The Fiddler

[Treadwell]

Merry music or not, children or not, wheezing breath or not, Aloisius H. Treadwell would do his best to stop this lunacy! "You can't just go off traipsing away with folks' children!"

He resumes his hurrying into the woods, his yellow robe flapping along his flabby thighs and rump. Even with his elderly ears, it's possible to pick up the sounds of music tinkling-whistling along--and sounds the Glutton is much more familiar with.

Chomping, gobbling, gnashing, shlurping sounds of delightful, fresh meat being sucked down whole and bloody and wet. The belly's brief bulge and gorge and burble as it tries to take it all in. Rising, wafting scent--iron and tangy--of life serving as liquor and beverage.

Treadwell's immense stomach gives its own agonized, unfed gurgling-roaring. It wishes to join the meal--the carnage!--but. . . .

"But these are our children! NOOOOO!" his aged squeak pipes barely through the music as his rotund body disappears into the wooded darkness, alone. Beady eyes catch on the gelatinous beast some distance away as it takes a whole morsel of a young lass. The heart wrenches, the belly squirms, the body ripples. . . .

Human frailty and clothing are lost, melted away into blubbery rolls and goopy slime, slick and gross and rotund and large, some three times Treadwell's usual girth and height in moments (and still growing! Now nearing four times!) as the slug-tailed, bare-bodied monstrosity of a dozen mouths ringing its belly and back lurches forward with a shriek from half his maws. One of the remaining, at least, is kept quiet with the swallowing whole of Treadwell's mutton.

With tongues slathering-slobbering and teeth coming down like sharpened blades, the Glutton throws his immense body's weight toward the orgiastic feast. . .

But over a ton of fat and flab, crashing over trees and roots and grass and earth, is enough to set ground to quaking, children to shrieking on seeing a second blubbery monstrosity. . . and woodland creatures to scampering, leaping their ways in the confusion.

The Glutton must feed.

The Glutton does feed. Children and heroics are forgotten--and surprisingly left alone by the intruder.

Teeth and tongues slash and slather out in all directions from the bloated elder. Hands feverishly grasp and tear--a tree limb caught in a fist here, a deer's back haunch clamped between the teeth below the right armpit there, a trio of hares swallowed whole in one maw, buried together, as the jelly-stomached slug-man both interrupts and joins the carnage in his own way.

[catch]

To the woods, to the woods. Fat councilor could never be in the woods, could never be part of it.

Catch could.

He came, silent as a shadow. He followed tiny footprints, engulfing them, marking not a trail to follow, save for his own trail, the bare outlines of bare feet. Treadwell hurried along, harried along.

"You'll n-n-not go, Ser Phlynn," Catch says, a whispered, hoarse thing past the greasy, silver tears. He turns his face down to them, a face that was long, longer; the grotesque suggestion of a muzzle, from this angle, crossing the bound of suggestion and into reality. A trick of the light. A trick of the angles. His face had been mapped out long ago. That face, so like the Beetle King's, and yet not, could not smile, but his broad, hard hand sought the boy's bone-thrust shoulder. "It's n-n-not in the stories. You t-t-take care of the little Wormgirl." Approval.

He followed. He wished to shut his eyes. Between destroyers he came, a silver-bronzed thing, his nostrils flaring at the tang, at the blood. Treadwell holds no fresh horrors for him. The Fat Man, the Glutton, is there, and is terrible, all tongue-lash and bulging flesh. Yet as he walked, the fear fell from him. Catch went among the tongues, and his hands sought them, sought two. Cherny's dark, dusky shoulder, and the fine cloth of little Tsoss. The silver scars on his skin burned into him, and he faced the mawed, many-eyed things, a cool gaze of emptiness, of madness.

"Th-th-these are mine," he says, his voice the depth of a wood and the breadth of worlds. He would hold them only, seeking to keep them from that terrible maw, and bear the brunt of the Glutton's lash. Against such powers, what could his frail flesh do? He had but two hands. And these two were his.

[channe]

And Elzie, desperate, watches her twin dance off -- and she'd love to dance off, too! Wouldn't she, oh, wouldn't she! The music is so beautiful --

-- and she turns to Phlynn. A stranger, but he has a kind face. A good boy, the kind her mother lets her play with. She doesn't see the hands, not at first -- "No, you don't understand," she cries, tugging on his sleeve to drag him back. "It's in the story. She is going to gobble us up. This is just like the story! It's not just a song, it's not. You have to help me." She pauses; something passes over her young eyes. "Please. Please promise."

