Eldritch Enrichment

By VivettaVenray

(WARNING: Contains a lot of 'out-there' stuff including tentacles/vines, plant-horror, and flesh-morphing/body-horror.

The main character also has plant-like powers and qualities, so keep that in mind.

In addition this story also contains vore [including hard] soul-vore, soul-play/torture, terra-scales, omni-stuff, powers-play, sadism, horror, gore, internals, transformation, digestion, absorption and eldritch themes among other stuff.)

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Chapter 1: The Ball

186X, London, England

It was a most splendid ball room. Not many windows filled the room, but what few was there were magnificent. The squarish outlooks caught the sun in their stained glass and warped it into a most splendid colorful luminescence. Most of the light came from the candle sconces spaced only a couple feet away from one another: that and the crystal chandeliers dangling from the high ceiling. On that ceiling, a mural above depicted all sorts of angelic figures frolicking about greenery. The floor was wide and smooth and alight with the dancing feet of London’s young elite.

Oliver was perhaps the richest and most handsome young man in the country. Naturally, this meant his 23rd birthday had to be the most splendid affair of the year. No expense was spared. Scalloped tables were festooned with the flowers interspersed between decadent deserts and appetizers. Casks of the finest wines were set in the room’s corner.

It was rather scandalous to have the liquor out in the open as opposed to in the kitchen, but Oliver always had a mild scandal like that at all his festivities. Besides, it’s not as though the servants weren’t the ones still carting it to and fro. No one here would sully their hands serving themselves after all.

A young party guest, scarcely older than 21 herself, stood by the casks. Her black-laced gloves were lightly torn at the tip of one digit by a pointed fingernail. She dragged that slender finger across a cask’s surface. She scraped at the wood a bit with the nail before moving to the next one.

Aside from Oliver, no person here carried more rumors about them. Her lissom build, pale skin, asociality, and blood-red hair had many joking she was a witch. It was very curious that she was here at all, in fact. This was the first ball anyone has seen her at since... forever really.

She did dress the part at least. Like the other women, she wore a hooped skirt with ruffle like petals at the hem. The fashion of the moment was to have these wide flower-like dresses, and she fit it well.

Her dress had a curious red to it. The blouse matched the shade, though her bodice was a bone white in contrast. Black dancing slippers adorned her feet.

As she continued tapping the casks, thoughts ran through her mind.

“I wish I was at home with my books and garden.”
“The performers play a bit too loud.”

“These shoes hurt my feet.”

So lost in her trance was she that she didn’t notice the gaggle of gossiping meanies till they were upon her.

“Well well if it isn’t Clover Marigold” came a shrill voice that was unmistakably...

“Angelica” said Clover turning around. “To what do I owe the pleasure.”

Angelica put a lot of effort into her appearance. Her goal was to woo Oliver into marriage. She loved the man’s handsome face almost as much as his prestige and money. Her blonde hair was styled into a bun, and she had the widest dress with the most flounces and ruffles. A corset squeezed her waist so thin that Clover wondered if her organs were claustrophobic in there...

At the blonde woman’s side, as always, were her two minions: Peggy and Megan. Peggy had brown hair, Megan black. Their dresses were the second and third best at the ball, respectively.

To Clover, it seemed they existed to support Angelica’s every word, all the while secretly relishing each embarrassment their queen bee did. Those gaffs were few and far between, but each one from their superior was a most delicious nectar to their egos. Clover’s green eyes caught the corners of their lips twitch as Angelica found a bit of dust on her skirt and blushed it off all flustered.

Angelica spoke.

“We just noticed you hanging out by the wine casks was all. A bit strange if you ask me. You know the servants won’t be serving it till later.”

“Of course” said Clover with a smile. “I was just inspecting the fine wood of the containers. Oliver spared no expense.”

“It’s so good to see you out and about you know!” said Angelica in a most saccharine tone. “They said you had thin blood, you know. How is that?”

“Hemophilia you mean.” said Clover. “It is a struggle at times, but I’ve found some good treatments in my studies.”

Angelica grabbed Clover’s hand, ostensibly as a friend would. Then, she curled her pointed fingernails at the lace of Clover’s glove. If she pressed a bit further, her poking nails might pierce the frail woman’s skin.

The blonde woman leaned in. “Just how did you get an invite anyway?”

Clover seemed unphased as she answered.

“His family owes mine a great deal.”

“Your family is dead.” said Angelica, her blue eyes locked onto Clover’s green.

“Yes, but before they died they helped Oliver with some investments. Investments I now own a stake in as the sole heiress. Now, if you’d kindly get your nails off me, I have a feeling he’ll be out shortly for his birthday toast.”

“They say you’re a witch. It’d make since to me, no one can have skin that pale naturally. I’ve tried.”

Angelica pressed tighter on Clover’s arm.

“I assure you my complexion reflects a sensitivity to the sun and a dearth of vigor. Nothing more.” said Clover.

A pause.

“Relax, I’m not after his affections if that’s your concern.” said Clover again to address Angelica’s real question.

The answer seemed to quell the blonde socialite, who let go and smiled smugly.

Before Angelica could open her chattering mouth again, Oliver stepped into the hall. All eyes were on him, and Angelica ditched her tormenting to rush into the center of the dance floor with the others. Her two minions followed dutifully after.

Everyone wanted to get a look at their host. Oliver wandered up on the stage with the band. His suit was slim, trim and fine. Pants legs stripped a thin gold on black. His suit coat was a pure black. He had a top-hat with a red band on it which gave the otherwise bland outfit a bit of tasteful flare. He waltzed onto the stage and raised his hand to stop the band from playing.

“Thank you all for coming to my birthday ball! Some of you I know from business, others from my college days, but I truly want to express my gratitude to you all. Why I can remember my first-”

And he went on and on and enamored just about everyone in the grand hall: everyone but Clover. She was busy tapping at those casks. Once she touched each and every one with her fingernail, she moved to the dance floor with the others. They cleared a path for her: the rumors of witchcraft had some benefits, such as not having to shove her way through a crowd.

She caught the end of the speech.

“...Without further ado, let’s have some drinks!” he shouted.

The crowd cheered and clapped. Oliver was a young man, and they too were young. No one here was over 30 sans the staff, and not a soul was under 20. The prospect of imported inebriants could excite any of them.

Any save Clover at least, who just clasped her hands quietly. Wait staff filled the room. They took to the casks and poured the liquid into fine glasses on their platters. Each one dressed the same: men in plain black suits and black bow ties with stuffy mustaches and stuffier accents. They were professional, yet very persistent. They made sure everyone at least sampled the wines.

Everyone except for Clover.

There was some chatter and gossip. Lips were looser now at the wine’s touch. Ladies and gentlemen stuffed their faces around scalloped tables freshly stocked with hors d'oeuvres. When it came down to indulgence vs decorum, the former always won out even among the ‘refined’ class.

Clover simply kept to the edges of the hall. No one had tried to talk to her since Angelica’s interrogation earlier. ‘Perfect’, she thought. She preferred it this way. It made things easier.

Within half an hour it was time to dance again. The band played a slow waltz. The red-dressed redhead hugged the wall, hoping she wouldn’t be asked to dance by some curiosity or dare from one of the men.

No such luck. Oliver himself approached her. The young man and extended his hand.

“Care for a dance, milady.”, he said.

Clover did not, but over Oliver’s bent shoulders she saw Angelica glaring daggers her way. The blonde was stuck dancing with one of Oliver’s lackeys for now; a fine fellow he was, but not the best. The notion of making that awful woman seethe prompted Clover’s answer.

“Of course.”

And Clover grasped his hand and the two made their way to the center of the dance floor.

She wasn’t a fool. The primary reason Oliver asked her for a dance had to be to make another one of his adored scandals. She knew these games, even if she didn’t play them herself. She imagined the rumors now.

‘He danced with the witch.’

‘Does he fancy her?’

‘Did she enchant him perhaps?’

Seems he had some curiosity to satisfy as well.

“I heard you are good with plants.” he said, jerking his body to the side in movements she begrudgingly followed.

“It’s true I have something of a garden in the building I own.”

Clover looked past his grinning face to one of the bouquets on a tabled vase. She hated to see flowers cut of their roots. Beautiful as they were, they’d wither soon. She’d vastly prefer the company of any flower to that of a gross, hypocritical human.

“Garden.” he chuckled. “That’s one way to put it. Don’t you have a greenhouse and everything.”

She smiled. “One must be a little modest after all, especially since it’s your birthday Oliver.”

The pair twirled as the violin solo part of the piece kicked in.

“Well, is it true, that you practice magic or something? Some say you use the herbs you grow for potions.”

Clover laughed.

“Come now, you’ve made a small fortune by now, surely you’re smart enough not to heed such rumors.”

“Right right, of course” he said. “You know I must thank you again for your initial investment.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Another twirl and Clover noticed Angelica was steering her dance partner towards her and Oliver. She likely intended to accidentally ‘bump’ into them so as to have an excuse to join the conversation. The redhead shot a smirk towards the woman before staring back to Oliver.

The man asked more questions.

“So why do you keep to yourself so much? I’ve invited you to every ball I’ve thrown these past three years. Why come now?”

“Did you really ask me to dance just to dig into my life like this?~” She asked her question in a teasing tone, but they both knew the answer was yes.

“I figured I’d get out more, starting today. Why, I have much I want to see. I recently uncovered a good treatment for my conditions as well.” said Clover.

“Hemophilia?” he said.

Clover raised an eyebrow. “That’s the big one yes. Also very good, you got the name right and everything.”

“Most people mess it up?”

“Quite. Anyways I’m even working on a cure towards it.”

“A cure? I had no idea you studied medicine?”

“I study many things in my free time.”

The violin solo ended and the waltz went back to a slower pace. Amid the seas of wide dresses, Angelica drew even closer. She had been stymied by the faster movements of the others, till now.

“I like your dress. It’s a very interesting shade of red. What’s the dye?” Oliver asked.

“I stepped the outfit in a mixture of my own design.”

“You made a dye with your plants?”

“Oh no, this was... animal based.”

“Ah, like those red beetles?”

Clover smirked. “Something like that.”

“Well, I’m sure their sacrifice was worth it.” he chuckled.

“I’m inclined to agree.”, she said.

The music slowed down, the waltz drew to an end. All the dancing party goers slowed with it. Feet misstepped. Angelica fell over, and whatever petty little scheme she was planning tumbled with her..

Oliver started to go limp in Clover’s arms. She gave him a small shove so as to not have his bulk collapse on her.

All the other nobles followed suit. Their heads clanged against the floor. Clover watched to make sure none of them had cracked their head open. She needed them alive. The band, however, not so much.

The waiting staff hopped onto the stage and drew daggers, quickly taking care of the musicians Oliver had hired.

Clover grinned.

“Finally I can take these awful shoes off.” She kicked her legs and set the footwear flying. Pale naked feet set themselves down by Oliver’s head. He turned and grabbed at her ankles with his right hand.

“W-what’s going on. I feel so tired.”

Clover slid her foot from his feeble, limp grip. She kicked the side of his head to have him look up towards the frescoed ceiling and its stunning chandeliers.

“Quiet now, you’ll see soon enough.”

His eyelids drew to a close.

Chapter 2: Ritual

Angelica’s high metabolism had her falling and waking first. Slowly, she opened her eyes. The room was darker than before. Not much time had passed, but the waiters had drawn the blinds on the windows. Clover didn’t want to risk anyone peering in and disturbing her plans.

Clover... That pale woman stood smack dab in the middle of the dance floor. The waiters brought her tomes and the like, and she flipped them open to pages with strange symbols and patterns.

Angelica tried to get up. However, though awake, she couldn’t move her arms. She felt them: she felt the chill dance floor under what little of her arm skin was exposed. Still, they refused her command. The back of her crinoline--the stiff, cage-like garment to keep her skirt wide--had been smushed down in her fall. Consequently, her dress hung loosely over her as she lay. The other women seemed in a similar condition. Their fanciful wide gowns all deflated over themselves like balloons.

