Once in a blue moon, Baba Yaga's house stops to rest.
When this happens, Death comes to play cards.
Baba Yaga and Death go far back, before her name had been washed away and replaced. The two prefer Honeymoon Bridge, a game which they find strikes an elegant balance between intention and chance. Like Death itself, the cards are transient and points unimportant. They do not play for keeps and never speak.
Baba Yaga's daughter, Eve, joins them occasionally (though she is no card shark like her mother, not yet). All of seven years old, she is the apple of her mother's eye; were she to vanish, Baba Yaga's world would split. Eve is delighted by books, merengue, and Berlioz. She loves her mother and stew above all else. The outside world mutters uneasily, and stories abound of her existence (Eve was born of an angel's tears, lured to Earth by a wax facsimile of God's lost love; she was created from one of a fox's nine tails, butchered for Baba Yaga's fur muff; her father was taken to bed by Baba Yaga and devoured as a praying mantis does with her mate), but they do not concern the child nor her mother. Pick a tale. They are all true enough.
Much like the stories of her house (the cabin grew legs and a soul to jump over a great wyrm in their way; it hatched from a phoenix egg after seventeen years of incubation in Baba Yaga's mouth; there is an ever beating heart in the cookstove and legs stolen from a giant's storeroom sutured to the foundation) or the question of Baba Yaga and Death's friendship (Death lost a game of knucklebones with the witch of the woods and now must sit at her table; she is the only one who can cure Death's periodical headaches drawn on by the scent of hospitals; Baba Yaga burst from the rotting belly of a great sea beast and knew Death from her first breath), how Eve came to be is not important to this story.
What is important is how the future comes a-knocking at the legged house's door.
Baba Yaga does not trust the door knocker. Any of her true friends know better than to use the distasteful thing. Clients knock once. Egrets twice. Traveling salesmen try thrice.
(Baba Yaga pretends to be gone when the door knocks three times, despite the fact that she never leaves her house except to tend her garden on the roof or sit on her back stoop. She has everything she could ever want inside — why should she venture out, when the whole world is within?)
The future knocks four times one morning, and Baba Yaga freezes. She does not invite the future in, but it pushes across the threshold bearing a shark's grin and chocolate. Eve squeals in delight when one such treat is placed on her tongue. Baba Yaga purses her lips and turns away into the library. While she is distracted, the future leaves a trail of chocolates out the door.
Eve, delighted, follows them outside and down the ladder. She jumps from the running house and follows them over hill and dale, through plains and forests and across the mile-high bridge. Eve follows the chocolate trail into the mountains, and when she looks up, the future is nowhere to be found. Only the dreadfully cold here and now.
Eve begins to shiver.
Baba Yaga, having made stew, calls for her daughter. Hearing nothing, she calls again. When only her echo comes running back along the floorboards, she panics and calls a third time, checking under cushions, behind the couch, and in cupboards. When Eve fails to materialize, half of Baba Yaga's soul falls away. She orders the house to retrace its steps.
(This only occurs in times of great emergency, as the house does not like moving back over land it has tread before.)
Baba Yaga and her inverted soul stop by a candy wrapper, crushed into the dirt by a passing moose. She and the house spiral outwards, searching. Dusk bleeds into night into dawn, but at last Baba Yaga finds her daughter, near blue and still. Eve is whisked back indoors, and the house makes for warmer climes. Soups and tonics and oatmeal and cocoa abound, but Eve falls further and further into herself.
Some time later, Baba Yaga realizes that the house has stopped and the moon shines blue above the boundless desert. She leaves her daughter's room and finds Death shuffling the cards on the kitchen table. She sits, too full of fear that her visitor will open the door and take her daughter into the next world to focus on the game. This time, they play for keeps. Baba Yaga fritters away her hand until only one card remains.
Death meets her gaze. They both know what happens next.
As Death stands, so too does Baba Yaga. She lays her last card on the table and offers anything, anything in exchange for her daughter.
Death, about to lift the door latch, pauses. All things must meet Death, and so they keep their distance. They hate from afar. These card games are Death's only respite in a long state of being.
Seven hours pass as Death considers.
The moon hangs frozen above, observing all that flits through Death's empty head.
When at last Death turns around, an offer is extended. In exchange for her daughter's soul, Baba Yaga must give Death a permanent companion. A bony hand is extended; Baba Yaga spits on her palm and shakes. She rears back, a woodcutter's axe flashing above her head before burying itself in the floor. The two former halves of Death stand suspended a moment longer before fluttering to the ground in tandem.
Seven more hours.
(Death decays)
Still the moon watches.
Baba Yaga deposits Death in her stew pot along with myrrh, an alarm clock, bear fangs, the axe, and a sheaf of her own hair. She squeezes three drops of blood and stirs withershins before covering the mixture and setting it to simmer. When she returns seven hours later from tending to Eve, the pot is clanging through the kitchen impatiently. Scolding the cauldron for denting the floor, Baba Yaga swipes the lid off the top and out spring two columns of smoke. One is dark as burnished ebony, the other pale as new fallen snow. They pool across the room, blanketing first the floorboards, then the stovetop, then the ceiling. Gradually, they solidify. One lumbers about the room, massive, while the other moves with delicate grace. They circle each other thrice before bowing to Baba Yaga, the deal accepted and accord fulfilled. The moon vanishes from sight and death's concurrent parts slip out the back window as, from the other room, Baba Yaga hears a faint cry for stew. Her soul returns to itself, complete once more.
Now death romps about the countryside in a glorious game of tag, chasing all into the next stage of their journey. Those who run from their demise meet the calloused hands of the Brute, while those who accept the end feel the feather-light touch of the Dancer. When there is nothing left to chase other than themselves, death's merry game will end in a choking embrace of camaraderie. They do not mind. To them, they only ever need the other — when one fades, so too will their twin.
The moon hangs blue overhead and Baba Yaga's house stops to rest. Death comes to play cards (though the table is set for four). Baba Yaga still wins most of their games, but Eve is learning fast. She will grow to rival her mother in her own time, bargained from under the shadow of eternity. Sometimes, it is a fox and a rabbit come to wager their hands, other times it is a sparrow and a goshawk. Still others a sheep and a wolf, or a moose and an orca. No matter their guises, the forms remain the same; the Dancer and the Brute passing their days in games of childhood fancy as Baba Yaga and her daughter grow old onboard the forever moving house.
Bless them.