text: [Themes: Food, Fantasy, fairy tale, violence, hunger, fantasy, constrained protagonist]
  
  > Go downwards
  You descend the staircase.
  
  Nobody now remains to tend this kitchen's hearth or knead the dough rolled on the countertops. Neglected saucepans cool. Flour has settled on the floor, tracked with footprints.
  
  Westward a doorway opens to the castle gate; stairs wind upward to the pantry and downward to the buttery; northward the banquet hall lies in ruin.
  
  > Go north
  No common bailey, but a garden with walls trellis-wound. Its master hauls herself from bed to bed, throwing her tendrils out to drag her leafy head across the ground. That would be Jenny Lettucehead, the castle gardener extraordinaire. Here you're in her domain, patches plump with young cabbages.
  
  She's rocking one cabbage to sleep, her vines laced into a cradle.
  
  Northward, below a balcony, a door opens into the balance gallery, and southward are the gateway and drawbridge.
  
  > go north
  Northward a gleaming golden door would lead into the chapel, but it's sealed. Beneath your feet, the floor's plated with silver polished to a mirror's shine.
  
  Westward and eastward you'll find tapestried chambers, and southward's the courtyard.
  
  > go west
  Across the western wall's another tapestry embroidered with a grand combat, in which this castle's vilest invader, the mouse king, had his tail chopped. Milk flows into the chamber from the south, streaming through breadstick grates set in the floor.
  
  A durkha guard stands, southward, at the entrance into the great hall.
  
  Eastward's the balance gallery; upward a staircase runs to the solar.
  
  > examine the tapestry
  All larders attract vermin, and the more well stocked the larder, the more vicious the vermin. You'd never fathom what waves were repulsed from this castle, what rodents swarmed the walls, until one midnight when the chimes were ringing came the mouse king with his seven heads to the vanguard. He'll die forever in this tapestry, slain by a golden virge in nobler combat, by a truer monarch, than vermin ever deserved to fight. Judge for yourself, darling, the portrait's faithfulness, how excellent its threads capture such fey beauty.
  
  > go upward
  You ascend the staircase.
  
  Omelettes carpet the floor. A brazier crackles merrily, surrounded by soft lard couches with marshmallow pillows. Less appetizing's that cage in the corner, where a carrion crow hunches behind nougat bars, watching the room.
  
  Southward you'll find the baron's cabinet, eastward the scriptorium, and downward stairs lead to the western tapestry.
  
  > Go south
  Before a giant fireplace sits a figure with proportions to match: the Baron d'Boeuf at his private suppertime. Oh how he hulks above your head, high, high enough to scrape the ceiling were he hunched merely a thumb's breadth less. He's engaged picking morsels from a basket at his feet, packing them down his gullet with a sirloin fist.
  
  "You'll do nicely," he says, pulling a spanish onion from the pile's peak.
  
  Northward you could return to the solar.
  
  > eat the basket
  You heft yourself into the baron's basket, tumble down amongst his vegetables, but you're not there one instant when he grasps you in his palm. Bratwurst fingers surround you. You're raised almost to the roof to meet his maw.
  
  "An aubergine?" he says. "Lovely."
  He swallows you.
  You slide along esophageal membranes until you're emptied out into the baron's... 
  First Stomach
  You've been engulfed into a butcher's dream: steak, steak galore, walls plastered with pastrami, roast beef pillars rising into porterhouse arches, meatloaf squishing beneath your weight. Gravy saliva gushes from the baron's throat above. Around you floats debris from his past meals: broken chairs, bedposts, bookcases, curtains, even one rotting horse still tethered to its cart. He's eaten more than vegetables in his heyday.
  
  > examine the steak
  You're sinking, darling, down into the gravy, deeper through the meat. Muscles contract around you. Somewhere some great sphincter opens and squeezes you through its tube. There's no time for sightseeing when you're being digested.
  
  At every side, smashed architecture leans, castles entire piled against cottages and mansions and wrecked towers whose spires jut through cascading acid falls. A countryside ruined lines this stomach with toppled walls. Rumbles upset the rubble. Stones clatter and brickwork breaks. The baron's working to process more than tonight's supper.
  
  > eat baron
  Another vegetable comes down the pipe and clobbers you. This one's a great potato. What a bump it makes! Again the baron's gut convulses, more muscles contract, and you're sucked through another sphincter's lips.
  
