Tiny Journey With a Giantess Adventurer (Patreon)

Update: 9/24/26 - New chapters added! New starting location/scenario, microscopic in stormwind bakery! This series will be like a choose your own adventure, with multiple endings, starts, routes, choices, and more! Ill implement the cyoa functionality soon, either a download or slides/docs link where you can actually click buttons for different choices! The series will be updated here on this post overtime so check back weekly for updates! Pleasee lmk what kinda things you'd like to see happen, what genres/kinks/storylines, im biased, i usually skew towards my own preferences and likes, i dont know what else to do if nobody makes requests, so please dm or comment! These chapters were more vore ending focused, but ill explore other possibilities non vore/food related in next chapters! Still writing the full written story versions of these new pages, stay tuned for those! Wanted to go ahead and get out the pages

You started playing this MMO, but tragically you were struck by the rare shrinking curse spell by a legendary monster.. after being stranded in the wilderness for days, your rescued by a new player.. you wonder what her true intentions are, her plans for you, and if she truly just wants to help, or wants a servant...

Chapter One

The Player Who Found You

You had only meant to play for an hour. That was the thought you kept returning to whenever the situation became too impossible to process. An hour to make a character, wander through the starting area, learn the controls, and see whether the game was worth sticking with. At first, that was exactly what happened. The world had seemed comfortably familiar, full of forest roads, low level enemies, glowing quest markers, and players rushing past on errands of their own.

It changed because you wandered farther than you should have. You were still new enough that the safer regions offered more than enough to do, but curiosity kept pulling you down roads you had not explored yet. Familiar settlements gradually disappeared behind you, replaced by older forests and rough paths where there were fewer players and much stronger creatures. You kept assuming you could turn around whenever things became dangerous. By the time you realized you had gone too far, the creature had already found you.

You never learned its name. Even afterward, your memory of the encounter remained a collection of disconnected details: something enormous moving between the trees, strange armor or scales catching the light, and eyes glowing from beneath a silhouette that looked far beyond anything your level should have faced. You remembered seeing its level for only a moment and knowing immediately that fighting it was pointless. Then a violet spell struck the ground beneath you, filling the dirt with unfamiliar symbols and a strange pulsing light. You expected to die, respawn, and lose a little progress.

Instead, the world began to grow.

At least, that was what it looked like at first. Grass rose around your legs, stones expanded beneath your feet, and the trees seemed to stretch upward into the sky while your clothing and equipment shifted awkwardly around your shrinking body. Within minutes, ordinary plants were reaching your chest and pebbles had become obstacles. The effect eventually slowed, leaving you frightened but still large enough to move through the wilderness. You convinced yourself the curse had finished.

The next morning proved you wrong.

You woke considerably smaller than you had been the night before. The following morning it happened again, and by the third day you understood that the curse had not been a temporary status effect at all. Each period of sleep seemed to give it another chance to reduce you, turning yesterday’s surroundings into something larger and more difficult. A shallow rut became a trench, a root became a wall, and a patch of weeds could become a maze that took half the afternoon to cross. The game was still recognizably the same world, but it no longer behaved like one built for someone your size.

After several days, you were barely half an inch tall. At that scale, traveling stopped being inconvenient and became genuinely exhausting. You could spend hours crossing ground that a normal player would cover in a few steps, and finding enough food or water required more attention than completing any quest ever had. Insects were no longer background decoration, and small animals were things to avoid entirely. You had stopped thinking about experience points, equipment, or whatever quests you had abandoned days ago.

By then, the wilderness felt less like part of an MMO and more like a place you might actually die.

You were sheltering beneath the bend of a broad blade of grass when the first vibration passed through the soil. It was faint, but you had learned to pay attention to movement in the ground, because at your size almost anything large enough to make it tremble was worth avoiding. A second impact followed, then a third, each one spaced evenly apart. The rhythm was too slow for an animal running through the brush. It sounded almost like footsteps.

You crawled forward and peered through the grass.

A pair of boots crossed the nearby path.

For a moment, you simply stared. The leather soles seemed enormous from where you were standing, rising and falling against the road with enough weight to send small tremors through the dirt. Above them were dark trousers, a red top, and the lower edge of simple beginner equipment. Whoever the player was, she did not look powerful, but that hardly mattered anymore. She was human sized, and after days alone that made her the most important thing you had seen in the world.

You shouted.

Nothing happened.

You tried again as loudly as your throat allowed, but the player continued walking. At your current size, even your loudest voice was probably little more than a faint sound lost beneath wind, leaves, and footsteps. You ran toward the edge of the path anyway, waving both arms even though there was almost no chance she would see you. The distance was not far by normal standards, but by the time you reached open ground you were already breathing hard.

Then one of the boots stopped.

The other turned.

The player looked around.

You froze in the open dirt.

For several seconds, she seemed unsure what she had noticed. Her head turned slightly as she searched the road, and then she crouched. Red orange hair slipped forward around her shoulders while her face lowered toward the ground. She was young, fair skinned, and dressed in the unmistakably simple clothing of someone who had only recently begun playing.