And then there's Catch. A moment to cringe away from Treadwell, and she'd say something, but he is bounding off into the treeline --

-- and there's Catch. She shrieks a little, but her Pa told her not to be afraid of the man, her Pa told her to just run away and tell someone when he'd seen her. Agnie had explained that he hadn't meant to hurt her, but that she should be careful, and she hates that word, careful careful careful.

[Rance]

First, there was Elzie.

When she touched his sleeve, it was only moss. It peeled away from him as if he'd been nothing more than a stone, having patiently let it grow upon him over the course of seasons so that this little girl's fingers could pry it free. He ambled with her, toes dragging through the mud, resistant to moving away from the too-roo-lee, too-too. "I p-...promise," he said, tongue ever-stumbling over hard consonants. "I promise I will help, b-...but we have to listen. We have to listen to all the notes." She was distraught. He was excited, his smile a thing of diluted life. She spoke to him. She was his friend. "Nobody will gobble anybody. Are you g-...going to dance with me?"

Second, there was Catch.

When the addled man's fingers touched his bony shoulder, a trail of blossoms slithered to life from the vines tangled there, spreading their white mouths toward a fading sun. His eyes were enchanted, distracted, and when Catch spoke, he thought he heard the wolf-wearer somewhere in his voice, bidding obedience, praise, loyalty.

You t-t-take care of the little Wormgirl.

He looked upon Cherny, so normal, so much unlike him. One time he had told the boy something about death. It was a memory stashed away in the broken webs of his brain.

"D-...do you dance," he asked the mill-boy, needing to know, as if the very answer to the question was the fragile axis upon which the world itself turned. Then, he said to Catch -- as if Wormgirl was a name he knew, innate and unquestioned: "I am a knight. I don't let pretty ladies get hurt--"

So when the world exploded into noise and commotion, when the trees seemed to bend away from the Glutton as his shadowy, bloated frame went barreling like a starving dervish through the underbrush toward a Dark Thing--

it was bad thoughts on the horizon hungry for little rubbery bones and yellow-ball knuckles gnawing through an earth full of tiny tiny children sliding their ribs between its great teeth to suck free all the fatty meat and happy marrow yes that was a good feast yes that was a fine meal yes that was--

--the boy locked his elbow into Elzie's, and when the noise of the fiddlesong seemed drowned in destruction, chaos, there was a clarity in his eyes that was only momentary. They were blue again. A little boy's. "There are s-...safer places. I know them. I know them all." He tried to draw her away from it all, the tethers of the song momentarily disrupted if only for the sake of the Glutton's interruption.

"We w-...will get your Tony," he told her. "I am a good boy. I am."

[Cherny]

A merry walk through the forest, feet lifting and stepping in time with the music, and how could anything seem frightening when accompanied by such a lively tune? Even a winding path through the gloomy forest seems a charming adventure while the fiddle plays. Cherny grins to the skeletal boy with his knife-fingers and moss-shirt, and can't restrain a hoarse chuckle as he answers in passing.

"How c-can y-you not d-dance?"

Onwards, into the woods, and one might imagine that they were coming to a halt as the fiddler turns to face them and sets her instrument aside, and there's only a distant wonder as she begins to change, and the boy laughs in croaking delight at such a clever trick.

The sound of young bones snapping wetly, the sight of the laughing girl vanishing between champing jaws is like a plunge into icy waters; a physical shock that steals his breath, numbs his flesh, sets his heart hammering and scrawny limbs trembling uncontrollably. And yet his traitor feet dance on, lifting and stepping, dragging him towards that gaping mouth, his head twisting to keep that nightmare in sight of panic-stretched eyes as he turns and spins inexorably closer.

How can you not dance?

And then there's another, another monster, another horror of slavering lips and gnashing jaws bearing down on the dancing children, and he's not the breath for anything but a choked sob, shaking his head in desperate denial.

It takes him a moment to realise that he's been caught, a broad hand clamping over his shoulder, and he grabs at it as if drowning; staggering, locking his legs to try and keep them from carrying him towards the fiddler's hungry maw. When he looks up into his rescuer's face his own features collapse in tearful relief - his friend is here, Catch is here, he is saved, he is saved! - and he throws himself against the addled man, a rock in the middle of a raging river that drags everything towards those champing jaws.

