007. baron of bricks

[honkinbigteeth]

If you would like a shorter memory than this, you can watch this video which is just the conversation at the end between Ylfa and the Big Bad Wolf after they rescue him. Otherwise, I link to the video where it comes up in the longer memory.

You are here journeying alongside your friends - Gerard, the ranger princess Rosamund, the puppet warlock Pinocchio, the clever cat Puss in Boots or Pib, the wielder of the magic book, Timothy Goose, who is your caretaker of sorts and who you call "Mother" as that's what all the children in the village always called him.

You are seeking word of what became of the Big Bad Wolf. The trail leads you to the City of Chimneys, a city of industry, with smoke and soot heavy in the air and unfriendly townspeople hard at work. Flyers around the town advertise opportunities to join the workforce of the town, the Baron of Bricks, who works to supply arms and soldiers for the Council of Kings. At the top of the hill above the city is an enormous, brutalist fortress made of brick. There are no windows, no courtyards, no decoration, not even a grand pair of doors. There's just a vaulted door at the base and the big smokestack like chimneys pumping smoke into the sky. You approach the door, which has a doorknocker depicting a dead wolf in chains, and you hide your ears and face under your hood.

There's no way to get in through the chimneys, so you all knock on the heavy doorknocker. After a moment, you hear wheels turning inside. The door swings open, and red light emerges from inside. Standing there in a sharp looking military coat with epaulettes, is an eight foot tall boar with a long snout standing on his hind legs. There is something very deeply sad about him, but also something very hard and cruel.

"Hello there, Sir Boar," Rosamund says. "I am a princess of the Kingdom of Reverie, and I'm here to offer myself in marriage."

He's stunned for a moment, but then bows and offers her a hoof wet with blood and ash. "Milady. I am honored, flattered, and above all, I accept. Enchanté." He chuckles darkly and beckons you all in. "I'm glad you didn't have to huff and puff to get in."

You walk into the magnificent mansion of his home and see that the halls are lined with more sconces in the shape of wolves. You tell him that Rosamund has come due to her country's need for an alliance with the powerful Baron. Gerard introduces himself as Rosamund's cousin, which he happens to actually be, and says he's come to chaperone. You claim to be Rosamund's handmaiden, Pib claims to be a butler, Pinocchio claims to be a Jester, and Timothy panics and claims to be a second butler. The Baron offers you all a hearty stew, but you're trying to hide that you're a wolf, so you claim to be a vegetarian.

"Ah, I understand," he says. "It is a foul thing to attempt to eat another creature... unless of course they have done something warranting eating." He chuckles darkly to himself at that.

You eat your vegetarian stew. At one point, the Baron eyes your red cape, curious, as though he knows you somehow, but you manage to evade his questions, Pinocchio distracts attention from you with some terrible jokes.

After dinner, you all gather in Rosamund's quarters, trying to decide what to do, sure the boar has something to do with the wolf's disappearance but not knowing how to find him. The wolf is part of your story, so you feel that you should be able to find him, but you're not sure how.

But Pib offers you one of his daggers, which are crafted from the wolf's fangs, and you stab the blade into your hand and clench your bloody fist, and you press the blood into the pages of your book. Blood spills onto the pages, and the pages suck them up and you see a vision of the wolf falling into a boiling ocean with fire all around the edge of it, but the ocean is thick and brown. And you see things floating in it. Onion, carrots.

"He's in the fucking stew!" you exclaim. "He's in the fucking kitchen. He's in the fucking kitchen!"

Within the vision, the wolf looks up at you.

"It's me," you call out. "It's Ylfa Snorgelsson! We're gonna get you out of that stew!"

"Huff and puff, little girl," he says. And he goes to take a breath in, but he hits the stew and swallows a lungful.

You see chains around him, and the voice of the boar says, with grief in his voice, "No more versions of this story. Not here. Not this world, or any." And in the room you're in, you hear a mechanical sound and all of the wolf sconces light up in your room.

