(no subject)

[butnottoobold]

Mister Fox is at war with himself. He's confused, mad, befuddled, bewitched.

Maybe Mister Fox is just a harebrained lordling. The eldest son of the ancient gentry, a scion of a family tree that's grown so rotten and anemic with the centuries it produces only strange and wormy fruit. His grand house is called Whitewood, now manned by an aging skeleton crew of servants growing scarcer by the day. He is the heir apparent, but he hasn't married. Lately he has not been... all there. And while his two younger brothers see to the estate's affairs and noblesse oblige and all that, he wanders about the manor grounds, the sprawling gardens and the forest. They've called in doctors from London, who've recommended all sorts of tinctures and pills. But still he wanders.

And that's true some of the time. Or perhaps none of that is true, and he's not so harmless. Sometimes he thinks he has tasted blood, felt writhing flesh between his sharp yellow teeth. Perhaps his airs are only a delusion; a means by which he can lure young, pretty things and eat them up in his bloody warren. He's a common robber, axe and club and hand who can comport like a gentleman. He's hardly sure himself. Mister Fox may not be human at all. He may be just a common red-haired fox living wild in the woods, and his adventures on two legs are odd flights of fantasy.

He was engaged once. Married once, intended once. Perhaps? Perhaps she went away, or perhaps she died, or perhaps he ate her and gnawed the dainty bones of her fingers. A dozen possibilities present themselves and he hardly knows if it's real and half-remembered or a fancy, wholly-invented.

He may be a man dreaming he is a fox. Or a fox dreaming he is a man.

He's partly based on Neil Gaiman's story "The White Road", which in turn is based on the Grimms' "Robber Bridegroom".