Her gaze moved across the path.

Then it settled on you.

The difference in scale was difficult to process from so close. Her face occupied most of your view, and even the movement of her eyes seemed exaggerated when those eyes were larger than your entire body. She leaned closer, her expression shifting from mild confusion into focused curiosity. You tried to speak, but whatever you said was clearly too quiet for her to understand.

She lowered one hand toward the ground.

You stepped backward on instinct.

Her fingers stopped for only a second before moving again, and this time she carefully closed them around you. There was no question, no attempt at negotiation, and not much hesitation. One moment you were standing in the dirt, and the next the ground dropped away as she lifted you into the air.

The sudden movement turned your stomach.

She opened her fingers and transferred you into the center of her palm, using the other hand to shield you from slipping. The surface beneath your feet was warm and covered in ridges that had never been noticeable when you were normal sized. You crouched automatically, spreading your hands against her skin until your balance returned. Far below, the path and surrounding grass looked even more distant than they had from the ground.

She brought you closer to her face.

You spoke again, trying to explain what had happened, but she had to lean in until you were nearly level with her chin. Even then, she seemed to catch only pieces of what you said. The words “curse” and “shrinking” were apparently enough, because her expression sharpened and she looked you over with new interest. When you pointed back toward the wilderness, she followed the direction of your arm and seemed to understand that you had been stranded there for some time.

She introduced herself as Starrey. You learned her name mostly because she repeated it while pointing toward herself, as though communicating with something much smaller than another player required simpler methods. Her equipment identified her as a priest, though she was only level two and clearly new enough to still be figuring out her own abilities. That should probably have made you less hopeful. Instead, you were too relieved that she had not simply put you back on the ground.

Starrey did not seem frightened by you. If anything, she behaved as though she had discovered some unusual hidden creature or rare NPC event that nobody else had mentioned. She inspected you with calm fascination, occasionally turning her hand to get a better look while being careful not to throw you off balance. There was concern in her expression, but it came second to curiosity. Within minutes, she had apparently decided that you were coming with her.

Before leaving, she reached into her bag and took out a piece of bread.

She pinched off what looked tiny between her fingers and dropped it into her palm beside you. At your scale, the fragment landed like a lump of stone and stood nearly as high as your chest. Starrey noticed your reaction and broke it apart again, reducing it until the pieces were manageable. You sat down and began eating without being asked.

The bread was stranger up close than you expected. What had once been a soft, ordinary texture had become a rough network of pores and torn fibers, each piece large enough to handle with both hands. You ate slowly while Starrey watched, apparently fascinated by the simple fact that someone your size could still behave like a normal person. Every so often you looked up and found her enormous face hovering beyond the curve of her palm. She did not appear embarrassed when you caught her staring.

Once you had eaten, she began arranging somewhere to carry you.

A small leather pouch at her waist became the obvious solution. She emptied a few items from it, lined the bottom more carefully with cloth, and folded a broad green leaf across one side to create a softer place to sit. Then she added several crumbs and lowered her palm toward the opening. The choice had already been made before you had any chance to object.

You stepped inside.

The pouch was dark compared with the open forest, but not unpleasant. Cloth fibers crossed the floor like heavy strands of rope, and the folded leaf formed a shallow green shelter against one leather wall. Starrey left the top open enough for light and air to enter, then attached the pouch securely at her side. A moment later she started walking.

The movement was surprisingly gentle once you became used to it. Each step rocked the pouch, but the cloth kept you from sliding very far, and the leaf gave you something to brace against. Through the opening above, you caught brief glimpses of the world moving past: tree branches, stretches of sky, stone walls, wooden fences, and eventually the roofs of buildings. For the first time in several days, distance no longer mattered.

Starrey carried you to Northshire Abbey.

Inside, the scale of everything became even more overwhelming. Stone columns climbed far above you, books rested on tables like enormous slabs, and candles burned with flames that looked dangerously large from the cloth where she placed you. The abbey was warm and quiet compared with the road, filled with muted voices and the faint glow of holy magic. Starrey seemed convinced that a priest should be able to solve whatever had happened to you.

Her confidence lasted longer than her spells did.

She tried several weak blessings, each producing a brief wash of golden light around your body. The magic felt warm but accomplished nothing obvious. Starrey repeated a few of the spells with more concentration, as though determination might compensate for being level two. When that failed, she began searching through books and speaking with nearby priests.

You could not follow most of the conversations from where you sat. The table was too large, the room too loud, and normal voices blended together above you. Occasionally Starrey returned and lowered herself close enough to explain something, but even then the exchange was awkward. She could hear you only when you nearly shouted, and sometimes she simply nodded as though she understood more than she actually did.

By evening, no cure had appeared.

Starrey made another small shelter for you near the center of the table, using folded cloth, the same leaf from her pouch, and a few crumbs she had saved. She did not ask whether you wanted to stay there. She simply arranged it, placed you in the safest part of the makeshift space, and continued looking through books nearby until the abbey grew quiet. It was slightly strange how naturally she had taken responsibility for you after knowing you for only a few hours.