One by one the others began to wake. Just in time it’d seem, as Clover snapped her fingers and the waiters started grabbing the guests and dragging them across the floor. One grabbed Angelica and dragged her in front of Clover; another dragged Oliver towards the blonde’s side.

“I knew it!” Angelica shouted. “You are a witch.”

Clover chuckled. “Impressive. You can still talk? I should go faster then.”

The other people began to groan, it was all they could muster. Each guest had one of the wait staff standing above them. Each mustached servant began undoing their own coats and shirts.

Angelica spoke again.

“You poisoned us.”

“Correct.” said a smiling Clover.

“How?”

Clover removed her black lace gloves and Angelica’s heart sank. Hidden by her wrist was a vial held snug by a leather strap. A strange purple liquid glimmered within, and a rubber tube went from it towards a false fingernail. Clover popped the pointed thing off and set the vial and strap down to the floor.

“You don’t have nails that long working in a garden.” The redhead chuckled. “I spiked the wine casks, you see.”

Angelica turned from clover to the waiter looming at her side. The tall fellow had removed all his top garments to expose his naked chest. From his pants pocket he fished out a dagger. All the others did the same for their ‘charges’.

“W-wait stop! Don’t kill me!” Angelica shouted at the man. “I’ll pay you double what she is.” She closed her eyes at that raised blade.

“Pay? Oh I didn’t hire them. I enchanted them. I requested to visit the wait staff before the ball. I shook hands, exchanged words--some of them ‘magic’...” said Clover, trailing to a laugh at the end.

Something wet sprayed onto Angelica and sullied her bodice with its red stain. The blonde opened her eyes to see the waiter had made a long and deep cut into his stomach. He slid his hand in the wound and drew it out deep red.

The man crouched and used his hand to paint a crude circle around Angelica’s body. As before, all the other thralls did similar with their own assignments.

“W-what, what’s going on? What are you doing?” Angelica stammered.

“My ritual.” answered Clover.

“So you do worship the devil? You fucking witch. I’ll burn you myself once I get up!” said Angelica. She fluttered her eyelids and face: about the only things she could move.

Clover laughed again. She looked away from her tome to watch Angelica’s futile attempts at ‘writhing’.

“The devil? Oh no that’s fairy-tale stuff. I can’t imagine how many frail women like me wasted time going down that rabbit hole. Poor, things they were. My lord, however, is very real, and they are more powerful and wise beyond your imagination.”

The waiters had gone pale; their blood nearly run dry. Each one finished the runes they drew around the ‘guests’, then flopped over dead. Per Clover’s instructions, they were considerate enough to die away from the circles so as to avoid mucking things up.

“What are you doing to us?” said a man’s voice. It was Oliver. Every word sounded a strain.

“Ah the birthday boy’s awake. My thanks for gathering everyone here. Every ritual needs ingredients after all~” said Clover.

Clover knelt down in front of one book, a rather grisly looking black tome, and started flipping through its pages.

“W-wait, why not get the staff to be your ‘ingredients’ then, why involve us?” said another woman’s voice: Megan. She was paralyzed not too far from Angelica.

“I need more than your blood as fuel. A powerful emotion is essential: suffering suffices. The servants are more inured to suffering. They eat stale bread to our moist cakes, and drink water to our fine wines. You all, my peers, have higher expectations out life. When its threatened, you lament. Now, I’m sure those waiters would still feel no small measure of horror in your place, but why chance things?”

The symphony of groans grew louder from the limp vessels. The redheaded witch would have to move a bit faster here. She didn’t want any of them regaining enough feeling to crawl out of their circles. The pale woman found the right page and started saying some horrid words: words that made Angelica’s skin crawl.

Angelica started screaming. She hoped to distract Clover, but it was music to the witch’s ears. Plus, the more Clover spoke these words, the louder her voice got. Its once squeaky timbre now echoed, bouncing off the walls and snuffing out a few of the wall scones with its thoom.

Clover’s emerald eyes turned deep black through and through. Soon, the void that filled them sparkled. She had a conversation with an unseen force.

“I’ve brought the sacrifices and prepped my dress. Where is my promised transformation oh great Hudraloth?”

Clover stood tall now. A small ball of red light formed in front of her chest. It glimmered as something spoke through it.

This voice was as deep and slimy as the depths of the sea. Every word snuffed another candle then replaced it with a deep black flame to keep the chamber lit.

“You shall have it, but know this is just the first step.”

Clover continued. “You said I could become as an eternal flower, free from illness and brimming with vitality.”

“You will be that and much more.” said the voice. “I give you a taste of true power. You will be as the plants you adore. You will grow rich on the bounties of reality and the nutrients life gives forth... but when the time comes you must bear the fruit of my arrival. Harvest enough souls to pierce the veil to reality so I may bless this universe and others. I will give you the means.”

“How will I know when I have enough?” she asked.

“You will know.” said the being.

A thin red tendril of light reached out from the sphere to poke at Clover’s neck. She shut her eyes and accepted it. Whatever the process was, it looked like it hurt, but she grit her teeth and didn’t squeak so much as once. It left no mark when it slithered out.

The sphere disappeared. Clover began to twitch. Something rustled under her dress. Her dress itself rustled. The hem of it, previously down to her ankles, raised upwards to her knees. It sounded not like cloth, but as flesh or the shifting petals of a flower. Indeed, the ruffles at the edge of her red dress curled almost identically to rose petals.

Clover started to laugh. Her voice was back to normal. Her cackle bounced off the walls.

“Oh this... this is something.” she muttered. The symphony of groans crescendoed as some of the guests got a look at the emerging horror. They crawled out from under the brim of Clover’s skirt: thin red vines.

The appendages were shaped like a plant: yet moved far quicker. They lashed in the air like whips and made similar sounds.

Angelica started to twitch, her fingers stirring. That wouldn’t do. Clover wasted no more time. There’d be time later to enjoy what she takes.

A vine cracked through the air, slithering right towards Angelica.

“N-no. Get off me!” said the young noblewoman. With great effort, the blonde moved her arm to grasp at the limb. She yelped. Something nicked the flesh of her palm.

“Ah careful.” Said Clover to Angelica. “Tiny hairs: much like a stinging plant. Although, they aren’t stinging so much as sucking...”

It was sudden. An eruption of thin lashing limbs. They rushed out from Clover’s dress and coiled over all the other paralyzed partygoers. There were dozens of them. The vines stung as they crept through their clothes. Under all those layers of fabric, the tips of the flesh-vines grew more pointed like the prick of a thorn brush. With this sharpness, they punctured through skin and muscle with ease.

And Clover began to drink.

She drunk not just blood, but their life itself. She siphoned their very souls. Angelica cried out: still the only one with the vigor to do so. The blonde socialite turned and saw Oliver. His once handsome face grew gaunt; his manly figure became so withered his suit hung on him as though on an old man. One of Clover’s vines punctured him at the neck.

The others were the same. Peggy and Megan’s eyes rolled back. They looked liked old ladies. Angelica worked up the courage to stare at her hand. Her skin clung to to her bones tight and wrinkled. She felt so dry, as if all the moisture was being sucked out of her body--which of course it was.

The runes beneath the ball guests glowed a bright red. Their offerings and suffering fed Clover. At the center, her body began to grow. Her once dull red hair snow himmered as it draped just above her shoulders. Her pale skin shifted in tone. As the vines twitched, the almost ghost-white of her flesh turned to a plantlike-green much like the stem of a spring flower.

“Yes!” she shouted. “I’ve never felt so energized before. Such vigor...”

Clover curled her toes into the smooth floor. Her strength was now enough for her toes to tear at it. She felt like dancing, and did a very small twirl one way than back the other--so as to not tangle her vines.

Angelica spoke, her voice now a whispered effort.

“Y-you. I don’t want to die. You witch.”

“Die?” said Clover. “Oh no, there’ll be no death anymore. No such thing exists in Hudraloth’s world, and neither will you perish in my flesh.”

“Your f-flesh? You sick twisted bi-”

Angelica fell over. Her body was done, drained dry as a husk to nurture Clover’s transformation. She was aware though: alive in a sense. She felt loose and light, yet constrained. She was surrounded on all sides by a tunnel of flesh: red and a bit greenish-yellow. It occurred to her she was in that tendril.

Her body--no, her soul, that’s what she was now--shimmered a dull blue. She was naked now, exposed. She tried to move or swim or float backward but it was no use. Some force pulled her deeper into Clover’s body. Worse still, she felt the walls in here. She’d bump against the interior of this vine now and again. It felt slick to her ghostly touch.

The witch felt the spirits as squirming bits of air. She could sense their every movement, flutter, and bit of pained discontent. It was lovely, but they hadn’t even settled yet.

Angelica emerged in some organ she couldn’t describe. There were walls of red-green-yellow flesh shifting. Only a few souls beat Angelica here: one of them Oliver’s. The blonde saw him there far in the distance stuck inside a blister-like construct. His original form was restored, albeit naked like her, and he pounded and thrashed against the inside of this supernatural cage.

Angelica knew Clover, that wench, that monster, was growing. She had to be, as the chamber of flesh expanded. Angelica found herself soaring towards the wall now. The witch’s laughter filled her ears.

“Ah Angelica, you’d like this. I know all they do now. Every memory, every skill, every bit of gossip. All of it’s mine as they writhe in my body like a bug in a pitcher plant. Oh if you only knew what Oliver thought of you~”

Angelica was stuck to the wall now. A hemispherical bubble grew around her, holding her snug in this living soul-cage. Like an open book, pages flying through the air, she felt herself exposed. Every secret of hers, every bit of her mind was now known by her captor.

Angelica felt pressure. Every movement of her ethereal form was a small burden now, but still she pressed up against the translucent container holding her spirit near Clover’s flesh. It wouldn’t budge.

“What?” she asked. “What does he think of me?”

Clover’s chuckle reverberated all around.

“You poor thing; as if I’d tell you! Why don’t you ask him yourself? You and all the other socialites have an entire eternity to gabber with one another now. An eternity within me.”

Angelica shouted to Oliver, professing her love--shallow though it may be, it still felt real to the 20 year old woman. It was something to cling to. Alas, he was too far away. He was out of ear range and only barely in sight: especially with the screaming of other souls drowning out her voice. Soon, the blonde quietly slumped in this new cell of hers.

Clover burgeoned up and out. The tomes by her toes got trod as she moved her feet to hold her balance. The sensations were unlike anything else. She felt alive, alert, and pleased beyond human bounds. The souls within their cages fidgeted nicely. Her awareness of her body reached heights she never thought possible. As her 5-and-a-half feet turned to 12, then 24, she experimented and found she could waggle her elbow much as she could a finger.

Not very useful, though it hinted to her how much she controlled her own body.

Clover’s dress stayed with her. It was no mere cloth, but now a part of her body. Fabric turned to flowery petals and leaves. Blossoms formed in her hair: begonias and bergenias, daffodils and daisies and flowers of all sorts. Those flowers were mostly green in tone to compliment the hair’s red. Those red-green tendrils coiled around her arms and legs like vines on trunks. Indeed, with how big she was growing, her arms and legs quickly reached that level of thickness and then surpassed it.

The magnificent mural adorning the ball room’s ceiling crumbled against Clover’s head and shoulders. Her head poked out from the collapsing roof and she took a deep breath of fresh air. For once, her lungs felt unstrained doing so.

The green-woman curled her arms, still growing, and her clenched fists ripped through the sides of the hall. By now, all the suits and dresses on the streets stared up at this disaster and the gigantic woman committing it.

Clover’s body finished ravaging Oliver’s manor. The dance hall was destroyed, and her first act as a 300ft (100m) giant was to waltz through the rest of the structure as though it were a paper doll house.

