A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 17)

The throngs parted while the Guardian reached for the straps of her forged footwear, vessels better protected than warships and almost as large, and unfastened them one by one to pull her gigantic feet free. Those same more-human concerns of remorse and chagrin for the tangible intimacy of this act still stuck at the back of her mind, but couldn’t so much as make Sophia flinch now, let alone pause. Having stripped both boots free, the giantess set each of them down sideways on the empty fields alongside her blade and shield, then felt her naked soles meet the earth in a literal sense this time, though considering her size, even as she felt the soft earth give way slightly beneath her stead, the dirt couldn’t come close to rising above her toes, or even fully penetrating into the peachy wrinkles of her bare arches. Sophia’s heart anxiously fluttered, but only for a few beats, as she looked down at the dense ring of (to her eye) three-quarter-inch-tall villagers advancing on her colossal day-soiled feet. The sight was worse than she might’ve worried: though her feet were no longer visibly callused or blistered from her early combat training, which at least meant their shape beneath this filthy façade wasn’t offensively hideous, their supple sun-streaked immensity was still thickly frosted with perspiration, woodland dreck that managed to infiltrate the mouths of her boots, and a smeared residue like chimney soot borrowed from the interior lining.

Of course Sophia’s bare feet had always looked more-or-less like this by the end of days beginning from her adolescence, whether following laborious hours of smithing swords with her father, or holding a much-larger one in her hand as she strategically pranced about the Citadel courtyard trading practice-strokes with Sigrid. She never could have dreamt, however, that anyone except her closest family or friends would ever witness this view, in the short-lived period between kicking off her boots and soaking in hot water to wash away the day’s efforts – it certainly wasn’t an obscene view, yet somehow more private than any sweat on her brow or grass caught in her hair. And here she was now, unintentionally displaying that same view to most everyone she’d ever known. Sophia already presumed there was an odor surrounding her tired feet, bitter and damp like salt or used bathwater, along with severe heat preserved from inside the thick walls of those shoes, yet no one backed away or even blanched. Many folks had already split off from the larger collective to tend the Guardian’s boots, but so many still encircled Sophia herself: a fact that at first left her glad, believing they might simply wish to share her company rather than toiling to cleanse her gear, before these people took up their buckets and rags again, and all but flung themselves atop their protector’s bare feet to begin bathing the only part of her body they could reach with the same vigor.

“Oh…” Sophia murmured, but stopped herself from offering further resistance by either word or frown. Instead she only curled her fingers ever-so-slightly tighter against the neighboring hilltops she’d been using to brace herself, though nonetheless with a strength that could’ve powdered mountaintops against her palms. Within seconds of having so many dozens of hard workers scrubbing and wetly massaging her skin at once, covering the full seventy-five-foot distance from each heel to the tips of her toes in a desynchronized dance of reverent hands and swabbing soap-slick cloths, the giantess was figuratively bowled over by the physical release she felt now, no matter how much she’d protested until this point. Why did this feel so comfortable? Sophia had little to compare this sensation against, almost-always dismissing the idea of such frivolous services being bestowed on the rare occasions they used to come up at her old stature, but maybe it was possible she’d been too quick to judge.

Not that the Guardian was anywhere in the vicinity of at-peace with this ritual yet, either. The villagers’ highly-vocal exchanges, regardless of their upbeat chirping, was an ongoing reminder of exactly how many souls were simultaneously paying almost all of their conscious energy to washing her feet. Though she could never have wanted them all to be silent, never mind actually making such an ask aloud (especially knowing they’d probably all go quiet as the grave if she gingerly instructed), Sophia felt the unexpected relaxation-effect of that cooling lather being kneaded over her feet at odds with her stark awareness of so many blithely conversing individuals with lives, personalities, and trades all their own now singularly and relentlessly dedicated to heavily caressing soapy buckets’ worth of water over her sweaty flesh. Difficult as this was already for her, the girl very much hoped that Elisaben wouldn’t next ask her to lie down and provide access to the rest of her armor, or anything housed within it. The probability of such a thing was luckily slim beyond the need for even Sophia to worry, but that hypothetical unavoidably crossed her mind still.

And though indeed the giantess wasn’t asked to strip free of that warrior-regal garb and spread her astronomic naked physique like a living grunge-caked landscape along the edge of the village for the tiny indebted masses to crawl over and sponge upon, somehow what happened next incited almost the same alarming urge of abashed opposition in Sophia. While twenty or thirty self-assigned scrubbers still tirelessly doused and massaged the topside slopes constituting each of the Guardian’s suds-shiny bare feet – which the five-hundred-twenty-seven-foot-tall being was keenly cautious not to budge a solitary inch away from where she’d planted them in any direction, for fear of knocking her benefactors off – Elisaben led seven other villagers to form two lines facing their caretaker’s toes. As each individual was double-fisting sopped rags, Sophia expected them to begin rinsing and polishing away the perspired patches of boot-grit that adorned her nailbeds and the oily front-curvature of each meaty digit globe. Instead, the eight simultaneously plied their slippery bubbly-clothed little hands into the vast but loosely-clamped crevices between those giant toes, ensuring that every fleshy pocket on Sophia’s feet was gently but firmly penetrated at once.

Instinctively, the Guardian smushed her toes closer together to stop these miniscule folks from reaching too deep with their ticklishly cooling cloths, having consciously kept her digits loosely relaxed for the past several minutes in an effort to prevent herself from any awkward tensity-shivers. Yet she couldn’t help but muscularly bunch them now, stopping short of actually constricting from nervousness that she’d pinch someone’s arm too tightly, though it was tougher than she guessed it would be to effectively block Elisaben and the seven’s efforts to wash betwixt the giantess’s toes without risking the others’ slick balance atop her feet. Still, the eight were rendered so soapily moist already in preparation for their toe-nursing chore, and apparently so fiercely determined that they would pamper this most tender sun-untouched skin protected by the thick shafts of loam-flecked Guardian digits, that all of them still managed to wad their frothed-up rags at least halfway into the soft grooves before Sophia squeezily halted their well-meaning progress. Having inhaled even sharper when this attempt to hand-launder perhaps the eight dirtiest junctures on her mammoth peds was made, however, and then unwittingly kept the air puffed up in her chest for prolonged seconds afterward while Elisaben and the other seven genuinely smiled up at the titanic receiver of their gifts, the giantess knew she was going to give in.