  Now you're in deep, and not alone. Halfway-digested heaps gleam in the dripping dark. Look closer and you'll see them looking back. They moan, although they won't move far, not rendered into chyme. What was an oyster duchess leaks across a lobster gentleman's boiled red claws. Oatmeal courtiers have softened into sludge. Rooster feet twitch, tendons gelatinous. They've been stewing.
  
  > eat baron
  They may have feeble hands, these eaten souls, but they have hands and hands and hands. You're swamped, pulled deeper by hands, hands, until you can't glimpse anything but hands—and then the suction's got your feet, and slurp you've gone downward once more.
  
  All's calm here in the baron's deepest pit. No clutter but a single candle burning on a small table. A black figure sits at that table, carving vegetables with knife and fork. It's blacker than a shadow, blacker than blackness. Its silhouette resembles the baron.
  
  > look at the figure
  As you watch, the figure cuts an eggplant and lifts one slice to where most people have mouths. It has no features, no contours illuminated by the candle's flame. All light's absorbed completely into its shadow.
  
  > look at the table
  It doesn't eat the eggplant.
  No, instead it shifts to look at you, lowers its fork again. Now something spreads across its head: little white teeth smiling. Your vision's filled with the figure's blackness. No matter where you turn, there's nothing else. You cannot see the candle, or the table, or the stomach that's enclosing you.
  You've been swallowed again.
  Val sans Retour
  Nothing but nothing surrounds you. A darkness deeper than the eyeless know. Well, dear, you're in a pickle now.
  
  > eat the darkness
  You can't eat the abyss. It's eaten you.
  
  > eat the darkness
  You can't eat the abyss. It's eaten you.
  
  Wait one moment, what's that? Something else swallowed into the dark. You're drifting closer, or perhaps you've always been this close. In fact, drifting's hardly the word. Your feet might be on nothing yet they're planted firm.
  
  Why, goodness, it's a woman. She's known better nights.
  
  > examine the woman
  She's swooned, frame wasted thin. Each muscle's just as visible as though her flesh were flayed, and lines divide her body as they would a butcher's chart. Spotted gossamer silk trails from her horned headdress.
  
  "Please, please," she says, "take me away... "
  
  > examine the headdress
  All that's left from her courtly days, however long ago those were. She's been inside the baron's gut longer than some kingdoms survive. He'd be nothing, you see, without her anchoring his appetite.
  
  > eat woman
  "I'm not even myself," she says. "It's been too long...  I'm spread too thin...  trapped in here...  and out there...  open your mouth...  I'd
  rather be... 
  anywhere else... "
  It's not polite to make a lady wait.
  She crawls into your jaws, one stomach traded for another. No sooner have her toes slipped past your lips than the abyss shatters. You're weightless, falling, shadows splintered, and your impact punches back through the baron's belly.
  
  Light blinds you. There's the roaring fireplace, and there's the Baron d'Boeuf roaring too—with stomachache. He can't contain what he's consumed. His bottomless gut's bottomless no more. Doubled over, he heaves his own insides out through his throat, gravy and steaks and sausages and meatballs and roast beef, everything that he's ever swallowed, everything from his basket, and your mouth's open for the feast. When he's finished, you're finished with him, and he's finished for good.
  Third course: eaten.
  Baron's Cabinet
  A giant fireplace burns in a vacant room. Without the baron here to dwarf its size, the flames seem to lash higher than ever.
  
  Northward you could return to the solar.
  
  > enter the fireplace
  You tiptoe carefully around the flames.
  
  Sweat beads your brow. Heat ripples in the air above the hearth. Stand far against the fireplace's rearmost wall, where barbecue sauce oozes down the bricks; there you'll have space to skirt the blaze.
  
  Northward you'd inch back to the baron's cabinet.
  
  > look at the sauce
  Globs glisten as the firelight flickers. Your nostrils inhale vinegar mingled with mustard, paprika, cayenne. Glorious sauce, why baste these bricks when you could baste a tongue?
  
  > eat the sauce
  You plant your hands into the sauce, lean forward and lick, lick. Mesquite flavors both savory and sweet thrill down your throat. You'd gulp this barbecue sauce by the gallon with delight. There's something strange, though, underneath the sauce.