A cool, languid twist of the wrist heard the engine sputter its last. Its gentle judder seceded to the ocean's calmer, more persistent call, which crept through the crack in the window, bringing with it a lick of salty air.
Slipping out of her sandals, Tassia popped the latch, then tickled her toes upon the reeded crest.
Resting a hand upon the roof, she permitted just enough time for a ritual scan of the horizon before succumbing to that call - now an intimate roar as though her ears were cupped by shells - and surrendering all her attention to its shimmering source, basking in the only light for miles around.
In truth it was neither the most picturesque nor the most pristine place, quite unremarkable in its appearance, but its condition gave rise to its profound solitude, and to Tassia, its solitude is what made it beautiful. And convenient.
That, plus the fact that her parents would bring her here often. When they were struggling with what to call her, they’d embark upon lengthy drives, and it was in this place that her mother had described having the experience of cradling her, gazing into her blue-green eyes, and it being as though the sea spoke her name.
Much as she once bemoaned the anecdote’s retelling during every journey over, that remembrance would always catch her at this juncture. Still, she’d been here enough that it wouldn’t linger, and the notion was gone with a clunk of the car door.
Heading toward some modest bluffs, Tassia padded through the bumpy terrain until the reeds receded to dry, dirty sand, loose between her toes and firm beneath her soles.
Along the way she acquired a figure, the size of a man. A useful reference. She adjusted herself to better accommodate her prize as she slung it over her shoulder.
It wasn't much, but the effect was instant. She could feel that everything had changed.
The same dual-layered ground became at once sturdier and spongier, her footsteps leaving short-lasting depressions that slowly refilled with the displaced, avalanching topsand. If anyone had been around to see them, they'd swear they were hot on the heels of a Sandsquatch.
At the V in the bluffs, her spot, she deposited the dummy directly into the crevice’s apex, her bigger body crushing immediately up against it from behind.
"Stay! No peeking!"
Tassia’s playful antics were whispered with another surge and slam, all but embedding the lesser figure into the crevice. Satisfied it would remain still, she took a few paces back, outstriding several markings upon the two symmetrically slanting faces of rock, the first of which she made as a child.
Those wouldn’t be necessary on this occasion.
Rather, she simply lay herself down in the sand, delighting first in the cushioning, then the ever-diminishing grains brushing across her body as though she were being conveyed in every direction at once. Throwing her arms above her head to writhe in familiar rapture, the shifting sand became silk, interwoven with coarser grains, once pebbles, until her soles struck the stone.
From there, one foot mimicked her earlier embrace, pressing the diminutive figure against the craggy surface. Though proportionally alike before, the power and potential was beyond comparison. A faint flex was sufficient to elicit the quiet crack; testament enough to the certainty of her capacity to effortlessly flatten the figure, should she so desire. Her curiosity sated, she mercifully relented, easing up the pressure and scrunching her toes about its shoulders.
Lifting her leg straight up, the suspended figure became her toy, and Tassia teased her hands up and down, indulging in the extent of the excursion as she reclaimed it.
Doll in hand she roamed the rest of her body, passively absorbing every intimation through her skin.
Nor did she relent as she rolled languorously toward the beckoning tide, shifting or sheltering her toy from her own ponderous weight with each tumble. Sometimes she’d arch and stretch, holding it aloft. Sometimes there was nothing but a cupped palm or equally conspicuously collapsible hollow preserving the space between her plaything and the packed, wet-sand impressions of herself, set solid as concrete.
Not many turns before the sand was wet, and fewer again before her skin finally kissed that cool, crisp water. The moment was electrifying for Tassia. Quite indescribable.
Though the stark chill would penetrate her, she knew nothing of its harsher attributes. No shock, no shivering. Pure invigoration. She was at home.
It’s something she’d mused on at length. Something she’d experimented with. The very second it happened, however slight, negative sensation would cease. There was something binary about her transition. As though from mortal, to…
It seemed so absurd, so silly. But then so did giants. Shapeshifters. Though it may be she alone, Tassia knew the one to exist, so why not the other? She had feelings, affinities, and when she’d ascend (it seemed the word for it, it felt the word for it) her sense of self, her sense of perception was an altogether different experience to what she knew from ordinary life.
Remembering that her companion was not so robust, she gathered a washed up buoy from further up shore, housing her tiny hostage within the ladder well. A playful bat from her finger set the buoy vigorously bobbing back and forth in the water, its occupant rattling violently inside, but evidently secure.
Tassia smiled, launching the buoy with a kiss before propelling it onward with her own movement through the water.
Initially she almost crawled, feeling out and following a sequence of stones, each a little larger than the last, until the water was deep enough for her to stand, and the stones vaguely fit the form of her feet.
