She Who Grows

Chapter 1 a world going soft

The Bloom was never violent.

There were no quarantines, no riots, no emergency broadcasts. No one knew when it started—not exactly. Reports were scattered, subtle, buried in medical journals and message boards. A new hormonal imbalance. A metabolic irregularity. A handful of women who couldn’t stop gaining weight. Who grew taller, too, slowly, and steadily, even into their twenties and thirties.

At first, it was treated as shameful. Doctors scolded them. Families intervened. Diet plans were pushed like religion. But nothing worked. They kept expanding. Pants ripped. Scales creaked. Height charts ticked upward.

And then came the hunger.

Something deeper than appetite. Gnawing. Constant. A need that wasn’t just for food, but for more. More attention. More touch. More space.

They tried to hide it. To shrink, apologize, disappear.

The world made sure they failed.

⸻

Meanwhile, something was happening to the men.

Slowly, steadily, they were losing mass—muscle, weight, height. Their shoulders narrowed. Their voices softened. They grew tired. Brittle. Some collapsed during workouts. Some stopped showing up altogether. The ones who stayed thinned into shadows.

The scientists didn’t understand it. The doctors lied.

What they eventually admitted—quietly, bitterly, buried in white papers and late-night radio—is that the Bloom affected the sexes differently. And permanently.

Roughly 10% of women began changing. Not all at once. Not uniformly. But with time, with proximity, the same patterns emerged.

Weight gain. Height gain. Unrelenting appetite.
And—eventually—pheromones.

⸻

That was year two. When things began to tip.

Because the women who weren’t Bloomed? They didn’t pull away. They leaned in.

First with food. Kindness. Curiosity. Then with longing. Obsession. They began to orbit the Bloomed like moths around some slow-burning, gluttonous flame. Feeding them. Dressing them. Defending them. Loving them.

Some gave up their lives to care for one Bloomed woman. Others formed harems. Whole households, entire communities restructured around a single massive woman who no longer fit through doors, but who stood tall with her back straight and her belly heavy—claiming space.

⸻

Men were still around. In theory.

Those who hadn’t wasted away now lived quiet, frightened lives—fragile, easily exhausted, and utterly irrelevant. The last of their importance existed in government buildings and underground labs, where sperm was stored and rationed.

But reproduction itself was shifting.

The Bloomed had begun to change that, too.

⸻

Lydia didn’t understand any of this.

Not yet.

When it started, she just thought her coworker was gaining weight. A little taller maybe. A little more commanding. A little… warmer.

Lydia didn’t know she’d stop dating men. Didn’t know she’d start skipping lunch just to feed someone else. Didn’t know her hands would tremble the first time she brushed crumbs off a soft, rising belly that wasn’t hers.

She didn’t know she’d fall.

But she would.

The world was going soft.

And Lydia was about to give in.