Three hours, and the world had fallen silent. Entire nations gone dark. No news, no feeds, tweets or calls. The ground shuddering for the hundredth time. People flinched. All the scattered survivors had were their own memories. It was stifling hot. All bad air and stink: the stench of fume and flame. The sky wearing a brown cast, like it was unclean, soiled by distant fires and endless tonnes of dust darkening the atmosphere.
There had been a plaza there once. The fountain pool, long ceased running, was choked with floating wood and tile from buildings like weeds. Flotsam that spread over all the ground and piled up in great irregular mounds that were spiked with twisted beams and broken rebar, veiled behind the still falling ash and dust. Her cataclysm had enlarged the plaza tenfold. Antique structures that had defied time for hundreds of years shunted aside like an avalanche of creation.
People moved through it like ghosts, coated head to toe in dirt, wearing a lost, haunted look as they lifted phones bearing pictures of those that were lost. Others had not even that. Dead mobiles were useless weight to decorate their pockets.
Soon, fights broke out, people squabbling over precious supplies. Water or dented tins that spilled from a broken supermarket. Yelling and fighting like animals.
Until the boom.
There had already been many. Distant jolts and tremors that shook a city with little left to destroy, each one drawing out its own rush of nervous silence as people held their breath in fear. But this one was different.
It ripped through the ground, vehicles jostling and bumping as though weightless, people staggering as cracks snapped and wound through the streets. Dust poured from the ruins, intact walls crumbled, their echoes dimmed by the immensity of the sound. The skies darkened and they beheld Her.
Her face was framed by the darkness of her hair, misted by distance. Lips that had split into a smile, like she could see every microscopic life beneath her. Beyond immense arms were spread wide, the very tips of her fingers cresting the horizon on either side of her captivated audience. The gesture was an embrace. Her expression promised only oblivion. Fingertips the size of cities touched the earth, parting the swirling clouds around them, glowing with the pressure of atmosphere. Miles upon miles of landscape sundered beneath her touch.
The shock wave rolled over the ground, kicking up a wave of powdered stone. The mites howled and pleaded. She never heard them, too busy dragging her fingers over the surface of this whorled blue world. The crest of earth before each one rising to consume the landscape. Cities and towns, fields, forests, all. History erased beneath her will.
Birds flew, screaming, into the air, taking flight from the End. None could withstand the powerful quakes she wrought, the roar growing ever louder as her hands swept inwards, cleaving the very crust of the earth. And between her wrathful hands, with eyes burning from the broiling fumes of magma, choking on the dust and ash, were those same specks who had seen her first. The first witnesses from mankind of her rise to divinity.
And the last.
It began, as so many things do, with the death of a hero.
Not one that had been embroiled in some grandiose scheme stopping supervillains or an alien invasion. One who had opened his heart to Armageddon.
That was then. Now, wires and lines held him to life. His hands knotted with age and eyes red rimmed, gazing upon a world they were long weary of. He had lost the strength to speak and now only stared silently at the woman who clasped his hand. Age hadn't touched her and it never would. She was out of place. Otherworldly. More suited to pillared halls or a temple than this dismal house of death.
Dark hair draped over her shoulders, catching the bright lights while piercing eyes glowered at every nurse and doctor, as though daring them to make a mistake. But he only had eyes for her, drinking her in, waiting for his time, mouthing something that would not come. For sixty years she had remained by his side. Sixty years of watching the seasons change, watching the good, the evil, the frustration. He knew what was in her to do. And he had pleaded with her over and over. To spare his world her ravages.
Sometimes she listened and he dared to hope that her fondness for him would extend to all.
Other times: her frustration bit him. Threats and promises hissed on bitter lips to doom all that trod upon the earth.
He coughed, and forced himself to speak. Something that could save or condemn a world. Or all worlds. His eyes met hers, tears wetting creases like valleys on his face.
“Indri, don't…”
The voice faded, his body went still. Machines screamed. Nurses flurried. She held his hand.
An explosion of sound shook the hospital building from roof to foundation: a scream of pain and fury no human could ever make. A nurse, her uniform soaked with blood and her body near snapped in two, struck the corridor outside the room, streaking pristine walls with red.
She emerged, Indri, filling the hall from floor to ceiling with her body and her wrath. With fingers bloodied, and a second, struggling form clasped by the throat, she strode into the hall, lifted him bodily and tightened her grip. He thrashed against her. She squeezed, first cutting his air then his life. The grisly death bringing her some savage pleasure to alleviate the pain.
His last request had gone unheeded. She was unleashed.
Rage and loss fueled her growth. Fury surging like fire through her veins, her hands braced to heave against the ceiling above. Fissures formed, the ceiling bulged, and her body burst through, releasing her expanding form. Indri filled rooms, writhing and exulting in the way the hospital yielded against her. It was a prison. Like this earthly form had held her these years, now this feeble construction attempted to confine her too. All that had led her toward was this pain. She sought to push free, growled, and grew.
