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Custard Cookie the Third paraded dutifully through the halls of the Cookie Kingdom Castle searching for the meeting room where The Ancients were discussing the adventures that had kept themselves and Brave, Strawberry, and Wizard Cookies away for so very long. He carried the largest tray of jellies he was allowed to hold with his scepter balanced atop. He got to the door and instead of knocking, almost dropped the whole tray when he moved his hand to attempt it. He stared, thwarted, at the large and heavy door, frowning imperiously to make it clear it better make itself more convenient.
"Your king has arrived with jellies for his guests!" He declared with his biggest, most respectable voice.
On the other side, he heard the muffled voice of Brave Cookie who before long very graciously opened up the impudent door almost directly into the jelly tray. Luckily, Custard Cookie the Third had impeccable coordination and after a solid ten seconds of bobbling around re-balancing the tray, not a single jelly was spilled upon the ground.
"I come bearing the tastiest of the pantry's snacks!" He announced brightly, prancing up and lifting the tray above his head to set onto the table, pushing it with all his kingly might far enough to be stable.
"Ooooo, gimme!" Golden Cheese Cookie leaned all the way across the table and grabbed the entire plate, pulling it in front of her and beginning to snack. "Wow, so sugary."
"Ah, thank you Custard Cookie III." White Lily Cookie smiled at him. Pure Vanilla gave him a gentle headpat and straightened his crown for him. Custard Cookie III beamed and trotted off to attend to his many other subjects. He could delegate a summary of the meeting to Wizard Cookie, his most trusted court magician.
“Oh! Don’t forget this thing!” Golden Cheese tossed him his scepter and it only took him two tries before he managed to get it firmly within his grasp. He bowed to her in a most grateful and kinglike manner, then turned and shut the door behind him. Pure Vanilla Cookie returned his attention to the table and resumed his debriefing.
"After returning from Beast Yeast, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to solve the problem of the beasts is to somehow turn their own plans against them."
"Against them?" Hollyberry tilted her head.
"We should try to -ethically- unite the Soul Jams."
"That will not work." Dark Cacao said before anyone else's reactions had time to percolate.
"B-but what if it can?" White Lily asked.
"I'm with Dark Cacao, Vanilla." Golden Cheese looked to him dubiously, mouth half full of jellies. "There's no ethical way to contend with The Beasts short of smacking the soul jams out of them by force."
"I wouldn't say that..." Hollyberry looked down to the table as she spoke.
"Fine, then should we petition the Witches to ~gently pluck~ the soul jam out of the Beasts like they did when transferring our jams out of them, then hand those over to us to do... What? What use do I have for the power of Destruction?"
"Let's keep our hypotheticals out of the realm of Witches." White Lily murmured.
“Oh, um…” Golden Cheese shoved a handful of jellies in her mouth by way of apology.
"Yeah, besides, I don't think The Witch has done anything gently a day in her life." Brave Cookie pouted, crossing his arms on the table. "You guys remember how hot she kept the oven?" He turned to Wizard and Strawberry Cookie, who nodded in agreement. It took the three of them a moment to notice the silence that had descended upon the room.
“… What?” Brave Cookie looked behind him to see if someone had magically appeared in the past five seconds. Just the door and a bundle sugar spun flowers in a waffle vase.
"Brave Cookie... what are you talking about?" Pure Vanilla Cookie turned to him, eyes half open. White Lily Cookie's brow crinkled anxiously and she leaned further towards Pure Vanilla.
Brave Cookie blinked.
"What do you mean?"
"Why are you talking like you've... met a Witch?"
Brave, Strawberry, and Wizard Cookie all looked to each other, confused as to why the subject had changed. And to something so…. Whatever-this-was to boot.
“Why wouldn’t we have?” Wizard Cookie asked.
“The Witches’ Banquet only meets every few thousand years.” White Lily whispered. “How could you have met one when you’re so freshly baked?”
“Because… the Witch baked us…?”
Crickets.
“Why are you all looking at us like that???” Wizard Cookie twirled his staff self consciously. Strawberry Cookie shuffled shyly in her seat.
Pure Vanilla reached for something to say to that. “You never said anything about this before.”
