Chapter 5: Dissolution

Kay was swish-sloshing that planet chunk in her mouth, talking to Lise still.

“What do you mean don’t talk with my mouth full? You wanted to know how it tasted right?”

She giggled, muffled. Noisily and shamelessly, she suckled the world against her cheek flesh.

Then, she heard something. A curious noise ringing in her mind: almost like a little squeak. A forced telepathic communication. Curious.

Kay looked down to an origin she discerned in fractions of a second. Cheek bulging with planet, she stared. After a brief pause, she erupted into laughter.

She swallowed that chunk of planet: easier to talk that way.

“Hey Lise, guess what I found?”

“What? No, some Stage One being.”
“Yeah, she looks like the lifeforms on the planet. Must’ve evolved or something. I think I’ll mess with her a bit.”

“Yeah I’ll talk to you later. We can meet up with Emile then jaunt there.”

“Duh, ‘course I’m still bringing the star. That’s why I’m here!”

Kay’s hair cooled down and the call ended. She moved to scoop Reella and pinch her up. The little being tried to run away, but Kay wasn’t moving with languidity here. It was like catching a mouse with three broken legs with how slow Reella could fly.

The little thing was very upset. Held up to her face, Reella was kicking at her fingers and blasting her skin with some golden energy. Obviously it didn’t do much to a truly evolved being like herself.

“Oh, the planet.” Kay chuckled. The little thing probably wanted that, didn’t she.

Kay realized the being couldn’t understand her speech. The tiny thing was covering her ears even, finding it harsh.

‘Lower lifeforms, such a hassle’ she thought. With a sigh, she deigned to mentally link with the thing.

--==--==--==--

“Hello? Helloooo? Can you hear me?”

Reella winced. The voice was so loud. It was much like how mortals heard her words when she wanted them to ring in their minds. This rang in her whole form though, including that inner, ethereal body.

All those billions of souls inside her heard it. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want them to know this. She’d have to wipe their memories if she made it out of this. Could she make it out of this?

She just saw a chunk of her planet swallowed. She heard a few prayers as it went down this invader’s throat. Unable to make them out fully, she managed to gleam the emotions to them: pain. This being was nothing she ever dealt with before.

Now she was in this entity’s hand, pinched tight at her sides. Held like a small doll. The other hand still held what was left of her world. It was wounded, little lights flickering up from it to the monster’s lips.

Reella steadied herself, focused on the hum of the souls in her body. She’d be confident here.

“Y-yes.”, she spoke, mind to mind. “I am Reella” she said. “I am the goddess of the planet you’ve so callously swallowed. Return what’s left to me so I may heal it at once!”

There was silence. The colossal invader did not look amused. Red eyes squinted at her. Reella smothered her pride just a little.

“Please.”, she added.

Kay burst out laughing, both in space and in mind. Reella and her souls were wracked with the loud volume and incomprehensible sounds. More wincing; more writhing between great fingers. Fiery hot breath wrapped around her. The blond deity smelled her planet on the being’s breath.

Kay figured she was too loud, so she mind-spoke quieter. It was hard to deal with such a fragile lifeform.

“Ha, wow that was something. You’re god of the planet huh? I like the costume. Well, oh great Reella, my name’s Kay. Nice to meet you.”

The red-haired being smiled wide, flashing pearly white teeth that could bite Reella in half. A bit of Hotera’s molten core started to drip down her palm.

“Ah fuck,” Kay said, instinctively lapping it up with her tongue.

Reella screamed at her with both voices.

“No stop!”

The invader paused. She chuckled again, but kept it mental. “Oh yeah, you wanted this huh. This snack of a planet?”

Reella mind-screamed, “Yes!”

Kay was feeling mischievous as usual. She pouted, clicked her tongue. Her mind-voice rang. “Well... it only fits in my mouth doesn’t it. Fair’s fair, right~”

With that, she took a bite and relished Reella’s futile squirmings against her fingers.

Kay chewed it nosily: obnoxiously. Kay’s mind sent all the noises over. It even sent the noises of humans in her mouth. Their screams and fears and sights flashed to Reella as they were crushed under incomprehensibly mountainous teeth.

Reella trembled.

Kay gulped. “Ah, yummy god world.”, she chuckled.

There was only one chunk of Hotera left, and Kay moved it towards her lips.

“If you want it, why don’t you try taking it out of my mouth Ms. Deity?”

The invader slid the planet onto her tongue. She lowered the psionic barrier around Hotera. A mere thought and it was gone in a flash. She let Reella know as much. It was faster to explain that bit wordlessly.

“Go on, go get it. It’s gonna melt in my mouth if you don’t.”

