Cassius Kurt Ravenwood the Woodripper did not begin their tryst by breaking the bed. That would be too simple.

Instead, the master bedroom’s doorframe was the first casualty of his shoulders—a staggering thirty-nine feet broad. A worthy rival to the 1903 Wright Flyer, which spanned a veritable forty feet and four inches.

One might object that the two “woods” in his name were excessive. This is a mistaken assumption. That was simply how much wood Cassius Kurt Ravenwood the Woodripper ripped. Unlike most of his peers who enjoyed the mundanity of gardening, CrossFit, reading, or listening to classical music by a deaf pianist, Cassius reveled in the destruction of arboreal ecosystems to stimulate the growth of his biceps—both of which had the circumference of redwoods. Unacceptable, Cassius huffed to himself. His goal was to surpass El Árbol del Tule by this December.

No wonder, then, that the polished oak of his estate yielded like butter.

Ten feet in front of him lay his prize, trembling on the bed. Wispy, squishy, and pliant as a non-Newtonian fluid with the translucence of a glass frog native to Central America, it is only right that her name also be something so vanishingly noncorporeal that the vowels flee upon enunciation. Liliana Lightwood Lovelace.

“My pet,” he roared softly. “You’ve been a bad girl.”

Which of the animals had that been? The lion? The tiger? Liliana squeaked in microscopic confusion. Her future mother-in-law warned her that her son possessed a menagerie of predatory fauna in his thoracic cavity. It gave their encounters a seductive thrill not unlike being chased by Freddy Krueger wearing a Victoria’s Secret babydoll nightgown.

“Daddy, please.” Her plaintive cry was not merely one of arousal. It was also her seventh attempt to commune with her father for guidance—another mammal tragically absorbed into Cassius’ chest. This is also how he neutralized several of the federal agents pursuing him for destruction of protected sequoias.

“You know what you did,” he growled. This one was definitely the timber wolf.

Liliana trembled even more until she became carcinogenic. For an instant, her wavelength was in the high ultraviolet range.

“Babe…” It was true. She was bad. Liliana left an anonymous tip for the authorities on the whereabouts of her fiancé. “The sequoias. They were my favorite.”

Damn her search history. She should have installed Tor Onion.

Never mind the fact that no such application existed. After half of one consumer cybersecurity article, Cassius acquired the combined confidence of ten masters in the field. Notably, skill did not follow.

“The spruces were too easy,” the hyena behind his pec snarled. “Light work. I needed more.”

Liliana sucked air through the luminous pearls in place of her teeth. He was growing too powerful. Soon enough, everything—including the sequoias her father took her to see as a little girl—would be gone.

She needed to distract him.

“More?” she managed breathlessly.

Cassius’ eyes darkened, past brown, past black, into two singularities of darkness. Somehow, this did not clash with his existing build, which absorbed all frequencies of visible light. This shade was not comparable to any natural variation in human skin. It was an implosion of naked perception.

“More.” This unholy, guttural emission could not have come from any zoo creature.

The bed fractured into its molecular constituents with the touch of his pinky finger.

Her seahorse patterned dress was gone in a microsecond with the mere proximity of Cassius’ nail. A shame. That was the one item in her wardrobe she actually liked. Cassius kept insisting that even sweet pastels were the suggestion of color, which implied assertion, which was antithetical to non-Newtonian femininity. They were good while they lasted.

His renewed roar was now enough to shatter the glass panes of the windows and shred his tailor-made suit. Twenty abs smoldered menacingly beneath his glaring clavicles.

His rock was as upright and hard as the ancient figures from Easter Island. Ten feet tall. Its face even grinned at her. Liliana gulped.

The tectonic plates beneath her volcano began to shift. So, too, did those beneath Southern California. Her volcano began to stir. Cassius began traversing the quivering length of her path.

“My fault line,” she groaned. “It’s splitting apart!”

“Your mantle hasn’t even taken my rock yet,” he hissed. It was unclear if this was the snake or the superheated magma at her core. “Get ready.”

Could one ever be ready for the geological terrorism of fracking?

Liliana gritted her teeth. She was the only soul in the Americas who could tolerate his spelunking. Her permission grinded against his like double lightning. They were telepaths, after all.

