Before any changes I’m a garlic or spice. My first is altered and I’m a hand-warming device. My second is changed and I’m trees in full bloom. The next letter change makes a deathly old tomb. Change the fourth to make a fruit of the vine. Change the last for a chart plotted with lines. What was I? What did I become? What did I turn out to be?
The trick here is that only one letter shifts at a time, so the whole chain rides on a single skeleton of vowels and consonants: C_OVE, then swap that first letter for G and you're holding GLOVE instead of a bulb of garlic. From there the puzzle keeps the L-O-V-E frame steady while marching through the middle letter, turning a mitten into a GROVE of trees with one small nudge. Then comes the darkest pivot, GRAVE, where the same shape suddenly means a tomb instead of a stand of trees — that's the misdirection doing its work, since nothing about the letters hints at death until you land on it. GRAPE softens things back to something sweet, and finally GRAPH swaps the vowel-consonant ending entirely, proving how far a word can travel when you only ever touch one letter at a time.
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