Maestosa (Patreon Commission for RhythmicSlither)

TAGS: Snek/Big Snek, Hyper, Macro/Planet Macro/Cosmic Macro, Ascension/Goddess, Musical Ascension

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The stadium lights blared in her face, reflecting off of her hood to create a spectacular light show that only added to the magnificence of her sheer presence. The best part is that it hadn’t been done on purpose; Cadenza just slithered into place, the lights were turned on, and the whole thing fell into place, leaving her quietly impressed at the serendipity of it all, and quite a bit excited at the prospect of turning the whole place into a large-scale nightclub of her very own… especially since she didn’t really fit into proper nightclubs anymore.

Cad would be lying if she said that she didn’t miss the experience. The (comparatively) tight space made for a compressed, heavily-fueled atmosphere that almost served to keep her going purely based on the contact high, with the bass beats reverberating off the walls for some truly stellar and stunning acoustics that just weren’t possible in the great outdoors. Still, improvement and progress came at a cost, and hers was… well, it was hard to call her current size a “cost”, in all fairness, but it did sometimes make her wish she wasn’t so utterly gigantic as to need half of a stadium just to get the party started. On the other hand, needing half a stadium just for herself and her equipment was such a divine and transcendental experience that it was hard to truly put it to words, especially when the giant boa looked down at the immense crowd before her and couldn’t even make out any one individual person. They were a blob of excited shouting and frantic motion, most of which was so fluid that it became legitimately entrancing, leaving the giantess feeling like she should’ve already begun the show yesterday.

It was a bother setting everything up as well; she’d been waiting inside the stadium for the past two days just to give the teams enough time and space to set everything up, tended to by a large group of roadies whose sole task was to make sure that every whim of hers was taken care of to the best of their ability. Cadenza made sure to keep her demands light though; she might be an almost-literal goddess in mortal trappings, but she was a merciful one, so there was no need to go overboard with anything… aside from her mixing table and sound system, those were absolutely worth going over the top with, and not just because of her predilection for volume; seeing as she was going to connect the whole system with her hood in order to both amplify and modulate it at will, it was important that everything be set up just right to prevent any incidents, lest the stadium’s crowd be left deafened or bleeding from the ears. Sometimes both, though no one really saw fit to complain about for some reason.

Seeing as it was impossible to truly hide whatever she was doing from her adoring fans, Cadenza spent the last couple of hours before the show was scheduled to start calibrating everything to make sure it was up to specification, double- and triple-checking the wires, the electronics, even the metal plating just to be certain that nothing would surprise her for the full duration. Six whole hours of her giving thousands of lucky people the show of a lifetime, completely obliterating anyone’s ability to sleep in at least a five mile radius; it took thousands of permits and goodness knows how much money in outright bribery, but it was going to happen. She, and she alone, would become the epicenter for an explosion of musical madness that would take the world by storm, because she didn’t intend to just stop there. First that stadium, then another one wherever they wanted to take her, and then the rest of the world; this insanity she was participating in at that exact moment was nothing but a test run for something even greater down the line.

Two hours she spent bobbing her head up and down almost subconsciously as she went through the motions, the crowd growing thicker and more numerous as all those lucky enough to get a ticket were ushered in and told, to no real avail, to find their spot in the marked sections and stay there. It was impossible to control anyone though, especially considering the type of people that had come to attend; they just wanted music, wanted to close their eyes and let their bodies move on their own without having to worry about whether they were going to bump into anyone, that sort of thing. To ask for them to hold still and keep to artificially imposed barriers was tantamount to heresy, both for the ticket-holders and for Cadenza herself; hell, the only reason she hadn’t already begun working her magic was only because she wanted to make sure everyone was in place before she did so, that no one would miss out on it.

Once everyone was in place, however, there was no real stopping her, not when one of the organizers gave her the thumbs up and the titanoboa began to stretch her fingers. Just like in every show, the world around her seemed to slow down and filter out; with her eyes closed, even the raucous crowd faded into the background of her mind, muffled by a curtain of her own consciousness, her body being the only thing she could feel. Her fingers met the surface of the mixing table, traversing every switch, every knob, every button, feeling it as if it were her own body; to a great extent, given that she had plugged herself in, it truly was, with her expanded mind being capable of tapping into the electronic components of the enormous array to adjust it on the fly. Even with her eyes shut she could “see”, the faintest hint of neon lights flashing in and out of existence as the electrical currents made themselves known… and when the display on her head went completely dark, the rest of the stadium’s lights dimming simultaneously, the whole world came into focus again.

