Red embers burned bright, a piercing light. A sanctuary in a murky
cauldron of night.
Fireflies glowed, providing a scant neon green that gave an
indication of a healthy presence of life in this forest. These
fireflies were a trail, one that easily allowed the armored maiden
passage back to her makeshift camp.
Her armor was a rusty brown, in need of a good scrub. Pieces slid and
clanged against one another with every step she took. Her sword too
clattered in its belt; she hadn’t the time to properly wipe it
clean since using the weapon to dispatch of a group of bandits for a
local hamlet earlier that evening. Only the kite shield hanging on
her back maintained a semblance of the prestige with which it was
crafted, if only because Cora Sisaif tended to eschew defense in
favor of more and greater offense.
“Alright…” Cora said, to herself mostly, as she reached her
camp. “Here we go…”
She dropped her belt and shield, in addition to a satchel that she
had ferried beneath the crook of her arm. Once settled, Cora finally
had the opportunity to rest. She took a seat on a flat stump,
stretching her armored legs out as she undid her gauntlets. Her
greaves were quick to follow, and though the fire assisted the
remediation of the dashing warrior’s musky scent, it was not all
dealt with, for as she bared herself to her leather under-armor, the
faint odor continued to hand in the air.
“Ahhhhhhh…” Cora reached forward, simultaneously stretching her
tense muscles and using her lithe fingers to pull off her padded
socks, finally unveiling her bare feet in the most potent scent of
the night. They were utterly soaked with moist sweat; the months were
hot, and full armor would do that to a girl.
“Gods help me… I’m utterly spent…”
Cora leaned back, stretching her spine the other way. It made several
popping sounds, each one causing Cora to loose a contented sigh.
Laying fully supine on the stump, Cora’s eyes landed to the
satchel, turned topsy-turvy in her mind. She smiled.
Cora sat up. Then she reached over,
grabbing the bag and undoing the buttons that shut it closed. Cora
looked inside, her smile growing.
Cora’s stomach growled at the
sight. Within were provisions; a rye bread sandwich of cheese and
dried jerky, a stalk of grapes, a glass bottle of milk, a leather
waterskin, and three squirming tinies, each one seeking to dig deeper
and deeper into the bag, away from Cora’s prowling hands. They were
all blonde, keeping in with the cultural phenotype of this region,
and they were all women, roughly between the ages of later-teenaged
and thirty-five.
“No need to fret…” Cora bared
her teeth in a Cheshire grin, plucking one of the women out, holding
her between two gloved fingers. “I just need you tinies to do a
little something for ol’ Cora.”
The tiny shouted in that tiny language tinies used. It was such an
odd dialect, and though linguistically it was the same language as
human tongue, syntax and inflection were so different that it
generally required far more attention and patience to decipher tiny
speech than Cora typically had patience for. So this tiny’s screams
for mercy fell on ignorant ears as she was dropped dead in front of a
massive pair of feet, heels firmly buried in the ground, sweat
dripping off of them to create a mucky quicksand that threatened to
swallow the mite-sized woman up.
“Go on. Rub.
And I don’t think I need to warn you what happens if you disobey
me, right?” With her other foot, Cora kicked a plume of dirt into
the fire, causing it to crackle and pop violently, singing the back
of the tiny’s leafskin jerkin, who jumped in fear. She looked up to
Cora, immediately reckoning the command. Tinies had to understand
these things, lest they die at the hands of the higher beings they
shared the world with.
“Very well. Chop chop!” Cora
clapped her hands, and the tiny rushed to knead her own hands within
the sore flesh padding the bottom of Cora’s feet.
A few giggles escaped Cora. Seeing
the minuscule human-like woman offer her tired soles a massage simply
left her tickled.
Literally, it seemed; she was so small her tiny hands didn’t have
the requisite surface area to apply anything more than a pinprick of
pressure at a time.
“Are you even attempting?”