Reella was loose and flew forward into the great horror’s maw. She just passed the teeth and got nervous. A pulsing throat, alight with an eerie red glow, stood in the back. The glow added to that of Hotera’s leaking core. Her robes were moist with spittle.

She reached out towards one of her countries. They were still alive, but fading fast. Above her head, a droplet of saliva was falling. It touched Reella’s arm and she recoiled backwards, letting the bulk of it drown the south lands. Millions of lives, nations she helped guide: gone. Monuments and churches washed off in a gooey deluge. The souls of the dead flew down the invader’s throat.

Reella reached down and tried to pry the planet off the tongue: no use. Kay was holding it there with some trick of hers. Reella only ended up mashing towns against the underside of grabbing arms. The planet was starting to melt in her. The invader’s saliva inundated it.

Kay started to close her mouth. Reella felt fear again. She felt more this day than even when she was mortal. Doleful, she fled the mouth and left the last of her planet to doom.

The invader swallowed with her maw open. It slipped past her throat. She cut off feedback from the humans inside. Seems Kay could grasp their senses too: when she wanted to at least. Seeing herself from the perspective of specks was often fun.

The red-haired horror sighed all over the defeated Reella. Then, she smacked her lips with an audible ‘pop’.

“Delicious.” she paused, chuckling again.

Another insincere frown.

“Aw don’t look so glum. You should be pleased oh gracious one, your planet’s nourishing a higher being. Besides, you were really after those souls, weren’t you?”

She pinched Reella back up again.

“That’s not true!” Reella countered back, shouting with the full fury of her mind. “I loved my subjects. I-”

“Were absorbing their souls huh? One of my professor’s was saying how your kind would probably do that.”

Reella’s already fragile perspective broke further. ‘her kind?’, what was meant by that? She only just heard of the concept of biology and a professor now, as Kay conveyed it telepathically. Her and her subjects never thought of these things.

“Let me see what you’ve been up to with them?”

Reella tried to protest, but before she could send a single bit of mind-speak back, Kay injected her body with some sort of presence.

A sliver of Kay’s consciousness infested Reella’s immaterial body. Every ethereal vein had its walls filled with the deep-red glow of Kay’s eyes. The invader had invaded her now, and was peering all around to study her ‘setup’.

Her stomach, her bosom, even the place she sent angels were rife with Kay’s multitude gaze. Those walls of light shifted to that deep red abyss. Reella felt gross; her souls were confused.

Kay just laughed and laughed, disturbing all Reella’s treasured spirits. This was a game to her, a joke. Like looking under a rock and watching the bugs scurry.

“Oh wow, you are so naughty aren’t you? I can’t believe you put them there. What a bitch too. I’m guessing those ones you keep dissolving over and over aren’t your fav huh?”

The invader’s laughter trailed off.

“That’s ok though. I’m a bit naughty myself.”

Back outside, Kay draped her tongue across Reella’s front, soaking those white robes.

“Mmm~ I hope you don’t mind sharing. I’ve never sucked souls out of a Stage One being before.”

Reella’s legs were slurped into Kay’s maw. It was gross, the tongue slithered here and there. Large, wet, and crimson. It reminded her of some large fish on Hotera. She missed her planet already.

Degrading as this was, the true horror was happening within. Reella’s ethereal body was being siphoned. It was indiscriminate, from all areas of her immaterial form at once. The sinners in her stomach, the billions in her bosom. Purgatory and where the angels were. None safe: all were getting slurped into walls of deep-red light.

The wicked souls were relived at first to be free of Reella’s body, but they were just entering another horrible fate. One their Lady didn’t even know.

All those repose blue souls were stirred alongside their worldly desires and regrets. Lovers remembered each other again. The endless blue tides whipped into torrents. Whirlpools of souls, spiraling down to the unknown. Their last thoughts were not of Reella, but of whatever concerns of their mortal life weighed on them most. That, or confusion at being washed away to some other higher being’s soul-gut.

Not even the angels were safe. That hum of bliss which helped keep Reella sane through all this was gone. With their modified minds, the angels lamented not serving their mistress anymore. They passed into foreign insides. Kay took them all: not a single one left.

All the while, Reella was shrinking to less than half her old size. Without all those souls giving her power, she couldn’t sustain an avatar that large. What would happen if she lost them all? She wouldn’t find out yet, as Kay let up on the souls after just a second: still a long time for two beings with such heightened minds.

Reella could fit entirely in Kay’s mouth now, and the invader was eager to suck her in. As that tongue sloppily tasted her all over, the monster stuck Reella’s head past her lips and pointed at the great ball of fire in the distance.