There was silence, as the crowd gathered there realized what was about to happen. With the sun long set and the stage lights being slowly turned off one by one, the massive, hulking silhouette of Cadenza stood there, immobile, her head bowed forward towards the mixing table she was ready at. Her hands moved so slowly as to be imperceptible, tension rose, and every eye was on her; within moments, though never in any predictable way, the stadium would erupt in a shockwave of sound and colour, and their minds would be awash by the kind of impossibly enrapturing music that only that colossal snake could provide. Within moments, their lives would halt for six full hours, that they could simply live in the moment and forget everything else.

And Cadenza would provide. With a grin forming on the edge of her lips, the faintest hint of bright fang glinting in the moonlight, the titanic giantess unleashed an electrical pulse that coursed through every electronic she was linked to, and in one fell swoop, in one glorious moment, every light in the stadium was turned on, the sound system blasted with a single, resonating bass beat, and every single person in attendance was practically forced onto their ass from the sheer strength of the shockwave. Then, just to complete the picture, Cadenza opened her hood wide, the speakers installed on it visually throbbing as another beat coursed through them and straight into the air, causing the crowd to erupt in loud, frantic cheers!

From there on, it was hard to tell just who exactly was in charge, her muscle memory and instinct, or her conscious mind. With herself being plugged into so much machinery, capable of feeling the very currents that were turned into vibrations in the house-sized speakers mounted on either side of her just moments before they became soundwaves, the whole thing became as much instinctual as it did directed, leaving her in this odd sort of half-trance where everything she did seemed to come to her a half-second before she decided to do it. The lights blaring, the beats thrumming, the crowd’s cacophony adding to the confusion, it was enough to overload even her well-honed and practiced senses; one could only imagine how overwhelmed those tiny ones were feeling down there, having to deal with everything that Cadenza herself did without the privilege of being a stadium-filling titanoboa with years of experience. Then again, that was the whole point of it; people didn’t come to her gigs for a reasonably fun time, they went there to get completely lost in the music.

As usual, Cadenza herself was having a hard time remaining truly cognizant of what was happening around her. With the stimulation being amplified by her own techno-organic components, the extra links to her mixing table and what were actually some pretty decent acoustics for a wide-open space, it was hard not to allow herself to melt into the background, so to speak, to give her mind permission to diffuse itself into every beat, every boosted bass, every moment of perfection where she felt her entire body vibrating underneath the unrelenting assault of her very music. She wasn’t even fully aware of what it sounded like; with so much experience under her belt, it was easy enough to go through the motions and just open her mind to the whole thing, which had the curious effect of not truly being processed like it was meant to. In a way, it was a sort of induced synesthesia, even if only a temporary one designed to take one’s senses and smash them into bits before rearranging them in increasingly exotic forms, providing a unique and impossible-to-replicate six hours for the lucky souls that managed to buy a ticket. They would speak of this for years to come.

However, something else was infiltrating Cadenza’s mind, worming its way through the thick curtain she’d laid over her own perception. It was something new, powerful enough that even the giantess, in her semi-fugue state, was all-but forced to pay attention to it as it intruded upon her vibe; it wasn’t necessarily bad, just new and unexpected, like her mind had birthed a brand new sensation that she’d never had the opportunity to truly analyze, leaving her more curious than concerned. So… she tapped into it, her head still bobbing to the rhythm of the beat, her coils having to work overtime to keep themselves in check, her hands still doing what they should be; it was as if Cadenza could compartmentalize everything but that one, unidentified thing, leaving her body in its own hands as her focus turned inwards to that small, and yet unbelievably bright flame burning inside of her. It beckoned her, called her, extended its fiery touch closer and closer still until she could practically feel it, filling her very body and soul with what felt like an endless wellspring of energy… and yet, rather than feeling alien, it was oddly familiar, like it belonged to her in some way.

Rather than a new thing, it had always been there, just not always active, simply waiting for an opportunity to make itself known, to show to the giantess that, rather than having just popped into existence, it truly had already been an integral part of herself that she had simply failed to recognize was there at all, growing stronger by the day, more intense with each foot of herself that was added onto her body. As she grew, so too did this fundamental part of herself become prominent, yet always remaining in the very back of her head, waiting for the opportunity to strike when the iron was hot… and now, when the stadium was packed with both her body and those of her most adoring fans, when she had progressed to the point where she could conduct an entire show without even thinking about it, when the very show itself was designed from the ground up to provide a transcendental experience to everyone there to feel it, that’s when this burning flame decided to make itself known.

