And Then You Fight the Cakes

In video games like Fable there are mercenaries and pirates, swordsmiths; adventurers and pickpockets-by-profession. In the coinpurse hanging at your smartly burnished buckle, three axes, seven cutlasses, a broadsword and three jeweled blunderbusses have been carefully packed. They shift soundlessly against a year's supply of immortal perishables and several thousand pieces of gold as you sneak by an encampment of Goblins.  Every enemy was born to fight you; Evil men wear black and have a glitter in their eye, and each has taken the same acting classes.  Bodies vanish into rainbow droplets of pixie blood.  Trolls never buy groceries, quest-givers never sleep, and if three hundred pounds of cobbler are too much to carry, any shopkeeper who knows five sentences will be happy to buy all of it, though no one but you has bought a saleable item in all the kingdom since last spring.  Pants, pies and pewter cups know their owner by touch and there is not a man or woman alive who won't fight to the death over a stolen wood plate.  Crabs can talk, boats never travel unless you're on them, and for the last seven years, the inhabitants have been ritually burying their possessions in small, perfectly covered caches throughout the realm.  To find them, there is only one important question: Do you have a cute dog?

Everyone is barking-dog crazy.

I have no quarrel with any of it.  I want more.

Suppose we re-enter our ordinary D&D-meets-faerie actio-adventudrama, and the madness escapes the confines of rhetoric and trope.  So when you ask where to find the mercenary camp, and you stumble across the talkative chap who tells you what mercenaries like...

"...and as everybody knows, mercenaries like cake.  When I was a mercenary, I liked cake.  When I was a mercenary,  I got paid  in cake.  I was a cake mercenary.  I fought for cake.  I fought cakes.  I fought for cake against cakes and then I ate them."

...if you think, what clue lies nestled in this dialogue, which discloses the location of the camp?

... there will be none.   He is neither lying nor crazy.

And then you have to fight the cakes.
You, against a mad army of cake-based desserts.  Maybe they have an alliance with the fillo nation.  Certainly the pies and doughy legions are among them.  Brightly colored, layered, frosted and assembled cakes, cakelike derivatives:  eclairs, operas.  Spongecake, rumcakes.  


Cakes.
All frightfully fragile and nearly tumbling apart.  Their tools, weapons, uniforms and garnishes are pastel and pressed-sugar hard-crumblies: wedding party figurine arms, thin paper hats and parasols. They fire silver decorative balls out of frankensteined kitchen implements and clown accessories.

Wobbling slits of cherry pie stoop to pick up their bloody, aborted filling as it dribbles out of folds and joints.

Their blood is pureed and reprocessed brains.  Stiff and slender recruits are held down, and the remains of the dead are pumped into their bellies.  Their mouths are stained with cannibal crushed raspberry, marionberry, salmonberry.  They march in rows by color, assorted and munitioned by rhyme.  Mouths and arms, whole floors of cooked, spongy thorax fall off when they talk and move.  They have very little magic.  To you, their weapons are at most a nuisance, an adorable surprise.  Their bodies break in your hands, you squish and puncture them.  Tear them to pieces, knock them down, scrape off their faces and limbs.
The battle will not go well.  You are a self-contained annihilation. Oh, they might get lucky; perhaps you drown in a well banana pudding and poison a whole state with your rotting meat and iron-filled, pulsing blood.  Accident, freak chance are their only salvation.  At night they shield themselves from the fragrant dead with white-ribboned gauze, hard, transparent plastic.  Perhaps your inscrutable design is satiated; rubbing sugar cubes on one another's crowns, they pray.   It is not.  The hours of slaughter stretch into days. 

The cries are sweet, and the swell murmurs low through the grass.  Unsettled, uncooked platoons bulge forward and expire.  Eyes stretch, plump, explode in gasps.  Roccoco, rainbow gutworks spill about you in fountains.  Their voices gurgle; the vibrations of wailing rend their soft throats.  You carve a single swath of silence through hillsides of horrified wailing, the width of your arms, through the countryside.  Still they advance.  Bodies fall apart on-the-march.  You splatter a thousand bodies with a gunshot.  You pause and shove a tray of babies in your mouth.  The horror eclipses them, their mouths fall off from screaming.  Plastic and sugar eyes bend desperately toward the mouth on the ground.  It continues to move, soundless.

Fresh poundcake ramparts rise on the horizon, petit fours hardened in chocolate fan nimbly through the galeries.  Volleys of tiny  pretzel sticks rain down, the doughy heads winking with brandy fires before they are extinguished in flight.  A mille-feuille drawbridge cranks upward, shudders, and disgorges its ribs into the egg whites below.   You begin to work on the curtain wall, hollowing a funnel through the dense frosting while hot peach cobblers are butchered and poured onto you from above.  The air is heavy with cinnamon.

You work mercilessly, back and forth to the river, pouring milk into the widening gap.  At last, hillsides of cake soldiers totter to avalanche.    Biscotti leap from the parapets to clog the flood and filled pastries teem about you with doughnut packets of flour, misstep, pop their innards into absorbent waists of bundt militia.  The mingling with death can never be undone.  Behind the walls, pens of tiramisu groan anxiously.

Now.  Perhaps you, the player, have inched along the borders of rotting fens, moved under cover of night, waded the rivers to avoid the maddened plains of soldiers.  Cradled your precious halo through the congealed wastes, the rank, expired cricks.  Well.  As the days lengthen, the choice must be faced:  even the kindest of heart must eat.   Scrape them up off the ground, cradle handfuls of bodies to your lips.  Pop them into your mouth, dip writhing crescents into a cup of coffee.  The army must be faced.  Only through the dense, mountainous cities at the heart of their civilization, can your mission be completed.  Omnipotent, you will wade through, feeding; wipe their fatty, whipped guts off your mouth with a sleeve, burp, and march grimly forward.

Maybe they get lucky. The first time through you're stupid and take a nap lying down.  A blue-eyed cupcake with a paper hat holds a squirming, severed macaroon above you, traces a wordless spell, and the stoic biscotti advance,  cram terrified, defenseless tarts into your mouth, ears and nose.  You convulse once, your nostrils filled with angelic, white-and-strawberry pus, vomit, shit.