Empires and Kingdoms, Lords and their people... they all bowed to her. A living sea of people, endless and rippling, chanting her name. They both loved and feared her. Lily lifted her leg, bare toes glittering with jewellery, and stepped out into the mass. She saw them yell, their faces twisted into grotesque shapes beneath her careless tread.
Lily sat up, panting, her body slicked with sweat and her mind heavy with guilt. The sheets were soaked with it. Their screams had followed her into darkness, but now the last cries faded, leaving only the dream as a looming presence in her room. The mundane drone of the ceiling fan was welcome sound, as was the rush of a car hurrying past outside. Somewhere, a fly buzzed, disturbed by her sudden waking. Normal noises that reminded her all was well.
But, the dreams were getting worse, more frequent and vivid, disturbing her nights with thoughts she should never have. Lily’s shaking fingers reached for a brown bottle, it's white label proudly proclaiming their brand and instructions. Two blue pills would be enough to kill her thoughts awhile. She tipped them out and contemplated them, sitting alone in the plain of her palm. Something so small, and yet they did so much. She swallowed them, grimacing.
Lily lay back into the softness of the pillows, watching the black shadows of branches on the wall. They'd promised the tablets would help her sleep and they had but… like hands, immense clawed hands, the shadows reached for her. The room blurred and Lily slipped into sleep.
Not until the grey promise of dawn did she stir. Twisting again, fretting and muttering. The dreams creeping back into their space, infiltrating her mind and fitting back into the void left in their absence.
Worlds crumbled at her touch again. Lily sang to them, crooning a lullaby at the stars, seeing them wink out one by one. Her lips curled into a smile and her weight shifted. Dream hands curled through the amethyst spiral of a galaxy. And real hands echoed them, stretching out to clasp the air.
They seemed to keep stretching. Beneath the thin cover of blankets, her restive body expanded. Outstretched fingers and toes making a bid for the far walls of the room. A few inches and she rolled over, clutching a pillow against her chest. All was still, so still that that slight growth could have been imagined. She tightened her grip on the cushion and muttered. Suddenly her hair scraped the wall, her bare toes slamming into her dresser. Bottles and detritus collapsed from it, spilling over the floor. Glass smashing to reveal pools of bright coloured nail varnish soaking into the carpet. It didn't wake her. Lily straightened, bracing legs and back against the wall, making the room shudder.
She started to curl as she grew, tucking her legs in to a foetal position, bending her head as her shoulders braced against the walls. The bed groaned, metal struts bending beneath her weight. Lily growled.
In her dream she was taped and bound. Tight thongs snaring her limbs and restricting her movement. She writhed and turned, seeking space to move. There was none, and Lily roared in frustration, her body arching, suffused with pent up power. It surged from thought to reality and her little house exploded around her. That sudden expulsion of growth sending brick and tile careening over the gardens. Her body naked and exposed atop the debris of her home. Lily sighed in her sleep, stretching her toes over it, one hand curled over the dust strewn car that would never hold her again.
The sound had roused her neighbours. Curtains twitching aside to give the slumbering shadow it's first audience. Doors opened tentatively and shaking hands rubbed sleep from bleary eyes as dozens gazed up at the gently sleeping form. Lily stirred, fencing splintering under her weight, and grunted at unknown figures in her dream world, her eyelids flickering. In the same motion, Lily squeezed absently, and there was the tortured squeal of metal as she left fingerprints on the sides of her car. Her next word drew gasps, people hurrying to drag their families away from the spectacle, heeding the danger in her tone as Lily questioned dream figures;
“Bigger?”
A smile graced her features, the young daylight washing her body in blue grey light. A fine mist had crept in during the night, hiding from the sunrise between the walls of homes. Birds sang, then faltered. Dogs howled. Lily gripped the car like a precious treasure, and her words became truth. The expansion was slow, her hand simultaneously pinning and shunting along the silver car. Other vehicles met a similar demise as her sprawled limbs forced them over the ground. Her foot pressing one into some poor soul's living room with a godawful crunch.
Lily knew nothing of this. Every sound translated to something pleasurable in her dreams. The sensation of folding lawn and crumpling vehicles an accent to her growth. Power poured through every vein, setting them aflame with pleasure in this world and her dream one. She moved, swelling fingers dragging the silver of the car inward, pinning it against herself in mockery of a hug. It crumpled.
Lily went still, her breathing deep with slumber. Without the constant grind of her motions, the change in her body was more evident. She grew with a ponderous slowness. In the quiet, there was the noise of cracking tarmac and fences as she gradually took up more and more space. People scattered, others yelled to attract her attention. Those that knew her shouting her name or pelting her with stone or broken wood in a desperate attempt to wake her.
Lily frowned, their chittering like the buzzing of mosquitoes to her mind. Then she grumbled, shaking her head. They shouted louder, hoping she would wake.
“Lily… Lily… Wake up! Don't get any bigger!!”
