Of Giants and Witches

The night was starting to get a little chilly, not uncommon for these early days of spring, but I was not bothered. My warm cloak and the knowledge that I would be back in my hometown in just a few hours protected me against the cool night air. Ah, home. I hadn't seen it in years, ever since I left to study magic at the Academy, but every night I'd spent in the crowded capital city had seen me yearning for the calm and quiet evenings of Woodsboro.

After I first left I had dreamt for weeks of the light and crispy pastries that the baker sold, the equal of which was nowhere to be found in the capital. Even now I could taste them on my tongue and feel their crunch on my teeth, as close as I was to home.

So enraptured was I in my nostalgia that it took me a moment to notice that my horse had stopped. When I finally did notice I frowned and stuck my foot forward to give it a good nudge from my seat in the cart, but still it did not budge! As far as horses go this one was not particularly smart, but you get what you pay for and Academy students aren't known to be swimming in gold, such alchemy having not yet been perfected by our illustrious professors.

And so it was that I was that I found myself stuck on the road, the night growing ever darker around me and my beloved pastries so nearly within my grasp. It was only after I'd given the horse a stern lecture on the virtues of moving forward that I thought to check why it might have stopped. Lo and behold, for once on my long journey the silly animal had actually stopped for a good reason. I conjured up a ball of light in my palm and surveyed the road ahead of me. Splayed out across the dirt was nothing but a giant's belly, toned and firm from living off the land.

Ah, of course. I had been so captured by all of the excellent and lovely features of my village that I had simply ignored those qualities that made it less desirable. But now they all came flooding back to me. The mosquitoes in the summer, the noteworthy lack of any bookstore, and, of course, our local giantess. The way I'd heard it she had been abandoned by her tribe and had wandered down from the mountains in which such creatures usually lived to settle in the forests around our humble town.

However, in my youth I discovered that there was a reason why humans and giants lived so far apart. I had distinct memories of whole fields worth of crops being trampled by the giantess whenever she tried to enter the town. I'd heard stories of her terrorizing merchants on their way into town, although I suspected that most of those were somewhat exaggerated. As someone who was magically gifted in a town that rarely saw such a quality in its children, I understood what it was to mean well, but always seem to produce bad results from your uncoordinated efforts.

Any thoughts of understanding, however, were overshadowed by one simple truth. Right now this oversized bitch was sleeping inbetween me and my pastries! Annoyed by this, I left the cart and gave her a swift kick to the side, but to no effect. The giantess continued to sleep comfortably. Frustrated to no end, I began to conjure up a blast of magical energy, but some rational part of me realized that waking a sleeping giantess by attacking her was probably not one of my better ideas. I sighed and pulled out my pocket watch, an enchanting project from my third year. It was getting late and wolves would probably begin to roam these woods before I could make it to the town. It was probably safest, then, that I should set up camp for the night. Fortunately, I had stopped in the perfect spot. No wolf or goblin would risk coming so close to a giantess just to nibble on my meager flesh.

I tossed a blanket over my mentally challenged horse and fed him some hay before curling up in the back of my cart.

___

I woke with a start to the sound of breathing above me. Oh no, I thought, it can't be.

It was.

My unknowing guardian for the night had woken up before me and was surveying me up close with an eye the size of my head. I had never noticed it when I was younger, but she did have beautiful eyes. A sort of aquamarine with a cute brown freckle in the left one. They were the sort of eyes that you could just get lost in- No! Now was not the time for such thoughts, now was the time for action!

I jumped up, ready to defend myself in case some of the crueler stories about her activities were true. But if she noticed the crackling ball of energy in my right hand she didn't seem bothered by it.

Instead, she was downright apologetic. "Did I sleep on the road again?" she asked nervously. "Oh no! It's so small that I'm never quite sure where it is..." She stood up to her full imposing height and looked off into the distance. "Oh gosh, this is the road. I am so sorry!" She called back down to me. "Let me just take you the rest of the way, I'm sure I slowed you down enough already."

Take me the rest of the way? I wondered, discovering only too late what she meant.

