honkinbigteeth | 003. episode 3 tpk

This place you're in is a wooded area, on a hillock near a road. There is an enormous pumpkin carriage rotting in the middle of the road, sagging and stinking of sugar sweet rotting gourd. Standing in the yawning rot opening of the enormous carriage is a sickly swamp green crown-wearing woman with an enormous jutting spear of glass coming from her chest, the wound scabbed over as it rests lodged within her heart. She's a fairy (cw: scary), but she looks wrong, something neither living nor dead, and she has lost much blood and much magic. But she is still supported by her army of transformed servants - barrel soldiers that have the heads of men growing from the sides of wooden barrels, soldiers who are half man and half furniture. These are constructs she raised and partially transformed into humanoids, existing only in a state of rage and pain, with the size and broad shape of adult male soldiers but only partly transformed and lacking sentience.

You and your friends have split into two teams. One team - you and the ranger princess Rosamund - to attempt to draw away this horde of soldiers, too many of them to be fought outright, and one team - Gerard, the puppet warlock Pinocchio, the clever cat Pib, and your caretaker, the wielder of the magic book, Timothy Goose - to attempt to remove the glass spear from the fairy while her army is distracted, ending the madness and destruction she's caused in this state. But the plan starts to go badly right away.

The soldiers notice your approach, so there isn't much time to come up with a distraction. Instead, you and Rosamund start to run, leading the soldiers away from the fairy in chase, up a hill and into a canyon, trying to draw them into a narrow position where they won't be able to surround you. You transform, growing bigger and taller and more wolflike, as Rosamund stands at the top of the hill and shouts to get the fairy's attention, revealing herself as a princess. The fairy godmother is delighted by Rosamund's appearance, and the fairy gifts and curses that touched her as a baby, but her laugh is sinister and frightening. She tries to convince Rosamund she is doing all she is doing only to put her life back the way it's meant to be, so she can return to sleep and awake from her slumber to her prince. But the fairy's actions seem to be nothing but madness.

Even from as far away as she is from you, in this position you've drawn her army into, with a "Bibbity boo!" she casts a spell of blinding light that cuts through the anger boiling inside you and leaves you bloodied. Beside you, Rosamund screams. You took the brunt of the spell, but she still looks to be hurt worse than you, and you know she can't survive another attack like that. You don't know where the others are, except that they're still somewhere down there, trying to find a way to get close to the fairy while her attention is up here.

So you position yourself at the mouth of the canyon so that at least none of the wooden soldiers can get to Rosamund; they can each only make it up the path one or two at a time, and your body stands between them and her.

"Welcome to my bottleneck, fuckers!" you taunt. Two furniture soldiers attack, but your ax tears them to ribbons, a pile of broken wood on the ground. "It's Ladies' night at Ylfa's bottleneck! Ladies die for free!" With your ax and your wolf strength and the protective hide your rage gives you, you hold off more soldiers who rush your way. They each try to attack you with swords and polearms and battle axes, and you can't avoid all of the the attacks, but you bear them, spit blood in the face of the ones to cut a wound into your skin.

Behind you, Rosamund darts into the cover of the woods and begins shooting her bow, felling more soldiers before they can reach you, but even more reappear behind their fallen comrades, lacking too much in sentience and free will to do anything but continue to follow this path and attack. You cut down another barrell soldier and back away, drawing others towards you. You know in this moment just what you've known since the fight began - you're going to go down. You were never not going to go down. You can survive a lot, but you can't survive an attack from an army.

You don't want the others to worry; or at least, you think Mother Goose will worry about you, might want to come help you. "Mother Goose," you call out, although you aren't sure where in the battle he is. "I think Rosamund might be the answer to all of this, so she's more important than me right now." Every answer you're seeking, ever person of power you've learned of, seems to be most concerned of all with finding lost princesses, including this fairy. And Rosamund is also your friend. So if you have to die here to make sure she survives this battle, that's something you're okay with.

"Come with me if you want to play," you taunt another barrell soldier. "I'm twelve years old and I love to play!"

You lose track of everything but the melee. A polearm drives into your body, and you grab it and yank it out. You grab another soldier and use his body as a shield. You feel blood pumping through you. You're overheated, but you can feel the cooling of the blood evaporating on your body. It's a wild rage, this mania of violence, and you feel a second heartbeat in your body, hearts of the wolf and the little girl both pounding with adrenaline until all you can hear is the blood thumping in your own ears.

