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TWO YEARS LATER
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“They were begging me for food, so I just lifted my dirty foot over them and told ‘em they could lick it off my foot, then I stamped out their little town!” The table erupted into laughter as the noblewoman in her early twenties finished her story, every woman on the table being able to relate to the horrible things bored nobles did to their defenseless tiny peasants.

The annual feast held on August 21 – the founding of the Garania Empire – was well underway, although recently the activities enjoyed at the feast had expanded to noblewomen torturing ant-sized peasants who were their legal property. Although initially Isabella wanted the rights of the newly reduced peasants to be protected, this proved not only unpopular around the noblewomen who had come to enjoy doing whatever they wanted with their peasants, but also practically unenforceable, so the empress had resorted to hoping that her subjects would be merciful towards the peasants, something which had unfortunately not happened.

Just by the entrance to the royal palace where the feast was held, a merchant girl was selling insoles with shrunken cities on them, a deal which was accepted by many nobles coming to the feast, as their feet were boiling from being in their thick riding boots on a hot summer’s day, and it felt amazing on their aching feet to have a fresh insole underfoot, as well as having hundreds of people absorbing the sweat and the satisfying sensation of peasants popping under their superior feet.

Of course, “people” wasn’t exactly the term that the attendants of the feast would use to describe the bug-sized peasants, the term “tinies” having caught on as a simple term that made sense as to what they were, after all, how can a tiny be a person when a real person can squish them in a single step? It just made more sense this way.

A woman sitting on the table threw up a tiny girl, then opened her mouth and looked up in an attempt to try and catch it. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the best reflexes and the peasant missed her mouth entirely, instead landing on the table beside her and splattering on impact. The feast’s traditional food, of lavish amounts of meat, cake, vegetables, and other delicious food had seen a new addition, that being tinies. Just a few months after the Great Shrinking, as it came to be known, a few tinies had accidentally fallen into a duchess’ meal, but she had found the taste to be much better than the meal usually was, and made sure to tell all her friends about it, who then told all of theirs, and by next year tinies had become a staple of a noblewoman’s diet.

At the head of the grand table in the front of the room lay Isabella, who despite the festive mood at the feast was reminiscing about this day 3 years ago, before she became Empress. She had sneaked away from the feast and rode down to a peasants’ town just a few miles away, where their own celebrations were occurring, as the day was a national holiday for every person within the borders of Garania. She was received with a warm welcome, and stayed for a few hours enjoying the mood at the town, everyone singing along around a campfire in the middle of the town, recalling stories of mythical exploits. Late in that night, she had grabbed the hand of a cute baker’s son around her age and they kissed behind the granary, the only watching eye being the moonlight.

Of course, the town, the festive peasants, and the boy who she had given her first kiss to were most likely long gone, turned to grime by the toes of one of Isabella’s vassals. The noblewoman that had done the act had probably forgotten the next day, the hundreds of people, all with their own dreams, ambitions, and loved ones all being wiped out and forgotten, purely because a woman liked the feeling of stamping out a little town under her delicate foot.

It was in the history books that Isabella had saved the empire from collapsing, every noblewoman in the palace adored her, bestowing great gifts to the Empress as a sign of their gratitude. Despite the adoration that she held across the entire empire, Isabella was melancholic that this had become of the nation she loved, its once proud citizens being seen as less than even pets, as nothing but property for a group of nobles whose only values seemed to be whatever was more pleasurable for them, not caring in the slightest about whether it was right to turn good, innocent people into tiny stains.

Beneath the table, dozens of peasants were beneath Isabella’s royal toenails, cleaning up the grime that had accumulated there with their tongues. They had been a gift to the Empress, and she didn’t want to seem rude by rejecting it, so the noblewoman who gave her the gift commanded her servant to put them under Her Majesty’s toenails. Isabella supposed she would take them out after the feast, as she didn’t want to seem dirty by touching her feet while eating.

“Michael! Hang on, please!” A peasant yelled to her husband, who was barely hanging on to a groove on Isabella’s big toe. However, the surface had become difficult to hang on to as the day grew even hotter, causing Isabella’s feet to sweat even more. Finally, a drop of sweat landed directly on Michael, causing him to lose his grip and fall down to Isabella’s sandals, where her toe loomed overhead. The man began praying to every god he knew of, and eventually prayed even to the Empress herself to have mercy. Of course, it was not a matter of mercy when Isabella shifted her foot unconsciously, bringing down her royal toe down onto Michael, squashing him instantly.

The peasant woman still on her toe began to weep. The only thing that had made her new life bearable was her husband, who made sure to care for her even now, giving her strength to withstand the smell, the grime, and the humiliation of having to clean the bottom of someone’s toenails. Now that he was gone, she had truly lost everything she once held dear.