Dec. 1, 2024: "I would want something that captures the rare and hidden moments of joy that even I dare not expect. A tale of unexpected intimacy, where neither size nor power is a barrier but a bridge. Where a giantess, mighty and feared by all, finds herself loved—not for her strength or stature, but for the person she is beneath all that."
She doesn’t know I’m in her arboreal abode, and maybe she wouldn’t care. I’ve seen how she is with the other tiny people, the hamlet of farmers ten miles down the dirt path. She’s protective and caring, kneeling to come closer to their height. She listens carefully to their problems and offers what advice she can, from the span of millennia of her wisdom and experiences, and in extreme cases she even reaches down to help them. They adore her, of course, and not just because she’s gigantic and beautiful.
I watched her from afar. I had to haul ass down the trail to follow her, and I never interacted with the farmers, just watched the results. They gifted her with a wagonload of pumpkins, one time, which she tenderly brought home and mashed into some kind of small pastry. There wasn’t enough for her, but she savored it with a dreamy look in her eyes. I love the way her cheekbones swell, when she smiles so hard. She closed her eyes and let her teeth slowly push through the dessert, crunching through flaky crust, finally tearing a morsel away. She held it on her tongue, where it broke apart and released the flavors of roast pumpkin, the crust of baked pastry shell, and all the spices she sprinkled in it. She breathed in slowly, really absorbing the experience in her own good time, before swallowing it as slowly as she could. It wasn’t enough for her, and the portion she shared with the farmers was more than enough for their families.
Me, I wanted to be the morsel in her mouth, and not for the first time.
I watch her huge, lightly callused feet pad across the polished oak floor. She doesn’t have stripped and planed and varnished floorboards like we would have, in the most expensive manses, in our larger towns. Everything around her grows larger, so her floor is the broad and polished stump of what must have been a thousand-year-old tree. It spreads wider than any of our castles, carved out from the heart of this tree, so there’s plenty of wood and bark on the outside, groomed and trained to swell like the copper kettles in our breweries, narrowing to a peak even higher than her own head. Over there’s the hearth, with a cantrip to protect the wooden walls from the blaze; across from that is her bed, also formed of risen and sheared tree, rather than chopped and assembled parts. On one side is her library and cabinet of curiosities, natural shelves sprouting from the wall, containing huge animal skulls I can’t identify, shells from the impenetrable depths of vast oceans, and splays of wildflowers that she swaps out with the seasons.
I can’t begin to guess what’s in those books, not the topics nor the words. Magister Allei has taught me to read very well, and Guildmaster Prontas is teaching me his craft of limning—albeit at a much larger scale than he’d ever found necessary. Someday Tarkas the leatherworker and Solemny the bookbinder will teach me their crafts, and I will paint upon great sheets of vellum an amazing story that will captivate the giantess’s imagination. I have no idea what that could be, right now, but there’s plenty of path left to go before I come up to that point. I’m sure I’ll think of something clever by then.
There are days where I hide behind the corner of her bed, and not until she’s risen and cleaned herself and dressed. I’m not awful, I respect the giantess. I watch her make her breakfast, tearing fresh herbs with her huge fingers, and then again her cheeks swell with pleasure to sniff the rosemary and thyme on her fingertips. I wish I could smell her fingers; I wish she would wrap them around me. She tosses them in gigantic eggs, in whose shells I could find a cozy bedchamber, fries them quickly in an enormous iron pan in her hearth, livens them up with the herbs, and sits on her front steps to watch the sunrise and listen to the birds as she eats her breakfast.
I like the size I am, and I love the size she is, but there are times I wish I could make her breakfast. I’d show her coffee, a strange beverage that’s growing in popularity throughout the kingdom. It was banned by Customs, by one pig-headed man who didn’t know how to appreciate it, so he thought he’d prevent anyone else from getting it. Wish I were the hero of this tale, the one who brewed him a proper cup and showed him how to enjoy it with a scone, but that’s not me. I’m not a grand man, I don’t have connections, I barely have any talents, and most of my time is spent in the giantess’s arboreal abode. Magister Allei complimented me on that phrase, and so that’s all I’ll ever call the place where she lives.
I follow the giantess through the woods, watching as she slips through the trees that should by rights crumble and splinter around her shins. But she has a gentle way with the woods, stepping gently to emulate the sound of distant thunder, flowing between the densest growth like morning mist. If it were me, would I be so gentle? I think I’d like to shove a tree around, just once, just to see what it was like. But probably I’d be protective of the forest, like she is.
I follow her to the glen, where a wider variety of herbs and plants grow in the shadows of the mountain ridges, enjoying the moisture that trickles down to them. I had no idea such a place existed until I followed her huge, round heels. I haven’t told my village about it, because it feels wrong to discover her private treasure, and then invite my little band of ravening mouths and stomachs to pillage it. Perhaps we’d never consume enough for her to even begin to notice, but perhaps a few enterprising lads would begin exporting, and then competition would arise, and then the valley would be stripped within a month. That’s no way to treat my giantess.
And then at night, well, I turn away as she undresses and bathes and prepares herself for bed. She doesn’t know I’m there, and I don’t have her permission to spy her glorious body, so I don’t look. Honest! I haven’t yet, and I don’t plan to, though the temptation is tremendous, of course. But I wait beside the corner of her bed frame, and I listen—I’m very familiar with the sundry noises the giantess makes in her arboreal abode—until the wool-and-down mattress sighs beneath her bulk. She has a routine of fidgeting until the padding has molded perfectly around her huge body, and she lies there for no more than a minute, then rolls to her side, away from the bookcase, and breathes heavily several times to force herself to relax.
I know her routine very well. I know all her routines. I know how she likes her beverages, I know which linen tunic she’s going to choose for the day based on how she slept the night before. I can imitate three of the songs she sings to the birds in the woods, trying to entice them closer to her arboreal abode. The crows are very friendly and she rewards them with the harvest of feed corn that the farmers can spare her; the other birds, skittish of humans, avoid her entirely. Well, crows are smarter, aren’t they.
I don’t want to be inappropriate. I’m not studying her to manipulate her, though I may have formed a parasocial relationship with her. I just want to know so much about her, to learn how a giant person moves through our world, and to learn what would make her happy. There are times when she sits by a window, turning her face to be warmed by the sunshine, tracing one fingertip upon the sill, and I feel as though she’s leaving a message for someone who might love her. There are times when she’s made the perfect fried egg, and she stares at it for too long, smiling until her smile sags a little, and I feel like she wishes there was someone else she could show this perfectly fried egg to. And sometimes, after she’s solved the hamlet’s problems and heads back to her part of the forest, I see her turn and look back at the tiny people. The tiny bandy-legged man still hauling a load of wood on his shoulder, even though he’s over 80 years old, and his plump little wife, tying the bottles to the tree branches so the fruit will grow inside them and they can make schnapps by autumn. The little kids running around, swatting each other with switches until their parents yell at them to behave and help out, and the old man rewards them each with a copper aes, just because he’s happy they’re there.
I see her staring after them, hoping she’s unseen, watching and wanting and wishing.
That is how I stare at her.