Still, you slept better than you had since the curse began.

Morning changed everything again.

You woke beneath the folded leaf and immediately knew something was wrong. The cloth beneath you had become rougher during the night, its individual fibers thicker and more widely spaced than before. The leaf overhead seemed broader, its veins more pronounced, and the crumbs Starrey had left nearby now resembled chunks of broken stone. You sat up slowly and looked around.

The curse had shrunk you again.

Starrey noticed almost immediately. She leaned over the table, and the scale difference was worse than it had been the day before. Her face seemed farther away and larger at the same time, while the movement of her hair stirred enough air to reach you. She studied you for several seconds, then lowered one finger beside the cloth as if comparing your size with what she remembered.

You tried explaining that the curse seemed to worsen after sleep.

She leaned closer.

You repeated yourself.

Even with her ear only a short distance away, she caught little more than a few words. Eventually you pointed to yourself, then made a downward gesture with one hand and pointed toward where you had slept. Starrey understood enough to realize that the shrinking was continuing on a daily cycle.

That discovery did not frighten her as much as you expected.

Instead, it seemed to make her more determined.

She brought you water using the tip of a leaf, allowing a single droplet to cling to its edge. At your new size, even that droplet was large enough to look like a clear rounded pool suspended above you. You approached carefully and drank from the edge while Starrey watched. Once you finished, she gathered her belongings and put you back inside the pouch.

The next part of her plan became clear only after you were already traveling.

The road grew busier as Northshire disappeared behind you. You heard players and NPCs passing outside, along with horses, armor, and the constant low noise of a populated questing area. Starrey occasionally checked the pouch while walking, lifting the flap and peering down at you as though making sure some unusually delicate quest item had not vanished. Each time, she seemed satisfied to find you still there.

Eventually she stopped.

A door opened.

Warm air rushed into the pouch along with noise, firelight, and the smell of food.

The Lion’s Pride Inn was crowded.

Starrey carried you through the room while conversations rolled overhead from every direction. Tankards struck tables, chairs scraped across the floor, and the fireplace crackled somewhere across the common room. Nobody noticed you inside the pouch. Even when Starrey reached down and lifted you out, the people around her were too occupied with their own meals and conversations to pay attention.

She placed you directly on the table.

The wooden surface stretched away in every direction, worn smooth in some places and deeply scratched in others. From where you stood, the nearest mug looked like a barrel and the edge of the table seemed uncomfortably far away. Starrey sat beside you and immediately began ordering food, speaking to the server as though having a person smaller than her thumb standing near her hand was already completely normal. You were not included in that decision.

She was hungry.

That much was obvious.

When the meal arrived, the table changed again. A bowl of stew came down with enough force to send a vibration through the wood, followed by bread, a plate, utensils, and a large wooden mug. Steam rose from the bowl in thick curls that carried the smell of meat, herbs, and broth across the table.

Starrey remembered you only after she had started eating.

She tore off a piece of bread and placed it near you. It was still absurdly large, so she broke it again and pushed the smaller fragment across the plate with one fingertip. From your perspective, the bread was not a snack so much as another piece of terrain. Its crust rose above you, while loose crumbs lay scattered around it like stones.

You climbed onto the edge of her plate.

Starrey watched for a moment before returning to her meal. She seemed increasingly comfortable with the arrangement, occasionally moving food around you without showing much concern that the slightest careless motion could send you tumbling. To her, you were clearly fragile, but you were also becoming familiar. Something she could carry, feed, place somewhere safe, and check on whenever she remembered.

That bothered you more than you wanted to admit.

She had saved your life, or at least made survival much easier. She had given you food, carried you out of the wilderness, found shelter, tried to remove the curse, and continued traveling in search of answers. There was no obvious cruelty in anything she had done. The problem was that she had never really treated you like an equal player either.

Maybe she could not.

You were too small to speak to normally. She could barely hear your voice even when she leaned close, and in a place as noisy as the inn you were effectively silent unless she made a deliberate effort to listen. From her perspective, most of your communication came through gestures, expressions, and whatever conclusions she reached on her own. It would have been easy for anyone in that situation to start thinking of you less as another person and more as something unusual they had found.

Starrey rested one hand beside the plate.

You looked at it.

Yesterday, you had been able to cross her palm without much trouble. Today, the ridges in her skin seemed deeper, the fingertips broader, and every detail more exaggerated. If the curse continued tomorrow, even that familiar surface might begin to feel like another landscape.

Starrey noticed you looking up at her.

She lowered her face slightly and asked something you could not make out over the tavern noise. You answered anyway, but judging from her expression she heard none of it. After a moment she gave you a small, confident smile, pushed another crumb closer, and returned to her food.

You were starting to understand how this might work.

Starrey would decide where you went because she was the one who could carry you there. She would decide where you slept because she was the one capable of creating somewhere safe. She would decide when to move you, when to feed you, and which places were too dangerous to risk. Not because she had announced any authority over you, but because the difference in scale made that authority inevitable.

For now, you could live with it.

You were warm.

You had food.