In a fit, Cora brought her foot
away, hovering it over the cowering tiny woman. Her toes, still slick
with the sweat of hours within their metal coffins, were raining down
droplets, each one splashing in an arc around the girl, until finally
the foot descended, pressing her lightly into the dirt.
“Ohhh…” Cora reclined on her
tree stump, completely stretching herself out, feeling the fatigue
drip off her body just like the sweat that still soiled
in her brigandine.
“Just like that… keep doing that…”
The tiny beneath her foot was not
precisely “doing” anything,
rather than having something done to it. Cora’s foot had slammed
her into the ground, continuing to smush and squash her into the
rough dirt, rolling her around in a mixture of earth and sweat. Her
entire body was kneaded into Cora’s sole, offering stress-ball-like
massage
properties. Her shouts and yelps for mercy and peace were
continuously smothered out, without a care in the world as Cora’s
relaxation took center stage.
“You know what this is missing…?”
Cora mused to herself, eyes to the stars, foot still absentmindedly
rolling the tiny around in the ground. She flexed her arms out past
her head then sat up, feeling the flexibility she’d regained as she
returned to a workable pose. Cora grabbed her satchel, rummaging
through it mindlessly until her fingers settled on the spindly limbs
of one of her captives. “There you are!”
With both arms between Cora’s thumb and forefinger, the woman could
only kick and flail out her legs with desperate hope, trying to
wriggle free in a maneuver Cora found utterly adorable. She reached
forward, plopping the woman before her other set of toes on her left
foot. Her right foot currently had the first girl safely and firmly
pressed underneath; to the average observer it would’ve seemed
there was only one tiny at Cora’s disposal. Which was the idea.
“So… you were quite a feisty
one, aren’t you,” Cora said, leaning her chin in her palm.
The tiny made no move. It had to stand tall in order to see upwards
past the peak that was Cora’s kneecap, but it remained still.
“Well… here’s what you’re
going to do. My toes need
a good massaging, and you’re going to be the one to give it to
them.”
The tiny shook her head, small, tentative shakes, backing desperately
away, closer and closer into the light, only stopping as embers
resolutely licked at her back.
“Not going to play along, then?”
Cora did not wait; her foot lifted
up and her toes immediately plucked the diminutive woman off the
ground. Entire head and upper body encased in their sweaty clutch,
Cora swung them around here and there, musing to herself as the tiny
suffered, “Oh well… I guess I have no use for you after all.”
The tiny screamed, shouted, tried to let out a coherent piece of
speech, even if it would’ve been a futile gesture, until she felt
something warm. Then hot. Then near blazing hot.
“I guess I’ll just have to toss
you into the fire now, will I?”
The tiny could not form actual words, but their emotions were clear
and emphatic.
“Oh, you don’t want to be burnt
to a crisp? Barbecued? I’m sure you would be quite delicious either
way. But if you’re not gonna service my feet…
well then, what other use would I have for you?”
The tiny shouted, her legs finally beginning to cease in their
dangling. Cora couldn’t tell if it was because she’d finally
succumbed and was prepared to serve… or if it was the lack of
oxygen to her head that caused brain-death.
“Oh… don’t want that.”
Cora retracted her leg, dropping her in a heaped slump right next to
her other foot. She was still for a moment, before twitching. She
coughed and went into a hacking fit before finally getting into a
kneeling position, though she struggled to raise her gaze any higher
than Cora’s shin, as though she was unfit to look into the face of
this superior being. Then, without any provocation on Cora’s part,
she crawled forward to Cora’s long, bare, beautiful toes, and began
to kiss them.
“It feels like fairy kisses,”
Cora said, grinning ear to ear. “And just before you get any
ideas…” Cora lifted her right foot on its side, showing the
dirty, slightly muddy, sweaty surface on
the sole, as though one had
lifted a rock to show the undergrowth and life tethered below. And in
this case, said life was the unconscious form of this woman’s
compatriot, plastered by a mold formed of calcified dirt and sweat,
hardened by the heat of the fire, buried in the flesh of the ball of
Cora’s foot.