“Such strength~” she beamed. She hadn’t felt this alive since forever. Hudraloth’s promise was true. These souls innervated her with power and with life. That was Hudraloth’s domain after all: life. It’s why she choose them as her lord out of all the others.

The sun hit her green skin and the chlorophyll within her green-flesh soaked up its energy. Clover no longer feared its burns. She didn’t fear anything.

Chapter 3: Vigor

The people on the streets began to flee, but their fashions failed them. The rich were the first to stumble on the ruffles and flounces of their dress. Even men tripped by their heeled shoes. The poorer classes with less layers got away--for now.

Clover reached down and pinched up a man in a top hat and his fluffily-dressed wife. She brought them up from her light green toes all the way to her face. Her crimson tongue, slick with saliva poked out to lick at her dark-green lips. The duo were too shocked to scream, though the woman clutched her pearl necklace in horror.

“Forgive me~” boomed the green giant. “But I haven’t felt this hungry in ages.”

She opened wide. Her flesh was red; her tongue wet in anticipation. Yet, on the insides of her cheek lurked vines. Those mouth appendages shot out to pierce their chests. With gnarled thorned tips for grips, the limbs battered the morsels onto Clover’s tongue for a quick taste. Then, they tossed the pair right down her throat.

Already bleeding, Clover’s gullet took more with every contraction. Her body had transformed in more ways than just color after all, as those trapped souls could attest. She was to be the ultimate manifestation of Hudraloth’s blessing: a mixture of flesh and plant. The eldritch god got her started, but she saw fit to work in her own creativity as well.

Clover’s esophagus was alight with sourceless light. It was much like the cold dark flames the lord himself generated, only there were no embers to be seen. The couple, who just moments ago had been on an afternoon stroll, were now assailed at all ends by teeth. Sharp, canines--as all humans have in the top of their mouths. Here, they grew from the throat flesh. Each bony protrusion was coated in the natural slime of Clover’s throat. Each and every squeeze of that muscle pierced their skin and squeezed out another scream: another bout of suffering.

By the time they reached the plant-witch’s gut, they were already near death. Punctured more than pincushions, their blood pooled in a strange yellow fluid. Under the thick churning waters and dark light, tendrils slimy as algae wrapped on them and tugged them under to an acidic end.

Clover trailed her fingers along her stomach region. Her dress felt like taut cellulose now: that which makes up plant cells and exteriors. Its flowery nature merged with her, so she had some measure of feeling to it. It felt nice and smooth to the touch. It made her smile.

Clover always adored plants: she was named after one. Like many flowers, she was delicate--fragile. She was born sick and weak. Much of her life was spent this way, but then she discovered gardening and alchemy. A bit of herbs made her blood flow thicker, like a normal person’s. It gave her energy.

It wasn’t enough. From there, she pursued witchcraft, but it was mostly rumors, superstitions, and falsehoods. It was only in the deepest annals of forgotten libraries that she could find the knowledge she sought.

Few libraries would give her access. She simply purchased the institutions, fired those who hindered her, then plundered the volumes for her personal book collection. It was in there she learned to contact these higher, eldritch beings, and from Hudraloth in particular her sorceries.

The being of innumerable parts, Hudraloth was called. They taught her the first useful trick: how to transfuse another’s blood to her own. That alone earned them her admiration, and she devoted herself. She contacted her lord in rituals to learn ever more mysteries. It all accumulated to today, where she became something more than human.

Now she had a mission: to harvest souls on her lord’s behalf. She didn’t need to be ordered for that. That couple she ate had perished by now and her body eagerly ushered their spirits to a resting place in living cages. Each spirit filled her with energy and warmth: each one increased her power and helped unlock some new mystery of her body or the dark arts.

She’d put her capabilities to the test right now. There was a small mob of people running to the North just 500ft away. At her current size, this was just a few steps.

So, Clover stepped. Her light-green soles slammed down onto the cobblestone roads, utterly ruining them. She could go around, as the masses did. That would avoid a few buildings. But, the once towering structures now came up to her shins at best. They were easy enough to walk through, so why walk around? Why chore herself on behalf of those she would usher towards a new eternity anyways?

She took a step atop a steepled edifice. The point of its tower dulled harmlessly against her sole. All its focused pressure didn’t breach her soft green skin. A little more pressure on Clover’s end and the building collapsed. The souls within found no rest as they were lapped up into the skin of her ankle. Tugged through fleshy vessels, they joined the others.

Another step, then again. The density of the city was its downfall here. Her power, potential, and body increased with every life taken, yet the bigger she was the more she could take. She didn’t even unleash her full size. She wanted to experiment with her power some more, and she didn’t want to lose any precision by rushing to titanic scales. Only a few dozen more feet of height: that was the treat she allowed herself till she reached the mob.

“Relax, there’s no rush you little things.” said Clover. She loomed over one end of a city street. At the sides were buildings, every door was locked. At the other end was a two way junction in the cobble stone road, with a tall clocktower on the far side of that. The street, of course, was filled with humanity.

“And besides, there’s no where to go.”

Clover throw her arm forward and launched outwards those vines coiled around her wrist. The mob screeched as they flew overhead, far thicker than any rope they’ve seen. The appendages latched at the clocktower. Clover grabbed at her own vines and tugged, pulling the structure down and towards her to block the street’s exit.

“There, now stay put. I need to explore my powers. It’ll be a burden to you all, but in exchange you’ll get eternal existence. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

The mob was stuck, with her at one end and rubble on the other. None dared move closer to the towering woman who stood hundreds of feet tall. If not for the comparative petiteness of the middling structures, Clover wouldn’t be able to get in without crushing them.

Thankfully, she took dancing, as many of noble blood did. As such, she put one foot in front of the other so that her legs barely brushed the building’s exteriors. That was enough to sheer them regardless, but as small as the structures were the resulting rubble didn’t kill her quarries. They’d live long enough for her purposes.

She bent her knee to bear down at them. The pack was diverse in dress and class. A rare sight in London these days. It must’ve been dozens strong. Every one of them was scantly an inch compared to her: hardly bigger than a toe. She felt their hearts thump with fear. She sensed the pleasant hum of their souls. It took every fiber of her restraint not to whip out some of her innumerable vines and drink them all dry of their rushing blood, but she managed.

The mob started to move backwards and away. One woman ran, so Clover lashed out at that one. A vine with its roots in her left wrist snagged the runner. An example would suffice: a drink to quench her thirst. A flex of the limb and the woman’s foot squeezed right off. The tip of that fine vine wiggled into the freshly gaping leg-hole.

Amid the woman’s screams, Clover spoke. “So often we think of only dirt when it comes to gardening, but many plants can grow in other places. The human body can be just as fertile as good soil.”

She giggled, then worked the vine to raise the woman up and wave her about like some macabre finger-puppet. The green giant drained her prey in a flash, and the freshly emaciated body burst open as many more vines grew and fractaled off the one’s tip.

“Everyone else stay put now.”

Emerald eyes scanned for the first subject: a nice, healthy young man aged 20 or so. He seemed poor, based on his rags, but in good spirits. Probably a beggar or shoe shinier. She reached towards him with a finger longer than he was tall.

“Hold still.”

He failed of course, shivering like a nudist in winter--but he didn’t run, and that’s what mattered. She brought her finger up to his face. Its surface was smooth and whorled. He reached out to touch it as though to shove it away, and Clover smirked at how pathetic his strength felt. She sent a command to her body and her fingerprint twitched. The ridges of the digit’s pattern shifted, shook, and then shot a puff of yellow dust into the man’s face: a pollen, of sorts.

It got in his eyes and nose. It touched at the skin of his face and sunk in. It went through his blood and every cell in his form. Most importantly, the dust reached his brain. The poor thing began to twitch and shutter. Clover giggled. So far so good. She leaned back a bit to watch the show.

The others surrounding the poor man crowded away. Clover slipped some vines behind them to keep them a little penned.

“Easy, don’t go too far. You’re part of this experiment too you know.”

The man clutched his head, screaming and yelping. Cracking sounds rung out from his skull. His form vibrated at speeds never thought possible for a human. Indeed, his body wasn’t equipped for that so his head popped like a cherry. Blood splattered the others, and he slumped to his knees.

Clover felt his soul flow into her, yet still he twitched.

Body still shaking, things sprouted. They eschewed the stain of his blood as they stretched out from his neck hole: tufty white filaments on brown, fleshy stalks.

“Oh joy, it looks just like a dandelion doesn’t it? It has pappi and everything.” said Clover, pointing at the white tufts. She shifted down onto her stomach and destroyed the buildings on either side of the street beneath her bulk. Stretched out, she curled her toes, kicked her legs, and penned the rest in with her arms now.

Twitching, always twitching, the dandelion man rose up. The crowd stumbled back, but Clover’s arm vines nudged one brunette next to this experiment of hers. He bumped into her and immediately yanked one of the pappi from his head. The base of the brown stalk wriggled with three gnarling, sharp ‘roots’. He jammed it into the woman’s skull.

All screamed, but Clover’s laughter dwarfed their voices.

“Oh my~”, she said. “Let’s see if things go according to expecta-Yes!”

The woman’s body twitched as well, her own head vibrating open to burst as a gourd. She was like him now, another dandelion zombie. She went after her husband first, plunging one of her head-stalks into his chest.

The original dandelion man stabbed another two people with his head tufts before Clover pinched him up. His ‘head’ held to pursed lips, she blew facing the crowd. His pappi flew off, as a normal dandelion’s did. These fluttering stalks weren’t aimless, they sought blood. The eager ‘roots’ of the things twisted and shifted to direct themselves towards the nearest bits of living meat. Like that, Clover had infected the rest of the crowd.

She pressed her hands against the street and rubble and rose back up. The crowd was twice more plant zombie than it was not, so it’d take care of itself.

“Wonderful, now with a strong breeze, I know the entire city could get infected. Saves work on my end.”

She watched this crowd of subjects filter out through the rubble to the adjacent streets every which way. She smiled again at her cleverness.

Clover’s ear twitched. There were rhythmic steps coming from her left: marching. A turn of her head and, sure enough, members of her majesty’s army were on the way.

“Oh joy.” she boomed. Clover clapped her hands together in glee.

“Toy soldiers~”

Chapter 4: Sap

It was only a small contingent. Just a couple hundred men dressed in red. Some had medals, but all had fanciful hats and a working rifle. It was nothing too spectacular. Clover pouted, a tad offended at such a low turnout.

No matter, they were enough to entertain. The troops were clumped in formation 1000ft away or so. The plant-woman monstrosity grew a bit with each step. The energies the souls offered was immense. She wondered how long a single spirit could power a train? She was sure if the industry barons had the know how, they’d be shoveling their ancestor’s immortal souls instead of coal in those furnaces.

Clover drew upon them as a colossus about 500ft (152m) in height. She loved how every single step of hers had them cringing. Some building blew up under every footfall. Most structures were shorter in height than her peds were long.

“Just this morning.” she said, her voice thundering louder than the booms of their rifles. “I was the frailest woman in the aristocracy. Now, an army shorter than my toes is sent to deal with me.”

She chuckled.

Just two steps away from the force, a great burst rattled the air. It was a canon, towards the back of the formation. She wasn’t paying attention and didn’t dodge. The black iron sphere ripped through the plant-flesh of her left arm and exited from the other end of the limb. It left an open hole that quickly stitched itself up with vine-like veins (or vein-like vines, they couldn’t tell) crisscrossing one another.

“Ack, you ungracious weasels!” She yelled. It didn’t hurt, but the notion they’d harm her had her seething. Thoughts of her past vulnerability flashed through her eyes. Having to be careful around every pin or needle or jagged nail; having to ration her limited energy. She wouldn’t go back to that.