"Oh! No no no!" I yelled as a giant hand reached down and lifted my cart into the air, another hand wrapping itself around my horse. She either didn't hear me or didn't care, however, as she held me and my poor horse just above tree level and started towards Woodsboro at a pace that no horse and cart could have matched.

Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate and sat back down. My stupid horse, however, seemed completely unphased by his predicament, being carried like a pet mouse. Instead, he was preoccupied with trying to nip the highest leaves from the trees as they flew by. As absurd as my situation was, I couldn't help but chuckle at this. At least the horse had some comedic value.

"Hey!" I yelled up at my bearer. She must not have heard me, since she continued forward without so much as a glance towards the cart in her right hand.

Then, remembering the spell for projecting one's voice, I whispered to myself. "Sonarus," and tried again.

"Hey!" I shouted once more.

This time she heard me and looked down, surprised. "Yes?" she asked in a tone so polite it would make the Emperor's butler jealous.

I hadn't been expecting that and I began to feel bad about the confrontational tone I had addressed her with. "Well, um, I think my horse is hungry..."

She looked over at her left hand and giggled at the stupid horse's attempts to catch the fleeting bits of green. We stopped for a moment so that she could lower him down a bit where he could eat comfortably. This moment of tenderness gave me pause. I'd never really seen her this close before. She had certainly grown while I'd been away. Her breasts, wrapped in wide piece of cloth, had become fuller and more pronounced and her hips had grown wider. Really, she had developed just as I, or any other girl at the Academy, had over these past years. Well, except in her case developing meant that her breasts were as wide around as I was tall and her hips were big enough to fill a modest cabin and then some.

My oblivious horse had apparently eaten his fill because we soon took up our course towards Woodsboro once more.

"I'm surprised you spoke with me," my giantess said, lifting me up to the level of her eyes. "People don't usually do that."

"Well they might be trying," I pointed out. "The only reason you heard me is because I magically amplified my voice."

She gasped, her mouth agape in wonder. "You're a witch?!"

"Well not yet. I'm still just an apprentice now. I need a few years of field experience before I'll be certified as a proper witch," I explained, not sure how exactly I'd come to have a conversation with this creature that I had regarded with great suspicion only a few years ago. "That's why I'm coming back to Woodsboro," I went on. "There are actually a lot of herbs around here with latent magical properties and I want to try exploring that."

So while my classmates had gone off to research various complex spells, seek out cecaelia and other rare magical creatures, or just taken up any one of the lucrative jobs that could be done with only an apprenticeship in magic, I had returned to the backwoods region that was my home. My professors had been skeptical, but I really hoped to do some good around here. That and a powerful case of homesickness had driven me back home and, apparently, into the palm of the local giantess.

"I'm Rosaline, by the way," I said, trying to be polite.

"Lily," she smiled. "I think I'd better drop you off here, they don't like it if I get too close."

I turned around to see that we were already at the edge of town, having crossed a distance that would have taken me hours by horse in certainly no more than 30 minutes.

"Oh wow." I couldn't help myself, my coveted pastries now so close. "Thank you!" I said earnestly as she put me and my stupid horse down on the road.

"It's the least I could do." Then with a smile and a wave she walked back into the forest and disappeared from my vision as quickly as we'd come upon my home.

___

My parents were glad to see me after we'd been separated for so many years. I'd even been so kind as to bring two pastries for them. They wanted to hear all about the Academy and the capital. Was I a witch now? Had I met the Emperor? Was I going to be famous?

I answered all their questions as best I could and regaled them with tales of life at the heart of the empire, although I left out the details on the final miles of my journey. There was no need to worry them unnecessarily, after all.

And so in some ways my life in Woodsboro returned to normal. I slept in my old bed, helped my mother with the chores, and visited all of my old haunts. In other ways, though, my life was vastly different. I was spending a great deal of time in the woods now, cataloging the various plants that were so far unknown to mainstream magical academia. By night I was running tests to discern their magical properties. On the whole most of them were just plants, but a leaf here and a berry there yielded occasionally interesting results.