For the first time in days, you did not have to watch the shadows for insects or worry about surviving another night alone beneath the grass. Whatever Starrey thought you were, she seemed determined to keep you alive. That was more than the wilderness had offered.

Outside, evening settled over Goldshire while the Lion’s Pride Inn stayed bright and noisy.

You sat near the edge of Starrey’s plate, surrounded by crumbs that were already beginning to feel too large. Across from you, the red haired priest ate her dinner and occasionally glanced down to make sure you were still where she had left you. She looked completely at ease now, as if finding a cursed half inch tall player had simply become part of her adventure.

You could not say the same.

Tomorrow morning, the curse would probably shrink you again.

And if Starrey already struggled to hear you now, you could only wonder how long it would be before speaking to her stopped mattering entirely.

Chapter Two

Smaller by Morning

The Lion’s Pride Inn only grew louder as evening went on. More players came in from the road, some still wearing dusty armor from quests around Elwynn Forest, while others gathered around the hearth with food and drinks. From your place on Starrey’s plate, most of them were little more than moving walls of leather, cloth, steel, and boots whenever they passed near the table. No one looked closely enough to notice you, and the few people who glanced in Starrey’s direction seemed more interested in her food than the tiny figure standing beside it.

Starrey seemed perfectly comfortable with that. She finished most of her stew at an unhurried pace, tearing pieces from the bread and occasionally leaving something small enough for you near the edge of the plate. She did not keep asking whether you were hungry or whether you wanted anything. She simply assumed you would eat if you needed to and kept a few crumbs within reach. It was a strangely casual kind of care, closer to the way someone might look after a little traveling companion than another player.

At first, you stayed near the bread she had given you. The plate itself was smooth enough to walk across, although every shallow scratch in the ceramic looked much deeper from your height than it should have. A smear of gravy left behind from Starrey’s meal formed a glossy brown strip that you had no interest in stepping through. Beyond it, the remains of her bread rose in a rough golden wall.

The scale of everything made it easy to forget that the meal was ordinary.

You had eaten in places like this before the curse. Back then, a plate was something you barely noticed once it was placed in front of you. Now you could stand on one for several minutes without reaching the other side, and a discarded piece of crust could block your path completely. Even Starrey moving her spoon across the table created enough motion in the air to make you instinctively step away.

She noticed that.

For the first time in several minutes, her attention shifted fully back toward you. She placed the spoon down farther away and leaned forward until her face filled much of your view. Her lips moved as she asked something, but the combined noise of the inn swallowed most of the words before they reached you. You cupped your hands around your mouth and shouted back, though you could tell from the slight narrowing of her eyes that she only heard a faint sound.

Starrey tried again, louder this time.

“You okay?”

You nodded.

That was apparently enough.

She sat back and returned to eating.

The interaction bothered you less than it probably should have. Talking to her was becoming impractical, and both of you were already adapting without really discussing it. A nod, a gesture, the direction you were looking, those things were beginning to matter more than words. Starrey appeared especially comfortable with that arrangement because it meant she did not have to wait for explanations she could barely hear.

When the server returned to collect the dishes, Starrey moved quickly.

Her hand came down beside you, fingers curving around your body before the plate could be touched. You barely had time to react before she lifted you from the ceramic and placed you in the center of her palm. The entire motion happened naturally, almost absentmindedly, as if she had already decided that picking you up whenever something became inconvenient was simply the easiest solution. From her expression, she did not seem to think there was anything unusual about it anymore.

The dishes disappeared.

Starrey remained seated for another few minutes while you stood on her palm.

Without the plate beneath you, you became much more aware of the crowd. A man in heavy armor walked past the table, his footsteps sending vibrations through the floorboards and into Starrey’s arm. Someone dragged a chair nearby. A dog wandered between two tables before being called away by its owner.

None of them noticed you.

Starrey eventually closed her fingers slightly around you and stood.

You immediately understood that the evening was over.

She carried you upstairs.

The inn’s upper floor was quieter, although still far from silent. Voices drifted up through the floorboards and occasionally someone passed along the hallway outside. Starrey had rented a small room with a bed, a table, a chair, and a narrow window looking down toward Goldshire. It was plain, but after several nights outdoors it looked almost luxurious.

To you, it looked enormous.

Starrey placed her pouch on the bedside table and transferred you onto the wooden surface. You stepped from her palm and found yourself standing beside a candleholder whose base rose above you like a metal monument. A folded cloth lay nearby, along with the leaf she had been carrying since Northshire. She arranged the cloth without asking and tucked one corner against a small wooden box so it formed another sheltered space.

You watched her work.

She was getting better at it.

The first shelter had looked improvised because it had been. This time she seemed to understand what your size required. She flattened the cloth so you would not disappear into its folds, checked that there were no large gaps between the tableboards nearby, then placed a few tiny pieces of bread within easy reach. Finally she set a shallow drop of water in the center of a clean spoon and left the spoon lying near the cloth.

From her perspective, it was probably nothing more than arranging a few objects.

From yours, she had just built an entire little campsite.