She took those two steps, then loomed her foot over the troops to snuff them out. Light green sole flesh drew down towards them. They shrieked out and raised their arms. But, she paused before crushing them: a plopping noise had rung out. A drop of her ‘blood’ fell from her left arm onto the ground, splashing some of the front line.

No longer was her vital fluid red and thin, but yellow, translucent and thick: sap. This sap of hers coated no less than three men, who promptly began to moan in agony. Their garbs sizzled as the liquid seeped through it to touch at their flesh.

One man’s shoulder erupted as flesh-colored limbs burst forth. Thick as arms, fist-sized teeth stuck out at the ends. Their first order of business was tearing open the throat of the human they sprouted from. That done, they reached forward and grew. Clover saw now it was a hand of sorts: the limbs were its fingers, and the ‘palm’ burst out from the man’s right-upper-torso like a bird from an egg. A fang maw adorned its belly as it crawled about with a whip-like tail of veins. It snarled and jumped onto the man immediately behind its ‘host’. There, it began chewing and drawing attention.

The second man was stained with Clover’s sap head to toe. Rather than incubate some horrible flesh-beast, he simply became one. His neck stretched out, and his collarbone to the tip of his head split into a fanged maw: thin and long with razor sharp teeth. His arms became whips of veins. His knees bent like springs, and he launched up into the air to pounce on his former brothers in arms. He could chomp down two or three in one bite.

This last gentleman merely had his face splashed. It melted, and from its front sprouted flailing, bone-bladed tendrils. He spun around in circles to decapitate the compatriots at his sides.

Clover removed her foot from above them and set it to the side with a thud. They were focused on fighting off their own now; just the three mutants she made had the squad occupied. It must’ve taken 50 or more bayonet stabs to bring the first mutant down, all the while Clover watched giddy as ever.

“An accidental discovery! Seems my blood--no, my sap--is blessed. You three were endowed with boons of Hudraloth’s minions: although I suppose you’re my minions more than theirs. It’s better that way. Were you competition, I might have to snuff you out~”

The cannon at the back was lit again, but this time Clover was ready. She flooded the barrel of the contraption with vines from her wrists, causing it to blowback and rupture. Hot fragments of cannon metal hit the operators to either side of the device. Her vines were burnt and shredded, but they grew back before the eyes of the troops. Those cannoneers could not grow back their ruptured organs or missing limbs.

“Marvelous~” she quipped. “I never would’ve thought to make myself bleed. Due to your aggression, I’ve another interesting bit of knowledge. As thanks, I’ll make your deaths quick.”

Clover lifted her foot and stomped. It wasn’t a slow savory thing, but quick and hurried as though a slippery spider were besmirching the floor and simply had to be dealt with then and there. Every step was a quake and an infusion of dozens of souls into her form. There were more canons, about the only thing that hurt her--the rifles were useless. Unfortunately for them, that artillery fell over from the thooming thuds of her steps. She worked front to back meticulously mashing them all to paste. The second and third minions of hers were caught under heel and burst as well.

She looked down at the macabre aftermath. The souls were hers and utilized, but the bodies were wasted. Her skin was clear of the mess: her body actively repulsed it for whatever reason.

“If only there was a way to put this all to use. Ah, of course. I’m a witch after all, I should be able to conjure what I desire.”

She foolishly hadn’t tried any magic yet. Now, she had another perfect idea. Clover’s arm was healed by now. She moved her palm over the mashed body-pulp and focused. From the tip of her index finger sprouted a vein--or a vine. To her, the distinction mattered less. In any case, it was red and green and wiggled a bit. The vessel squeezed out a drop of her sap onto the great puddle of gore.

Her emerald eyes dimmed black as they always did with her spells. She uttered words that boomed. The syllables were like a jagged, wet rendition of Latin. The bit of sap dissolved into the viscera and blood, and the whole mess rose as yeast in an oven.

Of this messy mass, the blood congealed and flesh restitched and regrew. What was once the mangled and pulped bodies of hundreds of soldiers grew up into a great blob of flailing limbs, myriad eyes, and dozens of flesh maws each rife with gnashing teeth. One hundred feet tall, it slithered up to Clover’s leg and nuzzled the top of its bulbous form beneath her knee.

She bent over to pat it. “Ah, my finest pet yet. Kill. Kill everyone so I may claim their souls. Its time to finish this city.”

It made some horrid sound best described as a coo, then rushed through buildings at the nearest crowds. Its bulky bottom tapered to a snake-like tail, and it pounced atop the masses to crush them beneath its bulk. Its limbs and teeth did quite a number: Clover could tell as her power grew with every soul. She could see the blue spirits sift through the air.

Why shouldn’t everyone else? She felt a weakening in the boundary between life and death and tugged at it with her will. Now, all the citizens of London could stare up and watch the souls of their kin flow into her body. They’d see this miraculous and grand harvest of hers in all its glory.

Clover closed her eyes and focused. She channeled more of the might stored within. All those souls, stuck in their flesh-bubbles deep in her body, shuddered as the fleshy soul-trapping organ grew and grew. Clover’s light-green feet burst through rubble and buildings as she erupted to an astounding height of one mile (1.6km): over ten times her old height.

“There we go. Now, to reap all the city has.”

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.

Chapter 6: Novelty

20XX, London, England

Her foot landed smack dab in one of the denser bits of this new city. Dozens of those tall and shining buildings she saw in her scrying crumbled beneath her fern-green sole. She sighed, for her first step into this new universe was a fun one indeed.

The other foot followed.

“Oh my, such density. And I thought things were overcrowded in my world.”

Behind the mile tall form of clover loomed that gaping portal. She mulled over the difficult decision of whether to close it or not. As things currently were, she assumed the entire planet she left behind would be infected by her dandelion zombies. They’d find their way onto a ship at some point.

Still, some people from there could perhaps run in here, or some people in here could run back to her home universe. Maybe the connection would destabilized both universes? She couldn’t get stuck in some sort of malformed space without the power to break free, could she?

She decided to close it; it was as easy as zipping a coat. She could always reopen that rift later to collect the harvest of souls she reaped.

Her attention shifted back to the city.

“What amazing sights!” she said. The flower-dressed colossus raised her plant-green hand to her red bangs and looked around. Back home, few buildings crested her ankles, yet here plenty did. Metal contraptions soared through the sky as birds. No carriages to be seen, just wheeled metal constructs. She simply had to know all about this.

As luck would have it, a mass of people cowered by her feet. People were everywhere! She could smell them: there were millions. Millions of souls ripe for the taking. She’d only need one to gleam its memories and knowledge. Just now the causalities from her first steps reached her soul gut, and she was flooded with information.

At her home, no one knew anything of use to her. She assimilated enough gossip that’d Angelica would seethe with envy, sure, but she was the only real witch back in her London. Fashion tricks and business secrets served her little then and now.

In this London, however, the average citizen knew many things. They held advancements in mathematics and science to get her caught up a bit. Of course, they had some history knowledge as well. She learned that the current year here was more than one hundred ahead of her older London. In a flash, they taught her more than the best tour guide ever could.

From these ‘modern’ souls she learned that those metal birds were called planes and they were rife with people. Trains were around, though underground at times. Most buildings were made like the ones she stepped on: tall and rectangular as it was efficient for space. She learned a great many things indeed. People rode trains underground now. There were all sorts of newfangled weapons. Women could vote!

Most surprising to her about this new world was how people dressed. Squinting, she saw how the women and men wore such few garbs. It was spring here as it was at home: blue skies and warm weather. Many of the woman wore trousers--trousers. Some didn’t even wear that! They had trousers cut above the thighs--they were fittingly called ‘shorts’. Others wore skirts still, but very short.

Clover found herself liking this new carefree style.

“My my, what a scandalous future. I quite like it! Give me a moment and I’ll change to better fit in~”

Clover twirled. A bit of residual pollen fell to the winds. At the same time, her dress rose up till the hem came mid thigh. No longer hooped, the thin petal-like ‘garb’ rested loosely against her green skin like a short half-slip. Her legs were almost completely bare now.

The upper piece of her floral ‘outfit’ of plant-flesh also shifted. Her sleeves shrunk to the point of disappearing. She dissolved the cellulose-matter coating her stomach region, and her taut green tummy basked in the glow of the sun. She tried out one of these ‘spaghetti tops’, letting straps of vine coil about her shoulders to hold the red-petaled top over her bosom.

She spun again: no more pollen spreading, for now. Her body now consisted of this new petal skirt and top with red-green vines twisting and shifting around her limbs. She looked much like some sort of nature god; if only those poor folks knew how far she was from ‘natural’. The witch had so many wonderfully horrific ideas on how to level this new city.

But first, it was time to grow.

Clover clapped her hands together. “Oh you can’t imagine what a day this has been so far, or how jubilant I am to meet you all. Such a big a bustling city this London has become.”

She sighed, then pentupled her height without warning.

Green toes now loomed over all but the tallest structures. They grew out with the rest of her feet to bulldoze the blocks around her entrance. As before, her body grew in proportion, and she treated much of London to the visually arresting sight of a near-naked, growing plant-woman.

Theories abounded as to who she was. Some agent of nature to punish their sins? Did they disrespect of mother earth with their overindulgence of plastic-bottled sodas? She gleamed much of these conjectures from the fresh souls flowing into her. They amused her.

“I’m sure you are all rife with questions. I will answer all in one fell swoop.”

She walked forward, her bare feet cleaving through and settling atop dozens of skyscrapers at a time. Blue outlines of humans--souls--flew up into her ankles. A snap of her fingers and it was visible here too: the barrier between the dead spirits and the living was thinner than paper and 10 times weaker to her will.

“You are all going to be granted eternity within me. It’s so easy! Just throw yourself at my feet. There’s no need to wait~”

She chuckled.

“Or stay where you are, or run, or hide. It matters not.”

The tentacular vines around her legs and arms began to stir.

“I’ll root you out wherever you are.”

The appendages grew sharp rotating teeth at their tips just before they hit the earth. Spinning like drill bits, the pointed pseudo-bones easily tore up the city’s foundation. The vines split and spread as they burrowed. Entire blocks rumbled as the appendages stirred beneath foundation before bursting out in a shower of rubble and red-green plant-flesh.

Any poor fools who survived the eruptions got tangled in all the new plants around them. Each one was a danger. Thin vines choked life out of them. Home-sized blossoms sprayed acidic nectar down as rain. Growths like pitcher plants, tall as skyscrapers, leaned forward to engulf mobs of people.

Clover closed her eyes and savored it. She felt it: all of it. Her vines where connected to these rooted patches of colors and green. She directed them and controlled them. Her presence had extended beyond her main body. Even when she cut her own vines to move more freely, she still felt them. They didn’t feed her main body this way unfortunately, but these ‘gardens’ of hers fed themselves nonetheless and spread. Besides, long as the souls all flew to her, it didn’t matter.

Oh how the souls flowed. She was unstoppable. A megalith. Her feet smothered dozens of blocks at once. They marshaled an army against her. It had tanks and snipers and rockets and all sorts of wonderful things she just learned about. All of them snuffed out beneath her steps.

The jets were trickier. That’s what they called the fast war planes. They flew at her and pelted her with bullets and missiles. Unlike the cannonball from before, these did nothing. Her magics had advanced to a point where she could enchant herself from harm. Even if she couldn’t, the softness of her green flesh belied its toughness. She was simply insurmountable.

Still, such effrontery was not to be tolerated. She opened her mouth as the jets passed by and sucked several in. They grew wise to that, and kept more of a distance. She adapted by opening her mouth wide and tall and lashing at them with the building-thick tendrillic vines resting within. They were coated with sticky nectar and brought the bounties into her mouth where a swallow handled the rest.

Very soon, they stopped sending planes at her.

She continued her stroll, taking in the sights as a curious tourist. It was one thing to learn of this world through the thousands of souls her body lapped up and stuffed aside: to see it in person was another matter.

