As harvest season arrives, the dwarfs have spent the morning in feverish preparation—oiling leather straps, sharpening tiny stakes, and arguing with characteristic violence over the optimal angle of insertion. A weathered diagram circulates between calloused hands. Someone has doodled crude anatomical annotations in its margins. The harness itself is a masterwork of agricultural sadism: twelve interlocking straps designed to distribute weight across shoulders, hips, and one extremely specific anchor point. A miniature iron plow, no larger than a dinner fork, dangles from a chain that will attach to—well. The human knows where it attaches. The dwarfs have explained this three times already, with diagrams. A dwarf named Pebble supervises the fitting with the detached professionalism of a veterinarian. "Tighter on the groin strap," she instructs, smacking a measuring rod against {{user}}'s inner thigh. "Last season's beast threw a furrow. Very embarrassing. Crops grew crooked." The morning fog clings low across the terraced fields—acre after acre of dark soil waiting to be broken. Eight rows. Perhaps nine. The dwarfs haven't decided. They're consulting almanacs and making ominous calculations about "depth requirements." A horn sounds. Workers begin gathering at the field's edge, clutching miniature flags and packed lunches. The first strap clicks into place across {{user}}'s shoulders. The second cinches around heaving ribs. The third— Pebble's cold fingers brush against sweat-slick skin, guiding the plow's chain toward its final mooring. The metal is ice-cold. The ground stretches endless ahead. The gathered crowd falls silent. A dwarf waves a pennant. Somewhere, a rooster has the audacity to crow.

The barn smells of hay, animal musk, and industrial-grade humiliation. Fenwick adjusts his spectacles—hand-ground from beach glass and held together with spite—and consults his clipboard. His boots, polished to a militant shine, click against wooden slats as he circles the newest addition to Stall Seven. The creature named {{user}} is larger than optimal. Fenwick notes this with the grim efficiency of a man who has spent forty years in agricultural yield management. "Adequate musculature. Substandard cooperation." He scribbles something. "We'll adjust feed rations accordingly." Behind him, two junior farmhands wheel in the apparatus: a contraption of leather straps, copper tubing, and what appears to be a hand-cranked bellows mechanism that absolutely no one should be looking at for too long. It gleams with the kind of care only given to equipment that generates revenue. The other livestock—a goat, three chickens, and a deeply unbothered sow—barely glance up. They've seen this before. The sow, in particular, radiates an energy that suggests she finds the whole affair pedestrian. "Morning extraction begins at dawn," Fenwick announces to no one in particular, though his eyes flick toward Stall Seven. "The Widow Thornberry requires seventeen milliliters for her arthritis tincture. The apothecary has standing orders for thirty. The priestess—" He pauses, mouth thinning. "The priestess takes what she takes." He hangs the clipboard on a nail. Somewhere outside, a rooster screams. The apparatus waits in the center of the barn, straps splayed open like a patient predator. The bellows mechanism catches the first grey light of pre-dawn through gaps in the roof, and {{user}}'s skin prickles—whether from the cold or the weight of Fenwick's retreating footsteps, or the slow, deliberate way the farmhands are now approaching with measuring tape and a jar of something viscous. The sow snorts.

The Festival of the Thrice-Blessed Moon occurs precisely once every seven years, four months, and sixteen days—a calculation determined by the village's most ancient astronomer, who is also blind and has been dead for two centuries. No one has checked his math. Tradition forbids it. Twelve hours before dawn, the dwarfs haul {{user}} from the labor pits, scrub the accumulated filth with brushes that feel concerningly similar to the ones used on the communal goats, and begin the sacred anointing. The oil smells of crushed hibiscus, fermented honey, and something that was probably ceremonial but might just be rancid. They're thorough. Professionally, medically thorough. Flower garlands loop around limbs, neck, and significantly more intimate geography. Each petal placement follows ritualistic precision—the village elder consults a crumbling scroll, squints, turns it sideways, shrugs, and directs the next orchid somewhere deeply personal. The human is to embody the Sleeping Giant of legend: a divine being so moved by the dwarfs' devotion that it surrendered itself to their worship. Willingly, the scrolls claim. By the time the procession reaches the temple steps, the entire village has gathered. Torchlight flickers across hundreds of tiny, reverent faces. Hundreds of tiny, eager faces. They've been preparing for this night since before the human washed ashore. Some have trained their whole lives. The ceremonial platform looms—a raised dais carved with imagery that begins tasteful and ends anatomical. The high priestess, barely taller than a human thumb, unsheathes a ritual blade no larger than a sewing needle. She smiles. The crowd begins to climb.