But they do get behind you eventually, a few of them do, climbing the top of the hill around you, and you hear the cry and smell the spilling of blood when Rosamund goes down. She might not be dead, you think, she might not be dead and the others - you haven't heard anything from them in a while. You think you felt a healing spell from Mother at one point. If they're still alive, you can still save some of them somehow.

"Mother Goose, I need to do something, because the princess is down," you say, hoping he'll hear.

In the back of your mind, you hear his voice answer you. I've got your back, girlie. So he's alive still, at least, but you're not sure how much he can help.

Any way you move, this army is going to come descending down on you, able to surround you on all sides once you've left this narrow bottleneck at the mouth of the canyon. If you go closer to everyone else, maybe you can help them, but you'll bring the army with you. Since they're focused on you now, so you can also drag them further away, down to the end of this canyon. You'll lose your advantageous position so you won't last long, but it might be enough. So you take a deep breath, and you let the girl in you fade away, you feel the dual heartbeats in you merge into one, and you howl and draw them as deep into the canyon as you can before they all surround you. As the blades cut you, you feel your battle adrenaline start to give way to exhaustion.

"I think this is the only way the story was ever going to end, anyways," you say.

Out of the corner of your eye, up on the top of the hill, you think you see Mother go down, too; he'd gone up there to heal you and had been left exposed. Even so, you still want to hope there's someone left who'll manage to use the time you've been able to buy. While being slashed and stabbed you manage to break away just long enough to claw your way up the hill so you can look down and see if anyone is still alive, even aware there's nothing you can do from your position but fight until you can't fight any longer.

But when you do look down, you see none of your friends still moving on the battlefield below. It would be hard to make out a tiny cat and a small puppet in this madness, but you also know how fragile both of them are. Except - there, facing the fairy, in range to grab the shard, you can see Gerard is still alive. He might just be able to grab it before she kills him, and he might just be strong enough to pull it out, but he isn't hidden and her full attention is on him.

So there is one more thing you can do to help you friends. At the top of this hill, bloodied and exhausted and out of the range of this army descending on you for one brief moment, you shout as loud as you can to the fairy - "It's me! Cinderella!"

She turns and looks at the sound of your voice. You are a gangly little girl who is also presently a full werewolf, so she probably is not convinced you are actually her goddaughter the princess Cinderella. But she's looking at you, and with a sneer, she casts another of those blinding spells of light against you. It burns and rips your bloodied chest open and you, too, go down. But as you go, you go with the knowledge that you might have bought Gerard a moment longer.

As you bleed out and fade away, you dream. There's the soft image of your grandma putting the finishing touches on a doily doll, and it's a happy memory. But then she looks at at you, her ears too big, her eyes yellow, her teeth too large, and she transforms into a wolf. The wolf grows bigger and bigger, less like an animal and more of a monster or a god, and it grabs you in its jaws and you feel it start to drag you down to your death, into a boiling heat that stinks like a corpse.

As the wolf is dragging you to hell, you hear its voice rumble in your head, pained.

"Hot. Too hot to live. Turn around, face me again."

You turn, and you look him in his hungry eyes, and you see that while he held you in his jaws, he isn't dragging you. You see a wolf, larger than the world, falling into a boiling red sea, and you're falling down with him. He looks almost hurt, an animal in danger, and automatically your hand moves as though to touch him.

"Will you remember?" he asks. "Will you remember?"

You reach out. Your fingers pass through fur, grasping. That fortifies something in you, somewhere. You're not sure where, or what, but he seems pleased with you.

"It's all right," he says, almost consoling you. "All of our times come, but there are things trying to stop the turning of the pages. Wicked, wrong, and selfish creatures, trying to drive a knife through the heart of the book. Do you know the four most important words, Little Red Riding Hood?"

You don't know the answer, you think, but you hear your voice speak anyway, like asking a question.

"Once upon a time?"

His terrible sharp teeth curve into something like a smile, and there's a chuckle in his voice.

"I knew it was you." He sucks the hot air in and then he breathes out a gust of wind and you are not falling with him any longer, lifted up and free by the currents of air. He continues to fall, but from your higher vantage you see it is not a sea he's falling into but a giant cauldron, a stew pot, and you are blown clear out of a brick chimney.

And those are your final thoughts, what you dream of as you die.