At first, the little boy didn’t understand why screaming and yelling that the wolf was attacking made everyone run around and panic so much. He didn’t know what a wolf even was? He had seen drawings of them in books. He’d heard far-traveling bards and merchants speak of seeing wolves five or six kingdoms to the east, a quarter of the continent away, but there had not been wolves sighted in their lands in three generations, in seventy years at least. He probably didn’t even think they were real, himself. It was just funny for him to give folks such a shock. To see them run around all panicked and afraid for their lives. But he was no peasant child who could know punishment or consequence for his lies, his father was a feudal lord. These villages were fiefdom to his father The Baron. He would be The Baron himself, some day. Only royalty was allowed to punish royalty. The king was far away and his father thought it cruelly funny in the manner that monsters who call people their serfs live within a miasma of seething hot hatred?
So, he just kept on doing it as he grew, soon with a studied malice, to get away with anything. When the young future baron murdered a horse to watch it die, he just said it was wolves. Or when he killed a forced lover for carrying his inconvenient bastard, it was wolves! When the nearby nobilities saw him as psychopathic even for a baron’s son and tried to send messages toward the king, the wolves killed the messengers and those nobles and Father just laughed!
When he became the baron himself, in deep paranoid delusions of rebellion and to hold onto power, his entire barony became about the immediate threat of the wolves. He controlled the populace with the lie and controlled the portion of the population not daft enough to buy into Wolfmania with the threat of prison or death. Gigantic walls were built around their villages, around the most important farms to keep the non-existent wolves away? Outside those walls, countless wolf traps and shifts of guards with pole-arms, on the constant lookout for nothing.
As Baron John, once merely a spoiled boy who’d cried wolf for fun, grew older and crazier, folks realized he was starting to believe his own bullshit. It didn’t hurt that his advisors were actively sending convicts in shabby wolf costumes out to be killed by some confused guards, hoping to curry favor with a madman. Their settlements were prisons for them all, by and by. Prison for that crazy old liar most of all, the highest walls, the biggest walls? The best walls!
Those wolves never came, of course, because there weren’t wolves to begin with. However? Near the end of the tyrant’s life, the dragons did come. And all of the defenses meant nothing when faced with dangers from above and they all died rather quickly. But not to the wolves?
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