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.