Agatha spent a while considering where she wanted to strike next. It couldn’t be too conspicuous, because then she’d have to deal with the annoyance of adventurers showing up to stop her. She did want it to be noticeable, though. For over an hour she had been viewing towns and cities, watching the tiny specks going about their routines, licking her lips while she considered whether or not to reach through. Each one was tempting, but she had to pass.
At last, she found the perfect target. A small town on the far edge of the continent with only one road going through it and very little outside stable space. Very few people outside of its residents would notice if it went missing, and it shouldn’t take too long to scoop up. They probably didn’t speak a common language, but there were ways around that. Besides, power transcended all words, especially the amount she wielded.
With a command word she activated the transportation properties of the portal, making it momentarily glimmer silver. All the little dots stopped moving to stare up at the hole in the sky, and a faint screech reached her when it resolved to her face. Almost simultaneously they began scattering, running to all four corners from her titanic face. She smiled and let out a chuckle, causing a tremendous rumble to filter down to the town. No matter how far they ran, they wouldn’t be able to escape her.
Agatha put her palms together and thrust them through the portal, and they came out enormous on the other side. She cupped them like a spade and angled the tips just to the south of the town. They drove into the soil, moving through it as easily as water and pushing mounds of dirt out of the holes. Her fingers ran half the length of the town, which she demonstrated by wiggling them just below the surface. The ground seemed to breathe while her fingers moved, raising and lowering with them. People toppled over and buildings split in half from her twiddling, but it was hardly the worst thing that would happen to them that day.
She pulled her hands out of the ground, prying half the town along with them. For a moment she simply held it there, in awe at the reality of holding a town in her hands. Clumps of dirt and rock fell off the side, exploding on impact with the ground, along with some people who had been right on the edge. No doubt they were killed on impact, but all that meant to her was she’d have a couple fewer worshippers living at her feet.
Her hands came back through the portal, making it ripple from the center as it passed. Agatha held her prize up to her face so that she could loom over her new captives, inspiring the proper amount of awe and fear in them. Carefully she knelt and deposited it on the floor, dirt and all, just past her toes. Maybe she had just set a town atop the person she captured yesterday, she had no idea of knowing. All she knew was that now she had half a town as her exclusive subjects.
Pierre heard the sky crackle with energy and looked up, then gasped. In the middle of the clear blue sky a woman’s face had appeared, looking down with disdainful silver eyes. She reached down with both arms, and amazingly her hands passed through the gap in reality, making the hole shimmer as they entered his side. He could only stare as they descended, paralyzed by fear. There were only a few reasons a gigantic woman would be reaching for the town, and none of them were good.
Her enormous fingers, the smallest of them longer and thicker than the largest tree trunk he had ever seen, plunged into the earth, displacing great mounds of soil. Palms larger than the town square followed, and the ground bulged upward while they tunneled beneath it. In only a few seconds – much quicker than he imagined they could be – her hands were beneath him, suddenly turning the street into a berm that put all the buildings at a significant tilt.
The ground squirmed, as though something just below the surface was alive and wriggling to get free. Pierre was caught off-guard and pitched onto his back, where he rolled down a ridge into an already teetering building. With the ground’s continued gyrations the structure fell apart, splintering into individual boards that fell away from him. Continued rippling pitched him over the edge of the rubble and into the middle, where he rode the remaining surges out amid a pile of debris.
A cacophony arose when the earth tore apart, and Pierre found himself being lifted into the sky along with his part of the town. He was being carried toward the portal, and short of jumping off the edge there was no way to escape. They passed through with surprisingly little fanfare, not even a noise or flash of light. The only way he knew he had been transported was the sudden increase in temperature and blast of wind from the giantess’s nostrils.
He had time to look over her face while she mockingly glanced over the town, though her features were too big to be taken in all at once. Her lips alone were wider than a city block, and her eyes were larger than a full moon at night. While she lowered them toward the floor he got a more complete picture of her long, lanky body, and he simply could not comprehend someone of his species being this large. On the floor, her shoe was the most massive structure he had ever seen, dwarfing even the great temple he had made his pilgrimage to. She lost interest soon enough, though, and returned to the portal she had pulled them through.
Half a town. Agatha was not about to leave the others out of excitement for what she had just acquired. She looked back through the pool, still fully active, and saw the absolute carnage she had wrought. A grid of puny buildings, none of them even half the size of a coin, with panicked little black dots running between them. Beside it was a crater showing bare brown earth with ridges between where her fingers had been. It truly looked like it had simply been scooped out of the planet by an enormous gardener.
Agatha dug her hands back into the soil, sliding her fingers underneath the remains of the town. This time she skipped menacing them and simply tore the half that still stood from the ground, waiting a beat for the clumps of loose dirt to fall back into the hole. She could hear pathetic squeaks while some of them dashed for the edge, trying to escape from their fate. Her lips twitched upward at the fear she caused, then she pulled her hands back through the portal.
When they were back on her side, she knelt back down to set it on the floor. She looked for where the town had been sundered and tried to make it fit back together as best she could. Her hands had to slide it back and forth while she tried to get one of the streets lined up, causing the taller buildings to wobble. Finally, she admitted it would never look just right and let it go, apathetic of all the additional damage she had just caused.
Her eyes looked over the village lying on the floor. It was about a foot and a half long with a few hundred buildings, and probably contained around a thousand people, not counting the ones who fell off. Not a huge score, but it was something, and it’d suffice while she built up her tiny empire of worshippers. They were still running around in terror, not sure what was going on, only that their homes and lives had been uprooted out of nowhere.
Near the center, Agatha spotted something she didn’t like: a temple. A crowd of people was rushing toward it with a traffic jam at the doorway. She leaned in and pursed her lips, then blew a strong gust of air into the crowd. They scattered, flying down streets and into buildings, some of them spilling off onto her floor. Many of them had likely been killed or injured, but fewer than if they had stayed. Her concern had not driven her to do it, rather her desire to leave a few alive and capable of praising her.
Agatha uttered a quiet spell so they could understand her, then declared, “You won’t be needing this with me around.” She extended a finger and pointed it toward the offending structure, then began lowering her hand toward it. The building collapsed almost as soon as she made contact with it, crumbling into a pile of loose bricks and broken bodies. For good measure she plunged her finger the rest of the way down, crushing the bricks into gravel and knocking down several adjacent structures.
She took a second to brush her finger clean with her thumb, scattering debris on the chaotic town below. Then she slapped her hand against the floor’s wooden planks, grabbing the occupants’ attention. “Your gods cannot hear you, and you only have my whims for your mercy,” Agatha boomed. “You have only one goddess now and she is me, Agatha the Black-Hearted. You will worship me and no one else or feel my wrath.” Her statement finished, she stood back up so she could gaze at her new addition and allow them to see their new goddess in all her glory.
Agatha took a step over the village, just missing the tops of buildings with the sole of her heel. It might take a couple of days, but they would come around to revering her as a deity once it was clear their other gods could no longer hear them. She couldn’t either, for that matter, but she expected she’d be able to feel their prayers energizing her soon. For now she returned to her books and maps, researching the next place she could strike and how to best do it.