The Monstrefact: The Fireys of Labyrinth

the film itself on Weird House Cinema. Today, I want to talk about the most terrifying denizens of the Goblin King's Labyrinth, creatures that have unsettled children for almost four decades now, The Fieries of the Fire Gang. You remember them. Do not tell me that you don't, because I know even now you're picturing their lanky, vulturelike bodies, their huge ears, their bright red and orange fur, and those piercing mad eyes.

The Labyrinth Bestiari by st. Bindet, with illustrations by Iris Complete, devotes no fewer than eight pages to illustrations of the Fieries, along with notations that describe them as chaotic, unhinged, good natured troublemakers. And that is essentially correct. But Bende also points out that quote, anyone adverse to combustion, disorder and the possibility of dismemberment is advised to steer clear of

their revelry. Yes, because for starters, the Fieries are so named not only for their brilliant, flamelike colorization, but also for their innate pyrokinetic abilities and even more terrifying, they possess the ability to detach and reattach their own limbs and heads at will. They can also remove their own eyeballs, roll them as dice, and then swallow them in order

to return their eyeballs to their sockets. But all of this reaches a fever pitch when these inhuman hedonists engage in what I can only describe as a dismemberment party. Fieries will dance around the great fire and pull themselves apart with gleeful enthusiasm. They'll employ their disembodied legs and heads as clubs and balls in morbid games of croquet. They will even swap body parts with each other and reconstitute themselves into multi limbed forms that cavort through the forest.

The only rule they keep is thou shalt only throw thine own head and all that is well and good for the Fieries, except, as we see in Labyrinth, they can scarcely comprehend beings that don't have these strange powers of bloodless living, dismemberment and instant regrafting. We're to understand that many an outsider guest to their festivities winds up as a pile of body parts that puzzlingly refuse to graft back together. Way to kill the vibe and welcome

also the guest. But it's a detail I always appreciated. The Fieries are indeed good time party creatures, but their inability to understand other beings makes them a very dangerous encounter in the world of Labyrinth. Naturally, we don't have anything quite like the Fieries in the natural world. Certainly we have some amazing examples of regeneration, from C stars and C cucumbers to the Axolotel, but they regrow, they

don't reattach. Humans alone have developed the medical knowledge of limb reattachment, and even this has its limits, and in the best of cases, is far from instantaneous. And as for the grafting of another's individual limbs onto your body, and even the zeno tissue of other organisms such as pigs. Humans face severe limitations due to the body's autoimmune response

to transplanted limbs, tissues, and organs. This generally requires the use of immunosuppressive medication to prevent rejection of the donor limb, tissue, or organ, but the lowering of the body's immune response in general can then open the door for other infections. Donor recipient matching can also help, and a host of more advanced techniques, including stem cell therapy, genetic engineering, biomaterials,

and more, may provide additional possibilities in the future. Now with the Fieries, we might imagine, well, it's possible that their own immune systems would reject another Fiery's head or limbs if it remained attached for too long. Human rejection can play out over days, months, or even years. The Fieries might simply not remain attached to other limbs long enough for it to be a problem, something maybe they

only do during these games and festivities. On the other hand, knowing nothing about their deeper biology, it's also possible that they're all genetically identical and therefore perfect donors for each other.

It's also possible that the fieries boast an overall reduced autoimmune response to allow this sort of fusing, and evolves some other form of complementary autoimmune strategy to make up for it, which may well be the case with the natural world anglerfish, in which the bodies of genetically disparate male and female counterparts are able to fuse together without invoking a strong anti graft immune rejection response, a rejection response that we see in pretty much all other vertebrates.

The fieries don't seem particularly concerned with predators or anything really, which raises the question of why they might have evolved to be like this. If such logic even applies to the labyrinth, one can imagine there could be a survival advantage in simply being able to graft on the limbs, tissues, and organs of other members of your group, perhaps even in a role based way, sharing particularly healthy or strong body parts for particular tasks. One can also see where

this could easily get out of hand. But then again, perhaps it also benefits the fieries as far as group cohesion goes. Not only can they share information and resources, they can share body parts and adapt their forms to different tasks. Hey, after all, there's no reason to domesticate a horse when you can just make a horse like

body out of your own assembled limbs. If this is all the case, however, clearly they overcame their natural obstacles long ago and now devote their natural talents exclusively to self enjoyment and celebration. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster, Fact, The Artifact, or Animilius Dupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.