Day
and night was a strange occurrence in this new land you have found
yourself in. It wasn’t based on the sun appearing in the sky and
shining its powerful light on you to burn through the darkness. It
was instead based on the whims of a titanic creature’s movements
and general habits. Whether you saw the light or were merely
stumbling around in pitch darkness was based on her whims, often
unaware of how her own minor actions affected your kind who was
cursed to live here. But you’ve grown used to it, after all, this
was simply the life yourself and countless others had to endure while
living as dirt on the empress’ sole.
You
weren’t quite sure how many lived on her practically divine soles,
but you know that your city alone, at this current time, had several
thousand still inhabiting the many ruined houses that existed in the
enormous sole wrinkle. Many of the homes were long since buried in
the mountains of dirt, which were likely an invisible speck of filth
in reality, that dotted the enormous plains of your new world.
Indeed, many of those who were left homeless from your Goddess’
movements had found themselves digging makeshift hovels into the dirt
just to have a place to sleep.
The
previously mentioned nights were incredibly long, daylight being
short and seemingly random. Of course there was the usual time when
it was night for the empress, but even during the brightest of days
you often ended up shrouded in darkness as her sole, slipped inside
her well decorated sandal, blocked out the light. Light was only
every seen when the Empress relaxed barefoot, or sometimes in very
short bursts when she kicked her foot around while cross-legged. You
felt lucky that her foot was so enormous that it had a gravity of its
own on your puny forms, keeping you from simply falling to your
deaths.
In fact, you were so incredibly
small that even her steps weren’t able to directly harm you simply
because your tiny selves were wedged deep in her wrinkles, though it
was still incredibly terrifying to watch the sky, or what in reality
was the floor, suddenly move towards you and crash on top of the
enormous mountain ranges that surrounded your entire world.
Every one of her steps caused
earthquakes beyond comprehension to anyone who isn’t forced to this
pathetic fate. For any part of the day when the empress is walking,
all semblance of a normal life ceases to be as every waking moment is
spent being shaken around to the point of being forced to the ground.
If she decided to run, sometimes people would be actively tossed into
the air from the force as entire buildings collapsed as a result.
Safe to say that the people living on this imperial sole were fairly
used to constant natural disasters, including very common mud slides
of foot filth that could bury entire countries.
So how did it come to this? How
did yourself and so many others find themselves residing on what’s
probably the most inhospitable landscape you could imagine? Well, it
varied from case to case, but one thing that all who end up here are
guilty of is disrespecting the empress in some form or another. The
entire term was incredibly vague, allowing hundreds of towns to
perish beneath her sole. However, despite the years spent rummaging
through the massive craters for dead skin as you are doing now, you
still remembered that fateful day.
You hadn’t done anything wrong
yourself, in truth most in your city of hundreds of thousands didn’t
do anything against the empress. You just happened to be on the wrong
side of a war, and the other side was much more magically advanced
than your own. Your city didn’t fall in a siege, nor was it
punished for rebellion. It was simply a gift, a peace offering from
your kingdom to the empress in exchange for a more favorable
treatment under her reign. You didn’t even get to see her majesty’s
face before she arrived at the outskirts of your city and suddenly
shrank you down. Your once illustrious city was gone from the map, a
hole where it used to exist as you were transported to the underside
of the mighty sorceress’ foot, doomed to live your lives under her
soles as an example for all other cities if they ever dared think of
rebelling. Under her law, punishment for rebellion was far worse than
death.
You’re not sure how long it’s
been since that day, time was hard to tell when sunlight didn’t
appear for dozens of hours at a time sometimes. You suspect its
roughly been a year or two, your time often spent looking through the
various mud piles in the dark. You felt like a worm, your hands
desperately sifting at a pile on the ground where you see some broken
down buildings, hoping to maybe find something of value under the
filth. Each and every moment of it was disgusting as the smell of the
filth entered your lungs, the overpowering stench from it making you
gag. This single speck of dirt was an enormous mound that you
struggled to sift through.
But you couldn’t give up any
time soon, you knew that you had to get back home with something,
your town is dangerously low on food and there’s only so much dead
skin around the area for them to eat before they run out. Your hands
desperately dug, starting to get tired in the complete darkness. At
the same time, the empress, your Goddess, was sitting down and
relaxing at her desk. She’s recently gotten into reading and was
reading a story of her own. None of the inhabitants of her feet knew
this, but if they did, they’d imagine she was reading something a
lot more peaceful than the post-apocalypse that their story was.
As you struggled to dig, you noticed your hands became stuck in the
filth, unable to move them at all. You began to panic, pulling with
all your might, but it was no use. The dirty mound was simply too
powerful for your tiny body to pull away from. And as you kept
pulling you noticed something that filled you with dread. Everything
around you was shaking and for a single moment you could see light.
The enormous empress was lifting her feet out of her sandals and onto
the table, making them rise high into the air before casually
slamming them on the table. This action made your entire world shake
as the giant mound began to topple down towards you. You could do
little but let out a scream as all the dirt and filth dropped on top
of you, burying you alive. No help would arrive, yourself doomed to
be crushed under a speck of dirt on the feet of a woman who couldn’t
care less about any of the microbes living on her sole.