Starrey sat on the edge of the bed and watched you inspect it. There was satisfaction in her expression, like she was pleased that she had figured out a practical solution. You tried to tell her that the spoon was probably too deep to climb into safely, but she only caught your voice as a faint squeak across the table. After watching you point repeatedly at the spoon, she seemed to understand.

She dipped one finger into the water.

A single droplet clung to her fingertip.

Then she lowered it toward you.

The rounded surface of the droplet reflected the candlelight as it approached. You drank carefully from the edge while Starrey held her hand completely still. She watched with obvious fascination, her eyes following every small movement as though this were some strange mechanic she had never seen before. When you finished, she lifted her finger away.

“Better.”

You were not sure whether she was talking to you or herself.

Starrey spent part of the evening sitting at the table with a book she had borrowed from Northshire. The cover was almost as large as a building from your perspective, and when she opened it the pages created broad white surfaces covered in lines of dark text. She searched through sections dealing with magic, curses, transformation, and strange afflictions. Most of it seemed far beyond what a level two priest was expected to understand.

You explored the cloth while she read.

The threads beneath your feet had become terrain now. You climbed over one raised section, followed the shallow valley between two fibers, and reached the edge where the material folded toward the table. It was not difficult yet, but it already felt different from the night before. You kept thinking about how much larger it might become after another shrinking.

Eventually you reached the wooden surface.

The table grain formed long shallow channels beneath you. Tiny scratches made by years of mugs and plates had become cracks wide enough for your fingers to fit inside. A speck of dust sat nearby and seemed absurdly large compared with what dust was supposed to be. You stared at it for several seconds.

This was becoming a different world.

Starrey noticed you had wandered away from the cloth.

Her hand appeared overhead.

You looked up just as two fingers descended beside you.

You tried telling her that you were fine.

She could not hear you.

The fingers closed gently around your torso and lifted you from the table.

Starrey examined you for a moment, then simply placed you back near the shelter.

There was something almost insulting about how effortless it was.

You could spend several minutes walking across the table, and she could undo the entire journey in less than a second.

You tried pointing toward where you had been exploring.

Starrey followed the gesture.

Her expression softened slightly.

“You were looking around?”

You nodded.

She seemed to think about it.

Then she moved the candle farther away, pushed the spoon aside, and cleared a larger section of the tabletop. Once she was satisfied there was nothing immediately dangerous, she lowered her hand beside you again. This time she pointed toward the open wood as though granting permission.

Apparently, exploration was acceptable now.

You almost laughed.

For the next half hour, you wandered around the cleared area while Starrey continued reading. Every so often you looked toward her and found her checking on you over the top of the book. She did not hover constantly, but she always seemed to know roughly where you were. Whenever you approached the edge of the table, her attention sharpened.

You never got close enough to find out what she would do.

Eventually fatigue caught up with you.

The curse seemed to make exhaustion arrive more quickly than it used to. Crossing the table had taken more effort than walking across an entire inn room would have required before. You returned to the cloth on your own and crawled beneath the folded section Starrey had prepared. The fabric was warm from the room and thick enough to block most of the light.

Starrey noticed almost immediately.

She closed the book.

For a moment, her shadow covered your shelter as she leaned close.

You could see one enormous green eye through the opening in the cloth.

She said something quietly.

You only caught the last word.

“Sleep.”

Then she stood and moved away.

The room grew darker.

The candle went out.

For several minutes you listened to the building around you. Boots crossed the hallway. Someone laughed loudly downstairs. The floorboards creaked as Starrey moved near the bed.

Then everything settled.

You did not want to sleep.

You knew what sleep meant now.

Somewhere between closing your eyes and opening them again, the curse would continue its work. You wondered whether staying awake could stop it. Maybe the magic was tied to dawn rather than sleep.

You tried.

For what felt like hours, you stared into the darkness beneath the cloth.

Eventually exhaustion won.

When you woke, something was wrong.

Again.

The realization came before you even moved.

The cloth above you looked different.

Yesterday, individual fibers had resembled thick cords.

Now they looked like ropes.

You pushed yourself upright.

The space beneath the fold had expanded overnight.

What had been a small shelter now felt like the underside of some enormous fabric canopy. The gaps between threads had widened into dark grooves. Tiny particles trapped in the cloth looked large enough to climb.

Your chest tightened.

You crawled toward the opening.

Morning light poured across the table.

Everything was bigger.

The wooden grain had deepened. The bread pieces Starrey had left nearby were now huge irregular masses. Even the smallest crumb could have provided several meals.

Then something moved beyond the table.

Starrey sat up in bed.

You watched her stretch.

From this distance, she looked almost unreal.

She turned toward the table.

Her eyes searched the cloth.

For a second, she did not see you.

That frightened you more than the shrinking itself.

Then her gaze locked onto movement.

She leaned closer.

Her face approached until it dominated the horizon.

The expression on it changed.

She knew immediately.

You tried shouting to her.

She heard nothing.

Starrey lowered her ear closer to the table.

You shouted again.

Still nothing.