On top of my magical work, I had begun to plead with my father to permit my help in the field. A magically-assisted farm would produce much more succulent crops than he could hope to do on his own. Still, my father clung to tradition and, perhaps, some memories of my botched attempts to "help" with untempered magics. He insisted on managing the farm by himself.

Still, he was getting old and was no longer capable of handling the farm like he once had. This became evident one afternoon when a shout from the field interrupted my work. I left my collection of crushed herbs and other reagents in their mortar and rushed out to find my father clutching his back, collapsed in the dirt.

"Father!" I called out as I drew nearer to him.

"I'm fine!" he said quickly, moving to stand up. But whatever injury he had sustained was still present and he quickly fell back to the ground.

"You're not!" I protested.

My mother had joined us in the field and had some clue of what the problem was. "It's your back again, isn't it! I told you to get that checked!"

I thought for a minute while my mother berated my crippled father, drawing upon my magical training for a solution to this problem. "There's a fruit," I interrupted. "I've seen it in the woods here. If I can find some, I can produce a potion that will heal you."

"It's really not that-" my father began to say, but my mother cut him off.

"If you can do something, please go, but be safe," she warned me, all too aware of the dangers that could lurk deeper in the forest.

"Don't worry," I smiled, conjuring a ball of blue flame in my hand for dramatic effect. "I can handle myself out there."

With my purpose in hand I hurried off into the woods. The fruit I was looking for was plump and orange and it grew on the branches of a tree with star-shaped leaves. I'd read about it at the Academy and we would use it often to brew healing potions for my classes. I had remembered seeing the fruit as a child wandering in the woods, but I hadn't thought much of it before my Academy training.

It was harder to find than I remembered, though. The forest had been greatly thinned around the town, hewn stumps replacing many of the old trees where the townsfolk had found a need for lumber. I had to go further into the woods, much further than I had ever gone as a child, to find this brilliant orange fruit.

Finally I happened across some star-shaped leaves on the ground below me. Looking up, I was greeted by a flash of orange. Only, it was so far up in the tree, the lower fruits having been eaten by the wildlife, leaving only pits and rotted segments of the orange flesh. The upper branches of the tree were far too thin to support my weight and the spells for flying or even levitating were well beyond my skill.

Hope began to fade from me only to be rekindled by the sound of my salvation: the crunching of enormous feet over the brush. My giantess was nearby.

"Sonarus. Hey! Hey, Lily!"

The crunching stopped and turned in my direction before a pair of great hands parted the leaves of the highest trees and Lily's face appeared above me, thick locks of dark brown hair framing her eyes.

"Rosaline!" she said smiling, apparently quite happy to see me.

I wasted no time explaining my situation. "Lily, I really hate to bother you, but I need one of these orange fruits for a potion! I'm a little short, so I can't reach them, but maybe you could help me?"

"Hmm," she paused to think for a few precious moments. "I'll help you, but I'd like you to come out and visit me if I do."

"What?" I was somewhat confused by her request.

"It gets awfully lonely here. None of the animals can talk and you humans don't like me very much, so I want you to come visit me, just so I have someone to talk to."

As far as requests go this wasn't so bad and I wanted the fruit desperately. "Of course I'll come visit you, now please help me!"

Lily settled down her knees, her silky smooth thighs no more than a few meters from me. "Wait," she said, "how will I find you when you come visit?"

"Ummm," I tried to find a solution quickly, my fruit nearly within my grasp "I'll enter the woods tomorrow evening and shoot up a fountain of blue sparks, so just look for those."

"OK," she smiled, satisfied. Before I could stop her she had wrapped her hands around the trunk of the star-leafed tree and yanked it from the ground.

"Oh, no! Lily I just needed-" I cut myself off, one of the precious fruits having landed right next to me. "Well, nevermind. Thank you so much!"

With that I left her and hurried home to brew my potion.

___

I kept my promise and returned to the woods the next evening, shooting blue sparks up beyond the tree tops to mark my position. It wasn't long before the sound of great running steps was audible in the distance. And it grew louder rapidly, so rapidly that I shot another wave of sparks into the air just to avoid getting stepped on by the overeager giantess.