All of you run to the kitchen. You change into your wolf form and Timothy casts a spell to blow open the vault like kitchen doors. The kitchen you see contains a massive cauldron ringed in fire, red bricks glowing from the inferno underneath. And inside that cauldron, a God, a legend, a story, a fairytale, death itself, the Big Bad Wolf is being boiled in a massive stew.

After all of the strange things you've seen in the past few days, the absurdity of this surreal scene, is something you somehow understand perfectly. This isn't just an animal being boiled to death, it is something bigger than that. The baron is erasing from time and space as many versions of the Big Bad Wolf as possible, boiling down and reducing this legendary beast, and in images of fire as the wolf twitches within the stew, you see versions of its soul stripped away over and over and over again.

On the other side of the kitchen is a massive boar-shaped suit of armor, twice as tall as the boar, and the suit of armor is stirring a giant spoon in the cauldron. The wolf is growling and snarling in pain. It is ferocious and dying and angry about it.

The wolf is in too much pain to do anything but react in fury and try to kill whatever comes near, but you aren't afraid. You leap into the cauldron, landing on his head, to try to break one of his chains.

In the suit of armor, across from the cauldron, you see two glowing eyes as the boar inside controlling it lays eyes on you.

"I would have thought you knew what this thing was!" he screams, finally recognizing you as Little Red Riding Hood.

"Yeah, 'cause I am too!" And you throw off your hood and show him that underneath it, you're a wolf. You land on the wolf's head. He's being boiled to death and so angry he doesn't know where he is or what you are, he just knows he wants to fight and kill anything that gets near him. You know freeing him will be incredibly dangerous, but you try to rub your face against his head so he can smell you and know that a friend is here.

"Stay mad, baby. That's where I want you," you say. "We're gonna get these chains off you." You nose nuzzle him, and he seems to finally recognize that there's a friend in the room with him, and he stops fighting mindlessly and instead starts trying to get free.

The Baron of Bricks in his armor tries to knock you off into the cauldron with his spoon. The cauldron is incredibly hot, and you have to flee before you're burned up, too. But you go to fight the Baron of Bricks as the others take turns trying to get near enough to free the wolf from his chains.

"Wasn't everything taken from you by this creature, too?" the Baron asks.

"No, this creature gave me my life!" you say.

"I know who this creature is," the Baron says. "And I know who he soon will be."

"Who's the real monster here?" you yell. "He killed two of your friends, you torture him for eternity?"

"Don't you understand? When we boil him away, there will be no more death. It will be a beautiful world." You see deep in this pig's eyes a magic of wanting to control everything. You see this pig has an awareness similar to yours. You remember how you ate the wolf's flesh, with his permission, to save your own life, but this boar also ate the wolf's flesh and has power and knowledge similar to yours. And you see that he is trying to remove death from the world.

The suit of armor is very powerful and you can't seem to do any damage to the board inside, but he begins to lose control of it as he's brought closer to the cauldron. You push the armor into the cauldron where it burns off the boar, just as Pinocchio breaks the last chain free on the wolf.

The wolf leaps up, grabs the pig in its mouth, and emerges from the soup, badly burned. And as it stands there, maddened by the pain and torment, as big as a house, you see its glowing eyes, blood coming from its mouth as it devoured the pig in a single bite. He exhales and blows out the fire beneath the cauldron and you are alone here in the dark with this thing.

Timothy reaches out a hand to heal the wolf, but the wolf in the dark moves quickly and is gazing at Timothy, jaw open, fangs glistening.

"Don't be afraid, Mother Goose," you reassure him. "He's just like me!"

"I know, honey," he says, sounding very, very afraid.

You reach out and put a hand on his nose.

"Not lightly do I let anyone place a spell upon me," he says, his voice rumbling.

"You once fed me, so we wanna do that for you," you say. "Do you recognize me? We hung out in a cabin for like a week until I starved and then went into a frenzy and split your skull in half and then ate your raw body but you were into it?"

