In a starved, ancient forest where trees shrieked like wraiths and the earth lapped up the blood of unseen abominations, two forsaken children roamed — Hansel and Gretel.
They had been discarded, like the discarded remnants of a haunted banquet, discovered unnecessary in a world famished for flesh.
Each night, their stepmother's venomous insults seeped into their father's mind like ivy crawling, until one leaden morning he led them out into the desolate forest, his tears falling like the venomous sap of a dying tree.
He abandoned them there, speechless and treacherous, his heart hardened by deceit. The first time, Hansel had scattered shining pebbles, but now breadcrumbs alone marked their path.
And the woods, a ravenous beast, hungered for more. It consumed the crumbs before they could hit the earth. Days blended as they traveled, hunger gnawing at their stomachs like beasts trapped.
Sleep came in the form of gruesome fits, with the shuddering crack of branches, the snap of damned leaves, and the gurgling breath of secret abominations that waited in the dark darkness.
The trees stood watch, their gnarled arms curled in baleful manner. They waited, wrapped in dark shrouds of despair. And there was the hut, a horror gnarl upon the clearing, running with honey sweetness, like gangrene flowing from a sore.
Its tiles, a cadaverous pall of thin slicing tongues, reflected in darkness, and walls, a gory mosaic of gold-hued skin, quivered like flesh, beating, living.
The air was heavy with maddening scents: cinnamon, caramel, and a grotesque smell of blood. Hansel's fingers caressed the warm wall, which groaned at his touch.
Gretel, tempted by a shiny gumdrop, bit hard. Her teeth sank into the sugary surface, not candy, but something squirmed beneath, making its way down her throat, a famished animal.
The door groaned open, creaking like bone. And there was the Witch, her skin slick as wax that had melted, eyes bulging like evil beads stuck too tightly in a face of madness.
Her smile contorted, flared: a grotesque grin of ravenous hunger. "Warm yourselves before the grim feast, little morsels," she invited, her voice dripping with malice.
The children entered, oblivious to the dancing shadows in the corners. The walls groaned, communicating their terror, as the floor dripped below their trembling feet.
Flickering candles with wicks made of human hair cast ghostly silhouettes in the darkness. The scent of cloves was combined with the acrid smell of decay, hanging at their throats.
From the rafters, bones clattered against one another in an ominous portent. By the fireplace, something sputtered and spat – charred fingers, blackened and jerking in a ghastly ritual.
She served them meat pies, their crusts glinting ominously. Hansel felt a reluctance, a creeping sense of unease. "This tastes like. teeth." The Witch beamed a predator's smile.
"And how would you recognize such a taste, dear?" With night closing over the world outside, the doors clattered shut with adamant finality.
Hansel woke up, suspended in chains, his form swaying from rusty hooks in the cold basement. The walls were an exhibition of cages, where half-eaten children whimpered weakly, their mouths stitched together with licorice strings.
Flies buzzed like living darkness, and crushed bones crunched beneath him shards of the lost, the abandoned.
Gretel ascended into the wicked room, encased in a psychedelic fog. Milk, warm and clotted, enveloped her like a shroud of killing, scorching her tender flesh.
The Witch warbled lullabies from a black abyss, her voice resonating like thunder after night, every word distorting with a twisted rhythm.
"You'll become a feast," she hissed, "tender morsel compared to your brother's flesh." Hansel's desperate cries echoed, futile against the walls that absorbed his terror.
Below, she could hear the macabre symphony: the grinding, slicing, the vile preparations for her demise. Time lost its grip; the Witch murmured to bleeding mirrors, their reflections oozing horror.
The house itself curled up, walls smeared with pulsing veins and unsightly blemishes. Gretel's bed crept menacingly underneath her, sheets heaving like a living creature.
And then. the cleaver dropped. She was awakened tied to a butcher's block, iron nails hammered into her wrists like dark portents. The Witch loomed over her, her body naked, skin etched with lesions and vacant seams where there should be eyes.
Her apron ran with clotted leavings, a sticky rain on the frozen floor. "You smell of bone and despair," the Witch jeered, kissing the wicked knife.
"You will be the taste of innocence devoured." But savage sparks of hope smoldered; hidden in her aching gums, a hairpin lay, waiting.
In a frantic struggle, she spat blood as she wrenched it out, fighting against creeping shadows.
A swipe to the Witch's eye provided her with a fleeting window of confusion. She tore herself free, tore a nail out of her own hand as if it were naught but a thorn, snapping the bonds like strings snapped.
The air became thick with her shrieks, escalating to a horrid trio of three discordant howls. Gretel fled, terrorized heart pounding, as underfoot Hansel fought tooth and nail with the ropes, flesh torn to the skin.
In ginger walls of flesh, they tore apart, splashing through thick, syrupy bile oozing from rotten wood. But the Witch would not relent—she had shed her human form.
She was a terrible monster of flesh and spindly limbs, her face stretched out grotesquely into a cavernous maw crowded with gnashing teeth that had once belonged to innocent children.
Her screams resounded among the trees, the sky being gilded with fear. The siblings beckoned her to a disused pit, a well-long abandoned, being full of rusty iron and the booty of the damned.
Hansel cut at her legs with a shard of crystalline sugar, and Gretel, bloodied and shrieking like a demon-possessed, shoved her into the depths.
But the Witch would not give way; she writhed and bucked, claws scraping against rotting walls, bones cracking with pressure. In spite, they kindled the fire, drenching her in stolen oil.
Her body twisted with spasm, eyes ablaze with the anger of an expiring star. Her screams contorted into wisps of thick smoke. Three days of agonizing torment went by before she perished.
When the last tendril of smoke vanished and silence fell over the woods, Hansel and Gretel stood at the smoldering pit, blood-stained and changed, gazing into emptiness.
They felt the unstoppable transformation within themselves. Something had been awakened, something untamed that must be satiated. They returned home not with the bliss of emancipation, but with a hunger that would not be quenched.
The cottage had not just fed on them; it had marked them in there. And now, a hunger so immense consumed their very hearts.
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2nd chapter!!!! YIPEE!!!!