Tales of the Big Bad Wolf: The Red Riding Hood Arc (A Fairy Tale)

Chapter One: Enter Red Riding Hood

CHAPTER ONE

Enter Red Riding Hood 

Winter, Year 1304

In December

Wings cannot cut the cold night and take flight.

Instead the bird will fall where the dark ones wait.

In the northern lands, the first fall of snow came early. In those woods, a woman walked the empty road. She was a dash of red that moved against a pale scene of trees, snow, and sky. The sound of her steps across the frozen dirt was crisp. They broke the silence of falling snow, causing the woods around her to stir restlessly.

There had been no one on the road for hours. Those who preferred the gentle predictability of spring, the plentiful harvests of summer and autumn had long left on these roads. Those types would winter in the warmer lands by the southern seas.

And yet she continued, her back to the south, her steps facing north—like a brown eyed, brown skinned bird caught in a frozen wind. She sang a strange little nursery rhyme quietly under her breath, not knowing that it had been a lean fall and an even more punishing winter. The trees around her were rubbed raw. She did not recognize the signs of hunger.

She had not been in the Northlands for years.

While the cold began to wear her down, the young woman counted the minutes it would take to reach her destination. She had been told if she had walked straight north down the road from Crossroads without stopping, she would be at Winchester in time for the evening dinner. From there it would be another ten minutes to her grandmother's home. But the shopkeepers in Crossroads had misled her. They could not have possibly known that the many hilly parts on said road would have iced over and could not be traversed as quickly as they had promised.

And so when the sun had set, she found herself caught in a dark part of the woods, far short of the town she sought. When a howl sounded faintly in the distance, she was additionally surprised. The townspeople had neglected to warn her of the larger things that dwelled within the forest.

The woman's hand left the basket she carried and drew instead to her side, fingering the gift from her mother that had been secured around her waist. She began to move more quickly.

'Not yet,' she thought. 'Not now.'

She had not used it yet; for once the gift was used, it would not work again so soon. The young lady put the temptation out of her mind and compelled herself forward; if she could reach the bridge south of town, her grandmother's retainer should be waiting to help her. Beyond that bridge would be the village and beyond that her grandmother would be waiting. She held this thought in her mind, using it to sustain her courage while she kept walking.

 However, when she came upon a clearing before an open bridge she found no one there. Only a stone lion statue waited, yawning indifferently at travelers as they passed by. She tried not to panic as the howls drew closer. She clutched the gifted pouch to her side and picked up her pace towards the stone guardian. She had been told as a child that it had been placed there as a protective ward against malevolent beings. If there was any truth to that story, she wanted to be behind it.

Across the bridge she went, trying not to slide on the slippery snow as she did so. The growls were close but had stopped moving. She tensed slightly but kept going. She did not wish to confirm if the beasts she heard were following her.

She had finished crossing the bridge when the growls changed to angry, attacking barks. They melted into anguished yelps that made the hair on her neck rise and her heart beat quickly.