Cad felt it before she saw, heard or tasted it, that last one striking her as incredibly out of place once her tongue felt like it had been dipped in some kind of magnetized metal, sending shivers down her spine just as her whole body seemed to freeze up, leaving the music… to keep going somehow. But it wasn’t being produced by the mixing table, and it certainly wasn’t being blasted through the speakers installed next to it; rather, it was coming from inside of her, from that tiny flame that grew bigger and more all-consuming each time it throbbed and thrummed to the beat, the sounds becoming louder and louder as Cadenza herself came to realize that the true song, the true essence of it, was coming from inside that… whatever it was. Her creativity? Her true soul? The very core of her ability to create music? Whatever it was, she reached out for it, holding it tightly against herself, her electronic display frazzled and seemingly corrupted as it flashed through several distorted iterations of her “eyes”, all while her hood carried on producing the same beats as before, only distinctly more powerful this time around.

Just as she held that burning flame within her mind, so too did its vibrations begin to course through her, leaving her body feeling like gelatin as it was thoroughly worked over by sonic shockwaves that started at the top of her head and made their way through her whole length leaving her tail feeling like it had been turned into a lightning rod, one that felt heavier and more unwieldy for some reason. It took a few moments and several of these waves before Cadenza realized what was happening: each time a cycle was over and a beat left her body, it also pushed her tail a few feet further away from her.

She was growing.

The realization should’ve hit her a bit harder than it did, but at the same time, it almost felt like the logical endpoint for everything she’d done so far. After all, as far as Cadenza cared, she’d already been growing for years at that point; the was a very good reason her career started with her being able to fit into actual buildings and now she needed whole stadiums just to be able to house her, so a few extra feet really weren’t all that impressive in the grand scheme of things. Hell, if it went on for long enough, the snake figured that she could occupy the entire arena and have her fans jump onto her for the duration of the show, making for a truly spectacular, one-of-a-kind experience, real bang for their buck. But, as the beats continued to come, as the growth continued to mount, Cadenza was forced to admit: this time was different. Very different.

Then again, different didn’t necessarily mean worse, as she was quick to find out. In fact, it felt remarkably better than all the other times her growth took place when she was aware of it; more often than not, her ascent towards the heavens happened slowly enough that she couldn’t really focus on it, nor really experience it in any meaningful way. Only very rarely did she undergo a growth spurt significant enough to be seen and felt, and even then those few occasions were nothing compared to what she was going through at that exact moment. It felt like everything she’d gone through, magnified a thousandfold and fed directly into her sensory nerves, those poor things fraying at the edges in their frantic attempts at making sense of everything they were picking up. It was overwhelming, yet simultaneously… fulfilling, like it was meant to happen and she was just going through something that had always been planned for her.

Rather than it being a gradual transformation, however, the process taking her over began to speed up over time, even if the crowd being encroached upon by the titanic coils was blissfully unaware of the danger they posed. The beat gradually grew stronger, faster, deeper and more reverberating, until it wasn’t just a single shockwave going through Cadenza’s tail, but several crashing into one another across her entire body; predictably, this not only meant that she began to expand in every direction rather than just having feet added to her tail, but it also ensured that this growthsplosion picked up the pace too quickly for the giantess to really slow it down or do anything about it… assuming, of course, she even wanted to do either of those things (she didn’t) as opposed to having her head move along to the beat as she enjoyed every single inch of herself that materialized from nowhere. It took a long time before the first people became aware of how Cadenza, rather than staying on her side of the stadium as planned, had begun to invade the dance pit; but rather than screaming in panic and running away, they instead turned to face her and threw themselves onto her body, glueing their own to her scales before attempting to climb upwards. After all, if Cadenza was growing larger, where better to celebrate this than on the extra room she was creating on top of herself?