“This is what happens when you
disobey me.” That isn’t what
happened to her… but
this new one didn’t know that. And Cora was nothing if not frugal
when it came to making examples out of these tiny pests.
Laying her foot down again and leaning back on her elbows, Cora
sighed once more, deciding to dig into her bag to search for the last
tiny. Perhaps she’d be a nice piece of butt-padding, or an
insertion in her codpiece.
But, her hands grasped nothing, aside from the different containers
and wraps that encompassed her provisions.
“What the…?”
Cora grabbed her bag off the ground, placing it in her lap to have a
better look. She peered within, seeing nothing but the packets of
food, her sandwich, her jug of milk, her stalk of grapes… Cora
turned her head, looking across the forest floor. She could be
anywhere right now…
Cora sighed in annoyance. These things were known to happen. Perhaps
an undone seam in the fabric; she’d need to go to a tailor to get
it fixed once she made it back to town.
Dejected, Cora thought that perhaps eating her sandwich would take
her mind off losing her newest subject. Grabbing it out of the bag,
she unwrapped the slightly-crinkled paper and revealed what would
have to be her main-course meal for the night. A sandwich, hand-made
by the local mill-town’s finest sandwich-maker, with only the most
premium ingredients of lettuce, beef jerky, and fresh goat-cheese
straight from the farm.
But what Cora did not know
was that there was another ingredient, nestled deep within the meal,
buried between the buns. The final,
most idealistic tiny, in an
effort to escape immediate capture, had dove between the flaps of the
wrapping paper, knowing that Cora would be overlooked. But as she
thanked the stars that she hadn’t been removed for whatever
hedonistic purpose Cora wished to abuse her, she found that it was
much harder to exit the
sandwich than to enter, especially when one was in the dark and
surrounded by so many viscous – if delicious – ingredients. The
tiny woman would not see light until the flashes of firelight poked
through the pores of the bread, indicating she was finally free from
the satchel.
But this firelight would soon be
replaced by a different sort of heat. An organic kind. The fragrant
breath of Cora as she opened her mouth, an adventurer’s diet
unleashing onto the tiny all sorts of ales, meats, and other hardy
foods and sending the tiny into a stupor of fear as she realized that
she would be next. The golden-haired teenager screamed a scream that
could not penetrate her bread walls, life cut so short as Cora
chomped into the
sandwich, gnashing teeth sending the tiny miraculously into a
tailspin that left her unharmed, until she was caught in the deluge
of mushy slimy sandwich waste, prepared to be sent straight on a
one-way ticket into the depths of Cora’s acidic stomach.
Gulp.
Her pale cries were to no avail as Cora took several more bites of
the sandwich, slop that would surely fall on top of the tiny’s own
head once she’d been safely deposited into her belly.
“Mmm… I’ll need to get the
recipe.” Cora grabbed the jug of milk, chugging half its contents
down to wash out her mouth. “Delicious!”
The night wore on until Cora decided the time to leave had arrived.
Her toes were still being rubbed, kissed, and worshiped, but her
right foot had had about all its kinks and knots rolled out thanks to
its new toy. Cora thought for a moment, then pulled her left foot
away from its service, causing the tiny to look up, confused.
“You did quite a good job… I
suppose it’d be a waste to crush one with talents as yours.”
As Cora talked, she reached back into her satchel, retrieving a
grape.
She continued: “But know this. Try
to escape… try to step out of line… I will know.
And when I find out…”
SPLAT!!!
The grape’s juices splashed all across Cora’s hand, some droplets
baiting the fire as Cora smiled gingerly.
“Understood?”
The tiny nodded vehemently.
“Good! Because I could really
use another insole,” Cora
said, dropping this one into her satchel before dropping the
barely-conscious other tiny into her leftmost greave, preparing to
insert her own foot into them and lace them up. There was still
roughly three-days’ journey, and even then, a warrior always had to
be ready for setbacks.