Synopsis[]
Deep in a place of irredeemable dark, three ancient witches - one short, one fat, one lean - enact a ritual. Sparing no expense for their precious Weevil, the Woebringer Hags chatter about what form the magic with which they prepare to endow him should take. If he is to adventure among the humans, it must be something subtle - and adventure he will, for the Fates have a plan for him.
While Cal is alone and in trouble some distance from the camp, not everyone is ignorant of her situation - The Gun fires against Flo's thigh, searing her leg - though, oddly, less severely than it should have, and her porcelain-white skin heals almost immediately. Weevil, incomprehensibly, manages to sleep through the gunshot, but Odionsprings out of his tent and sprints toward Cal, shortly followed by Flo.
In the ensuing battle, the party realizes that the hills through which the little stream winds are not made of earth, but of the bones and armor of fallen adventurers. It quickly becomes apparent that this is not only the gargoyle's work, however - a bizarre thing of twisting arms with clay masks at the shoulder joints emerges from the cavern at the far end of the cavern, tumbling swiftly toward them and engulfing both Cal and the gargoyle in one of its limbs.
Weevil's magical intervention prevents Cal from being hurt by the collision, but the gargoyle dissolves and Cal sticks in the mud of the creature's body as it turns and flees back toward its burrow. Odion points Flo at a small glint in the mud by her foot where the gargoyle was before pursuing, and she snaps up a small brass hairpin that was left behind before running after him, led by The Gun.
Cal struggles to free her face from the mud, gasping for breath and trying to soothe the creature in which she finds herself embedded. She writhes out of it as it growl-screeches a single word in an unfamiliar-yet-comprehensible language: "GOOOOOOOOOLD!"
All around the burrow, pale teal crystals glow slightly. She is conflicted - she has but one gold item on her person, and she despises the one who gave it to her - but yet she finds herself not wanting to give it up. The scraps of her pillow, however, do not seem to be to the Xorn's taste.
Outside, Weevil conjures a horrifying greasy slip'n'slide down a bone hill up to the entrance of the Xorn's lair, flinging himself forward decisively and finding his adventuring companion in grave peril. Odion follows and darts into the cave, getting Weevil's sign-off on the potential importance of the masks as he passes, but the Xorn seems to pay no attention to him or to Weevil - it doesn't even seem to realize they're there. As Cal tries to duck and dodge around it, Weevil realizes that - like many elementals - this one has an unorthodox way of perceiving the world, and does not rely on standard sensory mechanisms like sight and sound.
In her effort to escape, Cal manages to bring down a stalactite on the Xorn, but it is distracted only long enough for her to get to the other side of it before the entire rock formation is absorbed into its body. Her pleading gaze meets Weevil's as the rushing stream sweeps her leg out from under her and drags her back into the cavern, only perhaps 45 feet from where the water disappears down a hole. Back in her tent, a sleepy Nicholas crawls out of Cal's bag.
Weevil advances into the cavern and, seeing that the Xorn still does not react to him, fashions his shadow into a life preserver and fishes Cal out of the stream with it. After a brief and hurried conference over why it's targeting only her, Weevil urges Cal to give it the one gold coin she still holds, but she refuses. Weevil tries to defend her anyway, but to no avail - the Xorn sweeps him out of the way, grabs Cal, and drops her into its toothy maw.
Choking within the body of the Xorn, Cal's thoughts flash back to her first real encounter with mud - she'd been finishing up a moose-loading for an adventuring party who'd been watching, offering no help even though it was clear she was struggling. When she'd fallen, they'd laughed, and still no one came to help. Her throat begins to tighten and the gold piece slips from her pocket, melding into the mud of the monster. Angry, bitter, once again stuck, Cal involuntarily reaches for the coin.
Calling out to Flo by name for the first time, Odion flings a stick of dynamite at the Xorn and Flo - with a bit of guidance from the Gun - ignites it. It sticks into the Xorn's body just in time to explode one of the masks off its form, leaving a momentary void of mud. In that empty space, Odion sees Cal's hand reaching toward the gold coin before the Xorn's body reforms around her.
