angled the tips just to the south of the town.  They drove into the soil, moving through it as easily as water and pushing mounds of dirt out of the holes.  Her fingers ran half the length of the town, which she demonstrated by wiggling them just below the surface.  The ground seemed to breathe while her fingers moved, raising and lowering with them.  People toppled over and buildings split in half from her twiddling, but it was hardly the worst thing that would happen to them that day.

She pulled her hands out of the ground, prying half the town along with them.  For a moment she simply held it there, in awe at the reality of holding a town in her hands.  Clumps of dirt and rock fell off the side, exploding on impact with the ground, along with some people who had been right on the edge.  No doubt they were killed on impact, but all that meant to her was she’d have a couple fewer worshippers living at her feet.

Her hands came back through the portal, making it ripple from the center as it passed.  Agatha held her prize up to her face so that she could loom over her new captives, inspiring the proper amount of awe and fear in them.  Carefully she knelt and deposited it on the floor, dirt and all, just past her toes.  Maybe she had just set a town atop the person she captured yesterday, she had no idea of knowing.  All she knew was that now she had half a town as her exclusive subjects.

Pierre heard the sky crackle with energy and looked up, then gasped.  In the middle of the clear blue sky a woman’s face had appeared, looking down with disdainful silver eyes.  She reached down with both arms, and amazingly her hands passed through the gap in reality, making the hole shimmer as they entered his side.  He could only stare as they descended, paralyzed by fear.  There were only a few reasons a gigantic woman would be reaching for the town, and none of them were good.

Her enormous fingers, the smallest of them longer and thicker than the largest tree trunk he had ever seen, plunged into the earth, displacing great mounds of soil.  Palms larger than the town square followed, and the ground bulged upward while they tunneled beneath it.  In only a few seconds – much quicker than he imagined they could be – her hands were beneath him, suddenly turning the street into a berm that put all the buildings at a significant tilt.

The ground squirmed, as though something just below the surface was alive and wriggling to get free.  Pierre was caught off-guard and pitched onto his back, where he rolled down a ridge into an already teetering building.  With the ground’s continued gyrations the structure fell apart, splintering into individual boards that fell away from him.  Continued rippling pitched him over the edge of the rubble and into the middle, where he rode the remaining surges out amid a pile of debris.

A cacophony arose when the earth tore apart, and Pierre found himself being lifted into the sky along with his part of the town.  He was being carried toward the portal, and short of jumping off the edge there was no way to escape.  They passed through with surprisingly little fanfare, not even a noise or flash of light.  The only way he knew he had been transported was the sudden increase in temperature and blast of wind from the giantess’s nostrils.

He had time to look over her face while she mockingly glanced over the town, though her features were too big to be taken in all at once.  Her lips alone were wider than a city block, and her eyes were larger than a full moon at night.  While she lowered them toward the floor he got a more complete picture of her long, lanky body, and he simply could not comprehend someone of his species being this large.  On the floor, her shoe was the most massive structure he had ever seen, dwarfing even the great temple he had made his pilgrimage to.  She lost interest soon enough, though, and returned to the portal she had pulled them through.

Half a town.  Agatha was not about to leave the others out of excitement for what she had just acquired.  She looked back through the pool, still fully active, and saw the absolute carnage she had wrought.  A grid of puny buildings, none of them even half the size of a coin, with panicked little black dots running between them.  Beside it was a crater showing bare brown earth with ridges between where her fingers had been.  It truly looked like it had simply been scooped out of the planet by an enormous gardener.

Agatha dug her hands back into the soil, sliding her fingers underneath the remains of the town.  This time she skipped menacing them and simply tore the half that still stood from the ground, waiting a beat for the clumps of loose dirt to fall back into the hole.  She could hear pathetic squeaks while some of them dashed for the edge, trying to escape from their fate.  Her lips twitched upward at the fear she caused, then she pulled her hands back through the portal.

When they were back on her side, she knelt back down to set it on the floor.  She looked for where the town had been sundered and tried to make it fit back together as best she could.  Her hands had to slide it back and forth while she tried to get one of the streets lined up, causing the taller buildings to wobble.  Finally, she admitted it would never look just right and let it go, apathetic of all the additional damage she had just caused.

Her eyes looked over the village lying on the floor.  It was about a foot and a half long with a few hundred buildings, and probably contained around a thousand people, not counting the ones who fell off.  Not a huge score, but it was something, and it’d suffice while she built up her tiny empire of worshippers.  They were still running around in terror, not sure what was going on, only that their homes and lives had been uprooted out of nowhere.

Near the center, Agatha spotted something she didn’t like: a temple.  A crowd of people was rushing toward it with a traffic jam at the doorway.  She leaned in and pursed her lips, then blew a strong gust of air into the crowd.  They scattered, flying down streets and into buildings, some of them spilling off onto her floor.  Many of them had likely been killed or injured, but fewer than if they had stayed.  Her concern had not driven her to do it, rather her desire to leave a few alive and capable of praising her.