Maybe a faint sound reached her, because she seemed to focus harder, but it was obvious that normal conversation was already becoming impossible. Yesterday she had struggled to understand you. Today she could barely tell whether you were speaking at all.

You stood there looking up at her.

For the first time since she found you, Starrey seemed genuinely uncertain.

Only for a moment.

Then the uncertainty disappeared.

She held one finger beside you.

You stared at it.

Yesterday, that fingertip had been enormous.

Today, the ridges of her fingerprint were clearly visible from where you stood.

She watched your reaction.

Then she turned her finger slightly, comparing its width to your height.

Her eyebrows rose.

You had become far smaller than either of you expected.

Starrey reached for the pouch.

She paused.

Then looked at you.

Then at the pouch again.

It was obvious what she was thinking.

Yesterday, the pouch had been a safe little room.

Now it was becoming an enormous environment full of fibers, seams, folds, and gaps large enough for you to disappear into.

She set it aside. Instead, Starrey picked up a small wooden trinket box from the table. She opened it. The interior was mostly empty. She removed two metal pins and a piece of thread, then lined the bottom with a smooth scrap of cloth. After checking the corners, she folded another tiny piece of fabric against one side and added one of the smallest bread crumbs she could manage. Then she lowered her hand toward you.

You looked at the box.

She pointed to it. Apparently, that was your new transport. You tried saying something. She leaned down. You repeated yourself as loudly as possible. Starrey heard enough to know you were speaking, but not enough to understand any actual words. Her expression shifted.

Then she gave you the same calm smile she had used the day before. “It’s okay.” You heard that clearly enough. Her fingers came down around you. This time, even being picked up felt different. Her fingertips were larger relative to your body. The soft pressure that had felt manageable yesterday now surrounded much more of you, and you could see individual skin ridges passing beneath your hands as she transferred you into her palm. She held you close to her face, studying your new size.

You were no longer half an inch tall. Not even close. Whatever the curse had done overnight, it had taken another major step. Starrey seemed fascinated. You were terrified. She placed you inside the little wooden box and lowered the lid until only a narrow gap remained for light. Then she slipped the box carefully into her satchel.

A moment later, you felt her stand. You did not know where she had decided to take you. You could not ask. Even if you did, she probably would not hear you. All you could do was feel the rhythm of her footsteps through the wooden floor beneath you as Starrey carried you out of the Lion’s Pride Inn and back into the enormous world outside.

Chapter Three

The Little Wooden Box

Traveling inside the wooden box was nothing like traveling in Starrey’s pouch. The pouch had moved with her body, softening each step through layers of leather and cloth, while the box transmitted nearly every motion directly through the floor beneath you. Each footfall produced a dull vibration, and every turn shifted your weight against the smooth wooden surface. The narrow opening beneath the lid admitted only a thin line of daylight, so most of the outside world existed as sounds and movement.

Goldshire was already busy by the time Starrey left the inn. You heard horses on the road, distant conversations, clattering armor, wagon wheels, and the occasional shout from someone gathering a group for a nearby quest. Before the curse, those sounds would have blended into ordinary background noise. Now each one seemed enormous, especially when something passed close enough for the vibrations to travel through Starrey’s satchel and into the box.

You spent the first part of the journey testing your new surroundings.

The wooden floor was smooth compared with cloth, which made walking considerably easier. Starrey had placed one small square of fabric against the side of the box, creating something you could sit against without being thrown around whenever she changed direction. The crumb she had left with you was large enough now that you could not imagine finishing it in one sitting. Even the wooden grain beneath your feet seemed wider than it had when she first placed you inside.

You still had no idea exactly how small you were.

That bothered you more than you expected.

Yesterday, you could at least compare yourself with familiar objects and make a reasonable guess. Today, the comparisons had become strange enough that numbers stopped feeling useful. You knew only that Starrey’s fingertip had seemed much larger this morning and that she could no longer hear you unless you were almost directly beside her ear.

The box suddenly stopped moving.

You waited.

A moment later, the lid opened.

Sunlight flooded the interior so quickly that you raised an arm over your eyes. Starrey’s face appeared above you, filling the rectangular opening. Her hair hung around her shoulders as she looked down, checking that you were still where she had left you.

You waved.

She smiled.

That was apparently enough for her.

Her fingers entered the box.

You had already learned there was little point trying to predict when Starrey intended to move you. She simply decided where you needed to be, reached down, and relocated you. This time, her thumb and forefinger came together gently around your middle and lifted you into the open air.

You emerged onto a quieter section of the road near the edge of Goldshire.

Starrey was sitting beneath a large tree away from the busiest traffic. A wooden fence ran behind her, separating the road from a field where a few sheep wandered through the grass. In the distance, you could see the roofs of the inn and several smaller buildings clustered around the crossroads.

She placed you in the center of her palm.

The difference from yesterday was immediately obvious.

Her hand was no longer just large. It was beginning to feel like an environment of its own. The shallow lines crossing her palm had deepened into channels beneath your feet, and the tiny variations in her skin created ridges and depressions that forced you to watch where you stepped.

Starrey seemed to notice the same thing.

