Amra the Dryad

Amra stares in shocked disbelief at the small female body he wore. Wore... no. You don’t wear bodies, he thought He was a very naked and petite she. Her skin was a sickly green and her body was undeniably delicate and beautiful and frail, the antithesis of her familiar large almost brutish masculine form.

She felt... scared. Lost. Like she was ill. Weak. As though she were incomplete.

“A Dryad... hmmm, let me see.” A richly cultured voice said. Bargle!

“What? I feel faint...” she wilted.

“Ah, Yes. Dryads must bond with a tree. It imprisons them... shackles them in place... I have the perfect solution to your problem.” The Wizard gathered Amra’s failing body in his arms and easily lifts her tiny form and carried her from his lab. She sees dead bodies. Her former body and those of her companions but in her weakened state she feels no horror or grief. “You’ve been reincarnated...” Bargle explains as he takes her up some stairs to a balcony that overlooks the city. “I will reincarnate all of your friends and make them my slaves...” he confides in her.

A ****? Amra shudders. She feels like she is drowning, starving, dying. He puts her down on the flagstones. “Bond with this tree...” he says. She blinks as she regards the miniature tree. A bonsai? The words have a strange command to them and she obediently reaches out and touches the tree. She shudders as the stunted and controlled tree connects with her. She gasps as her sense of withering **** is replaced with a new ****. Life. Nature. She and this bonsai are now one. As she stares at her tree it grows larger before her. No. That isn’t it. She’s shrinking.

“Reincarnation?” She repeats as she turns. She realises that she is much smaller now. A perfectly formed woman standing only two inches tall. Much shorter than a dwarf or a halfling, childish races she had previously towered over and not respected in the least. Stunted like her tree. But perfect. And also a prisoner! Bargle towers over her.

“Shrink the girl and shrink her brain,” Bargle observes as he reaches down to pick her up.