“Why would we need to?” Brave Cookie tilted his head.
Pure Vanilla reached for anything else to say and after a few attempts gave up the search. “I suppose it never did come up…”
“How did you end up here from a Witch’s kitchen?” Hollyberry asked.
“I hopped out the window~” Brave Cookie chirped.
“I snuck out while she was sleeping.” Wizard Cookie raised his head and puffed up his chest.
“I… don’t remember how I got out.” Strawberry Cookie admitted. “I just remember running and running until I was all out of energy.”
“We all did that.” Wizard Cookie patted her on the shoulder and she relaxed a little.
“That… doesn’t exactly explain how you made it back to-- um… made it to Earthbread.” White Lily Cookie said.
Brave, Wizard, and Strawberry Cookie blinked.
“Do… do no other Witches live on Earthbread?” Wizard Cookie asked. “Wait, no, of course they don’t— Or at least they didn’t— You wouldn’t have gone off to the Witches’ Banquet if they did.”
“Yeah, wait a second…” Brave Cookie whispered with the voice of a Cookie who had only now put together the pieces of a thought multiple months in the making. “Why’d you go all the way to the Banquet to talk to a Witch? She’s only like a few days’ hike from here. I think.”
“WHAT?” The voices of the Ancients echoed off the ceiling.
“Um…” Strawberry Cookie fiddled anxiously with her hoodie strings. “I sorta thought she didn’t talk to the Witch because that happened… hundreds of years ago. So maybe the Witch didn’t move close by until after that?”
“Ohhhhh,” Brave Cookie nodded, “that makes sense.”
“What do you mean there’s a Witch a few days’ hike from here?!” White Lily gripped her staff tightly.
“I… mean that there’s a Witch a few days’ hike from here?” Brave Cookie didn’t understand why White Lily was panicking, the Witch never went far from her hut in all the time he’d been there. Which, admittedly, wasn’t too long, but he never heard tell of any rampaging Witches scouring the countryside for wayward treats since he’d left. Then again, White Lily had a pretty good reason to be easily wound up about Witches after her last incident with them. “I don’t think you gotta worry about her. She doesn’t really care about the cookies she does bake, let alone you guys. She didn’t miss us three enough to go looking after all.”
“That does beg the question though: How were you all baked, anyway?” Wizard Cookie stared at the cookies around the table with fresh eyes, ignoring for now their open and befuddling alarm. “If… White Lily really never met any Witch at all before going to the Banquet… how did you all bake without an oven?”
“The sun, like any other cookie.” Golden Cheese Cookie looked at him like he’d just asked how milk got in the bucket from the well.
“And some good old fashioned love and care from other cookies.” Hollyberry chimed in.
“Wh- but cookies can’t just—” Wizard Cookie waved his arms emphatically, swishing his gaze around the room. “Where did your dough come from, then??”
“The dough of a cookie is mixed by those that wish to bring them into this world with ingredients in their homeland and the life powder of the cookies that mold them.” Dark Cacao said in that usual weighty way he said all his sentences.
“Who made the baby dough we mailed to Custard Cookie, then?” Brave Cookie scrunched his eyebrows and turned to Wizard Cookie.
“You mailed a baby?” Golden Cheese balked.
“Well yeah,” Brave Cookie smiled dumbly. “We couldn’t bring them with us on the journey.”
“I… couldn’t think of a better solution.” Pure Vanilla fiddled with his hair. “So I just let them do it...”
“I heard from Chili Pepper Cookie that the baby dough is doing very well and had a birthday a little while ago.” Strawberry Cookie chimed in, hoping that would make them all sound a little less irresponsible. She’d mainly been concerned with getting the baby as far away as possible from whatever Witch had been careless enough to discard such delicate dough outside. Though now she had… a few more questions…..
“That is always good to hear!” Hollyberry Cookie beamed to her and she blushed.
“I… Brave Cookie, Wizard Cookie, Strawberry Cookie.” Pure Vanilla spoke gently but with an unmistakable tint of apprehension, like he was about to ask about something deeply sensitive. “You three were… baked in… an oven?”
They nodded. Not understanding.
