A Celestial Garden
I don't know why I called it that, it just seemed to fit.
Uh.. this is a very strange little story that I found myself writing over the last few days, based on some wacky ideas that I had in my head - essentially a Micky made of stars.
I don't think its particularly well written, and frankly I... think it comes across as more a story I wrote purely for myself for my own enjoyment, rather than something other people might enjoy, but here it is anyway.
Let me know what you think.
A dark serpentine creature drifted through the darkness of space, between the many lights that make up the sea of stars. Her luminous pink eyes glanced left and right, curiously watching over all the little worlds that circle the pinpricks of light. Her body was vast and sinuous, finned with gossamer, with streams of indigo and teal coloured swirls of hair trailing behind her head, and easily dwarfed any of the worlds she passed by, although she gave stars a wide berth, afraid of their fire.
Her name was Micky and she was a leviathan.
Sometimes she would happen upon worlds capable of supporting life, and would move closer, gazing fondly upon the tiny beings that roamed their surfaces. At other times, she would explores the empty swathes of nothingness, wandering dreamily through nebulas and stellar drifts.
In one of these wanderings, she happens upon a tiny pale star, and finds herself drawn to it. It's about the size of her head, and she overcoming her fears due to its diminutive size, she moves closer and stretches out a claw to touch it. She finds it warm to the touch, and goes in to sniff at it, but it tickles her nose and she has to turn away to sneeze, displacing orbiting rocks and rocketing away from the tiny star from the force. Reflexively, her tail wraps around it, but rather than arresting her motion she snags it up with her fins, and as she flies through the ether she brings it up into her claws and holds it, peering at the tiny pearlescent orb. A beautiful little glowing thing.
She hugs the star to her chest, feeling warmed in the cold of space, and nuzzles her snout into it. It smells sweet and some of the dust gets onto her lips, and when she licks it she finds it tastes of rainbow sherbet. So she licks the sun and is overwhelmed by the sweetness of its flavour. Before long, she finds she's eating and gobbling it down, glowing sticky globs of star-stuff being gulped down her throat and sitting in her tummy, making it glow faintly. Almost without even knowing it, the whole neutron star is gone, and she feels very full and heavy despite very modest little lump in her tummy.
A dusting of stardust clings to her scales, and her tongue is coated in the glowing stuff, the flavour saturating her tastebuds and making her crave more. She floats there, drifting through the cosmos, peering around, before swimming towards a nearby white pinprick - a white dwarf star surrounded by small, stony balls of rock. She wends her way through these circling planets, whose orbits distort around her intense gravity well, and approaches the white dwarf, drifting to a halt roughly at arms length with the bright ball of ivory fire, as wide as the length of her tail.
Hesitantly, she presses up against its warmth, enjoying the sensation of all that warm stardust against her scales, cuddling into the fiery orb and timidly giving it a lick with her tongue - the flavour is intoxicating, overwhelming her senses, and she starts to bite into it - its like warm, soft white chocolate coated in sherbet and sugar and honey, and under its soft flaming crust the innards are hot molten fire, which the leviathan drinks up, draining dry the inside of the stellar sweet before gobbling down chunks of its crusted surface. Before long the star is gone and a slightly bloated and slightly larger Micky floats in its place, glowing softly with all the stardust dusting her scales, and her tummy a soft blue of inner warmth, surrounded by lazily circling planets, destabilized from their usual orbit and slowly spiralling inwards towards her.
Ignoring them, she sinuously darts towards another pinprick of light, a slightly larger yellow dwarf star. She rushes to it headlong, pouncing on and cuddling it tight to her body, wrapping her arms and tail around it, and pushes her snout into its fiery warmth like a bird sucking the juices from a fruit. Another unique flavour - this one more like honey, the heavy stellar juices flooding through her throat and warming her insides like a ski lodge toddie. The crust tastes more of fiery honeycomb, tickling her tongue and throat as she gobbles it down. And then, the star was gone, and despite feeling full of warmth and fire, the leviathan sighs and feels herself empty once more.
She turns her head, ignoring the planets spiralling in towards her, and spots some bright nearby stars, close together - a trinary system. With a hopeful smile she drifts in their direction, her tail sparkling in the darkness as she leaves a faintly glowing trail behind.
Coming to rest in the middle of the three circling fiery orbs, she spins in a slow circle, taking in the sight. Each of the three stars is more than twice the size of the previous one, but even the biggest was no bigger than the leviathan herself. They twirl around her in a slow cosmic dance, slowly spiralling inwards as the gravity well of the galactic monster destabilizes their orbit. Streams of fire and gasses start to spiral out from the glowing orbs, reaching eagerly towards the leviathan, brushing against her tummy and tickling her scales. Gathering them in her cupped claws like water from a faucet, she gulps down these streams of fire, warming her throat and her chest with a hot fiery glow. As the three suns drift ever closer, she takes them one by one in her claws and holds them up to her mouth, letting the streams of fire drain out of the glowing orbs and flow directly down her throat, like squeezing the juice from an orange.
