It was years since the Grisholm Lion grew a mane, and many still since the carcass of its past had died.
When the King of Stockholm asked for a horse in 799, a sad carpenter named Gris Holme was forced to go on safari. He had returned with the rotting bodice of a lion, having never seen a horse and mistaking a lion for that which was requested.
A seamstress and a tailor decided to make the best of his later execution, and thus they combined Gris Holme's pelt with the lion's, using his eyes where the lion's should have been, his hair where its mane once was, and stuffing the piecemeal contraption with peach fuzz.
Only several centuries later, a Ventian merchant named Stevarino Da Vinci came to town. "The Grisholm Lion," he said, referring to the name it had adopted "is not living up to its true potential." Stevarino Da Vinci—Leonardo's father, and a smarter man—won a defense contract from the Swedish government after a short bidding process. The secretetive terms of the contract, never before released to the public, required Stevarino Da Vinci to construct the ultimate war machine. He filled the Grisholm Lion to the brim with gears, cranks, and a whole lot of good stuff. Nothing like the Lion was ever seen before. Nothing like the Lion has been seen since. Half man, half lion, half machine. Half a soul.
The King of Stockholm gave the Grisholm Lion a countship and some property in the middle of a moat in Örebro, and told him to stay put until his country needed him. If ever there were a time when a great weapon were needed, one so great as to be fearsome even to wield, even to behold—greater than Hitler, apparently—then he would be called to serve. Until then: leave us alone, don't let us behold you. You are a Frankenstein.
And the Lion worked and worked. He thought to make a castle that reminded him of the human breasts he could never feel again with his roughshod paws or his hidden claw contraptions. He pushed boulders from the quarries up in the fjords for the hundreds of miles down to the moat, threw them to his island, and set to work crushing them and shaping them until they made fine bricks and the worthless shards build up a dam for water for some peasants nearby. And a town grew around the castle, many never knowing where the castle came from, nor anything about the mysterious Grisholm Lion within.