Many generations of Everafters and Grimms have often wondered the same question: why, if she had forever to live, would Baba Yaga choose to spend it as the old woman she is?
The answer, though she would never admit it, was the same as for many old Everafters: for love.
Yes, once upon a time, Baba Yaga had loved. It wouldn't have been surprising to anyone who had known her when she was young, before she was known as Baba Yaga. She was just Yaga. She had been a raving beauty, and attracted many, many men. There was only one, though, who she truly loved in return, and as luck would have it, he had been human. They hadn't thought much of it at the time. They were young, they were happy, and they thought that was all that mattered. They got married without a thought, and lived many long years together.
During that time, they gave birth to two beautiful girls: Vassilissa and Kira. Both girls, the couple soon realized, were Everafters. The girls aged to sixteen, then stopped; they seemed to think that was enough. Yaga, however, could not bear to stay a second younger than her husband, and kept on growing until they were both old and wrinkly.
Their happiness was shattered when Yaga's husband suddenly fell ill with a disease unknown at that time. He suffered for weeks, but could not seem to die. Desperate, Yaga searched high and low for a cure. No doctor could help, but a certain witch offered help in exchange for work. Yaga agreed. She spent every day in the witch's hut, working until her arthritic fingers were red and raw, and every evening she brought home another spell or potion the witch had taught her. But the witch was stingy, and Yaga could not work hard enough. Her husband died.
Yaga suddenly found herself an old woman with no husband, no job, two hungry daughters, and a handful of magic tricks.
She went crazy with grief. Over the next years, she turned to cannibalism, and made a habit of kidnapping any children wandering near her hut. She used what magic she knew to learn more, then more, until she became the powerful witch people feared. She created the chicken leg house and enchanted her guardians. Her daughters lived in constant fear of her. Vassilissa, the more beautiful one, was rescued by a brave and handsome prince. Kira, however, learned as much magic as she could from her mother and escaped on her own. She married a common man who was not handsome or strong but kind and hardworking, and she eventually had her own daughter, who she named Yelena.
Yelena, when she was young, stumbled upon Yaga's cottage in the woods while out gathering mushrooms. She came amazingly close to being eaten, but Yaga recognized her, and could not bring herself to kill the five-year-old girl. Instead, she kept Yelena, hoping the girl might be some comfort to her. During her month-long stay, Yelena learned just a bit of magic from Yaga. She also learned that Yaga was her grandmother. "Babushka Yaga," she called her, "Baba Yaga." When Kira showed up to "rescue" her, she didn't want to leave. Baba Yaga and Kira fought, and though Yaga had felt affection for her granddaughter, she felt none for Kira. Kira was killed. Yelena, when she saw Baba Yaga kill her beloved mother, ran home in tears to her father. Enraged, Yaga killed the father as well. Yelena was adopted by a noble family, and many years later, became the heroine of her own fairy tale.
Yelena had two children: Vasilisa, named after her great-great aunt, and Nastinka. Vasilisa, too, found herself at Baba Yaga's cottage years later, and though Yaga tried to keep her as well, she, too, escaped. This loss, Baba Yaga vowed to herself, would be the last. In a short amount of time, she had lost her husband, two daughters, a granddaughter, and a great granddaughter. Her mental health went from bad to worse, and she stopped bathing, stopped eating, stopped caring. She found comfort only in her animals, who she could not bring herself to kill. When she ate, it was human flesh, nothing else. She grew impossibly thin and filthy. She had great mood swings at first, but soon fell into a permanent state of depression and hate. She hated the world. She hated Everafters especially, for no apparent reason. Some theorized that she had loved her husband too much to hate humans, but her Everafter descendants had given her nothing but grief, so she hated their kind. The people that thought this were most likely wrong. There was no method to Baba Yaga's madness. She just hated.
Nobody ever fully understood why she agreed to come to come to America with Wilhelm. After all, if there was one thing she hated more than Everafters, it was the Grimms. Perhaps she wanted to be closer to them, so she could hate them even more. It wasn't hard, though, to convince her to put up the barrier. She relished the thought of trapping all the Everafters in there, watching them try in vain to get out. And she had killed two birds with one stone, too, by trapping the Grimms in there with them. It would be fun, in her opinion, to watch them endlessly trying to kill each other. She sat back in her enchanted cottage, and watched wars unfold like life was a great big soap opera.
Another question many have wondered over the years is this: why on Earth would someone as restless and hateful as Baba Yaga ever consent to trap herself in a tiny town with creatures she hates so much?
The answer, another thing she would never admit, though for quite different reasons, is this: she didn't....