Yells filled the shuddering building, mingling with the protest of steel and concrete that twisted and reformed against her. Indri didn't care for the lives that perished under her. She relished them even, blaming them for their weakness, furious at their mortality. The mortality that conquered her. Mighty fingers braced, her body, suffused with power, arched and burst through the roof.
She ripped her hands free of the hospital, tearing the man-made guts from it. Her harsh laugh mocked their fragility. Her foot tore free next, cleaving apart floors and splitting walls. The shadow of it sweeping over the street and met her sole. A single car lay beneath. The driver yelling as she brought darkness down upon him. Indri didn't press down. She let the growth do it for her. Her toes covering more of the street and bringing more weight to bear over the vehicle. Metal couldn't resist her. It folded inwards and she felt the wetness of the body churned inside.
Indri never turned from her task. The tarmac buckled, forming a ring around the sunken print that grew as she grew. A miniature mountain range to frame her toes, shunted ever outwards. Her expansion chased the fleeing crowds.
Dark hair lay loose about her shoulders, lifted by the dangerously close passage of a helicopter. Indri frowned at it, but let it be. Let them film. Let them watch or fight or run. It mattered none. And so her rise was shown to the world.
Buildings rose above her. More confines. More walls. Her anger framed a smile, two fingers brought to those curved lips and kissed. She pressed them to the ground, to the rubble where the hospital had stood, transferring a farewell kiss to her buried lover.
Indri turned from him, and all his lessons. Liberated at last. She lifted her hands to the azure sky above, reaching for the clouds.
Screams poured through the streets around her, faces gaping from windows that reflected her body. Every curve stealing more of the road. Her toes shunting across a black crust like crackled icing, topped with cars and people. Wind whipped, tugging her hair into a wild tangle about her face. She hadn't moved and yet the delicate skyscrapers crumbled, collapsing as she outgrew the street.
Indri’s smashed through dozens of floors, smearing her foolish audience beneath an incalculable deluge of rubble. Her body swaying to savour the touch of it. Limp rags of people, furniture and dust fell. More speckled her skin, the stain of their existence swiftly fading as she grew.
Rooftops tickled her breasts, sank past her stomach and stranded her in a pool of skyscrapers inviting her to wade. Now she moved. Bringing her feet down over tower blocks, her calves powering through frail structures. Her toes filled roads, then spread beyond them. Each step now levelled buildings, each crater larger and more catastrophic than the last. Her expansion was more rapid now. Indri using her power to escape the pain of her loss and leave the writhing specks of humanity behind.
Moisture wet her skin, droplets that condensed and rolled across to splash a calamity when they fell. Indri hit the cloud layer, chill on her skin. She didn't stop. Fury had driven her this far. Contempt would take her the rest. People, caught up in their own little lives. So proud in their creation. No more than dust beneath her.
So she grinned properly, and brought a step down over blocks and neighbourhoods. Chuckled as the dust rayed out from it and mused on the mayhem so far below. Her swelling body smashed through more homes, stubbing out her own fires and mowing down people fleeing the wall of impossible living skin. The city reeled and shook, her steps sinking deep, disturbing the bedrock and pulverising all on top. Quakes that rocked for miles.
She left them the evidence of her ascension. Broken structures and immense footprints. A sea of destruction that would soon pale before what she would become.
At the next outcrop of civilisation she rose over the landscape. Her step shook a hundred spires to dust, the shock wave deafening those she'd walked amongst all this time.
All that he'd feared and more was she.
She crouched as she grew, offering her mortal audience once more a view of her. Her knees astride a sprawling metropolis, dragging her fingertips through a hundred years of creation, drawing new valleys that filled with magma. The earth surrendered to her. Soon cities cowered beneath the endless landscape of her body. Then nations were eclipsed. Buried in darkness and twilight while busy fingers ravaged.
She arched her back, sank her hands into the softness of the ground and let the power flow. She outmatched the home of humanity, smiling down at the first city to see her. Her hands drew through the clouds and surface, churning them into whirling hurricanes. All on the surface buried in a billion tonnes of earth.
More. And the planet diminished. What was left of billions of people now gazing at the monstrous face of divinity.
Her hand swept out, striping the world with darkness, all those lives clasped in her hand. Hers to destroy or spare as she willed. Billions lay in her night, waiting for the end. Indri turned from them like they meant nothing and regarded the distant light of millions of stars reflected in her eyes. She smiled in the silence and her fingers curled around her world. It spilled glowing fire from her fingers as she reached. Greedy hands seeking the specks of life and warmth, furious that they dared to live in a universe devoid of him.
Indri snarled into the darkness, tears the size of worlds streaking her face.
And she grew.