Richard and a convoy of people from a nearby village trudged through the forest on a cool autumn night. Twigs and leaves crackled beneath his feet as he followed those around him. Their muffled sobs reverberated through the otherwise silent forest, all of them were being driven, hands bound and at spear point, toward some unknown destination.

How did it come to this? The elves of Elsira shouldn’t even be on their small island kingdom of Ivelsten. Richard knew the elves had been on a warpath, but the western kingdoms were still fighting them in the field! He was no military strategist, but he was a scholar, so he knew the Empire of Elsira was powerful, but even with all that strength, how did these elves slip past all the western kingdoms?

He just didn’t understand, but given his luck in life, he wasn’t surprised. Lost in thought, he bumped into the girl in front of him, before he could even stammer out an apology she had already turned on him.

“Watch your step, my lord.” Her last words came out as a hiss, and she turned to continue on their trek. The other villages shot dirty glances at him, but otherwise kept marching in silence.

It was no secret that Richard was part of the nobility, all tax collectors had to have some noble lineage in Ivelsten, most were noblemen down on their luck, his own house had fallen upon hard times when their consumer goods trade with the western kingdoms dried up as those nations switched to a war footing; his own years of studying for entrance into the Scholar's Guild being halted as a result, he simply couldn’t afford the admission fees.

So he signed up as a taxman, though he quickly realized noblemen down on their luck in charge of taxation inevitably led to corruption, and animosity between the taxman and the villages they visited. He tried to operate within the bounds of the law, but the stereotypes were too deeply entrenched, and that tension led a very angry and resentful band of villagers to hold him up at the local inn with pitchforks and torches.

He didn’t know if the extra light and sound drew the elven raiding band to the village, but based on how the villagers looked at him, it seemed they believed it had.

Richard sighed, just his luck, he was cursed after all. Everywhere he turned, misfortune befell him. From his house’s finances, to this village’s capture, all the way back to his very birth. From the moment he came into the world he had been unlucky. He, of course, was born feet first and the shock his blue head gave the midwife as he popped out caused her to drop him to the floor. Even though he made it through the mishap unscathed, it set a dangerous precedent.

He didn’t know why he had blue hair; both of his parents were brown haired, same as many others in Ivelsten, but he was different. His hair was at least a darker navy blue instead of a sky blue that would draw even more attention, but it hadn’t done him any favors during his life. Constant bullying as a child and a distinct and visual marker of otherness in a society as conservative and insular as the Kingdom of Ivelsten led to a life devoid of close acquaintances or friends.

Which was why he could only get a job as a simple tax man, which led him to this village, which had since led to his capture. It was all the hair! Even when he shaved himself bald, dark blue stubble would start poking back through within hours!

His internal recollection was interrupted by the sound of Elven conversation.

“What a tiresome assignment, raiding these savage’s hovels, did you see their dwellings? I’m not sure if they were constructed with mud or shit.”

The speaker was a slender elven warrior, tan of skin, with a mean streak to her expression. The elf beside her, an even darker elf with more intricate armor, replied.

“We follow orders, they don’t need us in the west, so they sent us here, that’s all there is to it.”

“Silence both of you,” the lead elf hissed from further ahead, “we are still in enemy territory.”

The closer duo merely nodded. Their conversation eliciting no reactions from the villagers, as they couldn’t understand the Elven language.

Richard, however, had studied it extensively as part of his research to join the Scholar's Guild. He kept silent and tried to conceal his understanding. He wasn’t sure what would happen if the elves knew one of their captives could understand them.

They continued on like that for a while, eventually he caught sight of a light in the distance, and soon after that the gentle rush of waves hitting the beach; they were at the coast. As the group cleared the forest and the dirt beneath their feet transitioned to sand, his eyes fell upon an elven ship.

It was a work of art. Obviously military in design, built for speed from the number of sails, and adorned with ballistae with overlapping arcs of fire. The ship’s obviously superior craftsmanship combined with the elves’ magical advantage… this small raiding ship could probably punch far above its weight.