Crunching down the empty shells of the trinary stars, she sighed and looked around once more. There were so many flavours to explore, so many tastes to experience, and so many stars in the ether that she could visit. But there was no rush. And suddenly, there was a cramp in her tummy, which was bloated and glowing brightly from the inside as the light of all those stars combined and set fire to her insides, sparking hot fusion in her belly.
She moans, clutching her glowing bloated tummy, and drifts off into fitful slumber, as the planets continue their death spiral inwards and impact softly against the centre of her gravity - her belly, - splashing into tiny chunks that cling to her scales like dust. She twitches sometimes, as if in a bad dream, her scales flushed and slick as if she were in a fever.
Waking eons later, in a cloud of dust and gasses, the sleeping leviathan peers around at her surroundings, apparently having gathered a pink and blue hued nebula of dust, rock and gasses around herself . Her tummy has shrunk, its glow suffusing the rest of her body, which is large, vibrant, curved and soft. She floats through space, at the centre of a stellar nursery, stars and gasses and particles of dust all accumulated around her gravity well, bumping up against her tummy from time to time as if drawn to it.
She arches her back, stretching, yawning, and as she does, a stream of nearby gasses and matter spirals down into her mouth, almost choking her yawn and making her splutter, sending her in a slow tumble through the clouds of pink and blue, until she comes face-first with a glowing blue giant star, big enough that she can get her arms around it and hold on to arrest her movement. Sighing, she rests her chin on the hot blue flames, and closes her eyes, letting the star warm her body, wrapping her tail around it to suffuse her body with its heat, while the star stuff swirling around her adjusts around the new source of gravity. Once again, she falls asleep, and starts to snore.
Every inhalation, every opening of her mouth, causes a stream of fire and gasses to swirl its way down inside her, from the star, from the nebula surrounding the leviathan, following the gradient of gravity down into her tummy, where it joins the stellar fusion and slowly gains in power and mass.
Amidst warmth and hypnotic dreams, her body slowly swells and grows, glowing brighter and hotter all the way. The blue giant star is gradually dwarfed by the slumbering monster, whose light and inner fire overwhelms the glow of the star, as the star dwindles away and disappears, along with all the nebula, dust and rocks and gasses in the surrounding space. A new star forms in their place, the supermassive blindingly glowing purple orb of a curled up leviathan cuddling her own tail, a sight and a vision for astronomers for thousands of light years to witness and marvel over.
One of her eyes flutters open, followed by the other, two small orbs of intense pink light shining out from a glowing sea of purple scales. Was her own body not so fiery hot, she would shiver, for she drifted in the deep dark cold between galaxies. Uncurling her immense body she swims through the ether towards the nearest galaxy, a three armed spiral, seeking the warmth of its stars and the sustenance of its gasses.
As she approached, it seemed as if the galaxy was reaching out towards her, ready to embrace her arrival. And then she was amidst it, the stars streaming past as she rushed headlong towards the centre of its spiral. Suddenly the leviathan realised her size - more massive than the largest nebula, dwarfing the largest star. She turned and arrested her motion, slowly coming to a relative halt, and glanced around in some panic as all the stars moved towards her, eager to rub against her scales and climb down her throat. With a whimper she tried to leave, but they were all around her, spiralling and spiralling, moving faster and faster as they swirled downwards in the intense gravity.
Micky became aware, watching this, of the intense feeling of... emptyness in her tummy. More than emptyness - almost a cold and painful sensation, like her body wanted to collapse in on itself. She opened her mouth in a gasp, and before she knew it, several nearby stars had stretched into streamers and been sucked down her throat. The feeling of cold emptyness subsided for a moment, but then it returned. She closed her eyes, small diamond tears trickling from the corners, flowing across her scales like rivers of crystal.
Curling up her body once more, clinging to her tail and wrapping it around herself, she let her mind wander as she tried to think of what might happen, how it could be, why there was a black hole in her tummy, and what to do about it. In ancient times she had read books and watched presentations about the formation of galaxies, the substance of stars. Much of it incorrect, most of it merely theory. But maybe they were right about some things, such as the idea that the centre of every galaxy was a greedy black hole, surrounded by a cloud of food that spiralled down to feed it. Somehow... the leviathan had now become the centre of her own galaxy, a sea of hot purple fire in the middle of a spiralling disc of pinprick lights. And she didn't know what to do.
What if some of these stars had planets..? What if some of these planets had life? What if some of that life was self aware, and came to understand their doom?
Her thoughts slowed. Eons passed. She came to realise that this was simply the nature of things. Her perception was different from others. The passage of time for a being of her size was vastly different from those of terrestrial scale. Mere moments of her existence would mark the rise and fall of civilisation. A breath, a beat of her titanic heart, would chart the birth of life on a virgin world, and a blink of her eyes its fall and decay. In the time it took her to turn around, a civilisation could spread across half the galaxy.
She smiled quietly to herself, opened her eyes, and looked around at the sea of stars surrounding her. Able to face her fate at last, she uncoiled her tail, relaxed her body, opened her mouth, and let the swirling stars stream down her throat. She was the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, and more than that, she understood at last.
This wasn't the end, this was a new beginning, for after all, every universe had a beginning, and every universe had an end, from which a new universe would be born anew.
The next universe would be her, and it would be bright and purple.