Dominic began tilling his field with a hoe, digging up a pile of loose dirt. The day was just beginning, and he had a long day of toil to look forward to. It wasn’t easy by any means, and every day he went to bed with sore muscles and crusted with sweat, but it was necessary work. Without his efforts there may not be enough food to support his village, and he might have to watch someone starve to death. He asked for no recognition, nor did the other farmers from his village. Happy faces and fed bellies were all the thanks they needed.
A cacophony roared from the sky, drawing his attention. He looked up to see the sky tear open, an enormous gold border spreading in the clear blue sky. When it stopped, there was the enormous face of a woman in the gap left by the rift. Her skin was pallid, almost corpse-like, and her silver irises were larger than the sun she had replaced. A maroon scar ran along the veins below her right eye to her chin, and straight black hair framed the tremendous face. She smiled, but Dominic got the sense that it wasn’t purely out of joy.
A pale hand with long, spindly fingers joined her visage through the tear, fully outstretched. It descended toward Dominic, and to his surprise it passed through the sky itself, sending ripples throughout the rift. It came closer, growing larger, until the tremendous hand blotted out the sky. The only thing he could see was the pale hand coming toward him. Not just him, but the whole village where he lived – it was large enough that it encompassed hundreds of feet from one side to the next. Her hand kept coming until he could see the individual whorls on her palm as trenches, and he tried to run away from the gigantic hand.
He made a run for it too late. The edge of her palm caught him, pressing him down into the field he had been toiling in. His body compressed beneath the extreme pressure and strength of the titanic hand, splaying him on the ground. In an instant he burst beneath the tremendous weight as though he were nothing against it. Slowly the mammoth hand rotated back and forth, grinding itself into the fertile soil and pulverizing the village under it. Once everything was demolished it withdrew, leaving behind a titanic handprint in the earth.
Agatha pulled her hand back through the scrying pool, immensely satisfied that it had worked. She loved the feeling of such tiny, insignificant things being obliterated by her magnificence. Her power, magical as well as physical in comparison to those puny dust mites, was such that nothing could stand against her might. Carefully she inspected her hand and spotted tiny scraps of debris amid the stark white skin and delighted in the destruction she had caused. It was amazing what she could do with just one hand.
“Such power…” she whispered, in awe of what she had done. “And fascinating results, too.” With all the modifications she had made, she hadn’t expected it to be so efficient. Every tiny fragment had come back with her, each miniscule drop of blood marked her hand. It had perfectly preserved everything she touched, and she could see her handprint on the other side of the portal. With the might she wielded now, she would be unstoppable.
Agatha brushed her hand against her stomach, wiping off the few scraps that were stuck to it. They bounced off her long legs and landed soundlessly on the wooden floor where they blended in with the thin layer of dust. There were probably a few fragments or smashed bodies stuck in the grooves of her skin, but short of burning a cantrip there wasn’t much she could do about that. It only reinforced how powerful she felt: entire people could be lost on her and she would never know.
The scrying pool was, in all honesty, a fairly mundane magical object. Tens of thousands of them existed in the world, and many of those had even been modified to be two-way – they were popular among thieves and assassins, and Agatha herself had used it for that purpose a few times. However, with a few extra enchantments and some trial and error, she had turned an innocent divination device into an unstoppable weapon. Whenever something went in from her end, it maintained its size relative to what was being viewed, and vice versa. Zoom out far enough, whatever she sent through would annihilate whatever was on the other side. There was only one other like it, as far as she knew, and it was being used by some queen or empress to keep tabs on her city. What a waste.
Some movement among the still, lifeless wasteland she had created grabbed her attention. Agatha had forgotten to turn it off. It was miniscule, smaller than a gnat, but her supernaturally enhanced senses made it easy to pick out. A single person had avoided her strike and was now scavenging through the wreckage in her handprint. Her first instinct was to squash it out of existence, but she hesitated. She licked the tip of an index finger and a sly smile tugged at the corner of her lips. It was time for her to conduct another test.
Agatha reached her arm through the scrying pool, wetted finger extended toward the tiny person below. She kept her sharp, silvery eyes on it, apparently unaware of the monumental finger descending in its direction. Her shadow fell over it, tipping the puny person off, and they began running away. Their pace was pathetic in comparison to even her careful advance, however, and she caught him easily enough. When she made contact with the teensy body she quickly pulled her hand back, entirely unencumbered by its negligible weight. There was a slight rippling in the pool when her arm came back through it, distorting the smashed landscape on the other side.