Little did she know the true thunder had yet to arrive.

His rain pounded against her surface until she was thoroughly soaked. But the magma remained hot. It spurted out prematurely in hot lava rivulets. 

Somewhere in San Diego, college students cowered beneath their desks and made sure to protect their heads.

“That’s just round one,” he erupted. “We’re not done yet.”

Earthquakes usually last one minute or less. This did not stop the two.

“Keep going.” iHop employees in Sacramento cowered in fear. Millions of phones pinged with a chorus heralding their destruction.

Even with her copious magma, his drill bit still slammed into her core with all of the righteous rage of God striking down the Tower of Babel. Neither understood the other in their animalistic frenzy.

The fracking was a dangerous ordeal. UP and DOWN the drill bit relentlessly plunged, summoning rubble from her roof and walls. Liliana screamed with the combined shock of every emergency management agency employee in the Western United States. She croaked in a manner reminiscent of the Golden Gate Bridge’s death knell.

This exceeded even the most invasive manmade operation spearheaded by the government or any private corporation. He’d breached far beyond her crust now, pushing past her mantle to the outer core. She sweltered at nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit. But she did not bend.

The same cannot be said of the northbound five.

“Come on.” A sinkhole materialized in Hollywood, swallowing up Michael Jackson’s beloved star.  “I know you can do better.”

Cassius’s singularities collapsed in on themselves. He let out a shriek that destroyed any vestige of their manor. Every predator, reptile, federal agent, and even the ghost of her father could be heard joining in. 

Liliana focused on the last one.

He drilled onwards, scraping against her pulsating core. Plumes of steam burst from her surface. Even the most taciturn rescue teams and their dogs in the rural wilderness shivered.

Their circumstances were nearly as terrifying as the couple’s shared ancestor from one hundred twenty-five years ago.

Liliana assumed every possible position to accommodate the rock. She became a spring roll assembled in a rural Vietnamese village. She became an apple. A lace lamp. A tiny jellyfish. The bit drilled ever harder and bent around her non-Newtonian womanhood.

At last, the peak of Cassius’ rock brushed up against her inner core.

Every fault line in the Pacific shifted three inches. Tokyo schoolchildren ran from the ensuing tsunami. Old Faithful exploded to its record height. Lakes bubbled and boiled around the country. Houston had a problem.

Then the unthinkable happened.

Cassius’ absorbed photons no longer incorporated themselves seamlessly into his boundless broadness. They now reflected from his frame in a blinding constellation.

Her tree-mongering fiancé shimmered in a spectacle of pure light.

His head slammed against the base of an offending birch and vaporized its bark. His mouth staggered open. His mandible was wide enough for the black space to catch three unwitting pigeons.

An unfortunate cartographer out for a hike witnessed this sight and was immediately blinded.

The frequencies of their moans reinforced one another and proved yet another threat to state infrastructure. Every delicate fixture within a two hundred fifty mile radius shattered upon contact.

She gripped him by the ribboned remains of his shirt collar. The two of them ascended above the troposphere with an acceleration greater than the Parker Solar Probe orbiting the sun.

Beneath them, the continent was in chaos. Their manor was gone. So were the in-laws. California became an archipelago. Fires raged across the western terrain. Millions of families were undoubtedly lost, frightened, and without direction.

But the sequoias were safe.

Neither flooding nor fires or building collapse reached their wild depths. The sun blazed onward above them, feeding their opulent leaves the energy they needed to add more rings to their trunks over the years. Water sustained their roots. The soil-tossed roads remained for future generations to pass through and look in awe.

Twenty years from now, another little girl would get to see one of the tallest natural splendors on Earth.

Around the two of them, the final traces of the planet’s atmosphere disappeared, leaving only the shroud of icy cold near absolute zero clinging to their shoulders.

Without the constraints of gravity, Cassius resumed his photon-free brooding and increased exponentially in mass. Liliana winced as she felt her own frame compress beyond measure until she measured one planck volume. Her density skyrocketed.

The pair orbited one another in a dance that defied physics. Two black holes in a binary system nearing the Andromeda galaxy. Eventually, Cassius’ mass would overtake the observable universe.

She bought time.