She spoke, her voice a natural boom.

“Such splendor. And to think, you all live down there, groveling at my feet and foliage. The view up here is much better up here. If I didn’t know better, it’s as if you designed this sight just for me. It’s mine nevertheless, of course.”

She spotted Big Ben again and the fanciful hall it was attached to. Seems this universe’s version remained intact. Made sense, as it hadn’t run into her: until now.

Before she needed her whole foot to flatten the clocktower: here a toe would suffice. She set its soft plush pad at the steepled top. Another booming chuckle rang out. Clover could not help herself. It was brittle as sand. Everything here was. Her power was lovely, but absurd in its own way.

The steeple crumbled at a slight touch. She pressed down, twisted, and thus smeared the tower to naught. A slam of her foot and the attached hall crumbled under the rest of her sole.

She sighed.

“Lovely~”

Just across the river Thames she spotted a new wonder: some giant latticed wheel. It was that London Eye the souls knew about. They hadn’t invented this yet where she came from. She wanted a closer look.

She dipped her toe in the river. It was cold and shallow, and hardly wide enough for one toe let alone two. Her body lapped up a bit of the water. Rather than cross the river, she instead reached out towards the great big Ferris wheel with a vine sprouting from around her waist. The great big red-green limb burst through the constructs center. Ringed around the vine, she brought the wheel to her mouth for a closer look.

Her eyes studied it and, with a finger, she gave it a twirl. A few poor sods were stuck on the thing, and didn’t survive the centrifugal force she kicked up with that casual flick.

“Neat~” she said, before sliding her vine into her gob and swallowing the attraction down whole.

Souls flooded into her from her latest deeds, and even more were on the way. She had learned from them and earlier ones of a dangerous type of weapon: nuclear warheads.

She thought nothing of it. By the time they’d think to use it, it’d be too late. Already her gardens were spreading. They grew even more grisly as they crept over block after block. The color tones shifted to those of flesh: from green to red and fair-tones. The plants grew sharper teeth. Her presence was infecting the planet.

She also sent out seeds like samaras--those winged ‘copter’ seeds which spin down from maple trees. Once landed, they could sprout gardens farther than she cared to make her vines reach.

In her ‘gardens’, many stalks grew puffs like the dandelion-beings from her original London. These were more aerodynamic and modeled after the planes Clover saw. The slightest gust could carry them hundreds of miles. Several flew far, far south over the English channel to France. Altogether, they took root and sprouted more gardens, which in turn sprouted more of these pappi creations and so on and so on.

What would the humans do? Nuke the entire planet? By the time they’d agree to that, her vines would be crawling up their noses. Her presence was already too pervasive. Even if they scorched the surface, her growths lingered underground.

To be on the safe side though, she set a hex throughout a several hundred mile radius. It was a simple spell at this point. She spoke the words and waggled her fingers and nothing could fly within that invisible sphere but her and her minions.

It was a broad incantation, and dozens of planes filled with evacuees tumbled to their doom. Unlike the birds, they couldn’t exactly glide down to safety. They were much too heavy.

With all that business taking care of, Clover decided to allow herself a few more bits of enjoyment before rending this city to dust. She had learned from the absorbed souls of a most fantastic building called a ‘stadium’. Like a roman coliseum, but for safer sports! How fanciful and indulgent. She set her eyes on such a building now and walked towards it.

She knew from all these new souls that it was considered a ‘shelter’ during this time. How foolish of people to gravitate there. How foolish of them to gravitate anywhere with her around.

Chapter 7: Fun

At her size, she was upon the stadium within half-a-minute. Her steps were catastrophic as usual, and the city bore the brunt of them. Clover deliberately stepped over her expanding gardens of course, which meant her feet had to fall somewhere and that was usually on the trappings of humanity.

Clover set her naked peds hundreds of feet away from the stadium yet straddled it all the same. The structure was pathetic and about half the size of a tea-plate to her. Hands clapped over her waist, she bent over to get a closer look, and some green petals fell from the flowers in her bright red hair. They were the most delicate things, but each loomed as tall as a house. The wind spared the evacuees from all but one.

That single petal--a trifle to Clover--crushed dozens of citizens. They could see it coming: it was aerodynamic and fell slowly as any petal would. That didn’t matter when every human being inside was packed likes sardines. They trampled one another to get out of the way and to buy a little more time. The dynamic in there was as a fluid. When someone moved, someone had to take their place, and those that did were crushed under countless tons of plant-matter if panicked feet didn’t get them first.

The mob trampled trying to get out too, but Clover put a stop to that. A vine from her ankle dug a deep hole into the parking lot. Clover was being delicate, oh so delicate. Even still, the surrounding structures crumbled to the underground movements. Petals sprouted from the earth to surround the stadium. They folded over the building in a reverse bloom of sorts, though not so much that a ceiling formed.

With that, Clover had her next experiment subjects secured.

“Salutations~” she said. “I hope you don’t mind helping me out with something. As a reward, you’ll get to live a bit longer. You’ll also be helping advance the most important field of biology...”

The green titaness carefully sat down. A bit of destruction was inevitable, of course, but she didn’t want to break this neo-coliseum of hers. Her red petal skirt fell over more than one dozen blocks, and even her petite rump had enough mass behind it, at this size, to smash everything beneath it to a crater.

“...my biology, that is.” Clover covered her mouth for a dainty giggle.

She started scooting forward with her palms and shifts of her heels. At this point, she fortified the foundation of the stadium with her vines below the city. It wasn’t going to collapse anymore, though every deep tremor of her movements had all the poor souls trapped inside thinking elsewise.

Their fear had an odor to it. Sweet and alluring. Clover found it useful for what she had in store.

Her shadow was upon them. Her lithe legs were thicker than the building was tall. Soon, the masses saw the green of her thighs tower over the edges of the stadium. A powerful, sweet floral scent hit their nostrils. The plant-witch had the minuscule little coliseum positioned directly below her crotch. The warmth of her sex washed over them.

“I hope you don’t think this improper.” began Clover.

The petals of her skimpy flower skirt folded upwards before dissolving into her body entirely. Her lower body was naked now sans a few vines wrapped about her waist and legs.

“I’ve learned so much from your souls. Your culture is... interesting. I’m not from this time, you know. I do applaud your open approach to sexuality. Back in my London...”

she cleared her throat and talked in a low voice, as though it were the utmost scandal.

“...masturbation was very taboo. They called it onanism for men and for us gals, well, they could hardly stand to think it existed.” she chuckled. “I admire this new world where lascivious cogitations are treated so openly. I mean, those ‘TV’ ads you have are more scandalous than much of the drawn pornography I’ve ever seen.”

People figured what she had in mind. More trampling occurred. All exits were blocked by the walls of petals or vines. There was no escape.

“Anyways, you’ll all be helping me test the effects of my vaginal fluids on organic tissue. Rejoice!”

Clover had another chuckle at their expense before getting to work. She slid green fingers past green folds. Being 5 miles tall, Clover’s crotch easily loomed over the stadium as a monster in its own right. The densely packed mob of thousands sweltered in its heat, bathed in its scent and heard every echoing schlicking of its flesh. The organ was deeper than they could see: a great, unending cave. Its walls shimmered with some amber fluid.

Clover grunted in frustration. The ground shook as she idly shifted her posture, hoping that would help. Her titanic finger teased at her clit to no avail.

“Ah, this is embarrassing. It seems my mood isn’t high enough yet.” She sighed. “Now, you may not have guessed it, it’s very improper for a lady but, I’m something of a sadist; it’s true. Oh the things I used to do to the courtesans I hired...” she giggled, reminiscing.

“I thought smelling your fear and having you all penned up like this would be enough, but it seems otherwise. I hope you don’t mind being a more active party here do you? It’ll reduce your crowding, that’s for sure.”

Their screams picked up. Nice, but not enough for her libido to jump start. The vines by the entrance crept inwards. These were the thinnest offshoots from that building-thick one she had attached to her ankle: the one keeping the petal prison walls up around the stadium. Minute to Clover, these vines were thick as pythons and easily wrapped around whatever bits of the crowd they brushed against. Ironic that those closest to the exits would be dying first.

The red-green appendages grabbed their prizes and squeezed. Like pythons, they coiled about the arms and legs and neck of their victim. Unlike a snake, they sprouted tiny thorny bristles on their surface. From these, Clover sampled their delicious blood.

“Mmm~” she purred. Though it wasn’t too refreshing at her size, the taste was lovely. Her hand got back to work again as those vines did their thing. She had enraptured at least one hundred of the poor fools. As her mood steadily rose, she started cracking bones with the strength of the appendages.

“Amf, so helpless. So fragile. I feel every bit of your joints pop~”

Tremors increased with the shifting of her thighs. She worked more digits into her sex, and rubbed the shaft of her index finger against her sensitive clit.

“Ah, all this exertion is getting me a tad peckish~” she teased.

One more vine slipped in. This one was bigger, the thickness of a human. From its tip sprouted a flower of Clover’s own design. It was symmetrical and shaped vaguely like a coffin. There was even a spot for a man’s head at the top. The petals were a dark red and black, and they parted to reveal something more akin to a maw than a flower. Some people figured out that this horrid plant-flesh was based on an iron-maiden: a rumored torture device of the middle ages.

Sharp spikes of teeth extended from just one of the two petal folds. The pointed things dripped acidic nectar that sizzled to the turf of the stadium field. Many were singed by its droplets as it fanned through the crowds as a great serpent. She was hunting for the perfect meal, and found him soon enough. A nice, buff, bodybuilder of a man. The stem lashed at him with little tongue-vines and roped him in. His screams grew muffled when the petal snapped over him.

Those sharp teeth pierced his body from chest to waist. The acidic nectar ate at his insides. The petal coverings on the head area were thin enough that the entire crowd could make out his pained expressions.

Fear was reaching a crescendo. She hated to admit it, but the scent of it was more enticing than even the sweetest flower of her old garden. She couldn’t resist snapping those vined up evacuees like twigs. The sound of their shattered spines sent pleasant shivers down her own.

The souls flooded in: blue outlines of humanity, visible to all. Reaching their cages in that great fleshy soul-gut of hers, she assimilated all they knew. They hid no secrets, and she now had the perspective from her victims of her masturbatory session. Oh how her sex loomed. Oh the pain they felt: the raw agony that thrummed through their minds. Thoughts of lose and envy and impotent hate. They writhed like worms as souls now, lamenting this eternity before them.

Clover moaned. She ground her thighs into the earth. The quakes of her ecstasy ravaged the bits of city on the other side of the River Thames. She dissolved her top as well. The spaghetti-strapped petal-construct melted away. Vines on her arms uncoiled to squeeze at her breasts and titillate her dark-green areolae.

She was near climax. One more bit of cruelty should do it. One more vine, thin as a rope, slithered into the stadium. With its needle-like tip, it jabbed into some unfortunate sod and injected him with a pernicious toxin. His skin sloughed off like snow from a windshield and he fell to the ground screaming.

That did it.

Clover’s pussy twitched. Her lustful cry burst eardrums. Out from her quivering loins gushed a spurt of golden, cloying liquid. It wasn’t much, but at her scale it was enough to slather the entire stadium and its surroundings.

She fanned herself with her hand, panting. “Oh my what fun. Time to see the results now~”

The titaness leaned in to get a closer look. Alas, even with her senses the resolution wasn’t quite enough. She wiggled in some more vines into the stadium from above. They coiled around the high seats and sprouted not flowers, but extra eyes: green and pretty as hers. Now she had the perfect view.

What a sight it was. Her femfluid was merely sticky at first, but then it began to settle. All the people caught in its tide found themselves swimming slower and slower till their limbs couldn’t move. The consistency shifted from liquid to jelly to a solidified substance in the span of 20 or so seconds.