"You came! Eeeeee!" she squealed, dropping down on her elbows in front of me.

"Of course," I said, having already cast the spell to project my voice. "What kind of witch would I be if I didn't keep my promises?"

"A lying witch," she whispered dangerously, before giggling. Clearly that was a hobby of hers.

"Um, yeah," I answered absentmindedly, my attention drawn elsewhere. Her cloth-wrapped cleavage hung directly in front of me, the light of the setting sun illuminating a space between her breasts large enough for my whole body to fit into. The vision rekindled feelings in me that I'd had towards the other female members of my class. Of course romantic involvement within the Academy was explicitly forbidden, but that hadn't stopped me from dreaming about it. This sight, however, reignited those feelings and more. Had Lily been a normal sized human her breasts would still have been impressive, but at her actual size they were genuinely massive. Massive and right in front of me.

I was shaken from my stupor by a giant finger prodding me gently on the shoulder. "Rosaline? Rosaline, did you hear me? I asked where you learned magic."

"Oh- Oh right!" I said, turning my gaze purposefully off into the woods and snapping back into reality. "There's a great city far to the southwest, it's the capital of this empire and they have an Academy there to train young people who are magically gifted."

"Ooooh! Tell me more about the capital!"

I entertained her for the rest of the evening with stories about the great city, some of the quirky professors, and the few glimpses that I'd had of high society life. All the while working desperately hard to look at anything but her breasts.

___

I began to see Lily several times a week. Whenever I would go into the forest I would shoot up a shower of blue sparks on the odd chance that she would spot them, and no longer because I felt obligated to repay her help with the fruit. Rather, I was beginning to feel affection for her. While interspecies romance was certainly not unheard of (and the subject of more than a few steamy volumes hidden away in the far corners of the Academy library) it was still a rarity. In no small part due to the severe difficulties involved in managing a life with someone vastly different from you. If I had found myself with this sort of situation in the city, I probably would've had the sense to refrain from pursuing her, but the truth was that I had begun to feel lonely in my hometown.

When I had left I was just one of the townsfolk. One of the odder citizens of Woodsboro, no doubt, but a friend to all her people nonetheless. Upon my return, however, I had become something different to them. I wasn't just the girl who had a little magic, I was a witch. A witch from a foreign city who worked strange magics with an uncanny precision. I wasn't the town's little girl anymore, I was someone new, someone who they did not know.

Perhaps this was how Lily felt.

And so we found ourselves walking together in the woods on one afternoon. Although "walking together" isn't quite an accurate description. Insead, she would watch as I scurried about the woods picking a leaf here or a thorn there, then she would scoot along after me as I moved further into the forest, exerting an obvious effort to move as slowly as I did. So enamoured was I with our conversation, my work, and - ahem - other things, that I didn't even notice the clouds blowing in from the north until the first breath of icy wind rushed through the trees.

Of course such blasts of cold were to be expected when you lived this far north, but never in my lifetime had one come so late in the spring. I was wearing a simple short-sleeved dress which was not nearly enough to keep me warm with temperature dropping so quickly.

Lily noticed my distress and scooted over to where I had been picking some pale white berries. "What's wrong?" she asked, a creature of her size mostly unphased by the cold.

"The temperature," I answered, running around to gather as much dry firewood as I could find on short notice. "It's starting to get really cold for me." I tossed my branches into a pile and threw fireball after fireball at it until it grew into a modest blaze. Still, these were mostly fresh branches off the wet spring trees and what little heat they did provide didn't take long to fizzle out into nothing more than a useless plume of smoke.

"Come here," Lily instructed, seeing my shivering.

She would be warm, no doubt, but I hesitated. It didn't feel right knowing that I'd get some sexual thrill from being held against her body.

Lily, however, was not going to let me freeze myself to death. Before I could protest she grabbed me with one hand and set me down in her cleavage.

"I've seen you staring at them," she said, rolling onto her side so that one warm breast pinned me against the other. "So I hope you don't mind waiting out the cold in there."