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.