I'm gonna be honest here guys, running out of ideas... send help.
Also, let me know what other fairy tales you guys want.
This is gonna be a 3-parter, so get ready for the most cliffhanger story you've seen in your life.
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Part I
In the festering heart of a centuries-dead town which time had forgotten, between alleys that whispered your name and windows that blinked, there was a cobbler's shop. Its sign was worn to illegibility long ago, its paint chipped away in peeling scabs. Moss gnawed at the eaves, and something darker seeped beneath the boards. Nobody went there now, nobody sane at least. Not since the war. Not since the town square had been littered with broken statues and dried blood.
But inside, an old man toiled, back crooked into a question mark, fingers stunted by years of toil. He was called Meister Falk, though nobody knew why. Some said he was the King's personal cobbler. Others said he stitched the skin of deserters onto boots for hire. Falk spoke nothing else.
His hands trembled with each stitch, the knuckles swollen and cracked, the nails blackened and separating. A fungal bloom had spread across his palm like a starved moss. Still, he worked, not out of hope, but fear. Fear of what waited if he ever ceased. He didn't speak much, but he spoke to his shoes. Muttered apologies. Apologized to the leather. "Sorry, sorry," he'd whisper as he forced the awl in, blood speckling the edges when he faltered. The tools were older than him. Rusted, some of them whispering with the voice of all the soles they'd pierced.
He was impoverished beyond all reason, hungry even while he labored. His ribs protruded from under his thin shirt. His eyes were deep in wells surrounded by bruised flesh. His belly was the sound of a wounded beast. And though he sewed from dawn until nightfall, all that he made did not hold. Soles came loose before footsteps could be heard. Threads unraveled like unspooled arteries. The glue turned into pus. The seams irritated the wearer's flesh until they ripped them off.
It was as if the shoes did not want to be alive.
On the last evening of November, when the moon was bloated and raw like a carcass hung for butchering, Falk slept at his workbench, forehead pressed against the leather of his final commission. There was no money left. No food. His fire was ash. His hope was ashes.
His breath came in short gasps, drawn like thread from a tightened chest. He had accepted that he would die with needle in hand, with only the scuff of bare feet and the rats gnawing beneath the floor for company.
But he woke not to quiet, but to noise. The gentle scritching of thread being drawn through flesh. The wet squelch of tight leather drawn taut. The whisper of metal instruments moving with unnatural accuracy. He sat up, heart arresting, mouth parched.
The store glowed. Dimly. As if breath misted through ghost lips, producing trails of frost on the windows. The glow emanated from under the floorboards, working its way up like poison gas.
On his workbench, the shoes were complete. Beautifully. Stitching like veins. Curves like bone. They gleamed damply, like new organs. The laces writhed slightly when he looked too long.
And shadows around them.
Small things.
Too quick to be properly observed, and yet Falk glimpsed. Pale skin. Fingers too long. Joints that bent incorrectly. Eyes like sinkholes, empty of light. Lips peeled back in silent amusement, showing rows of pin-teeth. They scuttled, bone-thin and yet powerful, barbed fingers weaving across the leather as they worked another pair. Not sewing, but shaping. Carving. Making the leather shriek, though there was no sound.
One of them turned its head completely around to gaze at Falk. It blinked vertically. Another bent down beside, sniffing at a half-completed sole, and vomited a thick, black bile on it. The leather quivered, shook, and dried.
Then they saw him.
They stopped, their heads jerking toward him in a snapping motion. Eyes met his. And smiled. Their mouths opened wide. Too wide. Too many teeth. Gums stretched so tight they tore.
Falk screamed. But the scream never passed his throat.
His tongue had rolled back in his mouth like a scared slug. Down the chin was a thin trickle of blood. He attempted to shift position, but his limbs would not. As though the shoes had turned against him. As though the fibers in the trousers had been wound around the calves.
The elves progressed sluggishly. One inched along the ceiling. Another came out of the inside of a half-sewn boot, its shape contorted impossibly to fit.
And they spoke. Not verbally. But into his teeth. "You brought us back to life. We remember your hands. Your blood fed us once. It still does." Falk wept. Not from fear. But for the faintest spark of recognition. He had called them once. Ages ago. When his wife was dying and he had needed coin. When he had spoken the old rhyme aloud over a pool of blood beneath the new moon. He had forgotten. They hadn't. They never forget.