“I was finished up in the freezer.” Wizard Cookie provided as if that was somehow less absurd and borderline violent than cookies being fired in an oven to crisp up.
Brave Cookie wondered internally if this was like the first time he said one of his inside thoughts out loud to Wizard and Strawberry Cookie and figured out some thoughts should, in fact, stay inside thoughts.
“I’m starting to understand how you three got this far in all this Beast business as long as you have if you survived being baked like that.” Golden Cheese popped another jelly into her mouth.
“Are we… really that unusual?” Strawberry Cookie shrank into her seat.
“Oh, it’s… not that, Strawberry Cookie.” White Lily said. “You’re just… surprising. We didn’t think any Cookie but the Beasts had been baked by any Witch in a long, long time.”
“Really?” Brave Cookie asked. “She made us by the batchful.”
“There were other Cookies in the Witch’s hut?” Dark Cacao looked at him a little strangely.
“She seemed to like finding new recipes to try.” Wizard Cookie twirled his staff around like a whisk. “She was pretty lazy about housekeeping, though. She lost me behind some frozen peas before she had the chance to eat me and that’s about the first memory I have.”
“I never got to meet any other strawberry flavored cookies before running into Strawberry Crepe Cookie.” Strawberry Cookie said. “I… woke up for the first time in a cookie jar with a bunch of strawberry flavored treats and candies in the pantry. I think I might’ve fainted in the oven from all the heat. I’d probably still be in the jar if Wizard Cookie hadn’t found me and helped me out. I was… probably leftovers…”
“I’m surprised I didn’t completely bite it in the oven.” Brave Cookie flopped on the table, feeling like he was overheating just thinking about it. “I woke up on the baking sheet and the first thought I had was ‘I gotta get outta here.’ So I was relieved to be put on the cooling rack. Until the arm on the ginger cookie next to me fell off, of course.”
Everyone but Wizard and Dark Cacao Cookie recoiled and Brave Cookie blinked the memory away. He looked around and for an instant imagined each of the Ancients on the baking sheet. Cracking and browning and crisping in the fire. He wondered for that second what made them special and him common if all cookies crumbled away one way or another. It was just a matter of either going stale and stiff until you dissolved into crumbs and powder, or getting crunched violently between a Witch’s teeth.
He blinked again and laughed, fighting the embarrassed flush from his face.
“Sorry! That one’s kind of a mood killer.”
“Are you three sure you’re alright to talk about this?” Pure Vanilla asked softly.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Brave Cookie tilted his head.
“Well it’s not every day you have something so traumatic brought up out of the blue.” Hollyberry said.
“Traumatic?” Wizard Cookie boggled.
“I would describe watching the Witch eat handfuls of cookies as… pretty traumatic.” Strawberry Cookie squeaked. Wizard Cookie put an arm around her shoulders.
“Oh, yes, I suppose that does make sense.” He said. “Sorry Strawberry Cookie. We don’t have to keep talking about it.”
Strawberry Cookie nodded. “We… didn’t come together to talk about the three of us, after all…”
“She is correct.” Dark Cacao said. “Pure Vanilla, what could possibly possess you to suggest uniting the soul jams?”
Brave Cookie really truly intended to listen and pay attention, but he couldn’t help going fuzzy and unfocused around the edges. It had been a while since he’d had occasion to think about this stuff, and now Hollyberry Cookie went and called it ‘traumatic’. Which he always thought was a word cookies used in things like medical brochures and mystery books. ‘Bundt force trauma’, ‘trauma to the sugar coat’, that sort of thing. He thinks he’s heard it once or twice the way Hollyberry and the others used it, but it never really… sank in until now. Just what that meant.
The feelings were… really really big. And spindly. Kinda sticky and prickly. Icky in general, really. He wondered if Wizard Cookie would want to study it, it certainly seemed strange enough to warrant his attention. And Brave Cookie knew he certainly wasn’t smart enough to do it on his own.
He felt a gentle tap on his back and turned his head to see Strawberry Cookie’s sucker, then followed it all the way back to Strawberry Cookie, her eyebrows the littlest bit scrunched and eyes overflowing with her own signature sweetness.
He smiled bravely at her, and she smiled back.