Agatha uttered a quiet spell so they could understand her, then declared, “You won’t be needing this with me around.”  She extended a finger and pointed it toward the offending structure, then began lowering her hand toward it.  The building collapsed almost as soon as she made contact with it, crumbling into a pile of loose bricks and broken bodies.  For good measure she plunged her finger the rest of the way down, crushing the bricks into gravel and knocking down several adjacent structures.

She took a second to brush her finger clean with her thumb, scattering debris on the chaotic town below.  Then she slapped her hand against the floor’s wooden planks, grabbing the occupants’ attention.  “Your gods cannot hear you, and you only have my whims for your mercy,” Agatha boomed.  “You have only one goddess now and she is me, Agatha the Black-Hearted.  You will worship me and no one else or feel my wrath.”  Her statement finished, she stood back up so she could gaze at her new addition and allow them to see their new goddess in all her glory.

Agatha took a step over the village, just missing the tops of buildings with the sole of her heel.  It might take a couple of days, but they would come around to revering her as a deity once it was clear their other gods could no longer hear them.  She couldn’t either, for that matter, but she expected she’d be able to feel their prayers energizing her soon.  For now she returned to her books and maps, researching the next place she could strike and how to best do it.

Agatha sat on her velvet upholstered throne, overlooking the tiny empire she had stolen over the past month.  Twenty towns arranged around a city, all from different parts of the world, laid at her feet.  Individual buildings were too puny for her to really notice anything, but she could clearly see the individual clusters making up the settlements.  There might have been fifty thousand people down there (she had neither the time nor inclination for a census), all under her thumb.  She should have had more, but a couple towns got flattened as examples when some refused to bow down.  Effigies glorifying her began to appear shortly after.

And yet, she didn’t feel even the slightest tug of divinity.  There was nothing inside her lifting her up, no indefinable warmth spreading through her body.  All her research said that her apotheosis should have begun by now, and all she’d need to do is the ritual.  She knew they were worshipping her down there: not only had she instilled the fear of a living goddess in them, but she had a habit of magically eavesdropping on them at random times to turn their pathetic squeaks into something she could understand.

Her disdain for them sparked an epiphany.  The issue wasn’t amount of worshippers, or how zealous their belief was, or how she cowed them to her will.  They were simply too small to contribute to her divine ascension!  When she thought about it like that, it made perfect sense.  If all of her new worshippers were combined, the mass might be the size of her right foot.  Even though they acted and ostensibly looked like people, they had become too miniscule to be considered people by any real measure.  She would have to come up with another source of captive worshippers.

Agatha stood from her throne and took a second to stretch her joints.  She strode toward the sconce with her scrying pool, paying no need to the settlements on the floor.  Each step made the sound of crunching gravel as buildings were obliterated, and countless useless worshippers got flattened.  No doubt they would be incensed, but so what?  They weren’t contributing to her goal, and outside the little circle she had built for them, they would never contribute anything else to the world.

She leaned forward over the rim of the pool and chose an unconventional target to look at: herself.  A bird’s eye view of her tower amid the familiar landscape formed in the rippling surface below her.  Agatha spoke the command word and it temporarily flashed silver again, and she heard the sky above her tear open.  Her hand reached through the portal, and a corresponding shadow engulfed the tower.  Curious, she turned her gaze out the window, where she saw her own enormous hand hanging from the sky.  As a test she wiggled her fingers, and to her delight the tremendous fingers on the hand moved as she commanded.

Satisfied, she withdrew her hand and prepared to commit.  She swung a leg over the ledge and plunged it through the magical pool, sinking in up to her thigh.  Her foot stopped and an enormous crash sounded outside, along with the tower shaking uncontrollably for several seconds.  Agatha looked out the window again and saw a titanic dark purple wall had appeared worryingly close, with a pattern that matched the one on her shoe.  Of course, it was her shoe.  If her foot alone was this size, how big would her whole body be once it was through?

Eager to find out, Agatha sat on the rim of her scrying pool, dangling her other leg through it.  Slowly she lowered her body through it, not wanting to topple her tower by merely stepping through to the other side.  When both her feet were on the ground she was up to her waist in the pool, and she paused to simply watch the ripples moving out from her.  Then she dipped the rest of her body in, slowly sinking into a crouch.

The last strand of her long black hair came through, and Agatha gave the command word to close it.  Once the rift over her head closed she stood, marveling at how far up her full height was now.  Immediately she looked down at her feet and spotted her tower.  She knew as an absolute fact that it was five hundred feet tall, and it just came up to her ankles!  Her head stopped just below the bottom layer of clouds, and the forest she had lived inside for years looked like moss on the ground.  It was likely she would never know exactly how tall she was, but she would clearly be a force to be reckoned with now.

On the far horizon, she spotted what would become her new domain.  The Kingdom of Simkin started on the other side of the forest, with its capital against the mountains only a few hundred miles away.  She expected she could be there in only a few minutes and crush any real opposition to her in a matter of seconds.  After that, it would only be a matter of tearing down their local religions and setting up worship of herself.

