A/N: standard disclaimer ~ this is a fan fiction meant to amuse fellow fans, nothing more/ nothing less.
I wondered how it would be to get his story directly from the source, then I wondered what could possibly induce Rumplestiltskin to tell it! I hope you enjoy it; reviews welcome.
It is never so simple as one might think, telling my own tale. It's probably pointless in any case, who will ever read these words? But, as I've got nothing else to do to pass the time until the "curse-to-end-all-curses" goes off. I've got claws and I'm in a prison of earthen walls – hah, walled in by the earth herself more like – what need I or torches; I have been able to see in the dark from the very first. I might as well scratch my words here. Perhaps one day someone will happen upon it. And if not, no harm done? Boredom will be the death of me, and I'm not quite ready for that ultimate surrender just yet. There are accounts still active whose balance is coming due.
I've heard it said that this sort of tale should begin at the beginning, but that would be an interminable bore. Besides there is no one left alive who remembers – I think – unless Baba Yaga has somehow managed it: the very first Ogre War. Not that I was ever a great hero. Who would want to be, really? So many of them go through hell for people who neither know nor care, only to die horrible deaths far from home. War is never what they tell you, cannon fodder. If you remember nothing else I have to tell, remember that. It starts for some political gain, usually disguised as a righteous cause, and ends only when all the children and youth of the nations are ground to pulp in the name of their kings and kingdoms' ledgers. How many kings fall in the process? The numbers never balance. Never.
I tried to tell my son, so long ago. I know he didn't understand then. Perhaps he did at the end, when I finally found what was left of him, just alive enough to know it was me.
Maybe I should have told him when he was younger. But I was only human then. Stupidly thinking that I could protect him from what was coming: the ever grinding, insatiable mechanism of greed and bloodshed and politics – war.
Surprised to find me a bit of an anarchist? Wouldn't you be?
What would you think if you had been conscripted, pressed into the service of a king you had never heard of? If your local lord or duke, or even town aldermen, had appointed you as part of a levied force of untrained peasants and farmers and craftsmen, then merrily sent you and your unlucky neighbors down the rocky road to hell without so much as arms, armor or weapons enough to protect you?
You certainly might have fought back, as I tried to. There was too much at stake: who would protect our village if they took all the grown men? Women and children and grandmothers, that's who. While we marched, they died. This, I learned later though. In the beginning I believed the knights who pointed us down the road to the war when they told us that, by meeting the foe far from home we were better able to protect our loved ones. Either they lied knowingly or were just plain wrong. It doesn't matter.
It is said that ogres are not men. This is true, mostly. They are built like men. They have hunger and thirst like men. Ogres have a desire to live, as men desire to live. But unlike most sane men, ogres seem to derive some sort of ecstasy from the wholesale slaughter of other beings. This is not to say that they are necessarily evil. Evil is, after all a rather complex thing, and to say something – or someone- is evil implies a mental process, an intent that simple beings do not seem capable of. Whatever else they are ogres are relatively simple. They are beings who operate on instinct, and their instincts tell them to kill, burn, and perhaps most disturbingly eat anything alive that crosses their path. They enjoy bloodletting and violently, needlessly messy battles are their delight.
Before I acquired the power of the Dark One, it was said that I had run from battle. The knights who came for my son on the eve of his 13th birthday told him – told my son! - that I was 'the man who ran.' Did I? Well might you wonder.
Is it possible to run after standing in the face of an ogre charge? Do you think you could rouse yourself from the blood-freezing terror of that sight: hundreds of eight foot-tall ogres thundering across the land toward you with bloodlust in their eyes? Don't you think we all would have run if our feet were not rooted to the spot by shock and horror? Think you that it is cowardice to turn away when boys you have grown up with, cousins, friends, your own wife's brother, are torn asunder or crushed into the clay? If you had seen what I saw… but no one has. I was the sole survivor out of all the men from my county. Five thousand or more fell – a number I could not even comprehend back then. What it meant to me was that everyone I had known was dead.
I was found in the shadow of a shattered wall, the rampart I and my brother-in-law and cousins had stood upon. When at last the ogre hoard had passed through the province and the duke's men came into the blasted landscape again, I alone among the levy of five thousand still breathed. My hip was shattered, my leg mangled; my back I thought broken by the falling stones of the wall. How I lived, no one could say. Perhaps it was the thought of my young son growing up without a father that kept me holding on. I honestly don't remember.
The first memory I have after they found me was of being questioned. The fact of my survival was an unaccountable embarrassment to these men, these knights. It was they who first claimed I must have turned tail and run. My wounds were attended to in the duke's prison to insure that I survived long enough to tell what I had seen, and in the end the war-weary duke had granted me clemency and sent me home. My village was a charred wreck but my son survived, though there was no sign of my wife. What did I care that the word was that I had run?
I came to care soon enough, as my surviving neighbors spat accusations that I had left their kinsfolk to die and saved myself. All I wanted then was to be left alone to raise my son in peace. That was not to be.
With the return of the ogres ten years later the wars were on again and it was my son's turn to play the role of soldier and martyr. The memory of how I was then makes me ill to this day; so simpleminded as to think an ordinary man could protect his boy from the grinding wheels of progress and conquest! They all said I had run? So be it, I resolved to take Bae and run to save him from death or worse. We were caught of course, but a beggar on the road had told me a valuable secret: how to gain power over the duke's wizard, the Dark One.
Wouldn't you like to know how I did that? How I became the most powerful mage in these lands? One day maybe that story will be told, but I'm not so foolish as to scratch it into my prison walls now, am I?
I've probably already said too much as it is.