Cadenza… well, she didn’t exactly think the same, mostly because she wasn’t really thinking at all apart from how much she could intensify the beat before it went completely out of control, or if she should take it so far that it did slip away from her grasp. The sound system wasn’t even plugged in anymore, with the synesthetic sound being blasted exclusively from her opened hood, the air vibrating with such strength that the distortions were actually visible if one paid close attention; and with each thrum of her speakers, with each sonic wave that nearly deafened those that it slammed into, she grew just a little bit larger, a little bit faster, until the whole stadium began to feel dangerously cramped. With her hands held high in the air in a victorious pose, her muscles subsumed by the strength of the beat, Cadenza was the first to feel the metallic superstructure holding everything together, and soon enough her head would be pushing up against beams and rafters, with everything around beginning to grind and groan as her body pushed against the tight confines of the arena; the crowd climbed onto her, cheering her on, demanding more, and while the giantess was still mostly focused on nurturing that burning source of energy within in, she was nevertheless more than happy to provide.

The rest of the city and its surrounding suburbs would be given a rude wake-up call when the already-loud music began to reach areas that it really shouldn’t, the curvature of the planet no obstacle for the sheer strength of the soundwaves produced by the titanic snake’s techno-organic components. She could feel the beat through every inch of her skin, every ounce of muscle and bone… and there were a lot of those, considering she hadn’t stopped growing and the entire stadium had already begun to fall prey to her increasing size. It was almost too easy, with her not even having to rip chunks of it away; rather, all it really took was for her to look in the general direction of an obstacle and the vibrations coming from her hood would eventually get rid of it, turning it into a warped and bent version of itself before the whole thing was turned to a thin dust. How exactly the squishy people dancing on her body weren’t being affected was anyone’s guess, but it also wasn’t a priority for Cadenza to figure out; just as long as they were safe, then that was all that mattered.

In the meantime, the world became her plaything. No need to move anything out of place, because either it was atomized by the increasingly powerful, rhythmic pulsing waves produced by the speakers on her hood, or it was shattered and broken in the old fashioned way, when her tail made its way clean through whatever was in front of it, alternatively flattening or just outright crumbling it depending on its constituent materials. The entire metropolis would very quickly be infected by the same sensory overload that those in the stadium had already gone through; even those who had been woken up by the noises couldn’t find it in them to be even slightly annoyed, because why would they ever complain about being given such a beautiful gift? Especially when all they had to do was crack open a window and look outside to be able to see Cadenza’s frame, looming over the whole city as it progressively occupied more and more of the horizon.

The titanoboa herself wasn’t even fully aware of just how immense she had become; then again, it was highly doubtful she’d actually care that much even if she were, given her typical attitude towards growing outwards was general annoyance at the fact that it wasn’t going any faster. For her, to be able to turn herself into a beacon, a spectacle of musical self-indulgence was the height of achievement, and if she could bring others along with her to enjoy the ride, then that was just the cherry on top of the cake. So what if buildings had to be removed from existence at a molecular level as they were shaken apart, so what if others still had to be physically destroyed when her body began to grow at an unsustainably quick pace? No one was being harmed, as all those lucky enough to be in the way simply had to stretch out their arms and embrace her as her coils advanced through the urban landscape, so why bother holding back anymore? Each beat, each bassy thrum, added yards onto her form in every single direction, yards more of length to coils that would very quickly grow long enough to be discernible from low orbit thanks to their striking colours. But that still wasn’t enough; it wouldn’t be enough until she was in low orbit, her music bouncing off of the atmosphere so that all those living on the planet could hear it, regardless of where they might be. Her blessings would not go unheard, and if she had to restore hearing for that to happen, so be it.

She wouldn’t have to worry too much about that though, given the rate at which things were progressing. Restoring senses to those that lost them was a noble goal and all, but as her growth became exponential and the rhythmic beat continued to mercilessly add more snake on the already-colossal giantess, Cad’s problems would soon become those of a more planetary persuasion. Well, one said “problems”, but they were hard problematic; perhaps someone who truly cared about stability and the long-term survival of the Earth itself might object to the notion of a serpentine body very quickly growing to encircle the whole thing, transmitting the seismic vibrations of its music to the crust in such a way as to crack and shatter it, all while creating large, all-encompassing waves that threatened to consume most shorelines around the world. Perhaps this hypothetical person might even panic at the prospect of a musical apocalypse wrought by a titanoboa that lived up to its species name and then some.

