A stream of light widened from a hair’s width across the pitch-black room as the doorway opened. The glow was briefly blocked out as a towering silhouette appeared, somehow growing larger as it entered the darkness. Her footsteps were short and punctuated, yet landed with the strength of a thunderbolt, and made the whole of the blackness quake in unison each time her heel landed.
In the center of the space stood a stone pedestal, upon which rested a metal bird cage. The bars rattled softly like old bells as the titanic shadow approached, until all the light from the opening in the room was blotted out, entirely eclipsed by the slender landscape of the leviathan form. Wisps of hair twinkled golden as they hung into place, then turned to shadow again. A pair of enormous hands settled on the edge of the pedestal, within flicking range of the bird cage. Fingers, large and strong yet graceful as the rest of the female silhouette, drummed on the surface. Occasionally, the giant’s fingernails grazed the bars of the cage, pinging the sound from end to end, before they balled back into fists. The knuckles popped.
“Please…” a tiny voice rang from within the cage. The speaker couldn’t even make it through the first word without cracking in the back of her throat. “Why are you doing this?”
“Me?” boomed the silhouette in reply, her voice silky and kind, but for the ominous dance of her fingers. Still, the ends of her digits tapped the bars of the prisoner’s hold, even hooking them briefly in her fingers to pluck like harp strings. “Why am I doing this? I haven’t done anything, except serve justice. Everything that’s happened was all dependent upon your own choices, not mine.”
“I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent. Please, you… have to believe me.”
“Your requests for unearned pity don’t impress me. Your guilt is a foregone conclusion. All that matters now is when you choose to let the message sink in.” The giant’s fingers latched between the bars of the bird cage, and remained there this time, giving them a tug to the side. The metal groaned, and the space between the prison bars widened as those fingers literally ripped open a way. “Tell me, is it sinking in yet?”
“Oh, God. No, please. Don’t do that. Stop this,” begged the little voice. By now, the words were nearly drowned in tears. When next the gigantic body overlooking the cage shifted to the side, the light shown through strands of her golden hair again, and then flashed across the bird cage. For an instant, the miniature woman, not much larger than the gatekeeper’s index finger, cowered on her knees. She clawed at her dark hair, draping it protectively over her eyes. Her whole body shook with seismic urgency.
“Tell me,” the larger being boomed as she finally wrenched the bars wide enough for her hand to fit. A gently closed fist entered the cage, hovering over the pitiful creature inside. “What are you?”
“I’m… nothing. I’m a rat. A germ. A smear on the planet.”
“Very cute. But that’s not what I want to hear, and you know it.” The giant hand opened up, fingers curled like a hawk’s talons to snatch. The palm waited an inch overhead of the prisoner. “What… are you?”
“I’m…” the woman sniffled, bowing face-flat to the floor of the cage. She broke into harder sobs, but managed to choke through them and spill the answer. “An Alpha.”
“That’s more like it. Alpha.” The Omega spoke the word like cancer. Her fingers stabbed into the ground around the little woman with a dramatic thunk, but didn’t wrap them inward to capture her prize just yet. Instead, the colossal hand formed a miniature prison cell unto itself within the confines of the bird cage, formed of warm vengeful flesh instead of rusted metal. “And what have you learned is your place in the world?”
“Expendable,” the sniveling voice recited, obviously practiced word-perfect. “My kind is part of a broken equation. There are the Betas: the vessels of innocence and the salt of the earth. And there are the Omegas: the protectors of innocence and stewards of the earth.”
“And the Alphas?”
“An unstable… element, unbalancing an otherwise… perfect union of the large and small.” Again, the words rambled like classroom memorization. “We are the negative which prevents everlasting goodness.”
“Very good, little one. It sounds like someone’s been doing the reading I made just for you.” The spires of the Omega’s monumental fingers at last curled inward, collecting the Alpha upon the pillowy tips, and bundling her into a firm fist. The darkness became muggy and flesh-scented, only for a moment, until it gave way to the darkness of the cage room again. Yet this time, even though she couldn’t make out the intricacies of the billboard-sized face, she felt the spectral presence of the woman’s judging countenance staring her down and mentally dissecting her in the dark.
“B-But…” the Alpha murmured. Still in the Omega’s palm, she remained on her knees. “Please… you h-have to listen… what you’re saying, it’s…”
“Oh, good.” A sarcastic drawl echoed through the room. “Exactly what I wanted. You have something to add now?”