She brought her other hand closer and held one finger beside you.

The fingertip rose far above your head.

She studied the comparison for several seconds, then looked thoughtful.

You shouted something about not enjoying being measured.

Her eyes narrowed.

She leaned closer.

You tried again.

Nothing.

Starrey tilted her head slightly, clearly aware that you were speaking without understanding any of it. After another unsuccessful attempt, she simply pointed toward herself and then toward the road ahead. She followed that by making a small walking motion with two fingers.

You understood.

She was taking you somewhere.

You pointed ahead and shrugged.

Starrey nodded enthusiastically, apparently treating that as agreement.

Then she placed you back into the box.

You were beginning to understand how communication worked now.

If Starrey could not hear you, she filled in the missing information herself.

Fortunately, she seemed convinced that most of her decisions were reasonable.

The journey resumed.

It continued for another twenty minutes before the sounds around you changed. The busy crossroads faded behind you, replaced by birds, wind through leaves, and occasional footsteps on packed earth. When Starrey opened the box again, you found yourself in a small garden beside an unfamiliar cottage.

Bundles of herbs hung beneath the roof.

Glass bottles filled the shelves visible through an open window. Some contained ordinary liquids while others glowed faintly green, blue, or violet. Strange dried plants were tied to posts around the garden, and the air smelled strongly of flowers, smoke, and something bitter you could not identify.

An herbalist.

Or perhaps an alchemist.

Starrey carried you inside.

The cottage was crowded with things that became increasingly intimidating at your scale. Clay bowls sat on a long worktable beside mortars, pestles, bundles of roots, open books, knives, bottles, and dried mushrooms. A metal kettle hung over a small fire. Glass jars containing powders and crushed leaves covered most of the nearby shelves.

An elderly woman stood behind the worktable.

Starrey immediately began explaining.

You could not hear everything from her palm, but you understood enough. She described finding you in the wilderness, mentioned the monster and the curse, and explained that you became smaller each morning. The herbalist listened without interrupting, although her expression suggested she was not entirely convinced.

Then Starrey held out her hand.

The woman leaned forward.

For several seconds, she did not see you.

Starrey pointed.

The herbalist leaned closer.

Her eyes widened.

You had become small enough that even someone actively looking for you needed help finding you.

That realization settled coldly in your stomach.

The herbalist adjusted a pair of small spectacles and lowered her face until you could see every wrinkle around her eyes. She stared at you with the same kind of curiosity Starrey had shown when she first discovered you, although hers felt more clinical. She asked Starrey something without taking her eyes off you.

Starrey answered.

Then the woman reached toward you.

You backed away.

Starrey’s palm tilted slightly beneath your feet.

The herbalist stopped.

After another brief discussion, she took a small glass dish from the workbench and placed it on the table. Starrey lowered her hand beside it and gently encouraged you toward the edge with one finger. You looked from the enormous fingertip to the dish.

Apparently you were being examined.

You climbed down.

The glass surface felt cool beneath your feet.

From inside the shallow dish, the cottage became even more distorted by scale. Starrey and the herbalist stood on opposite sides of the table, both of them towering above you. The herbalist moved a small magnifying lens over the dish, and suddenly one enormous glass circle filled the sky.

You stared up at it.

Starrey looked fascinated.

The herbalist looked concerned.

She turned the lens slightly, examining your arms, clothing, and whatever magical signs the curse might have left behind. Then she took a tiny crystal from a drawer and placed it near the dish. The crystal glowed faintly.

At least, it had probably been faint from their perspective.

To you, it was painfully bright.

You stepped away.

Starrey noticed immediately and moved the crystal farther back.

That small reaction surprised you.

She had done it without needing to be told.

Maybe she was beginning to understand you better after all.

The herbalist performed several more tests.

None involved spells powerful enough to hurt, although one produced a strange tingling sensation that spread through the glass beneath your feet. Another caused thin green threads of light to appear around your body before disappearing into the air. Each time something happened, the woman wrote notes in a book while Starrey watched closely.

Eventually they began talking again.

This conversation lasted longer.

You understood almost none of it.

That was becoming increasingly frustrating.

Before, losing your voice had seemed like a practical problem. Now it was changing your place in every conversation about your own condition. Starrey and the herbalist discussed you while you stood several inches away, and neither could hear anything you said.

You shouted once anyway.

The herbalist paused.

Starrey leaned closer.

You tried again.

She caught something this time, though clearly not enough.

Her expression softened slightly.

Then she held one finger close to the edge of the dish.

You realized she wanted you to climb onto it.

You hesitated.

The fingertip waited.

You stepped aboard.

Starrey slowly lifted you until you were almost level with her ear.

You shouted again.

This time she finally caught enough to understand the question.

“Curse?”

You nodded.

Starrey looked toward the herbalist.

The woman gave a slow nod of her own.

Whatever she had found, the curse was still there.

You tried asking whether it could be stopped.

Starrey only caught fragments.

She looked at you for several seconds, then understood enough from your expression.

Her confidence weakened.

Not much.

But you saw it.