“It’s funny, I just came here for that. Gonna have to unshrink myself to nab it. You didn’t think this was my real size, did you? This tiny form?” She chuckled, then slurped Reella in to seal her up with only that red light to see with.

“What a lucky day this turned out to be. I didn’t expect some treats as well. Maybe just a moon or something. An organic planet like yours though? Beats the artificial hands down~”

Reella’s robe was loose, the deity didn't shrink it in time, so Kay swallowed it down. Reella was too distraught to think on it much. Her dream of reaching that fire was gone. Her divinity got cut to half or more with just a few suckles. She still felt like a god. Power coursed through her. She was millions of times better than the humans she failed, but it meant nothing here. It meant nothing to Kay. She was nothing to Kay.

“What are you?” Reella asked.

Kay paused for a moment to think of something clever.

“I am Kay: Devourer of Gods.” she mind-thundered.

Kay cut off the communication-link, then swallowed. Right after, she burst out laughing.

What a story to tell at the party! “Kay: Devourer of Gods”

That ‘Reella’, a ‘god’? What a joke. The less power entities have, the more they think they did. That didn’t seem to change based on the reality too much.

Still, Kay seemed partly relieved. ‘What a chore’, she thought. She was tired of squinting with her higher senses to converse with such creatures.

Knowing it was safe, Kay grew to a slightly bigger fraction of her true size, then moved towards a star now smaller than one of her toes.

--==--==--==--

Reella never thought she’d be eaten. She only ever physically ate a few mortals herself, but that when she was new at this and trying out a variety of strategies at divine rule.

Some god she was... She was food, tugged by this slimy throat down to some horrible end. Rolling pulses of deep-red flesh made the scenery. She could see what she thought was Kay’s flesh-veins in here. They were giving this place light. Some bright red-orange fluid flew through them. It made these insides unbearably hot.

Reella slipped down into the stomach among what was left of Hotera. Her body fell down atop the latest chunk of the planet. Only a few thousand people were alive on it. She still felt them, barely. They soon died under her naked backside.

She watched those faint few thousand souls flicker up. She reached out to grab at them. She tugged with her incorporeal being, but Kay’s idle existence had a far greater pull.

This gut was near incomprehensible. All sorts of gases and liquids and things floated around. There was at least one for every color, some for colors she never even thought of till now. The walls of this stomach were great and towering and undulating. They were perplexing to stare at. Wrinkles upon wrinkles into wrinkles. It went on forever infinitely deep. Fractals were all around her in this stomach flesh.

This Kay truly was a higher being.

Reella began to feel pain: bad pain. She wandered around a bit, saw a small piece of Hotera, not yet dissolved. It was close. She zipped towards it, floating through the rainbow clouds of gas and plasma and energies that worked her down her all the while. Still, if she was gonna die, it’d be with a chunk of her home in her hands.

Reella felt her souls slipping outside her body. She was shrinking. Worse still, Kay must’ve grown. The entire gut grew thousands of times larger in a flash just when the planet was within arms reach. That short trip to what was left of Hotera got ever more arduous, but she could still make it. Even as she was now.

Reella kept going, getting smaller and smaller. She was inhaling the digestive clouds. She was bathed in those droplets of fluids. Her skin grew red. She was leaking souls like a squeezed sponge dripped water. But she was divine, at least for now. She’d last.

By the time she got to that chunk, it was mostly gone. Soaked with spittle and slime, it was wet mush. She was small, almost mortal again. She clung to her last few hundred souls best she could as she floated to the world-chunk’s surface. She landed on a piece of what used to be a forest. A few seconds later she was at a mortal height.

Reella relaxed best she could on the moist crumbling ground. Tugging soggy grass, she looked up at at all the colors around her.

Fully mortal again, Reella lasted just one more second before she dissolved. Shortly after, that last bit of planet melted. Her soul whisked upwards to join the others.

Passing through the walls of the gut, she was in what must’ve been Kay’s immaterial form. It was vast: vaster than the space that used to make her so anxious to look at it. She felt herself, her soul, mashed into a tiny dot small as can be. Then, her spirit was shattered and erupted in a great ball of light that fed the invader.

--==--==--==--

The aftermath of digesting a god’s worth of energy hit Kay: a tiny belch. She laughed.

Humming the latest pop song of her kind, she tapped the star and a semi-clear sphere of white light surrounded it.

“Perfect!” she thought.

The being pinched up the marble-scale star and slid it into the pockets of her jean shorts.

She stretched. “Ugh, how constricting here. Time to get ready for that party. It’ll be good to get out of this dump of a reality.”

With a thought, space warbled all around Kay and she left.

Fin