Once upon a time, there was a girl named Gretchen who knew that she lived in a fairy tale. This caused Gretchen two problems.
Firstly, no-one believed her.
Gretchen wasn't stupid, but you didn't need to be clever either to understand that wolves descended upon the village only during a full moon and a virgin simply had to step into their path to make them lie down peacefully. There was no difficulty in piecing together that whenever the baker had no leftover bread to share with the old woman who brewed potions in her forest hut, a storm would unroot all planted seeds the next day and spread them between upturned trees and broken planks of shattered chicken coops. (The old woman knew nothing of this. She kept on brewing and if you were kind to her, she would gift you a potion that made you handsome enough to attract the next-best royalty close in age into sweeping you off your feet and into an adjacent castle.) Gretchen knew that a lamb was sacrificed for every equinox or all the men would grow horns for a year, that you left out milk and honey during every half-month ritual so that your house may find gold in its well, and how you only let the third wanderer that asked stay at your inn, never the first or the second.
So when Gretchen laid this out to her parents at the tender age of ten, her father put a gentle but firm hand over her mouth and said that she was to set the altar for the garden gnomes in the upcoming month. This was a long and tedious task and thus was a punishment, which didn't seem fair to Gretchen. Had he not understood what she meant when she'd explained how a horse had to never wear seven or nine braids or it be stolen away by the fae, leaving an evil-eyed and sinister-minded silver steed for it? But her father refused to explain. He only said, do not anger them. Do not speak ill of the stories that guide our lives. Gretchen fumed all evening and all morning. She did the altar service and whittled the wooden statues for the gnomes. And when she cut herself and a beautiful bloody drop fell onto a wooden gnome nose, she knew that her father's shop would not make a single sale in the next month. Gretchen gritted her teeth together hard, and whittled some more, and cursed all myths and tales and stories that rewarded obedience and humility.
The second problem appeared when Gretchen's little brother vanished.
And when her parents said that "nothing could be done", and people in the village shook their heads all sad and already grieving, and a gravestone was picked out with flowers engraved on it that kept bad luck away, Gretchen decided that it was time.
So she took her father's shotgun, baked a cake for the old woman that she traded for a potion called "dynamite", waited for the wolves, and followed them home when they ran from her.
