Prompt: The Quicksand Queen (Part 5)
Added 2023-02-10 13:47:01 +0000 UTCSummary: An archeologist gets in over their head exploring a new tomb, but strange magical jewels transformer her into a being made of quicksand with a powerful appetite. Prompt for Someone anonymous.
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As Alex surged along, trying to retrace her already wind-swept steps, it had dawned on her as to how much she had changed, how great she had grown. She remembered how she had to take a biplane out from the city center and towards an outpost closer to the temple. The trek from that outpost was a couple days in the hot sun; on towering legs, she covered that distance in only a few hours, feeling none the worse for wear travelling underneath the blaring hot sun.
The view of the tarmac she recognized upon her original travel, touching down on her flight down. It looked so much more... quaint now. It was like looking at a model display, the sort that her grandfather would show her. Only the little plasticine figures were skittering about on their own, about something or other. She didn't really know for what reason.
The small office building didn't even come up to her knees... well, her lower body had reformed into a tower pillar shape, but still, that was the thought that crossed her mind. She paid it little mind as she decided to continue on her way towards town; if she had come this far on foot, the main city wasn't much farther away now.
As her body slid forward, sand spilled over the asphalt tarmac and, with pulsating undulations, crunched up the runway; black chunks of runway began to slide up her pear-shaped form, sinking just above her hips, giving her a look resembling that of a ballroom gown. She grimaced to herself, feeling a twitching, crawling sensation inside of her, wondering if a bug had slipped inside of her clothes. That was the sensation she experienced... except she wasn't really wearing clothes, other than the lines of dazzling gems lining her body. She decided to put that thought in the back of her mind as she advanced forward. Things were safer inside of her temple anyway; once she was settled down, she could take inventory.
Planes began to hurriedly take off in succession, practically lining up single-file to do so, as the asphalt eroded behind them, consumed by the colossal sand woman. As the entire airport was, without any warning, subsumed by her form in but a few moments, she raised her head, jeweled eyes focused on the retreating planes. That seemed very dangerous, with a dozen or so taking off so close together...
Her stomach lurched, her body quivered, and her form let out a low rumble. The small-sized airport did little to sate her cravings, and the swirl on her stomach began to pick up speed, intensifying, growing in size as she stretched her body upwards and outwards, as if her form was unfurling to envelope the sky. The spiral, ten times the size of any billboard, opened its maw, producing a terrible gust of wind, a desert storm of which the eye was her perky navel. Kicking up sand and dust, a tornado surged, parallel to the ground. It was impossible to see the ground anymore, through such an intense air current.
The planes, upon initial takeoff, hadn't escaped to higher altitudes, and struggled to ascend further. Before Alex's very eyes, they seemed to pause in the air, propellers churching and sputtering to escape the pull of their form. But before long, they too were being pulled into her, plucked from the sky and disappearing inside of her cavernous stomach.
As the last of the planes slipped inside of her, her body shifted again, the spiral on her stomach slowing down into a gentle swirl. She rubbed her belly, like a mother fawning over their gestating child. She realized now that there had to have been people on those planes. And there were surely people she had slowly picked up during her initial traipse through the airport... the airport that, after a cursory glance behind her, had been totally wiped off the map.
Her insides crawled, tingling with life. This must be what an ant farm feels like, she mused to herself, content with the fact that the people seemed to be still alive. And certainly in a panic, after an encounter with a being such as herself. Perhaps it would do well to pause for now, settle for a spell, and ease her people and their worries.
Yes. Her people. She looked over herself once again, delighted by her appearance, looking all the part of a voluptuous royal, a proper queen... She was dazzling.
Alex lowered herself to the ground, allowing her curves to spread out around her. She felt like closing her eyes as her grandiose body began to lose its bountiful curves, her wide-base growing wider. Objects shifted around and inside of her. Alex closed her eyes, drifting off as her gem-encrusted irises sunk into her sand form, along with the rest of the gems in her body.
Her curves hardened into sandstone, massive bricks carving out of her form like an army of invisible artisans were chisling at them. From all around her increasingly solidifying form, palm trees began to sprout. The spiral ebbed away, leaving a spout from which water flowed; the earth seemed to part ways to accept it, and a small lake began to form. Around the lake, foliage, trees, plants sprouted, twisting up and around, looking as if it had been there all along...
Interestingly, on a far side of the temple, the previously-destroyed airport and tarmac rose up from the sands, the black asphalt unfurling like a red carpet. There were no signs of the people previous at this, whatever mechanics, pilots, radio operators, and otherwise average, unassuming folk who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had been spirited away somewhere else within Alex's seemingly infinite form, secure and protected from the harsh elements of the desert.
As Alex's form collapsed and restructured around itself, the spitting image of the temple that she had spelunked had reformed, along with its oasis. A standing monument, jutting up in the middle of nowhere. It trembled and rumbled as, from within, it hollowed out, and carved intricate passages through its shape once more.
Alex needed to prepare her royal chamber for her arrival, and for her first audience as a newly crowned queen of the sands.