He nods at you, as though he does recognize you. "If there is trust between us and I have nothing to fear from this spell, would you place your hand in my mouth for safekeeping until after the spell is cast?"

"Can I ask you a couple questions first?" you ask. (Video of this part) You don't really fear putting your hand in his mouth, but you can't honestly say there's trust between you, either. But he nods.

"Okay." You take a deep breath. "So I know we talked about my grandma and you said it was her time.
And I've been trying to make peace with that, but the thing that I can't make peace with is that it doesn't make it hurt any less and every single day. I keep thinking it's gonna gonna hurt a little less and it doesn't. Is that normal?"

"Yes," he says.

"So then I've sort of made this pact with you," you say, "but I don't wanna do to other people what happened to me. I guess I understand the necessity really of endings, but I feel like there's a lot of people who have to keep going after other people's endings. I don't know how to make sense of that."

"I don't know that you must make sense of it," says the Big Bad Wolf. "Some things simply are, and in time all things will end, but if you fear that you have made a pact with something that cannot live within your heart, then what comfort I can offer is this. In no corner of the long ages of all the worlds that I have walked, have I ever for one moment felt the desire to devour everything."

In a way, that promise is a relief. You take another deep breath, as tears start to well in your eyes. "Do you sometimes devour things that aren't people? Because I kind of feel like there's a part of me that's dying, as I become more like this wolf. Maybe it's the little girl, like the little girl is dying and right now that feels really scary. Is that gonna be good someday? Are you responsible for that?"

"In a sense, I have been there hungry and waiting at the end of every story, but I am also in you, and the part of you that is the wolf has already begun to devour the you that you can only remember. The little Ylfa that wandered into the forest to look for flowers was always going to be eaten, by me. Or perhaps she would have been eaten by you. What was your grandmother's name?"

"Ylfa," you say.

"You were named after her?"

You nod.

"Do you not think in some way your grandmother devoured a little girl that used to walk through that forest as well?" And in his eyes, you see a reflection of a little girl who looks a lot like you wearing a red cloak. From an old family portrait, you recognize your grandmother as a little girl walking through the forest.

Tears roll down your cheeks as you look at her image. "Where is she now? Do I get to see her again? Did she start a new story like me?"

The wolf sighs. "There are many versions of our story, and in most of the versions that exist now, you and your grandmother are happily reunited. In this version, no, but the battle that you and your friends engage in is perhaps not to save this version of your story alone. Sometimes things are too late to be rewritten or undone, but there are more blank pages ahead of us, Little Red."

"I think maybe the final question I would have to ask is, part of you is inside of me. What would you do if I were to disagree with you? What if I saw you coming for someone and I stood in the way?"

"I am big, and I am bad," he says simply.

"But so am I now," you say.

"Then I think you might be able to stop me, Little Red," he says with something like a smile.

"So I could be your follower and a thorn in your paw?"

The wolf looks at Mother Goose holding the healing spell. "I know the lion. I don't think you're a thorn in my paw. Your grandmother, your mother, all of them make a pact with me, in a way somehow older and more profound even than the gift I gave to you. They brought life into this world. They began a story. But there is no story you can begin without making the promise of its ending, and only very strange and dangerous things try to make a story that never ends."

He regards the boiling stew and cauldron as he speaks, and snarls.

"There are other people doing that right now, too, aren't there?" you ask.

"Yes, great and many beasts of power that wield story itself within the confines of the Neverafter," he says, and sniffs the air. "And perhaps even some things that move beyond it."

"Okay," you sigh. "Well I've decided that I will trust you, but I am making it clear to you that I might try to defy you every now and again. I don't like to lie to authority figures and you seem to be very authoritative."

"Can I tell you a secret?" he asks, and you nod. The Wolf moves his massive head and moves the front of his snout close to your ear, and says "I welcome your defiance, Red. In most of my stories, I die. I am here to be stopped." His eyes glow. "But I am only ever stopped for a time."

The word time reverberates out, and you put your hand in his mouth.