The herbalist explained something quietly.

Starrey listened.

Then she looked back at you.

She pointed toward the crystal on the table, then toward you, then made a downward motion with her fingers. After that, she shook her head.

You stared at her.

She repeated the gestures.

You understood.

The crystal had detected the shrinking.

It could not stop it.

Starrey added another gesture, pointing toward the road and then farther into the distance.

Someone else.

Another place.

Another attempt.

You nodded slowly.

Her smile returned almost immediately.

As far as Starrey was concerned, that settled it.

The herbalist gave her several small packets before you left. One contained some kind of powdered herb, another a bitter smelling mixture wrapped in waxed paper. Starrey packed them into her satchel and listened carefully to whatever instructions came with them.

Then she reached for you.

By now, you barely reacted when her fingers approached.

That bothered you too.

She lifted you from the glass dish and placed you into her palm. You sat there while she thanked the herbalist, gathered the wooden box, and left the cottage.

Outside, the afternoon sun felt warm.

Starrey did not immediately put you away.

Instead, she walked to the edge of the garden and sat beneath a tree.

She rested her hand on one knee.

For several minutes, neither of you did anything.

You looked around.

At your new size, the garden had become enormous. Individual blades of grass rose like narrow green towers. A fallen leaf several feet away looked broad enough to explore for hours. Tiny flowers scattered through the ground cover were now tall plants in their own right.

Starrey watched you taking it in.

She seemed quieter than usual.

Eventually she reached into the satchel and removed one of the herbalist’s packets.

Inside was a small amount of dried powder.

Starrey pinched the tiniest quantity she could manage and placed it near you.

You stared at it.

She pointed toward the powder.

Then toward you.

You shook your head immediately.

Starrey raised an eyebrow.

You pointed toward the herbalist’s cottage, then made an exaggerated questioning gesture.

You had no idea what the substance was.

For once, Starrey understood perfectly.

She smiled.

Then she touched the powder to her own tongue.

You stared at her.

She made a face.

Apparently it tasted awful.

That did not inspire confidence.

Starrey drank from her waterskin and wiped her mouth.

Then she looked back at you and pointed toward the powder again.

You crossed your arms.

She laughed.

You could not hear the sound clearly at this distance, but you saw it in her expression.

She did not force the issue.

Instead, she wrapped the powder back up and put it away.

That surprised you more than it should have.

Starrey could have made you take it easily.

She could have decided that she knew better, picked you up, and done whatever she wanted.

She did not.

Maybe there was still more choice left in your situation than you had begun to assume.

The thought was comforting.

For a while.

Then Starrey suddenly looked toward the road.

Someone was approaching.

You followed her gaze.

A mounted player passed beyond the fence.

The horse alone was terrifying from your perspective, each hoof striking the ground with enough force to send vibrations through Starrey’s hand. The rider never looked in your direction. There was no reason to.

You were much too small.

Starrey waited until the horse disappeared.

Then she looked down at you again.

Her expression changed.

You knew that look now.

She had decided something.

She opened the wooden box.

You pointed toward the garden.

Starrey paused.

You pointed again.

The enormous landscape of grass, flowers, roots, and fallen leaves stretched around you. After being confined to tables, pouches, plates, and boxes, you wanted to spend a little time outside. Even if it was only a few minutes.

Starrey looked across the garden.

Then back at you.

For several seconds, she seemed to consider whether allowing someone your size onto the ground was a terrible idea.

Finally she lowered her hand.

Her palm touched the grass.

You stepped off.

The world swallowed you almost immediately.

Grass surrounded you on every side.

Starrey remained sitting nearby, but from down here you could see only parts of her through the vegetation. Her boots stood beyond the stems like dark structures. One knee rose behind them.

You moved forward.

A flower petal rested on the soil ahead.

What would once have been something you could crush beneath one finger was now nearly as long as your body.

You climbed onto it.

The surface bent slightly beneath your weight.

Above you, something moved.

Starrey.

Her face appeared between the grass stems.

She had leaned down to keep track of you.

You kept walking.

For the first time since waking that morning, you felt almost normal.

Not because anything around you was normal.

Because you were moving under your own power.

Choosing your own direction.

Exploring.

Starrey stayed close but did not interfere.

You climbed over a root.

Crossed beneath the shadow of another leaf.

Stopped beside a tiny bead of morning moisture that had somehow survived in the shade.

Then you noticed something ahead.

A faint purple light.

It came from beneath the edge of a fallen leaf.

You stopped.

The glow pulsed once.

Your stomach tightened.

You had seen that color before.

Starrey noticed you had stopped moving.

She leaned closer.

You pointed.

At first she did not understand.

Then the purple light pulsed again.

Her expression changed instantly.

She reached down and lifted the leaf.

Something was hidden beneath it.

A mark.

Small by Starrey’s standards.

Enormous by yours.

A circle of faint violet symbols had been burned into the soil.

The same kind of symbols that had appeared beneath your feet when the legendary monster cursed you.

Starrey stared at them.

Then she looked at you.

For the first time since she found you, her confidence disappeared completely.