Everyone needs to unwind from time to time, it’s a simple fact of life. The push and pull of the day to day, going to and from your duties, your leisures, over and over, back and forth, again and again. Such inactive action dampens the mind, and it takes its toll on even the most resilient soul. If they’re to avoid snapping or losing their spark to the deep recess of repetition, they need a way to kick back, ease up, and recuperate. Even if their chosen comforts might be said to be… utterly excessive.


Kenra had had a long week… month? Year? She’d begun losing track, and it’s difficult keeping track of time when everything you used to track it with is either utterly minute, or felt like it was years away. Sleep came and went in a distressingly irregular pattern, a product of distressingly irregular responsibilities.

Her ‘week’ had started simply enough, touring her realm, settling disputes, indulging in the finer things every now and then. It was quite a few rungs down from idyllic for her; there were complaints aplenty, which were solved with the carrot as often as they were the stick. Arguments between regions, between the seconds and thirds in command she had there, often needed to be resolved quickly; a boot to the aggressor or a pair of heads knocked together usually saw to those. Even the finery began to drag, often partaken in just to appease a flatterer; she couldn’t fault them, of course, and spreading good cheer was always a delightful pastime. This time, it was only the third banquet this week before it felt samey. Then came the incursions.

Neighbouring rulers and realms, as well as more natural phenomena than she cared to recount, had all seemingly attacked and occurred at once. She loved a good scrap--she’d have not gotten nearly as far as she had if she didn’t--but it was just so much fighting these days. Endlessly, her every moment seemed to involve seeing one foe off by hand or by heel, only to hurry towards the next. Her ‘subjects’ had needed to handle threats she’d normally never leave to them, if only for the thrill of the hunt, and she’d even come close to feeling genuine, gut turning concern once or twice. The gall of it all.


And so, Kenra found herself reclining in the warm, luxurious light of a middling yellow star, utterly at ease. The heat of it seeped into her form, numbing the tensions she’d accumulated and aiding her rejuvenation. Her body was utterly bare, no part of her hidden from the rays: It would be counterintuitive to let some false modestly get in the way of recovery. Besides, any threat that might have been swayed by her state of dress had been dealt with long ago, with a great big fight, of course.

She couldn’t help letting a smile betray her mirth at the image she must have been projecting; it wasn’t every day one of her people might happen upon such a view of her, vulnerable yet utterly untouchable. Of course, she knew that a great many of them were catching that same view of her at no fault of their own; it’s hard to miss when your goddess has chosen to use your sun as a bathtub.


It was a heady sensation, the feeling of using an entire sun as little more than your own pool to relax in. Stars were utterly magnificent, after all, so what did that say about her? The form within a bathtub was always more enticing than the water around it. In comparison to the lifegiving orb of the entire system, she was the most spectacular sight by an astronomical margin.

The ripples and stellar debris of her entry were still making their return into the star’s surface. Entire planet-dwarfing orbs of gas and plasma cast arcs of light over those few bared parts of her during their descent, giving her skin a warm, slightly mottled appearance. Some even splashed against her, much of it seemingly vanishing, soaking into her while the rest dripped off to re-join the plasma beneath.

Adding to the bliss of it all was the knowledge of having billions of eyes on her. She had a tumultuous relationship with attention, but an inability for anyone to look away from her, even while doing something so utterly benign, was a deep-seated kick for her. Her form wasn’t exactly clear to the masses; the star was too bright and far off to distinguish much more than a deformation on the side. They knew what it was though, in the same way they knew that their moons were far closer. The scientists, the military, the well-off amateurs however, all those with the money or intent to mark any shift in their system with a near obsessive intensity? They had the perfect view as far as she was concerned.

Beneath the surface she was held aloft by the sheer heat of the core, her shoulders, knees, feet and hands forming pale mountain ranges that loomed high enough to shadow entire worlds. A little rocky planet could fit beneath her knees, under her hands, in her armpits, and still not find itself within the star. Convection drove columns of heat into her body like the jets of a cosmic hot tub. The hellish reaction at the heart of the star drove the layers she’d taken up into a roil, eliciting sighs that soon travelled up with the solar wind.

With her head fallen back, locks of copper hair hung into the burning hydrogen unscathed. Each hair alone was grand enough to cause calamity on the worlds of her audience, but here they were immersed in the depths of the plasma. Those strands put much of the star’s own arcs and flares to shame, the tempest they created beneath the surface making a lovely light show against themselves for any stellar travellers brave enough to come close.


She breathed slowly, collectedly; she didn’t need to at that moment, but the imagery of it delighted her, what with the way her chest neared the surface every time she inhaled. Each time, her bare breasts came close to emerging into open space, only to retreat with another exhale. She dipped a finger into the yellow glowing star stuff beneath, mixing it through and tearing across a sunspot or three. Crooking her fingertip, she pulled her hand from it, and a radiant dollop of plasma came with it. She opened her great amber eyes and rolled her head to appraise it, every small motion sending another wave of disturbance through the star; alone, any single one of her movements caused enough disruption to occupy astronomers for weeks.

To call her next motion cataclysmic would be doing it a disservice. She raised her arm out of the star’s body, the sheer volume displaced and colliding back together likely to send out flares for centuries. Though she was merciful about it: they wouldn’t be pointed anywhere near the planets. Probably. Of far more concern was where her hand was going, her fingerful of star matter drifting towards her lips for a brief moment to her, a terrifying pause for her audience. She meant them no ill will--not now anyway--but rumours had a habit of spreading regardless. It passed her lips, lighting the inside of her mouth for the instant it took to close over her fingertip.

She popped her digit out as she sucked the golden gas off it, then let it fall disinterestedly back into the roil over the next short while. Her planetary plain of a tongue swished the glowing ichor around her mouth, against her teeth and along the roof of it while she savoured it all.

“Mhmm…”


It was the only vocalisation she’d make the entire time she was there, before she gulped the treat down with a casual mirth wholly in contrast to the magnitude of the deed. Shrugging her shoulders ever so slightly, she relaxed once again. She wasn’t particularly hungry, and the star was a little too metallic for her tastes. The collective sigh of relief across the system barely registered to her; she just needed to relax. She began to descend into the closest thing to sleep that her kind ever really knew, total looseness in all her joints and muscles, her mind a placid sea and her heart a low tempo. She’d stay in place for a long while, days enough for the sight to occupy slightly less than the full attention of those surrounding her.

Her thoughts diffused across her realm, a network of places and objects she’d committed to her mind, as well as several individuals she trusted with carrying out her will. The gentle, weightless energy she used to get things rolling again was a delightful contrast to the frantic activity of recent times, and with all the disparate thoughts her conscious mind was able to dip to its quietest in a long, long time. The last movement those observing her would see for a season was a smile playing out across her lips; perhaps she’d visit a certain demon while she ‘slept’.

He’d more than earned it.