Clover’s myriad eyes widened. “Impressive. Seems my fluids there are some sort of resin.” She laughed. “Just look at you, like bugs stuck in amber.”

She watched till the last trapped fool expired. Their souls filled up more of the flesh-cages for spirits deep in her body. Their memories of being washed in her tides of bliss made her after-glow all the more exquisite.

“Fun and informative. Delightful, but I think it’s time to be done with this city. I’ll leave your solidified corpses here as a monument to my ecstasy--for now.”

The towering plant-witch rose up, still stark naked. It was time to fully destroy this city and take all it had to offer. She just had to think of how. She mused aloud to herself.

“I could grow again, but that’s a bit boring. I could spread my gardens a bit faster: also boring and they’ll get all the city along with the world on their own with enough time. Hmmm.”

She tapped her foot as she spoke, kicking up small earthquakes throughout the metropolis. Buildings crumbled to them, and it gave her an idea.

“Ah of course, a nice bit of witchcraft should do the trick. I keep forgetting the dark arts at my disposal, what with how destructive my mere body has become.”

Clover snapped her fingers and a ferocious spell cascaded from her nude form. This was visible: a crackling red energy over a hemispherical shockwave of shimmering sorcery. The energy past through buildings and her gardens without harm, yet any human caught in the explosion had their very blood roil to a boil.

To boil blood was one of the more advanced forms of witchcraft. She had only done it once before: on one of her guards who caught her with her tomes. It was a bit of a panic, and the energy the spell commanded had her bedridden for a day after. Now? Washing the entire city with its effects was a literal snap.

Souls flew to her from the vast radius of inner and outer London. The already blue sky shined bluer as they sifted towards her. The tug of her body was inescapable. Indulged by their power, she felt an immense infusion of vigor and power.

“Not enough.” she said. “Still not enough.” She couldn’t yet rip apart the veil to Hudraloth’s realm. Must she really visit another world? This task seemed so far. She wondered if it were possible even with the billions of souls offered on this Earth. She’d take them nonetheless in time, but was it worth waiting to get them all now?

“I suppose I must travel to a new world. Very well.” She took one last look around before scrying out her next stop. The solidified humans in her femfluid caught her eye again.

She had an idea.

All this time, she left her imprisoned souls within a bubble-like cage of flesh within her form. There, she felt the souls move about and fidget. From her knowledge in physics, she knew those movements meant something though: wasted energy.

So, she’d freeze them in place. Just like her climax did those pitiful humans earlier.

Within her soul gut, a golden fluid began to fill all those millions and millions of spirit containers. The souls worked themselves up in a frenzy. They felt violated before, their knowledge and history exposed, but this was another level. This fluid wasn’t just physical, but ethereal. A design of Clover’s own and soon as a single bit of their ghostly bodies touched the stuff, they was stuck.

They pounded on the impenetrable, clear walls of their cells. They flew far from the undulating walls of flesh this syrupy substance poured from. All in vain. They couldn’t get out of that bubble, and the soul resin hardened till they could no longer move.

They were awake though--alert and conscious. Clover got more out of them that way: and she liked the idea of it. All those souls, expressions frozen in horror, trapped within her as batteries for her powers.

What she drew from them doubled from this optimization. She cackled aloud in a dead city with no one around to hear her. The nation’s government had given the city up to fight the expanding gardens in their other settlements.

“Such energy. Let’s see.” she closed her eyes and focused on that veil of reality.

Not enough.

She’d have to find another world to plunder. She was sick of waiting. Clover didn’t want to be some universal tourist. She wanted that power: the power to bridge the primordial chaos into ordered reality. The power to bend all of reality to her whims.

Hudraloth was waiting after all. She reached out with her mind to peer at connected universes and found she could see them clearer than ever. While this planet and her home planet expired, she would finish off a super-dense Earth herself.

It was much easier to sift through all these choices compared to before. Clover found the perfect one. This newer London seemed shiny and chrome and much like the visions of a future Earth. It’d be lush with humans.

She opened a miles wide rift and stepped through.

Chapter 8: Future

40XX, London, England

Over half a miles worth of foot slammed down onto shimmering chrome. Another foot followed. Clover finished stepping through the rift and sealed it behind her.

Before her was an endless expanse of chrome and silver and steel. There wasn’t a single blade of grass in sight, let alone a tree. She was confident she was the first green thing these people had seen in countless years. These humans of the future had optimized their existence and packed themselves densely into near-equally dense spires of shiny metal. Not a smidge of the Earth was wasted, and they harvested most of the planet’s energy with all sorts of machines and power plants.

Her first steps had claimed tens of thousands of lives, and their souls joined the others to be solidified in that ‘amber’ as all spirits now were. Their knowledge flooded her.

What she learned was so marvelous she couldn’t help but speak aloud. “No way. I must see this for myself, with my own eyes.”

Clover channeled her power and grew. She had been saving up this height for some time. She didn’t stop till she was tens of miles in height and she saw the curvature of the Earth. With her sight, she even saw over the English channel into the next country full of endless chrome and gray.

That was what the world was now: cities. Every square inch of the planet was habituated by humans. They ate from processed food that had ingredients from vats, not fields. Long chrome bridges spanned the continents like ropes. Some were for cars, most were for high-speed trains of people and goods. Even at a divine vantage point she couldn’t spot the tiniest bit of flora: or any life, really, other than the humans and this techno moss they thrived in.

She spoke, using her sorcery to spread her words across the globe. The minor gesticulations that accompanied rumbled the Earth with her shifting weight.

“You poor things, you’ve never even seen a real flower have you? Only pictures and videos are left of them here. And the fashion: full body suits. What a downgrade. I’ve seen more constricting outfits though, believe me.”

She laughed, and the thoom shook snow off mountains.

“Don’t you worry, I’ll show you all the splendors of nature: my nature. Consider it a blessing before you join the other spirits within me.”

Clover looked down at her feet. They rested miles long over much of what used to be called London. Now? It was part of the endless Earth City that knew no borders but the sky and the stars. She wiggled her toes and felt thousands more souls add to her power.

Her legs shifted, vibrating at vast speeds. They unfurled, though not to gore and viscera but to a fantastical array of vines and petals. From the waist down her body turned to this: a twisting throng of stems and roots. Green and red, the limbs dug into the land beneath her.

The main isle of the United Kingdom erupted. That was to be the primary rooting location of hers. Settling into it cost billions of lives. It was a bounty of spirits she supped up with eager ease. The thickly barked roots of hers almost looked safe once they settled, and hundreds ran to them for shelter. Foolish, as a single touch against the bark sucked them in as more nutrients.

Once rooted, her body shifted again. She formed downwards facing petals with an open hem at the front. It was much like a dress-skirt save it didn’t cover her front at all, and only came half-way down the mass of vines and roots her ‘legs’ had become. Her upper-body remained bare, but four monolithic petals sprouted from her back. They were as the wings of a fae in shape and colored bright red with hints of pink.

“I know your satellites can see me as am I now. Am I not gorgeous? Are my colors not beautiful to you? Ah, just now I absorbed a soul who saw. As predicted, I am divine in my splendor.”

“And my power~”

She spread her arms wide as if offering the planet a gift. Vines shot out from the throng beneath her waist and from the coils about her arms. She spread her tentacle-like stems far and wide. They slammed into the epicenters of cities. Where Paris used to be now had a thick, pulsing vine digging into its center. The impact into the dense super-city another 10 million souls: all hers.

She could grow these vines much quicker than her entire body, and soon they spanned to what used to be Spain and Poland. Soon after that, and she reached as far as Russia with these appendages then farther still.

Vines slithered into the inter-continental transport tunnels. Their sheer bulk mashed everything inside before they coiled around and burst apart the great passageways. Through these, she reached the America region as that was easier than burrowing into the salt waters of the ocean.

Billions of souls flew into her at a time. Once she had her reach onto every landmass, she spoke.

“Behold. My green. My glory. Gaze and experience the wonderful creations of my body: more beautiful and splendid than any flower of old.”

The ground erupted in green from her vines. They were fields of grass, wild flowers and three-leafed clovers at first. Some of the people were curious. Amid the quakes, the jumpsuited humans willingly stepped towards the encroaching greenery they’d only seen on tele-screens. One step on the grass was all it took for the green blades to wrap around their gray shoes and hold them tight. The strength the plants had was beyond compare. The grass shifted and made strange fleshy sounds as it swallowed them down and out of sight.

The further one got from the city-sized vines the more macabre the plants got. Pastel colors turned to duller shades of red and black. The petals grow as thick and hard as flesh. Soon they grew teeth and got more active at consuming the city and the people within. Their blossoms swallowed down thousands at a time as effortlessly as any maw. As she was physically connected to all her creations, every mouthful fed Clover directly, and her cataclysmic coos filled the air.

All her roots and stems shimmied. The planet rumbled with even their minute movements. Other vines joined them, bursting from the ground to form arcs taller and thicker than any monument humans had made. More vines branched off of those, and then more vines from those in a near-endless fractal of the things. They latched onto humans and drunk them dry, leaving them dead husks much as those partygoers were two universes ago. That was back when she was just a frail little human. Now, she drank down humans by the billions.

Plants loomed above the miles-tall super apartment complexes that dotted the world. They thrust their forms upon the structures to swallow them in one gulp. Entire blocks of buildings, miles in radius, fell via sinkholes into the maws of pitcher-plant like flesh-flora. From there, they splashed into golden digestive fluids that were lakes in diameter.

All the planet’s souls flooded into her. Innumerable rivers of blue glow. She gazed down as the last bit of chrome was swallowed by her green and her red and her plant-flesh. She watched with awe at her might and her very presence.

Clover drunk the vitality from whatever was deep below the now dead human civilization. Whatever nutrients and warmth filled the smothered Earth were now hers. Her titanic body shivered, she indulged herself with more growth, and her head passed well into the mesosphere.

The sun reached her well here. Unhindered by the ozone, its warmth and energy reached her near full. Like the sun, she brimmed with power and energy.

“Such a view.” she said, speaking so the souls in her body could hear. All their thoughts were shared with her, all their pasts made bare. It was all useless as before. Nothing humans had was of value other than their spirits and the pleasures of their suffering. Still, they were hers now, forever.

She paused. The thought pleased her. She laughed into the void of space. All the while, her roots and vines sucked the planet up. She had reached the point where even inorganic matter could be imbibed and ingested. As such, the city remnants were absorbed without issue.

“This feeling, this power. It’s sublime. Divine...”

Clover used her power to see herself from a distance. She looked much like some great god. Her flowery form was a symbol of life. She controlled all of this planet: she was all of this. She was god of this Eden of hers as well as the garden itself.

The bark of her roots was no longer needed, so she shook that off and made all her lower body loose with limber vines and stems. She now floated in space, flying freely. With a thought, she grew past the size of the planet she just consumed.

Her fingers pinched up the moon. The moon of all things! It was less than a marble now. She didn’t even eat it with her mouth: she sprouted a vine from her finger to wrap it up and engulf it down.

“Ah yes, the other planets.” she mused, remembering the other universes she graced.

Clover tore open two rifts, each the size of what Earth used to be. Soon as the rifts were open, billions of souls flooded into her, from them she learnt what happened.

She checked back in on where she came from: her home Earth in her home universe. The entire planet teemed with those dandelion-like tufts of hers. It was fuzzy and white. All life had been infected by her plant zombies. There was no where else for them to spread, so with the bodies as fertilizer they simply grew all over its land surface.

“Interesting.” she said, before she stuffed her world-rending hand into the planet’s core and drained it dry. The white tufts turned brown and withered as she took back what was hers.

That other planet she visited was teeming with her plant-flesh life. Even the ocean was coated in algae: red and green. The surface of the planet flourished with her greenery and flesh-plants. Horrifying and beautiful. She drunk in the diversity of the growths she left behind.