They screamed till their throats were sore. The giantess stirred, and muttered through her sleep smile for the second time;
“Bigger?”
Despite the frantic yelling that far exceeded the volume of that word, it was all she heard. The peaceful giantess moved lightly, murmured something, and exploded in size.
Her slow, lazy expansion became a terrifying rush of euphoric growth. Her limbs swelling to become immense battering rams that shunted aside all in their wake. Those people who had called her howled once before they were unknowingly pulverised, the curve of her breast ploughing over them, reducing their living bodies to a hidden smear. Her own property was no longer enough to contain her, and she covered more of the street in living flesh.
She lay, breathtakingly huge, filling the grey asphalt of the street. And there was nothing to break against her body. A frown appeared, and Lily, now several hundred feet had she been standing, rolled onto her back. Dozens of homes, occupied or not, vanished under the curve of her body. Manicured gardens and shrubs mulched back into the earth. Walls no longer outlined little private plots of land, they were quite simply erased.
And to Lily, the powerful touch of he landscape bulldozed by her body reached into her dreams. She felt the kiss of her town and the deaths of her own friends. They were the emperors from her dreams. A thousand private empires perishing beneath her most secret desire. Their deaths would have horrified her, but nothing could reach her, the sounds of voices fading into the effortless contortion of her town. Lily rolled again, her belly now facing the inner city, outlined in black as the horizon turned pink. She cleaved through more homes and shook the ground, wiggling to get comfortable against the neighbourhood she had unknowingly demolished.
And it seemed these tickles roused her, flicking on some primal urge. Her dreams grew more vivid, and her growth sped up. Curving walls of ever rising flesh rose over the delicate homes, facing the dawn and casting a darkening shadow at her back. Lily slept as her body hunted down the populace, peaceful atop the shunted wall of devastation she created.
Bigger and bigger she grew. Her breath sending her chest plunging into delicate buildings, surging towards the fleeing masses of people. Then a pause as it slowed, drawn away from them while she exhaled. In, out, each larger and more chaotic than the last. Fingers the length of telegraph poles curled through the ground as though it were the sheets on her bed, gripping and tugging until earth broke and spooled through them.
By the time the first outskirting structures of the city touched her, she was already thousands of feet tall. A breathtaking, impossible, breathing mountain that dominated the scenery. Lily murmured again, squirming as the first delicate structures were powdered under the weight of her breasts, thousands who couldn't outrun the rate of her expansion now yelling as the incredible orb burst through skyscrapers, sending debris pouring down over her naked skin.
The sunlight struck her first. The most colossal thing on the landscape, her skin glowing orange with the new light. It caught her hand, then darkened, dipping down towards the miles of buildings spread before her. An outrunner for the consuming figure she cut. The shadow streaked the city, bringing more fear with the darkness, then slammed down, erasing the buildings and people alike. Dust and debris whipped into a hurricane that poured through minute streets. And hushed people beheld her fingers laying lazily across a district. Each one lengthening and thickening, until the stray limb alone could outmatch their constructions.
She reformed the landscape, smiling serenely in slumber, bringing the city down around the people without even the slightest notion they were there. Lily fidgeted, curling her toes together, sweeping up a hundred specks and grinding them into the creases of her skin.
Explosions lit her from the front. Missiles and bullets hitting her in a desperate bid to rouse her. It turned out to be a mistake. She responded as though she had been bitten by a fly, an arm miles long sweeping across to brush the irritation from her. Planes swung to avoid her, too late, and they sparkled against her skin like glitter. The few who managed to eject in time getting caught in the slipstream and dragged from sight.
The last skyscrapers lay helpless before her, the survivors sobbing as the ground danced and a living wall ran over a rolling mess of rubble towards them. Her body was everything to them. Earth and sky, endless and motionless, devouring their civilisation in a widening circle of goddesshood. She was immeasurable, insurmountable and unstoppable. The last structures vanished beneath her.
Fresh mountains skirted her body, speckled with lives and rubble, rising and churned by the swell of her form. Earthquakes wracled the nation swiftly dwindling beneath her. The sweep of her leg raked towns from the earth or tore down forests. When she moved, districts fell from her fingers, sundered, fueling the ravages of her dreams. Lily cradled a nation to her chest, sweeping thousands to vanish in the sweltering canyon of her breasts. Growing so immense that the delicious sensation of a crumbling nation could feed her dreams.
Untold numbers of people beheld her. They cried, prayed and fucked their last. None could outrun her expansion. She outgrew towns and cities, great winding cracks snaking across the helpless world, more and more, larger and greater. Billions of people awaited the unknowing end.
Then it stopped. Dust choked a nation, thundering echoes and booms as the desecration settled about her.
Lily moaned and stirred awake. Eyes larger than lakes opened in her serene face. They reflected the minute stains of civilisation on the ground. They widened as they took in the people lay down before her. Her expression was unfathomable, confronted with her dreams made flesh.
Her fantasy exposed.
But, who, now, could tell her it was wrong?