Marcus dropped his load when he saw the devastation where his home had been. There was nothing left standing; not so much as one board on top of another. Animals and people alike had been flattened, their hides practically two-dimensional with their innards on the ground beside them, also smashed flat. An enormous crater, hundreds of feet wide, was centered where his home should have been, and five trenches split off in one direction. It was like something had come from the sky and obliterated the town out of nowhere.
He crawled through the wreckage, looking for anyone alive, even mortally wounded, or at least a keepsake to carry when he went on to the next village. Clearly, his life here was over. While he sifted through the wooden shards of a market stall, however, a gigantic shadow overtook him. Marcus ran, but it was completely in vain. His legs could not carry him fast enough, and in only a few seconds he found himself affixed to the tip of an enormous finger, held fast by a thick, gooey layer of saliva.
A meteoric ascent miles into the air left him light-headed, and when it stopped he must have been hallucinating. He was suspended in front of a face the size of a moon and twice as bright when full, filling his entire field of view. It was feminine, but that made it no less terrifying. Her lips were like a mountain range at the bottom with a vast plain up top, covered by a waterfall of fine, straight black hair. Silver eyes larger than his whole village were focused on him, or at least in his general direction, and he could see every minute flare of her ginormous nose’s nostrils while she breathed. There was a long red scar running down her right cheek like a canyon, and he found that it was impossible to focus on all of it at once.
Agatha still could not discern any features of the tiny person aside from the fact that it was, in fact, a person. It was a fraction of a fraction of an inch tall, nothing compared to her. If it weren’t a tiny blemish on her alabaster skin she’d have no idea it was even there, and even then, if she hadn’t picked it up herself it’d be doubtful. In comparison to her it was so insignificant that she could scarcely even believe they could both be called human.
Her natural impulse was to rub her fingers together and eviscerate it like the rest of its kin, or lick her finger clean of the filth. Before she brought her fingers together or stuck her tongue out, however, she got a better idea. This miniscule, teensy person must see her as the goddess she aspired to be. She lowered her finger to the floor and scraped the tip against a wooden plank by her right shoe, gradually rolling it against a ridge in the grain. Either it would be squished without a sign or dislodged to fall at her feet. To her, it scarcely mattered.
Marcus’s stomach jumped from his feet up to his head when Agatha’s finger plummeted downward, the wind of his rapid descent making his clothes ripple behind him. He saw the floor rapidly approaching and closed his eyes, ready to be dashed against the floorboard. It was no different than his friends and family had gotten, after all. The thud of tons of meat slapping against the ground struck his ears, and he expected it to be over. Instead, he continued to feel the warm air of the tower on his skin, and he forced his eyes open. The world was turning over, rotating fast enough that he could feel it, and he was faced with the faded surface of an unfinished hard wood floor.
A ridge on the floorboard scraped him off the edge of her finger, depositing him onto the ground. The whole ordeal disoriented him and he got up slowly, unsteady even on his hands and knees. When he was able to stand he was still fairly dizzy, but he could not attribute what he saw to a mere trick of the mind. He gazed up at a gray wall almost eight times his height before it broke, giving way to an absolutely insurmountable dark purple wall above that. It was hundreds of feet up before he even laid eyes on her porcelain skin, then he saw the tremendous bulge of her ankle. Escape would be hopeless through any means aside from her own negligence.
“Hello down there, tiny person,” Agatha boomed. She wasn’t sure whether they were even alive, or if they were if they could understand her, but she decided to hedge her bets. “I am Agatha, though you may know me as Agatha the Black-Hearted. You are in my domain now, because I willed it. I am the one who destroyed your village, and can easily do the same to you. Bow down to me as your goddess, and I will spare your pitiful life so that you may serve my ascension. Refuse, and become dust on my floor.”
Marcus heard a terrifying rumbling come from above, and it took a moment for him to realize it was someone speaking in a language he could understand, just said by someone millions of times his size. He did not catch every word since it was more of a primordial roar to him than anything, but he got the gist of it. His faith had never been particularly strong toward his gods, and in this very moment Agatha posted much more of a threat to him than the distant deities who had allowed his village to be pulverized. Without hesitation he bowed down to her, offering whatever prayers he could think of. For all he could tell, he was at the feet of a goddess.
Agatha had no way of knowing whether he had complied if he yet lived, and she would have acted no differently if he hadn’t. She simply went back to her research, preparing for the next experiment involving the scrying pool.