Sorry in advanced for the slightly convoluted grammar, was trying to experiment with increasing my word count.
Without further ado, enjoy!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They twisted the legend into a child's bedtime story. The girl draped in crimson, the monstrous wolf lurking, the gallant woodsman standing tall. Deceit—every last word.
For she was not a child in the classical sense, but a crafty predator, well versed in dealing with the intricacies of her environment. Innocence? It was no more than a simple facade that hid the deep-rooted darkness that grew and throbbed in her very essence.
Red was not her name. It was her legacy.
The cloak had been a prized piece of property that her mother had once owned. Or, more accurately, it was the last skin her mother had ever worn. It had been dyed a deep, crimson red from the inside out — having been thoroughly saturated with blood during a brutal winter famine, a time when Red was six years old, starving, and wishing desperately for rescue that never arrived.
The villagers had whispered behind closed doors. "The girl is strange." "Her eyes don't blink right." "She always stares too long."
They were right in their judgment.
Red was always driven by a vast and boundless hunger. But it was not food one would traditionally think of with hunger, such as bread, rich stew, or crisp fruit.
It was for control.
By the age of ten, she could trap and gut rabbits quicker than any adult man. She never flinched when she smashed their skulls. Didn't even breathe harder. Once, the local butcher attempted to grab her wrist when she went for scraps.
She left him with eight fingers.
No one dared lay a hand on her after that.
When the forest started undergoing a miraculous transformation — at that moment when the birds took to the air with an unusual silence and the deer scampered away as if chased by invisible ghosts — the villagers began whispering that a Wolf had indeed reappeared among them.
Not merely an animal. It is, in fact, a creature of profound significance. This creature predates every human language ever uttered. It is the final echo of nature's enduring will, arrived to deliver punishment to those who have chosen to disregard the ancient pacts that once bound them to the natural world.
Red did not care.
She unsheathed her sword.
Grandmother's home was three miles deep in the dense, mysterious forest. Nowadays, most people would not have ventured so far into the bush. Trees here grew in unusual, twisted shapes, with roots like darkened fingers reaching out in futility from the dark earth. There were mushrooms with bruised, discolored faces and bulbous, thick stems along the path, making the vision ominous yet fascinating. Even the air itself had a certain metallic flavor to it, with a hint of iron, and this added to the foreboding nature of the place.
But Red walked it easily.
She was not scared of the dark. The dark had always been home.
In the interior of her basket, she had a varied assortment of presents, meticulously selected: strong steel tools wrapped protectively in a coating of oiled cloth, slender bone needles made for fineness, a tiny vial filled with lye, and a powerful hacksaw made for severing. At the top of this lot, wrapped softly and sweetly in a linen napkin, lay the polished skull of a fox, smooth on its surface and empty in its eye sockets, making an unsettling yet fascinating centerpiece.
As she strolled along, Red smiled to herself, contented.
She had a fervent hope that the Wolf would discover her first, ahead of anyone else.
It did not howl.
It whispered.
"You carry a distinct scent of blood about you," the voice came from within the thicket of trees, its tone low and mournful, like the wind blowing across the markers in a neglected cemetery.
Red slowly turned.
And there he stood, standing fast in that location.
Was a massive ten feet tall, his fur the somber hue of mourning ash. His eyes, a deep and bitter gold, seemed to radiate sorrow. The structure of his body was lean and yet decidedly powerful — possessing a grace far from beastly, but instead beautiful, akin to something finely crafted from swirling smoke and ancient deities.
"You've pursued everything else," he told him. "Now you pursue me."
Red tilted her head.
"I don't hunt. I cleanse."
"You're not a girl anymore," the Wolf whispered. "You're a curse."
A wide smile crossed her face, and she showed her white teeth. "And here you are, a ghost," she said.
And then she attacked.
Her movements differed from anything that is expected of an ordinary human being.
Through the trees. Over branches. Beneath roots. She cut and spun and slashed, her cloak billowing like a living shadow.
The Wolf did not fight initially. He fled. He cried. He attempted to reason.
He told her of the balance of life, the songs of ancestors, the peace before humans tilled the earth into ruin.
But Red did not care.
She chased him relentlessly for three long days without rest.
At night, she would quench her thirst drinking from the black waters of the swamp, laughing with glee as the frogs appeared to dissolve at her touch. She would smear her face with the thick, black mud and then stretch out to sleep alongside the twitching corpses of the animals she had slain — raccoons, owls, and on one macabre night, even a child who had wandered too far from home.
On the third night that had elapsed, she was able to corner him in a narrow and secluded ravine.
"I do not wish to kill you," the Wolf whispered softly, his form racked with the agony of a wound in his haunch and struggling to draw in gasps of rapid, shallow breaths. "What I truly desire is to hold on to the memory of how kindness was and how it was when it was present. I wish to hold on to the hope that there remains the chance that your kind can change and evolve for the better."
Red blinked once.
"Then die knowing the truth," she snarled. "We never could."
With a swift and powerful thrust, she drove the serrated blade deep beneath his ribcage.
It took hours for him to die.
She made sure of it.
By the gentle, silvery light of the moon, she skinned him with care, humming a soft lullaby her grandmother used to sing to her many years ago as she labored at boiling bones to create broth. The Wolf, who was surprisingly durable, made no sound — not even once during all that happened next. His tears of sorrow and despair fell silently, flowing into the blood-stained moss beneath in tiny droplets of sorrow commemorating the heart-wrenching moment.
After she had completed her work, she carefully stitched his fur into the material of her cloak, adorning it with the special material.
It did not fit.
It made it perfect.
The village celebrated when she returned.
The children danced. The men clapped her shoulder. The elders nodded in fearful approval.
The alteration in her eyes went totally unnoticed by them.
They never noticed the howl in the wind that night — weak, but there. As though something had died… and something else had taken its place.
Red lingered on the edge of the square, watching the fire dance.
Her fashionable cloak's plush and luxurious fur was whispering gently in the cold air, and if you listened very closely, you could still make out the throbbing rhythm of a heartbeat resounding within.
She didn't just put on his skin. She kept him alive. Some part of him — trapped, screaming, begging for death.
She wished for him to know what it felt like. To be hunted. To be used. To be reduced to a tale narrated by people who never knew the truth.
And then Red smiled.
Not because she'd won.
She smiled because she was still hungry.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, that was interesting!
Let me know which childhood classic you guys want me to ruin next!