“That’s not what the Omegas teach. It’s not what they believe,” wept the Alpha. Even as she spoke, she winced in rapid succession, expecting inevitable reprisal. Yet she spat it out anyway. “I know the Alphas of the last generations were flawed. A lot of them were monsters. But we’re not all like them, and the Omegas know it. They believe the three classes can live in peace and harmony. Y-You know it. Please, God, I know you do. I know you believed it once that I wasn’t just like my mother!”
The Omega remained tight-lipped, but a storm cloud of sheer fury seethed from her skin; the Alpha could sense it. Instead of responding, the Omega turned and marched back toward the waning light of the doorway. Only once she emerged, were both the golden-haired giantess and the mewling brunette prisoner turning to a puddle in her hand plunged back into light.
“I did believe it, Lexi. You know I did,” Bridget Cade snarled. “Which is why it hurts me more than it could ever hurt you to have to do this.”
“W-What are you going to do?”
“Serve justice. Like I said. Don’t you ever listen?” Bridget’s other hand arose over the plain of her outstretched palm, her thumb and index finger preemptively separated by just enough space to insert an average-sized human woman between. Her two digits formed a vice of spiral-printed flesh beside Lexi’s shoulders, and before the Alpha could react again, the Omega had pinched her adoptive sister and former best friend into a finger-lock.
Then Bridget’s hand rose. She tilted her head back, the shimmering honeyed tresses draped back in a cataract, while her soft pink lips steadily parted. The darks of her eyes glowered; Bridget’s nostrils flared. And then her pinched fingers began to descend again, but this time directly over her increasingly opened maw. By the time Lexi was dangling close enough to feel the hotness of her Enforcer’s breath, the Omega’s teeth had fully separated, and her slimy tongue was dancing up toward the outside.
“N-No…” Lexi peeped. “No, no. I don’t want to do that again.”
“Again? When have we ever done this before?”
“W-When you stuck me on the… p-popsicle, for my second t-time…” Lexi cried. She buried her face in her hands as tears poured between her tiny fingers. “You d-did it just to remind me of when we were… kids. I know you did.”
“Oh, silly little Lexi. You really think all I’m going to do is lick you a little bit again? That’s hardly a punishment, if you ask me. I was just following the manual, not trying to take you down memory lane. Besides, I’ve had you in my custody for five years now, and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon, no matter what Aegis says. I couldn’t possibly do something so boring as that now.”
“Then w-what?”
“I’m going to swallow you, of course.”
“WHAT?” Instantly Lexi started thrashing, though it was useless against the abject strength of Lexi’s tanned fingertips. The thick pads of her dexterous digits quickly pinned the Alpha back against the heel of her giant hand, and lowered her yet again, until all Lexi could make out was the sweltering blackness, two rows of gleaming pearly whites, and a writhing serpent of a tastebud-speckled muscle.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” the Omega said. “I think you’ve always known Omegas are capable of more, even when you look past the fact that we’re big enough to move cities with our bare hands.” Casually, Bridget’s tongue flicked out, lapping at Lexi’s hanging legs. “Is it really so shocking that I can swallow you alive, and bring you back up at a time that it suits me?”
“B-Bridge… no, no, no… you ca-”
“Actually, you’ll find I can.”
“But what if you can’t? It could kill me,” Lexi sniffled. “You can’t just swallow another person to teach them a lesson.”
“Oh, I can think of several Omegas who would disagree.”
“This is what Alphas do to Betas!” she squealed as the tears gushed anew. Lexi had stopped fighting, and gone limp in her sister’s claw. “This is what’s WRONG with the world. I know that. I see it. And you know me, Bridget. You know I could never hurt anyone!”
“I did,” Bridget coldly replied, just as she had once before. Her tongue circled the rim of her lips, glossing them with saliva. “Are you ready to know what it feels like? To be completely, utterly powerless in the mouth of a thing which cares so little for your extinction?”
“PLEASE, Bridget! You’re my sister. I… I love you! No matter what you do,” Lexi defiantly screamed through the sobs. She’d become still and strong, like a little martyr, and Bridget could feel it through the sensitive tips of her fingers, but she was unmoved. “Do you hear me? I LOVE you, and I always WILL.”
“That’s nice,” Bridget said. Her steely resolve remained frozen in her face like a beautiful sphinx. “You’re going inside me now, where you belong. Oh, and one more thing, Lexi: do not call me your sister ever again, or the next time I swallow you, it will be a one-way trip. You belong to your real mother and the rest of your vile kind. Not me and mine.”