A moment to find his breath, to find his wits before fearfully glancing back over his shoulder - only to see a worse horror yet, children still dancing to their death, those too rapt in the fiddler's tune to flee at the arrival of the second monster. In the moment after he's squirming, stretching out his arms to grab wildly at the nearest children as they hop and twirl past, thin hands reaching for collars or sleeves or hair, anything to catch them, to hold them back from the fiddler's jaws. Trusting in Catch's hold upon his collar to keep him from following them - the woodcutter has only two hands, but the mill-boy has two more, and that might be enough to see two more children saved.

[Treadwell]

Delicious, tasty delights and morsels: all manner of woodland critters shoved into gobbling mouths and swallowed either partial or whole.

The Glutton has touched no children, his great body setting the ground to thumping and shuddering under him in his brief feast, and yet--

others.

Here.

Squinty, wet eyes lock first on Cherny, then Catch.

Ravenous hunger forces the Glutton into action--not vengeance, not heroism, not morality.

Hunger. Starvation.

And yet, a recognition of where he is and, more importantly, what he is at the moment flutters through the obese slug-thing's head. At the moment, Aloisius Treadwell is forgotten, shoved aside, as divinity swells bloated and large, seeking sustenance and succor.

Away!

A grab of a hand at a half-eaten tree, a shove to the right, deeper into the woods, and that is one monster making its exit with a lurching of its tail and seemingly endless, mesmerizing rippling of the rolls and layers and pouches of fat all around.

Into underbrush and wood the Glutton goes, leaving the carnage behind. He starves and craves.

He has more important things to do than to pursue the lives of mere mortal children. He has a hideaway to hunt, at least until he can change back to the body and clothes of the fat, little taxman.

Most importantly, he has bellies to fill.

[Jirai]

How can you not dance, indeed.

Cat danced. Cat danced, laughing.

But then there is this horror in front and a horror behind and the laughter stops but the feet keep moving, blue eyes growing wider and wider.

The child screamed.

The feet kept dancing. Tiny knife in hand, the terrified urchin danced nearer and nearer to the horror... only to jerk to a sudden stop as an unexpected hand snags hold of that patched jacket.

Cat screamed again.

[Dulcie]

Things were unravelling at an astonishing rate. A few more children waltzed into that waiting mouth only to be crunched and slurped up, but those eyes saw what was happening. The great gluttonous slug had gotten in her way, as had the strange tentacled man. Her friend had understimated these people greatly, she was sure of that.

There was a shimmer of forms again, the black formless creature drawing up and weaving itself into the beautiful human seeming fiddler, though her clothing had changed colors and her hair was now a firey red. She'd snatch up her fiddle from where she had laid it, her hand clenching on the bow as she began to start playing again. The effect that the music had upon the children would intensify with the return of her bow to the fiddle.

She looked at those gathering and she'd run, knowing that the children would follow the sound of the music. She'd run, and run, looking for a cave or a more secluded area where she could lead the children off safely.

[Suede]

These stupid farmer's kids had no idea what dancing was, they just pranced around like the ninnies his father always warned him they were. Tsoss had DANCED, smooth steps and strides meant to impress his parents with proper decorum, even with the more fevered pace of the fiddle. But a little garnish hardly mattered on dinner, and he'd have moved right along with the rest into that gullet had Catch not caught him up.

The little drow didn't try to fight the madman's grip, only to keep dancing forward at the same rate, whether or not he could actually succeed at it. He never really spared the man much attention, or Cherny in his other hand. Not even the bizarre slug beast, he'd seen worse before, down below. It had been a 'learning experience.' His eyes did flicker at the screaming cat, however... that sounded a bit girlish, maybe he could tease him later. After the dancing.

[catch]

Cherny in one hand, Tsoss in the other - and screaming Cat for Cherny - and they are a chain, a daisy-chain of laughter and dancing and horrible, terrible screams. For a moment, their eyes shall meet, Fiddler and Catch. They will both know each other, in that instant, and Catch's eyes are pools of black, glittering with stars that have no names.

He will smile at it.

They have claimed their own.

"C-c-come," Catch says, low, unhurried, immured to the horror about him. The children follow theirs, and Catch is content to keep what he has in his hands, though he tries to turn them, to put them away from blood and bones and wildling-dance. Turn them from the wasteland the Glutton has left behind, and it is he, and not the Fiddler, that causes Catch to shudder, shaking himself like a great, docile dog. "We sh-shall walk - or dance -" And, here, a nod for little Tsoss, who danced so wonderfully, so gracefully. A solemn, little courtesan who knew his steps.

"Walk. We sh-shan't run." Catch's steps are backwards and calm, his fingers like steel, gripping hotly to the little bodies. Back down in his own prints would he walk, back the way Myrken's children had come, en masse.