She set off in its direction, her long strides making short work of the distance.  Each step she took felled over a dozen acres of forest beneath her feet, though she was clear of it after only four steps.  On the edge, she spotted a small hamlet that had built up around a farmhouse.  Agatha diverted her route slightly so it was under her foot the next time she set her heel down, and without a second thought stepped forward.  There was not even so much as a crunch when the hamlet flattened beneath her sole, and she continued on her way.

Agatha followed the narrow strip of dirt road from the hamlet she demolished toward the kingdom’s center.  Without her even knowing it, traders’ carts and travelers were eviscerated by her languid steps, even some roadside inns were demolished.  She passed up the opportunity to wipe the occasional small town off the map as she went, recognizing that she would need some people to not be obliterated in the future.

Just as expected, after only three minutes of walking Agatha practically had the capital beneath her.  A sea of tiny black dots rushed out to greet her, drawing up into a line in front of her right foot.  They held their position for a moment, admirable compared to what they were up against, but seemed to be doing nothing.  Agatha raised her foot slightly and moved it over the line, turned it sideways, and brought it back down.  In a single step she had annihilated the only serious resistance against her.

The militia captain heard a loud boom off in the distance and felt the ground shake a few seconds later.  He looked toward the sound and it came again, a little bit louder with more violent quakes.  A cap of black hair peaked over the horizon, and after several more thuds, more of what was coming was revealed.  It was so crazy he scarcely believed it even though he saw it with his own eyes.

A titanic woman’s face, with silver irises and pale skin, with a large red scar running down from her right eye.  Each step brought more of her into view.  She was slender, with a small chest for her figure and a narrow waist, and a plain black gown covering her from shoulder to ankle, with a long slit up to her waist on her right leg.  Her gait had such confidence, it was like she thought she was invincible.  He had never seen anyone so huge, so it was difficult to estimate her height, but she was at least a mile tall.  Based on that, she might as well be invincible.

“To arms!” he shouted, ringing the bell to summon the rest of the force.  It was hopeless, he knew, but they still had to make an effort.  He ran to the rally point where men-at-arms were already gathering, still adjusting their hastily grabbed weapons.  Another crash came from near the horizon, and he saw some of the militia members cringe.  Admittedly, he was hardly enthusiastic about the prospect of battling a woman so tall he couldn’t even see all of her at once, but it was his duty.

The militia advanced in a loose rank, hoping to get to high ground before they had to engage, but the giantess was closing the gap much faster than they were.  She was practically upon them before they were even a hundred yards out from the city, and they had to stop.  They drew up into lines of battle in the shadow of one of her great shoes, though that was just out of habit: they had no idea what they would do.  Archers fired an initial volley of arrows, not a single one of which came close to cresting the toe of her shoe.

She lifted the shoe off the ground and moved it over the battle line, hovering several hundred feet over their heads.  Some of the militia broke and ran when she turned her foot sideways so that it ran over every member of the response force.  Those who stood looked up at the gigantic shoe sole, its smooth gray surface blocking out the sun, with jaws dropped in awe.  In a flash the shoe came down, squashing those who ran and stood alike and leaving a gigantic footprint in its wake.

Agatha stepped over the entire city in one lunge, shaking buildings apart when her foot crashed into the ground again.  People wanted to run, but they had no idea where to go.  It was clear that no matter where they went, she would be able to reach them.  She looked over her new city and gave a nod of approval.  No other power, magical or mundane, would dislodge her from her position over it.  By right of conquest it was hers, and she intended to make full use of it.

First, though, she needed a throne to rule from.  Agatha turned to the mountain overlooking the city, and with a few short syllables the rock melted and reshaped itself in her image.  Stone folded and bent, or outright disappeared, until there was a vast throne magically carved into the mountainside.  She smirked, looking at her literal seat of power, and turned around.  Slowly she lowered her butt onto it, leaned against the back and crossed one leg over the other.  Later she would have to get some padding for it, but for now it was the perfect seat for her.

Her foot dangled above the royal keep so that it was cast in shadow from sunup to sundown.  She scanned the city, looking for the largest, most elaborate temple.  Light glinting off the gilded finish drew her eyes to it, and she pointed at the building with a single finger.  A ray of fire shot out from her fingertip and crashed into the building.  Over the course of a few seconds the gold melted and stone exploded in a hail of shrapnel, demolishing the building and spraying the streets with bits of rock and mortar.  Agatha allowed herself to laugh, a loud, booming, haunting sound, at the temple’s destruction, and looked out on the rest of the city with a satisfied smirk.

“Listen close, you worthless insects,” Agatha boomed, making sure her voice carried all over the city.  “Unless you think you can stop me, you’re mine.  As your new leader, I issue my first directive: you are to destroy every temple in every town and begin worshipping yours truly.  Send out messengers to convey this message to ensure that it is done within the month.  I can say from personal experience that the omnipotence of your supposed gods is lacking, and their rumored omniscience leaves a lot to be desired.  If even one temple stands in this kingdom in thirty days, I will begin destroying city districts each day until they’re gone.  Do not test me.”  Once she was finished, she slouched back down in her chair and smirked.  It felt good to be in charge.