The Omega listened to her former best friend and family member’s sniveling wails as she was inserted down into the waiting pit of her upturned mouth. Once Lexi’s back met Bridget’s tongue and slid into her cheek, her teeth clacked loudly together, and those lips slurped to meet once more.
The light which once crept inside the bird cage room was fading now back into darkness, but the Omega didn’t notice as she stood in the center of it all, contemplating the sensation of her charge’s body flailing pitifully from cheek to tonsil to roof. Her tongue was merciless, lashing Lexi with the fury of a bullwhip, and making up what it lacked in smarting precision with gooey bludgeoning.
The little woman was heavy with soggy spit, balled into a fetal roll, and inevitably humiliated beyond reasonable belief after her final unrequited words to her one-time BFF were met with Lexi being turned into a snack. Just as she’d promised, Lexi used her tongue to roll and push the Alpha toward her throat, and without pause, gulped the lump of her battered body down into the gullet. Rivulets of saliva followed, raining down on the innocent woman, while the Omega savored the fiery glow of self-righteousness. Soon, Lexi would splash down into her stomach, and in the meanwhile, there would be a chorus of battling gurgles and screams from within to entertain.
She’d earned this. Yes, she had.
It was just kismet that Bridget had befriended Lexi when they were children: so that when the real monster inside the Alpha emerged, revealing her to be the same product of her mangy species as her mother, then who better to drive the final nail in the coffin than Bridget? What could be a bitterer last blow than to be swallowed alive by your older sister, while the rest of the world carried on firmly believing in your guilt and ugliness, with the full knowledge that you could well-be dissolved into mush in her stomach if you refused to denounce that you ever had a family to begin with?
Enforcer Cade tapped her fingers, counting out the long seconds until she would decide to bring Lexi back up. Odds were, it would be a while, but she had all the time in the world.
###
“LEXI!” Bridget Cade’s scream could’ve leveled a small town, were it not confined to hardy reinforced Omega quarters. Still it rattled the walls.
The Omega awoke in an ice-cold sweat, a choking feeling in her throat diverting airflow. Two a.m. moonlight still streamed through the window across her tangled sheets. She gasped for several desperate seconds, pressing her fingers hard to her windpipe, until she was assured that there was nothing lodged inside to impede her life force. Only a ghostly sensation of her tiny sister passing into Bridget’s digestive system.
The Omega pulled herself up in the bed. Even once she’d convinced herself she wasn’t choking, her body-wracking sobs quaked her to a nauseous level. Her cheeks were as raw and damp with tears as her hundred-plus-foot-tall body was with nightmarish perspiration. She clutched a fist over her stampeding heartbeat. The voice which sprang from her lips within the dream wasn’t her own, and recalling some of her unnatural phrasings again, she wanted to gag. It was as though she’d been possessed by the spirit of totalitarian regime and made to spew it like a giant despotic robot: the very thing Lexi, surely, now saw her as.
God, how had it all gone so wrong. How. Nearly two years since it happened, since she’d seen or even spoken to Lexi, but Bridget’s nocturnal visions were just as potent and unrelenting as ever.
The Omega tried to remind herself of the facts, if only to find some small comfort after the trauma. The things she’d seen in the dream were all wild perversions of reality: indeed, Lexi’s real imprisonment had lasted just over two weeks, and consisted of only two low-class enforcement sessions in between a great deal of sitting in her glass cell. The true scar of that short period had come not from its length or consequential severity, but in Bridget’s own unyielding conviction that she was serving goodness. Her heart had been so broken over the revelation of evidence, combined with loyalty to the mission of the Omegas, she’d been blind to reality, as intentionally obscured as it had been.
How. How. How.
Bridget rolled over in bed, certain that she’d never get back to sleep now. Strands of her hair hung over her face in a golden mess, and as she gently spread her fingers through to sweep them away, she flinched at the sight of what she thought for just an instant to be a person. A small one, not any larger than her index finger, pushing through the tangle of blonde locks. Frantic, Bridget reached out, trying to close her palm as compassionately as possible around the body of who her instincts told her to be Lexi.
However, her fist just closed around empty air, and Bridget couldn’t help but slip back into heaving sobs. Her pillow was soaked straight through to the other side in tears, but she still laid her cheek against it, and brushed her hair back over her eyes. What she would give for the chance to make things right again, impossible as it seemed. Yet that was selfish to think, and Bridget knew it. There was no turning back. One thing was for certain: she’d done so much damage to her best friend and dear sister whom she loved with all her heart, that there was only a single recourse for her penance.
She could never allow herself to appear in Lexi’s presence ever again.
Giantess World