On they went, and Tassia kept pace, the slant of her chest barely breaking the waterline as the seemingly dwindling buoy accelerated away from her ever-looming countenance, until all her toy could’ve made out from within its metal cage, would’ve been her lips. The same lips that soon after turned crooked enough to herald mischief, and soon after again expanded at such a rate that they disappeared into the sky, followed after by the female body’s equivalent of a Star Destroyer; a nigh endless, upward and outward procession of soft, all-encompassing flesh.
Ascension indeed.
Nobody witness to such a spectacle could’ve been hesitant about throwing around the term Goddess.
Gazing down between her legs, to where the tops of her thighs besieged the ocean’s surface, and the lonely little buoy bobbed about as if begging before a deity, Tassia couldn’t feel ill at ease with the term either.
Her feet no longer fit the stones. Perhaps her toes did.
The Ocean’s mighty waves forgot their own purpose, and adopted hers as Tassia waded against them. Her attention remained fixed upon the little trinket caught up in the turmoil, and her mind raced with realisations. It could’ve been anyone down there, trapped, tossed around mercilessly by her subtlest stride, stranded and quivering before her immensity, beholden to her merest whims. Anyone.
As she quickened her pace, the ocean got that little bit wetter.
Permitting the water to gradually overtake her again, her body seemed almost to reverse, until her feet found the final stone. Tassia’s face returned level before the buoy, now utterly dwarfing it.
”This is it!”
The declaration came with a lash of her tongue, and a gaping mouth that closed slowly in on the eminently swallowable buoy, stopping short only by the skin of Tassia’s teeth.
”Don’t go anywhere!”
With the mischief of a mermaid, at that she dove, disappearing into the deep even before the hot mist of her breath had time to condense around the buoy’s frame.
Minutes passed.The lonely figure rocked about, stranded somewhere at sea. Nowhere, lost and alone until bubbles broke the surface some way off. The froth built to a boil before, like an old sailor’s tale, the barnacle clad prow of an enormous ship burst forth, followed shortly by the rest as the ghost ship eerily righted itself.
Or rather, was hoisted aloft by two huge hands, latched to the hull like a kraken’s tentacles, which promptly tilted the surprisingly intact vessel, emptying it of its excess water.
Amused by the levity of her newest toy, Tassia emerged enough to curl it a couple of times. It was little effort, and she was delighted to observe, upon setting it down beside her belly, that it could still float somewhat. At least well enough.
She wasted no time retrieving the gumball-sized buoy and loading it onto the deck, marvelling at how the tiny splendour of her prisoner somehow vivified the whole abandoned ensemble. Squatting before the vessel, still cradling its ruptured hull with a single sustaining hand, her mind multiplied that one passenger into many hundreds, all scrambling about the deck, with many more seeking refuge below.
With all this resting upon her hand, it perceptibly occurred to Tassia just how easily she might be rescuing people, performing grand, noble deeds of a sort impossible to humankind. Indeed perhaps she would be, were she not compelled by discretion. She wasn’t without the impulse.
But that's not why she was here. She had other impulses too.
Never forgetting her mentally conjured crowds, she tilted her wrist this way and that, eagerly leaning in to watch the buoy clang and clatter across the deck. It wouldn’t matter how many, the effect would be the same. All of them, completely in her thrall. Awestruck at her towering presence. Terrified by her capacity for cruelty, by the hot hiss of her breath hovering above their roiling bodies.
Tassia growled above the deck. What do mortals know? This was nothing.
She dunked below the surface, a furious effervescence counteracting the inrush of her wake, out from which she reemerged, rocketing upwards, ascending like never before, her titanic thighs well clear of the waterline, and the ship carried perilously upon a crest of their causing.
This was not discreet. She didn’t care.
Torrents still cascading off her body, crashing threateningly around the enfeebled vessel, Tassia sneered down, appraising it much as she did the buoy as it buffeted between her thighs, beneath them.
If they hadn’t been flung overboard or otherwise rendered incapacitated by the cataclysm resulting from her gargantuan presence. If, whilst contending for their very lives, they’d been able to snatch a direct glance. What would they have seen? What would they have felt? She wondered.
Worthless, was a word that came to mind as she stooped to scoop the doomed vessel, letting the water filter through her fingers, ascending until the newest gumball was marooned upon her palm.
Bringing it up before her face, she could barely make out the speck of a buoy, imagining them all now, so utterly insignificant.
No. They were not the same. She was not the same.
Pinching it now between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, Tassia turned the withering craft inward toward a solitary, blue-green eye expanding to envelop its horizon.
That was all they would see. That was all they would know. And they could count themselves blessed for the ethereal experience, for even being worthy enough of her notice that she should find amusement in snuffing them out like dust between her fingers.
Quite indiscreetly, Tassia flicked the dust free.
Let them find it. Let them wonder.
Ascended well beyond anything she’d attempted before, Tassia was coming to enjoy the ambiguity of her anonymity. Consciously, she wasn't quite ready to reveal herself to the world. Perhaps she never would be.
But should it ever come to pass, the world most certainly would not be ready for her.