“Marvelous~” she quipped, before sticking her vines into that planet and turning it to yet another husk. Her celestial form twitched at such a delicious influx.

“Two more planets, yet only 10 or so billion more souls.” she chuckled to herself. “Only that many souls. Oh how my perspectives have shifted~”

She stared at her hands and looked down again at her divine form. She snapped her fingers and made a lightning storm in space, wide as half-an-Earth, simply because she could. Another snap dissolved it in an instant.

‘I can’t give this up.’ she thought. ‘I won’t merely be a vessel for some greater being. I will be the greatest being. I will be the god of all.’

‘Though I will fulfill my bargain.’

“Hudraloth.” she spoke. “Let’s bring you into reality.”

Her mind reached out to the dividing veil. It sliced like butter to her power.

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.

Chapter 10: Travel

The system Clover warped to was known as the “Thumnih System” after the dominant and sole sentient species that lived there.

Clover changed her body on the way over. Her skin was still green, and her hair still bright red and rife with flowers. Her petal side-coverings, however, were gone. Gods didn’t need to cover themselves, she reasoned. She also reformed her legs and feet. She didn’t need root herself in planets anymore, though vines grew from and coiled about her limbs as before.

Wings still fluttered on her back, only more splendid than ever. To emphasize her self-proclaimed divinity, they morphed from the wings of a fae to the great spanning wings of an angel. The ‘feathers’ were petals: white and red like iris and begonias. She adored the design so much she duplicated it with another smaller set sprouting just below the main. That made four wings in total.

Lastly, she grew. Compared to her, the populated worlds that littered this star system were the size of tennis balls at most, and marbles at the least. The closest one, several thousands miles in front of her, was as a particularly ripe plum in scale.

She perceived the aliens on the world, smaller than dust to her, finer than any photograph.

“Oh wow, such square eyes. You walk on two legs too. How quaint. I wonder how you taste~” she said, making them hear and understand her words. She spoke in the void of space and in their minds.

She reached out a finger to touch at the world, and in that moment a swarm of grey spots warped in. Mortal eyes wouldn’t be able to discern them, but she could. They were spaceships, each with a single pilot. Together, the fleet spanned twice the height of the planet vertically.

“Hmm? And what might you little things be.” she boomed.

The grey shifted, becoming a rainbow of lights. It was like those ‘LEDs’ she learned of on that second Earth. They made an image with the lights: a picture of two abstract beings fighting with a red-X blinking over it, on and off.

She chuckled. “Oh how cute. You don’t want to fight? Neither do I. Just stay still then, and I’ll welcome you to an eternity within your god, hmm~”

She reached out towards the swarm and pinched up a few hundred ships. As a few souls flew into her celestial body, they flashed images again. These were more specific. They showed giant fingers and their planet--with a red-X blinking over it. Next, they showed their fleet, her finger and, of course, a red-X blinking over it.

Some of the Thumnih souls reached their new unresting place within her form, and she learnt all the history they had, the tech they owned and their culture. All these ships were auto-piloted save their weapons systems. By Thumnih law, they needed a living operator to decide to fire every shot. They were a very peaceful and pacifistic sort.

Clover giggled. “Oh my, you’re so cute, all of you. To think you can tell a god what to do: the god, rather.”

She opened her mouth and out-flew a vine. It tangled around thousands of ships and brought them into her gob. She swallowed. By now it was clear she was hostile, and they all opened fire.

“Such advanced weaponry. You’d be able to level an Earth in minutes. Alas, it’s mere tickles to me. Let me show you the merest glimpse of my capabilities.”

Clover floated upwards so that the taut expanse of her abs was level with the world and its stalwart defenders. Her wings fluttered softly all the while: not they needed to, but the rhythmic motion pleased her and she loved how divine it made her look.

Her voice continued invading their minds. “At a glance, you may think I’m a just some nature god. Spreading blooms and green. But all flesh is my domain: all reality and unreality will be soon enough.”

The great green expanse of flesh quivered. From the bottom of her chest line to the crest of her waistline grew a slit. Her flesh began to part with a horrid squelching noise. It was no wound, but a maw wide large enough to swallow countless worlds whole. Moon-sized teeth spiraled down and in towards the maw’s end: a great dim light of umbra and sanguine shades. Between the teeth, vines stirred.

“Gaze upon your god and rejoice at the honor of feeding her~”

The vines lashed out. Their speed was unmatched. She knew the ships could warp across the star system in an instant, but they wouldn’t. To do so would leave that planet defenseless. It was defenseless, of course, but they figured they could distract her and hope for a miracle. But, miracles came from gods like her, and she didn’t seem willing to share any.

Ships fired at vines the size of countries to no avail. The appendages slammed into the swarm and impaled ships with the minute bristles on their sides. There were also thinner ones: thin as the ships themselves. These wrapped around the space vessels personally.

Throngs of the appendages brought back their bounties. The ships were hurtled deep into Clover’s body at speeds they couldn’t escape. Many vessels burst against those teeth, but others made it deeper past the view of the strange light. Even if their short-range jump drives were intact, they’d discover Clover’s dark arts warped the space they were in. All paths lead deeper into her form. The entrance of the chest-maw was an event horizon.

Eventually, she started to ‘suck’ with this maw as though inhaling. A great roar bellowed out form it, and whatever was left of the fleet slipped right in.

The vines outstretched to wiggle in the void. She flew closer to the planet.

“There, now it’s your turn~”

A single vine stretched out across that world’s equator. It was only as thin as an island, but the size belied its strength. She tugged the planet of billions into the fanged orifice, then sealed her chest back up. Soon as the world disappeared into that dim light at the maw’s end, she felt all those alien souls flood into her.

“Welcome~” she spoke as their amber encasement began.

“An alien civilization. Such wonders exited only in human imagination till now. Now, all of you will exist within me: forever~”

She turned around to the rest of the planets. With the barest flex of her power she was upon one. Her normal mouth opened wide, and her tongue curled the marble-scale treat into her gob. It didn’t survive the trip to her stomach. Her throat-teeth ripped the tiny thing up to its core.

Only two planets left, she didn’t want to waste much time. Another flex of her power and they warped in front of her. Why should she move to them, after all?

Billions of Thumnihs looked up to those green eyes that filled their skies. The abyssal black of her pupils gazed back.

“There’s something I want to see, but it requires I leave for another universe. One of your planets will be transformed by me to become an obedient minion! You’ll travel this universe, spreading my blessing across the stars to reap souls on my behalf. Why don’t you two go to war to see who gets the honor?”

She waited a bit. If either planet wanted to, they could wipe out the other in minutes. They had tons of weapons which they never used save to blow up asteroids and the like.

“Ah, you won’t do it will you? Too peaceful. I cannot be defied though. You will fight. I’ll make you want to. Your will is not your own: it’s mine.”

She snapped her fingers and bewitched the two planets. Planet A’s people now hated planet B’s with all their might. The contrariwise was also true.

The two worlds immediately readied their weapons against each other. Planet B was faster to strike, but A dedicated more of their resources towards interception, and they hit B with an asteroid cracking armament which tore the planet asunder. Blue lights flew to Clover as the red-orange core of the world froze in the dark of space.

“Good!” Clover said. “Time to be blessed~”

A vine on her wrist twitched and lashed at the victorious planet. It burrowed to the world’s core and pumped it full of her sap. The aliens sunk into its surface, which sprouted plants and tufts and vines and all sorts of things. Their flesh melded into this planet and when Clover withdrew her vine the world morphed into a living abomination, planetary in scale. Around the equator it tore open halfway to make a fanged maw leading to the molten core at its center.

“One more touch~”

Clover tapped at the planet’s north pole and a ring of country-sized flowers sprouted on it: a cute garland.

“Perfect! Now enjoy this boon of mine while you can. I’ll be back to collect this universe shortly.”

It nodded obediently: an entire planet, nodding. She loved the sight. Soon after it vibrated to the nearest inhabited star system. There, it spread moon-sized pollen and pappi and all sorts of things. It latched onto worlds and bit down. All these things infected other worlds to make them like it: a living garden of death subservient to Clover’s will.

The thought had her smile. She scanned the catalog of universes. She wanted one where humans truly excelled and explored the stars. She found a few such universes, but one stood out above the rest as an older universe. There, humans advanced over millions of years. There, humans reached their peak.

She opened a rift to go there at once.

Chapter 11: Peaks

Rather than waste time mucking about in this new universe, Clover appeared right atop her target. She had scried in her search what humans had made, and was sure to show up at a size to handle them with ease. Soon as she arrived, the rift behind her sealed.

Here, humans had harnessed all the energy of their star and thus became what is known as a “Kardashev Type II” civilization. They built a vessel around the Sun, and used it to traverse the cosmos. Clover leaned in to study its form up close.

One end was flat as the end of the cylinder. From there, the structure tapered to a pointed tip at the front. The entire vessel was adorned with little squarish bubbled worlds of green and blue. A thick, transparent and strong material protected them from the void of space. They weren’t spheres, but flat planes bent slightly convex. Each one had a population of tens of billions, and with Clover’s sight she saw grey metropolises speckled across the continents.

These myriad world-bubbles arranged in tightly clustered rings spanning about the vessel. Very slowly, the rings turned turned, which simulated the passage of days.

Clover took a look at the material underlying all this: seeing through the outer layers if need be. The construct was made out of some futuristic metal. Within the structures core, humanity’s Sun had been squeezed down to a deformed oval by gravity manipulators, and every bit of energy it had was lapped out by harvesting panels. They focused the star’s light at parts to handle the day cycles properly, but even with the terraformed bubble-worlds blocking it out when convenient, the entire structure had a dim yellow glow from the green deity’s perspective.

It was humanity’s greatest technology marvel. With it, they explored the Milky Way galaxy, all while carrying out luxurious lives on one of 800 or so pseudo-earths of their design. The super-structure was immense: longer than a star though not nearly as tall since its power source was ‘smushed’.

Clover erupted into laughter.

“Oh my. Surely you must’ve noticed this in your designs? Why, you look just like corn on the cob!”

Still in a giggle fit, she placed her fingers on either end of the vessel. As a precaution, humanity’s admiral council tried to warp away, but Clover had seen to it those functionalities failed.

“Believe it or not, you’re the most advanced race of humans out there, of all the universes! That’s something to be proud of.”

She pressed her finger to one of the bubbled-worlds. For a moment, billions of humans saw deep into the ridges of her finger prints as great green canyons. Clover gave the entire ring a spin. The vessel groaned as it wasn’t quite designed for that, and a ring of dozens of Earth-like habitats spun wildly. Their buildings crumbled. Human insides flew out from the g-force, and day and night cycled rapidly as systems malfunctioned.

Clover laughed. “All these worlds you made for yourself: they’re just like kernels. Sweet, delicious corn kernels~”

When the vessel finally restabilized, the great abyss of Clover’s maw was upon dozens of their habitats. Sharp white teeth dug under the world-kernels and tore them from the literal star-ship. Clover didn’t chew her meal, instead swallowing the morsels whole. Still, as with eating normal corn, a kernel or two was bound to burst. The worlds hit directly by her incisors popped easily.

“Mmmf” she swallowed the first bite. With the world-kernels removed, yellow plasma from underlying tubes ruptured out into the void of space.

“Sweet and succulent~”, Clover quipped.

She rotated the vessel again, chomped, then again. Much like an actual ear of corn, she moved it side to side as she gnashed at it. Chomp after chomp, gulp after gulp, and she was left with just a few kernels on either end.

“Ah, it’d be a bit undignified to bite you off. Kernels on the ends are always hardest to nibble. Still, I wouldn’t want to waste any food though~”

With a giggle, she reopened her chest maw and stuffed the rest of the structure therein. The spirals of teeth made short work of the rest of it, and the sound of shearing and crumpling metal on the stellar scale echoed through her body. Soon, she resealed her abdomen.