Atop the ship’s bow, Richard spotted a hooded figure, a staff in one hand and a torch in the other, it was an elven mage. She called down to her subordinates.

“A new batch? How many?” She inquired.

“We count a little over a hundred.” The lead elf called back.

“Perfect! We’ve a cage left, let’s get them aboard.”

One cage left? So multiple cages? How well-built was this ship that it could carry enough cages to hold a hundred people?

Before he had time to ponder elven logistics, he felt the butt of a spear in his back, pushing him toward the ship with the rest of the villagers. As he ascended the gangplank, he was forced into the center of the deck. More villagers were forced into him from behind, and the elves made sure to squeeze them all in. People cried out and protested being corralled so close, but their pleas had barely begun when he heard the elven mage shouting… something, and the world began to change.

The world was getting larger, he felt like he was collapsing in on himself as he watched the masts of the ship somehow seem to get further away despite the fact that he wasn’t moving. When he looked around and saw the rest of the villagers heads disappearing into their clothes, he realized that the world wasn’t somehow getting larger.

They were getting smaller.

Within moments his own head had fallen through his shirt; his world became a blur as he got lost in his own clothing, he ran as he shrank, desperately trying to find an exit. Terrific thuds would occasionally jolt him upward from the deck of the ship, faint screams usually followed them.

Perhaps a minute passed before he felt his prison of cloth begin to twist and shift, vertigo overtook him as he fell through his clothing and… directly into a gigantic palm. It was the size of a house, even at its narrowest point it would take four of him, head to toe, to cover its girth.

He was, at most, barely over an inch tall.

As his world came back into focus, he found himself staring up at the gigantic face of a tanned elven warrior. Strikingly beautiful, as all elves were, but with an expression of… complete and abject boredom.

Her eyes glanced over him as he crawled on her palm, trying to stand, only for her movements to disrupt his balance before being unceremoniously dropped into a tiny cloth bag.

Upon landing, his perception was overwhelmed by a cacophony of limbs, heat, and screams. There were dozens of the villagers trapped in here with him, all as nude as the day they were born, with most screaming like the day they were born too.

The pandemonium continued for perhaps a few minutes more, as additional hapless victims were tossed into the sack; by the time the tie zipped and darkness overtook the container, he was buried a few bodies deep.

And then, motion, he got a face full of some woman’s belly and a couple knees and elbows into his abdomen as their prison swung about, a sweltering mass of humanity packed tightly into the bottom of a tiny sack. Time seemed to move at a snail's pace in the darkness and chaos, but soon enough the vertigo returned as the cloth bag’s tie opened. Gravity shifted as he, and the rest of the bag's unlucky denizens, were poured into a… cage.

The latch came down on the top of the cage and the screams subsided, only to replaced with a sense of panic and shock. Richard followed the gaze of the villager’s out into the cargo hold. The ship’s interior, a cramped space by the definitions of their previous size, now loomed like an immense cavern, multiple times larger than the largest hall in the largest castle in Ivelsten, or at least it was from their now diminutive perspective.

A single candle the size of a lighthouse stood in the center of the hold. Adorning the massive hall were the standard provisions and tools of seafarers, at a scale that seemed unbelievable to Richard, but what drew his attention was the rows and rows of other cages, all filled with teeming masses of pale, miniaturized humans.

He had heard tales of elven magic shrinking people, preliminary reports from scouts on the front in the west… but he and every other learned individual dismissed those reports as the tall tales of soldiers…

Now… he was living it, along with what looked like thousands of others. A series of cries passed through the cage as a now titanic elven warrior descended into the hold with another cloth bag in hand. She approached them, her bare midriff looming over them, it felt like it was all they could see.

A clunk reverberated through their cage as something hard and heavy dropped onto it, another cage, he realized; the cage being placed above them was quickly followed by a plethora of screams and shouts as the elven warrior dumped the other bag of villagers into the cage above. Her task complete, she sauntered off, back to the deck of the ship.

And after that… nothing. Some tried to slip through or bend the bars, some wept, and still others, like Richard, were silent as they felt the ship cast off and everyone in it was taken away for some unknown purpose.