But the magical aspect of it was that there was no such person, or at least they didn’t stick around for long enough to really matter. It was, after all, utterly impossible to resist the sounds being produced by Cadenza’s entire body, with the electronics on her hood having long-since linked to the rest of her form in ways that defied even her comprehension in order to spread the infectious, rapturous joy of her new, divine tune to the rest of all furkind. None would be left behind that wouldn’t hear it, feel it, more than than not both as their senses were assaulted from every possible direction, and several others of a more hypothetical nature for good measure; if one couldn’t hear, their brains could still be vibrated at just the right frequency to ensure they received the same message anyway. For once in all of history: unity. Through song.

It was poetic in the kind of way that required one’s mind to not be in the state that everyone’s were in order to be truly appreciated. Of course, that didn’t preclude them enjoying this rather romanticized retelling of events in their own unique ways; just as the planet was being destroyed by a snake that had miles added in her stature and even more in her tail’s length each time a single beat was produced by one of her speakers, so too did all of her passengers do their absolute best not to give the most singular of shits about whatever was happening outside their immediate area. They each had their own part of Cadenza’s body, often shared with others who climbed onto it at the same time, and that was all they needed; the sounds seemed to energize them, turning them into something akin to perpetual motion machines that lived off the very song they were creating, for they too were instrumental in the perpetuation of the beat. Every single one of them served as a resonator of sorts, through which the vibrations could be magnified and altered in unique, mind-bending ways, until whatever anyone was hearing was more a result of the people immediately around them rather than what Cad herself was blasting at full volume.

Of course, what Cad was subjecting herself to was the purest, rawest form of the transformative beat, unfiltered as it slammed into her every half-second, in time with the tempo in just the most marvelous way. It was perfection in musical form, impossible to transcribe and of unending brilliance, to the point where the giantess was convinced that it wasn’t even her who had come up with it, because no one came up with it; it was a fundamental force, something inherent to their universe, a beat and rhythm that she had stumbled upon after so many years of perfecting her craft. Perhaps it was a gift from some higher being, who chose to bless her with this knowledge that she may unleash it upon an unprepared world, or perhaps she had simply been lucky, and the combination of everything that had happened to her up to that point could only ever have led in that direction. Whatever the case, the tune was hers now, and she was going to use and abuse it to her heart’s content.

Soon enough, there wouldn’t be a place on the planet that didn’t experience the effects of Cadenza’s beat, even if her body had merely grown big enough to just barely encircle the Earth once around the equator. It did give the planet a certain distinct aesthetic to it; looking down from high orbit or even from the moon, having that belt of vibrant purple and yellow made for a wonderfully dashing belt, even if it was one that grew thicker and more all-encompassing as time went on and the sounds began to try and break free from the confines of the atmosphere. This would be the ultimate test, in a way; noise simply couldn’t propagate properly in the depths of space, so clearly the music would have to end once Cadenza grew big enough. She could keep it going of course, but it would be nothing more than vibrations at that point… or at least, that’s what science said, and what did science also say about giantess snakes who grew thanks to the power of divinely-inspired song? Very little, as it turned out, and yet she was there, making a right mockery of conservation of mass as her coils tightened their grip around her homeworld and began to outright crack it open like a fragile egg.

The only reason she hadn’t done so any earlier was purely because there were still people left who hadn’t climbed on; couldn’t really destroy the whole place if that meant harming someone, so like a good, merciful goddess, Cadenza took her time to allow her precious little ones to get close enough to smack against her scales and then climb to safety. Of course, by that point, volcanic activity around the planet had been turned up to eleven as veins of magma erupted thanks to the pressure she placed on the whole globe, but thankfully, no one was really hurt by it. Singed, perhaps, but not hurt; and besides, as soon as they climbed aboard the goddess musical train, all their wounds would be tended to, all woes taken care of, all concerns made moot. They had Cadenza, that was all they needed.

As such, the planet was free to go. With a final burst of size, her coils by that point having circled around the Earth so many times as to hide most of it from view, Cadenza tightened her grip just enough to shatter the rocky body into a couple of thousand differently-sized pieces. Only the solid iron core remained, surrounded by the wispy remnants of the liquid outer portion, but even those were adequately taken care of with just a flick of the wrist; off to interstellar space they went, Cadenza taking their place in the Solar System… for the time being.

After all, what was stopping her now? The planet was gone, and yet she remained. Sound was impossible out there in the vastness of the cosmos, and yet she clearly still heard the beat, as did all of her little ones of their endless dancing was any indication. Why, then, should she bother to stop, ever?

The whole universe was waiting for her.