'Why can't I see my reflection?' thought Damon, staring into the clear water, seeing only clouds, a blue sky, and the face of a squirrel staring back at him. 'What did the fairies say again? That they were turning me into an animal? That would explain why I feel so weird, but I'm looking straight at the water, and the animal face I can see in the reflection is ... oh no. OH NO!'
Damon opened his mouth. The squirrel on the surface of the water opened its own. Damon twitched his face in different ways, surprising himself with how easy moving his own ears turned out to be. The squirrel twitched its whiskers and swiveled its ears. Damon put his hands out in front of him and looked down to see that his fingers were tipped with insanely long claws. His arms were coated in a thick layer of brown and gray fur all the way to his fingertips. He looked up at the forest again and realized he wasn't surrounded by the tallest trees in the world, as he first suspected. He was, most likely, in a relatively normal forest but simply happened to be very small. A gentle breeze rattled the leaves above him and tickled his whiskers and fur. He felt the tickle of his shaggy fur blowing around on his chest, his arms, his head, his legs, his back, and his belly, plus a whole lot of even shaggier fur somewhere else. Something large and powerful jerked and flexed unexpectedly, and Damon remembered the heavy swollen feeling on his rear.
'No way, it can't be!' Damon whipped his head around and saw a giant squirrel tail stretched out far behind him. At least, it was bigger than any squirrel tail he'd even seen before, because he was seeing this one from the perspective of his now squirrel-sized body. He paced around toward the end of it, practically another body length away, and he was soon hopping in circles, watching it twitch and follow along behind him. He stopped and stared and practiced waving it around behind him. He soon discovered it felt oddly satisfying to curl it up over himself and sort of stand back-to-back with it. Just as he'd seen squirrels do more times than he'd ever cared to count.
'Oh no,' he thought, chittering to himself and freaking out. 'It can't end like this. I'm the heir to the throne. I can't stay like this!' He had gone from being a stubborn pampered prince, desperate to prove to his family that he could accomplish what generations of kings had been warned not to try, to being a vulnerable forest animal cowering among the trees.