[Cherny]

His hand finds purchase on the waif's jacket, and his other hand joins it to be certain, grabbing white-knuckled fistfuls of patched fabric and heaving with a wiry strength born of hauling bags of flour and grain about the mill, seeking to haul the urchin back.

His own panicked breaths and racing heartbeat fills his ears, the music thin and faint beneath the more visceral music of splintering branches and snapping bones, young voices raised in a chorus of laughter and fear. His eyes stare helplessly, dark pits ringed entirely in white, as more children skip into the fiddler's jaws and its slavering counterpart rolls past in an avalanche of ravenous mouths. Stop them escapes his throat as a wordless croak; catch them, stop them emerge only as hoarse cries, lost amid the chaos.

He tries to walk at Catch's urging, to keep his balance as the addled man draws him back from the horror, but trips and stumbles as often as he walks. Each step a struggle against the fiddler's renewed tune - she changes, and he can only wonder dumbly how she is so thin after eating so many children whole - and yet each step a small victory, another foot further away from that.

[Treadwell]

It is in reasonably short order that the Glutton gives up his pursuit of tasty morsels and delights. Animals scatter before his bulky, slime-slicked bloat, and the more he oozes-flaflumps into the woods, the more he realizes he is alone.

A grumpy, snorty, wheezy Glutton thus pauses to reflect, to breathe, to snap a random tree branch off for the devouring. . . and to return to the corpulent, yellow-robed butterball with the walking stick and floofy beard.

Wobbly, waddly, woozy steps are taken away from the slime trail he's left behind, plodding through the trees back toward the fair and away from this madness in the forest. The former slug-monster must readjust to being a mere five feet and a very few inches--not to mention a mere six hundred and some pounds! However, in his full-bellied, transformation-induced dizziness, the tax collector of Myrken Wood promptly knocks himself senseless as his head meets a low-hanging branch and drops him onto his rump, then his back, his limbs spread out, his cane hanging from its strap at his wrist.

There he lies, out cold, belly quite visibly ballooned from all he's just had to eat, a lovely little knot starting to swell up on his forehead.

[Jirai]

At first, the urchin is docile enough, Cherny's grip enough to turn steps back, away from the fiddler, though blue eyes never left the... thing. But things change when the fiddler begins to play again.

Abruptly, Cat's feet can resist the lure of the music no longer, and the terrified urchin strains and pulls against Cherny's grip, only to slip out of that ragged coat and dart, horrified, towards the Fiddler. Towards the back of the pack, now, but following. Unable to stop.

[Dulcie]

The fiddler laughed in delight as she broke away from the group, moving quicker and quicker on her journey deep into the forest. She found a cave to claim as her own, dancing and twirling into it's mouth where she once again set her fiddle to the side and shifted into that horrible creature that they had witnessed before. The first of the giggling children was easily consumed by the beast, though now that it had eaten a few it seemed to be slowing, taking it's time with the next one, eating only an arm first, then a leg, giving the poor child time to feel the pain, to scream and fill the forest air with it's terrors.

[Glenn]

There is something that every teenager figures out eventually. Elliot Brown, with his fairy-touched life, basically a series of adventures and misadventures, may have figured it out a little late. Here and now, though, it was terribly clear. The world was so much better without Children. The carnival was especially so. There were no little brats underfoot. There were no lines getting in the way of everything. There wasn't that much annoying noise errant screaming.

It was, in short, the best carnival ever. In fact, it was so good he didn't even doubt the children's absence. They'd probably all found something interesting to look at, like a wart on a mule. It really didn't take much to amuse and catch the interest of anyone under the age of sixteen. There were things that caught Elliot's interest like Niall and Nova, like demon possessed girls and the current proprietress of the tea house (though maybe that last one at a distance). Certainly not fiddle music that lured a bunch of raggedy youths off to their doom.

Of course, Elliot's interest was a fairly broad thing, rogue and adventurer and general troublemaker that he was. Catch was like a younger, head-impacted brother, really. Or cousin. There wasn't all that much difference with the way families worked out on the Myrken farms. Cherny was the most self-righteous little brat in the entire province. Tsoss was.. actually, he had no idea what Tsoss was, and that itself was interesting on some level. He'd been towards the edge of the festivities, taking in the entire pleasant, child-free atmosphere. It meant he caught sight of Catch and his strange cargo before many others did. With a frown creeping over his face he started towards them. "Catch?"