Difficult to find words to say on this one that haven't already been said but in a word: Electric. The beginning where it was mostly just imbalanced back and forth was gripping on the sheer sense of.. affective scale? Something I feel like not a lot of fairy stories play with enough is the sheer sensory experience of being That Small and how that amplifies the fear at play here, which I think this handled very deftly.
Then of course there's the game.
I'm not that good a chess player and the way that this game unfolds is.. a live wire. I found myself compelled to do 'the gamer lean' almost purely by the prose itself coming alive on the page. The mechanics of the rules and the amount of data expansion in the shift from what feels like Side A and Side B of this project is something else. That aforementioned energy of a more physical sensory experience is fully converted and supercharged into a cerebral one, perfectly honed in on the observing, processing and deciding all at once. A kind of shell-shock even starts to set in. The palpable overwhelm, the deeper understanding of what's at stake-- Pure, raw information expressed on page and experienced by a character voice that has never had to think this hard in her tiny life. I had to remind myself to breathe by the time the ending arrived, as though I were docking into the station at the end of a roller coaster.
On the note of that metaphor, my one sadness is how the ending just kind of drops down and grabs you. I almost feel like it needed just a little more time to fully set up? Of course that could just be a desire for more of the thrill or letting myself get so caught up in the whiplash of the ride that I couldn't see the end arriving. Either way, thank you for this!