#so the witch of the gingerbread house calls him dandelion in german

[cedefaci]

The Tale of Turmeric, or Löwenzahn

Extracted from the broader fic in which he is but one character.

Once upon a time, there was an old woman.

No, this gives the wrong impression. The old woman is still there, like many of her kind, keepers of knowledge—and therefore power—far beyond mortal men. The old woman was—is—a witch.

In a time—a darker time, perhaps—a meaner time, certainly, the time when magic existed openly in the world, before cold iron, hot powder, and clean penstrokes banished it to shadowed corners and liminal spaces—there was a woodcutter. Woodcutters and their children seemed to be rather prone to strange happenstances at that time, as it were, and so, he loved, and married, and his wife bore him two children.

You know this story, don't you? The two children were named Hänsel and Gretel. The first a boy, the second a girl. Their mother died, and their stepmother, in the manner of stepmothers of this sort, found them expendable when famine struck, and left them in the woods and the hands of fate. Of course, in the manner of all children left in the woods, they did not die. The first time, they found their way back home; the second time, lost deep in the dark forest, they found their way to a house. A wondrous house! One of gingerbread and icing, spun sugar and tempered chocolate. Driven by hunger, these two children ate, and for their crimes, the brother was imprisoned, to pay back with flesh what he had unlawfully taken (for witches have their own laws, see, alien to us though they may seem); the sister indentured, to work off her debt by feeding her penned brother and keeping the witch's house.

You know what happened. The brother endured—the passive sort of endurance, bearing captivity and confinement and the knowledge of his impending death, forced to watch his sister suffer. The sister endured—the active sort of endurance, biting down on rebellion and too-telling inquisitiveness and the fear of the fate in store for her brother, forced to comport herself despite her hands being forced to bring their doom. In the end, the sister's ingenuity, coupled with courage, defeated the witch and won the siblings their freedom.

This is when the story starts being wrong. Witches are feared by men, and men react to their fears with fire. No witch worth her spells can be harmed by it, not if she has any love of life. But Gretel had won the house and its contents by right of conquest, so the witch could not—would not either—oppose the girl further. The children left. The witch left also, to build another house of cakes and cookies.

The children grew up, and had children of their own, who had children in turn, allowing memory to fade to mere myth, as they lived their mundane lives. Yet their ancestors had supped at a table of what they would call a Hexe, and that marked their blood as changed. Touched by witchcraft—a very attractive quality, for certain other creatures.

Uncounted generations passed. The witch checked on the descendants of the siblings who bested her, sometimes. Call it curiosity, call it concern, call it a combination of the two. It was only natural for her to hear the news of one of them being taken by the Courts. Seelie. They had a fascination for the simple innocence of children, as great as the Unseelie love of adults' complexity of emotion. The witch watched as the mother went to treat with the Court, as such things went—and if the way to the Good Neighbors was so easily found, what of it? If the woman found two iron knitting needles in her pack, what of it? If a red riding hood could be found beneath a tree, if a wolf would startle the woman from her enchanted stupor, if a hoary crone gave her a flask of some vital substance for the price of a mere story, what of it?

These too-fair folk had changed since the days when Janet could save her knight by waiting at a crossroads and not letting go. Though the woman saved her child, she lost her life.

The old woman had cradled the infant in its swaddling, and laughed away all the fair lords and ladies who cooed endearments and dripped sympathy with honeyed voices, then tramped back to her new gingerbread house.

The baby had been fed with goat's milk and bread sops, watched over by skulls glowing with fire within. He grew up riding in a mortar and pestle, stirring mysterious concoctions and knitting cotton candy to sweaters for gingerbread children (there was an episode during which he thought himself one of them, and was deathly afraid of water and foxes both). There had been no one to return the boy to, and so he was raised by three riders, of the sun, night, and day, two witches, one tall and thin, the other plump and stout, and a single great wolf, taller than he.

He learned strange things, in his childhood years: guard your name carefully, give it to no one. True love is potent beyond measure, though it need not be born from Cupid's arrow-prick. Evil stepparents get their comeuppance. And you could not truly live if you spent your life as a boy in fairyland (although as his first human friend, who would become the woman called Oregano, demonstrated, it wasn’t as if spending your childhood in the real world was a more rewarding experience).

What his guardians forgot to teach, perhaps thinking the truth self-evident, was that the names your loved ones called you had just as much weight as the one you were born with.

It would have warned him, thought Turmeric ruefully, to beware the Young Lion when his Oma had, in lieu of his name, called him Löwenzahn.

#khr #CEDEF #cedef headcanons #Turmeric khr #fae #fairytales #hansel and gretel #according to the wiki Turmeric's German #so the witch of the gingerbread house calls him dandelion in german #AKA lion's teeth #she's lovers with Baba Yaga #they met when Baba Yaga's chicken-footed house tried to eat her gingerbread one