The Tale of Toad, Part III
We were en route to find the bones of St. Gravis (as usual).
The giants aren’t bad once you redirect their bountiful energies. We slept soundly next to this one, who was plagued by little men with stabbing, rusted knives, who woke him with a stab every time he slept.
Once the little lights from their wicker-basked heads appeared, we woke him, Poopy died, and he smashed the lot with his great giant-hands.
Further North, the bridge was blocked by two fae knights. The vampires from the West - Alistair’s lot - also could not pass, as any time they tried, their pet beast-men would revolt, attacking everything in sight. So Marius (the vampire) and his unpaid guards camped at the village by the bridge, putting the villagers into a hypnotic state where they did not get paid for their services.
We journeyed forth, past the knights, explaining that we had an urgent message for ’the princess’ (I wrote it myself, and decided I was urgent).
The princess was “five encounters away”, they said. En route, we met little drinking-men, a wild boar, a troll, and more fae-knights in armour.
Poopy did not die, merely became more drunk and feeble-minded, as they insisted on entering every drinking contest the little men challenged her to. We did not find any princess, just old men made of leaves, who explained the princess dreams, inside the village, and we could awaken her.
After awakening her, everyone (villagers and vampires alike) died in a sea of flames, which I had nothing to do with.
Poopy consoled themself after the event by taking everyone’s magical scrolls, and making them tattoos. (we hope the nightmares won’t be a problem)
Finally, we made some headway, and with the bishop’s map which indicated the grave of St. Gravis, where his bones might lie, we tarried, and tarried, and fell over. The mountains in the North have thin air. We could not walk or even stand for long. Only the BAD (Blessed-Ass Donkey) walked unperturbed.
The North is infested with gleeful giants, who have small servants. They look squished, as if giants have been pushing them down for generations, leaving long mining-arms, and no neck.
After finding some cenotaphs to the shadow king and the giant-slayer, we located a hole in the intersection of the four points. This mirrors the false-tomb in the East, which also had four points, forming a cross, with the tomb in the centre.
So we went to the middle, found a sleeping giant, and sent in Poopy. Poopy died, but we descended the great pit, using the spiderweb crossbow to ensure the BAD’s safety.
Down the tunnel, a bridge supported everyone, and the giant could not reach us.
Further down, fire giants were eating fire (as all fire giants do). The servants would bash through the ground until they hit magma, then the fire giants would bathe in the magma, while pulling out the warmth, and leaving themselves trapped in the stone.
We moved left, right, up, down, and Poopy died. We bribed the giants with food, and fled before they ate the BAD. We spoke with an armoured ghost who said something about Feminism.
In the end, it was clear, the bones of St. Gravis were not here.
Ascent made the worst challenge. Poopy had not the strength to fly properly, and simply batted itself onto the shaft’s walls like a lost daddy long-legs. Maia had to tie a rope to its legs, and swing it round, and release it upwards, so it could take the rope up, and climb out. We clamoured up soon after, with with BAD in a rope-harness, as usual.
Now at this point, gentle reader, you may wonder how Poopy could live with this awful ‘death spiral’, where every death makes them weaker, and stranger. Each one bringing useless limbs, damaging their muscles, memories, or the ability to keep their shape for long periods of time; so many shadowy voices in their head that their conversations exist only partly in the real-world, with unseen interruptions. This wheezing homunculus, spending half its ’life’ in a state of magical gloop; you may wonder, how they persist, with such a horrifying death spiral. And if so, you have not been paying attention, because there is no death, there is only the spiral.
Of the many voices and curses Poopy gathered, one commanded her to seek the golden serpent in the North. We were already North, so we decided to take a ‘short trip’, to see this serpent, and ask it to help with Poopy’s countless afflictions.
Gentle reader, it was not a short trip.
Through the giant’s causeway, with hexagonal stones everywhere, days’ of travel through lifeless nothing, in a frozen land where snow never settles, just a thin sheet of ice on top of rocks. Through all this, our brave BAD persevered.
In the West, we found the famed tomb of the Giant King, where the giant slayer met her end, it his stomach. We collected her bones, because we may as well get some bones out of this excursion.
We mapped out far too much of this place for my liking. Little men threw rocks at us, forcing us to waste precious lantern-oil. We passed mechanical things, a grand statue, and cracks in every wall. Honestly, the place has become shoddy.
The myriad caves, caverns, palaces, tombs, and dungeons have all blurred into one in my mind. Somewhere inside the mess we found, somehow, the famed golden serpent, made of piles of golden treasure, rubies for eyes, sharp golden teeth (hopefully an alloy, as gold is not very hard). I threw in a silver piece, for good luck.
The golden serpent felt bad because it could not eat the Sun, though it tried many times. And so we made a deal. In exchange for help with Poopy’s maladies, we would steal a famed magical artefact - the heart of frost, which lies in the North, and makes the North cold. People were there already, trying to dig it up. We need only join them, and take the heart before they did.
Of course, this is not theft, as the heart belonged to none of them. It just sat below the ice.
Tired, and irritated with the giants everywhere (who have no sense of humour), we drudged North. We hid from a troll, but not out of cowardice. I eat trolls for breakfast, but have grown oh so weary of eating trolls for breakfast. The first time you think ’there is enough food here for forty days!’, and that sounds good until day 1, and worse on day 2, and by day 3 you swear never to kill a troll again. Better to kill nothing than waste food of course. To waste food is a sin.
So farther North, we found the mining site where men want to dig up the heart of frost. They had uncovered the entrance, but each door down became frozen, so they pumped the place full of lethal amounts of steam.
We dug and dug. Maia won employee of the month award. Her fire-sword came in handy as we descended the rings of frozen corpses.
And each time that rooms unthawed, things in that place woke up. Trolls, undead, Poopy (who had died).
We found the heart in the hands of a frozen corpse. This man had pulled out his own heart to give to a woman. So the moral of the story is something about Feminism. We swapped the heart for that of a random undead person, and went back up to give the ice-mining men the normal heart, and departed quickly.
On the way back, everything was fine, no trolls stopped to annoy us, the BAD seemed content. It was frozen perfection. Or it could have been!
Poopy had a nightmare. Every magical scroll carved onto that cursed body activated at once. Unanswerable questions, pieces of spaghetti, and a demonic entity made only of arms.
Maia fought valiantly. I fought briefly. Poopy died.
When Poopy resurrected, it found a homunculus in its own image - a little Poopy, known now as ‘Nugget’. It has no voice, nor mind. It cannot lift much, and does not have the strength to chew our only food - old chunks of troll-meat. But Poopy made-do, ensuring it could feed on the chunks of writhing arm-demon we still had lying around.
And so we returned, to the golden serpent, to gift it the heart of frost and let it eat the Sun.
It’s getting too warm nowadays anyway.