Just when things seem most dire, Crawdad Sally comes sprinting into the cavern, Nicholas perched on her shoulder. She scruffs Odion and demands to know what he's gotten himself into; his reply that he's doing what she wasn't hero enough to does not seem to impress her. After one swing of her hammer at the Xorn, she realizes someone is inside, and lets down her long, lichen-coated braids to release a cloud of luminescent spores that bring Cal back from the brink of death.
Weevil, encouraged by the moment of cooperation between Odion and Flo, takes a running dive into the Xorn and feels around for Cal. Once he finds her, he pulls her into a hug and then directs a wave of thunder downward, propelling them both up and out the top of the Xorn. Weevil manages to shove Cal to the side - much to her chagrin, as she realizes she does not have her gold piece in hand - but Weevil falls right back into the muddy elemental. Odion manages to wedge another stick of dynamite into one of its remaining arms.
The Xorn's focus shifts to the only remaining person in the cavern carrying any gold: Flo. Sally and Odion both swing as it beelines toward her, and Odion's pike stabs all the way through its body, contacting something solid and pushing it out of the creature. The Xorn stops mid-run as it grabs wildly for the item - a crystal or gemstone of some kind - pulling it back into its form and then fully deflating into the silt of the river. The masks begin to float downstream as Weevil feels the mud loosen around him. The river rises and begins to overflow.
Though discorporated, the Xorn is not defeated: one of its arms rises from the ground, holding a boulder about as big as Flo, and hurls it toward her. Seeing that this arm does still have the stick of dynamite Odion had wedged into it, Flo takes the opportunity to fire, exploding another Xorn limb into nothing.
Cal, intuiting there is still more to the creature than the arms rising from the ground, summons spiky plant growth downstream, close to the waterfall. Searching the water, she spies two of the Xorn's shoulder masks floating toward her, and her gold piece. She fishes out the gold and one of the masks, quickly depositing the coin back in her pocket. Weevil is swept up by the current, but rather than fighting it, swims along with it to catch up to the remaining mask and snatch it before taking a magical step across the room to Cal. She insists that she's fine and to focus on pinning down and killing the Xorn, though it's clear she's not well. Weevil, his disapproval manifesting as a series of magical echoes, grimly tells her they need to talk about some things when this is over - but he does place himself strategically with respect to Flo and Odion to continue the battle.
Three arms burst from the ground, battering Flo into unconsciousness as several of the stalagmites erupt in mud and steam. Cal and Sally hit the floor to avoid the eruption while Odion launches himself at the arms attacking his half-sister, obliterating two of them. Weevil, thinking fast, runs over to Flo, rifles through her bag for her coin purse, and flings it away from them. The remaining arm pursues, and as it does, Odion impales it with his spear, splattering it into so much mud and a small, perfectly-cut emerald.
Cal, still battle-raged despite her exhaustion, hammers furiously at the mud and water while Weevil and Flo breathlessly confer about why he threw her coin purse. Weevil marvels in horror that Cal knew about the Xorn's fixation, but still refused to get rid of her gold piece. Flo, in a rare moment of insight if not compassion, points out that while gold means little to those who've never wanted for it - either because they have it or they have no need of it.
The party collects the emerald and the masks, and as they debrief, Sally is agog at the suggestion that this battle was *merely a test*. She tells them that the Xorn is the dragon's gatekeeper, and she has known about it and avoids it with purpose. She further notes that she's been following them for a week, and lucky that, or they might all be dead right now.
Flo sharply whines that she has too much of a headache to be lectured, and asks why The John Johnson hired Sally to follow them in the first place. Sally shoves a bottle of Wet Whiskey into her hands to calm her, but a tiff between Cal and Weevil breaks out before Sally answers. It becomes apparent that Cal struggles to admit that she is able to call upon Giant magic, or to do so consistently, but Sally corrects her assumption that as a non-Giant, she wouldn't be able to learn to control it. Giant magic is emotional, she says, and Cal clearly has both the rage and the love that could fuel it.
Weevil and Odion and Flo all encourage Cal, in their own unique ways, and as Sally pries into the particulars of their current mission, Weevil and Odion realize that there is more afoot than they realized. The angels who arrived with Mick in their hotel that night were the same that boarded the cable car with Weevil after The John Johnson signed his forehead. The John Johnson hired Sally to follow them, though she doesn't know why. Someone summoned this Xorn here, with a thirst for gold - and why would someone do that, if it wasn't protecting something?