Clover wanted most world-kernels to reach her stomach intact, so her toothed throat was extra gentle gulping them all down. They plopped down into dozens of stars worth of her thick digestive syrup.

The green deity was well past the point of needing eyes to see: but she wanted them to know she was watching. So, as they sunk into the mire of her gut, she formed a great big green eye on a wall of stomach flesh. That clear super-material protecting the habitats started to yield to the corrosive fluid. Still, gravity generators kept the trillions of humans on their feet no matter how their containers turned or churned. Humanity looked up to their skies to see, amid the glowing fleshy horrors, a shining green eye looking down at them.

Soon they were gone, and Clover was infused with trillions and trillions of souls.

She pushed her arms and legs out for a divine stretch.

“Aah~” she thundered, her voice rattling to the edge of the cosmos.

“You’re all mine. Time to join your god~”

She snapped her fingers and loomed over the Milky Way galaxy like a cook over a pot of soup. There were over 40-billion inhabited planets in there and, like a soup, she pursed her lips and slurped them all up.

“More~” she said.

Another galaxy. This one quite distant. It was wrapped up in a great silver construct. One alien civilization had harnessed all the energy within: a Kardashev Scale III civilization. Clover tapped the megalithic structure with her finger and vines blossomed on its inside. The stems ripped through stars and smothered the great empire within under pollen and puffs and greenery. The entire galaxy containment construct erupted into dust as a great flower emerged soon after. Her body imbibed all the souls.

“More~” she said.

Another snap. The large Magellanic cloud--a rather diffuse collection of star systems--was in front of her like a tuft of cotton candy. She reached out with her tongue to dissolve it.

“And again~”

Another snap of her fingers and she was upon the Andromeda galaxy. It was as small as a bowl of water and she dipped her toe into it. A little swirl and quintillions more alien souls flooded into her.

“More~”

Another snap and the green deity loomed in front of a super cluster half her height. The galaxies were as small as sprinkles to her divine might. She fluttered her wings and dashed those stellar-spirals to atoms. Countless more quintillions of souls: all hers.

“More still~”

Super clusters were but sprinkles now. Clover fancied a strawberry, so she conjured one big enough to fit in her fingers. Another thought and a chocolate glaze coated its surface. Another trivial thought and those dozens of super clusters, each made up of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, all swarmed to the fruit’s surface and stuck.

She slipped the treat into her mouth and chomped down. Clover discarded only the leafed top of it to the void. She pointed a galaxy rending finger at it and that sole remnant burst into dark flames.

“I can feel a bit more souls in this universe. Stragglers, know that if my voice can reach you, so too can my other powers.”

Another snap of her fingers. A wave of dark energy rippled out from her form at speeds to make light’s gait look like a snail’s. The entire universe was reaped of life and the souls sowed to her.

“And done~ Now, let’s check on that other universe.”

Clover tore a rift to the universe she was in previously, the one where she turned a planet into her minion. Well, that planet turned another, and then the two of them turned two more, and so on and so on. With Clover having granted the creation the ability to warp within its universe, that particular cosmos fell exponentially fast.

Clover entered a universe rife with her planet-scale plant-flesh minions and grinned. Soon as she stepped forth, torrents of blue entered her: another universe’s worth of souls. Her minions couldn’t harvest spirits on their own: she wouldn’t make the same mistake Hudraloth did. So, they just waited there for her.

She moaned, a god could enjoy herself as she saw fit: unabashed and unashamed. The power influx was unrivaled bliss, she couldn’t contain herself and climaxed on the spot. Her wings stretched, star-cluster dwarfing toes curled. Several galaxies worth of femcum-resin gushed into the void and solidified elaborate spherical patterns.

“Wonderful work my creations, simply wonderful.”

A snap of her fingers and they exploded into plant matter. With a thought she pulled it towards her unfathomably large body. Clover willed it to melt into her skin and be absorbed that way.

“Now, for everything else ‘everything’ has to offer. If it exists from here on, it shall be mine alone.”

Clover snapped her fingers, and millions upon millions of little rifts opened up around her.

Chapter 12: Garden

Clover’s divine form was surrounded by these portals of hers. Each led to a universe, and each was just big enough for her to slide her vines into. The twisting, gnarling appendages got to work soon as they crested into their target cosmos. They grew forward and to the side. They branched out and sprouted all sorts of flowers that spread deadly pollen or morphed into fanged maws dripping with corrosive nectar.

Their speed of growth was unmatched. They traveled by growing, and did so at speeds exceeding light billions of times over. In the span of fractions of seconds her growths consumed entire universes. Galaxies, planets and even other large though lesser beings one might call ‘gods’. Many such beings were somewhat like her: humanoid and gigantic. Some even had wings. She relished those meals the best. Those treats were planet or star sized entities who also sought everything. Some even just wanted to watch over their domains, content with their lots.

They were slower than her with their apotheoses, that or less ruthless. Fools, she thought of them. Now they were souls for her: sources of power sequestered in her divine form for all time. Many at least had the souls from their prized planets and civilizations imprisoned nearby. They could watch their flocks, also frozen in horror, within those ethereal-amber cages deep in Clover’s body.

Soon as the red-headed divine finished a rift, she closed it up than opened another. She made more and more vines, sprouting them off almost every inch of her gigaparsecs of green flesh.

“No use, they are infinite, I need a better method.”, she mused.

She thought back to what Hudraloth told her back when she was a frail and pale speckling on her antiquated Earth. Universes were ‘infinite in number’ yet ‘none insurmountable.’

Clover had a moment of grand insight. There may be infinite universes, but one couldn’t have ‘half’ a universe, nor a quarter of one nor a square-root of a universe. They were infinite but countable. She just needed a way to bundle them up so as to swallow them in one big metaphysical gulp.

“But I cannot clump up all reality from within it. I must get beyond it, to look upon it as the frail little thing it is.” She fluttered her wings and kicked her feet in her empty universe, thinking. She looked around, not a single star was left here: she had consumed them all. She was the only source of light. Then it hit her.

“A starless void, how nostalgic of my studies. Ah of course, I’ll journey to the unreality of chaos. There, I can make the infinite universes my meal.”

Like when she summoned Hudraloth universe, Clover reached out the veil which separated the ordered cosmoses from the homes of the elder gods. This time, she tore a wound as wide as she could. She tore it so much that all the individual realms of the elder gods faded away and merged into one great chaotic plane.

The normal rules of physics didn’t apply to the eldritch plane. Reality itself held little sway here. It was something else, an ‘unreality’. Clover could hover a few feet and appear light years away due to the instability of how this space worked. It wasn’t an empty void like normal space, but a realm of immense scale and ineffable colors.

The beings in here were plentiful and large. Most dwarfed planets, many dwarfed stars. When Clover arrived to the eldritch plane she took her place as a megalithic invader. This unreality tried to reject her presence and contort her into naught. Failing that, it tried to make her an elder god in her own right.

Clover bent to no will but her own, however. In fact, it was this primordial chaos that was corrupted by her. Every warble of the realm against her vast being had it recoiling and erupting with vines and blossoming flowers.

All the elder gods scattered before her. They were worms at best, mere mites even or lesser still. Some were new to her, but still she recognized many from her dark studies: Nabothoke the Lord of Beasts with its ten thousand tails; Rhudaegug Singer of Sins, crooning constantly in unworldly tones; and Urhollli of Gnashing Teeth who clamored its millions of teeth together across the bulbous blob of its body. She even sensed Holzokrar the World Render with its myriad tentacles and claws. Some World Render it was: it couldn’t even scratch her toe now, though it certainly tried.

She was beyond them--beyond all! She would prove it and become mistress of all order and chaos. Mistress of everything.

They and millions of other elder gods scattered. Only the less-sane of the beings sought to attack her, and those were the first she ate.

“You cannot run from me! I am everywhere! I am everything! My presence eclipses your comprehension a hundred fold. How’s it feel to be the specks for once?”

She snapped her fingers and bent space to her will. All directions now led to her. No matter how the elder gods wiggled or warp through this realm, they ended up closer to Clover’s clutches.

“Such magnificent, delicious looking horrors you are.”

Clover’s entire face shifted. Slits formed from the top and then diagonally from the bottom left and right corners of her face. Her entire head opened up to expose a floral, triangular maw. This construct of hers was lined with teeth and red flesh which dripped corrosive nectar. Vines writhed on the sides and a great big stamen-like tongue slithered out stems to pierce her prizes.

Once stabbed with the vines, only the strongest of the elder gods avoided a complete draining before she ingested them. This horrific head maw of hers sucked them all down. In her gut, they melted to nothing: souls absorbed as any other. Her head and face reformed shortly after back to her beautiful visage.

“Yum.” She said. “And now, for this plane itself. You can’t hide your awareness from me. Raw chaos tends towards some semblance of order. Enough monkeys typing randomly with enough time can write Shakespeare. You’re aware enough to know I’m a threat. I felt you trying to twist me to your will. Your borrowed time is up!”

The chaos around her shrunk as she willed it too. It collapsed down and into Clover’s body. Through it her skin, it was absorbed like any other meal. The realm’s own essence--its soul--was solidified in her being.

Her soul gut now held an entire unreality. She stuffed that special morsel deep within her, as any mortal soul looking upon its immense chaotic spirit would go mad. She didn’t want that. The souls entertained her this whole time with their suffering: humans, aliens, gods. Their potential madness would threaten that. She could fix it should it happen, but that seemed a chore.

Clover was now in nothing. There was no space around here. Unreality was no more. Still, she existed nonetheless. Nothing mattered except what she deemed to. Rules and concepts melted when they tried to affect even a single micrometer of her skin.

A thought and she surrounded herself in a white void. A workshop of her own. Here she’d consume the last of reality. She willed the infinite universes to appear before her as a grape-sized clump of void-dark and starlight.

She pinched it up and held it to her eyes. A bit of pressure from her fingers and its shape gave a bit.

“Such power, such ecstasy. Mine for eternity~”

She let all those souls know their fate. They saw it all from every angle when she set them on her moist tongue. Strands of saliva dripped over the cosmoses. Taste buds ripped super clusters to shreds as they rubbed themselves into the morsels. Galaxies were less than crumbs to Clover now and she didn’t spill a single one.

She felt it when they dissolved: the death of reality itself. There was no reality, nor unreality, only the redheaded green-skinned god and the void she made for herself.

But, Clover’s mind was vast, and she knew there were souls missing. Beings who died before she appeared, or would have come into being had she not interfered. She didn’t like that idea, that some souls would escape her. A god was mistress of everything, even the past and the potential. So, she worked time as putty to produce all those permutations of universes. She feasted on the past and all potential futures.

It was then that she held true dominion over all, and it was time to do as a god does and create.

The white void disappeared in a flash. There was now a garden, stretching into eternity.

The grass felt velvet soft against against her bare green feet. Though scale mattered only to her, a single blade of that grass would’ve dwarfed a universe a million fold if such constructs still existed.

There were shrubs, beautiful flowers and trees that came up just below the tip of Clover’s wings. She walked up to one such tree and plucked one of its many strange and alluring fruits.

She created that fruit herself: all these treats and pleasures were hers. She shared one one-millionth of its sublime flavor with the souls stuck within her form. They would have wept if they could. It was so delicious, so forever out of their reach. She drank up their envy like the finest nectar.

Laughing, she erased their memory of even that fraction of its flavor. They remembered only that they had tasted a fragment of something wonderful and divine, and that she stole even that from them.

“No no~” she said into the very core of those innumerable souls. “This garden is mine. All the pleasures are mine. You should be content to suffer for my joy.”

Clover laid on the grass which meant, in a sense, she laid upon herself. The suffering of the old and the splendor of her new pleased her so.

The light she made warmed her body in her paradise. She’d have fun here. Eternal pleasures evermore.

Fin