My eyes were clear. My resolve steady. The past few days were full of narrow escapes--a baboon, a dragon, falling from a cliff, and poison--but that was the past. My future would be brighter, and I left the cave confident I would make it so.

And immediately ran back inside, gagging.

I’d forgotten about the massive log of dragon dung left to steam in the hot summer air. I couldn’t smell it from inside the cave--thank you, waterfall, thank you--but the smell hit me as soon as I stepped outside.

The dragon’s dung was even more toxic than Danny Reinhart’s.

Back in 1983, I joined the crew filming a documentary about 19th-century sewage systems. The director, the then-unknown Reinhart, was a nascent genius obsessed with details and authenticity. That combination would eventually earn him a Golden Globe twenty years later for The Last of the Last. But his genius was a lot less pleasant when applied to sewage. At the time, I never thought I would smell anything worse.

Oh, how wrong I was. So naive. So innocent.

Still, I was determined. If I could weather Reinhart’s grotesque stew, I’d handle this. I held my breath, stepped outside, and ran away from the glen as fast as my legs could carry me.

I didn’t have to run far. The fallen cedar was close by. I collected my digging stick and retraced my steps to retrieve my spear. I was careful every step of the way, but I didn’t come across anything dangerous. Which was a relief. But also annoying. I wanted to stab whatever creature was responsible for poisoning me. I shrugged the feeling off. It was probably better that the journey was uneventful.

Armed and ready, I went to catch a fish.

I hiked back down to the stream and walked along the bank looking for places where fish gathered. There were bass, catfish, and perch in the water, along with a smaller fish with dark orange scales I didn’t recognize. I found a nice shallow spot and waded in to wait for one of the fish to come by.

The area was shady and the water cool. If I hadn’t been so hungry, fishing here would be pleasant. Relaxing even. A catfish wandered into the shallows. I jabbed at it with my spear, but it flicked away. I tried again but missed. The fish shot between my legs. I spun around, but it was already back in the current.

Half an hour and several failed attempts later, I caught my first fish, a large mouth bass. I learned several lessons in the process.

One, a lighter spear was a faster spear.

Two, a lighter grip resulted in a lighter spear, assuming that one doesn’t mistakenly throw it.

Three, I was more likely to hit if I aimed at where the fish was going, not where it was.

Four, a spear with a single point required more precision than one with multiple points. I should’ve realized that earlier, but I wasn’t thinking right. Otherwise, I would’ve made a different kind of spear, one more appropriate for fishing.

I told myself I’d make the new spear tomorrow. In the meantime, I had my fish, and it was time to start a fire. For which, I’d need an axe, which I no longer had. And I also needed a knife to gut the fish, which I also no longer had. I sighed, looped my catch on a length of cord, and ate some plums and fennel greens.

After lunch, I braved the glen’s new stink to make some new tools. I was determined to enjoy fish for dinner.

###

It turned out that flintknapping while not in a god-induced fugue was hard. You’d think that being clear-headed would help, but no, it just meant that I was more easily distracted and prone to questioning myself. It took a couple of false starts to finish the axe, and I was starting on the knife when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. There was a lot of it thanks to the cloud of black flies swarming the dragon dung, but this was bigger.

A worm lifted itself free from inside the dung. It was pale, like bleached bone and three feet long, with a spike at its tip. It was soon joined by two others. The three worms swayed their spikes, as if scenting the air.

I’d never seen anything like them--parasites super-sized. I grabbed my spear.

The otter had been sticking to the inside the waterfall to avoid the smell, but she came out to observe the worms, her face scrunched up in disgust. She made a waving motion with her paw and splashed water in the worms’ direction. It was cute.

She looked directly at me, looked at the worms, and splashed the water again.

“Wait You mean me?” I asked, pointing to myself. "You want me to clean up the worms?”

The otter rolled her eyes and nodded. I felt like I was dealing with my kids, back when they were just hitting puberty. I could almost hear her thinking, Of course, duh.

Snark aside, the spirit of Ikfael Glen saved my life, and the debt was bigger than the flint knife I’d given her. The worms were big and gross, but if I tackled them one at a time, it shouldn’t be that hard, right? Right?

I approached the dung cautiously, and all three worms turned towards me. Their spikes were as sharp as ice picks. The worms themselves were about three inches across and segmented like earthworms.

I licked my lips, nervous. I took a step to the right, and the spikes tracked my motion. To the left, and they did it again. My plan to fight them one at a time failed before I even got the chance to try it.

Okay, time for a new plan. My digging stick was nearby. I reached over and tossed it one-handed towards the dung. The two closest worms shot forward.

“Holy Jesus loves a merry-go-round!” They were fast! As if they’d been launched from a cannon.

One worm managed to stick the spear with its spike. Its body instantly coiled around it. The other missed, but its tail curled to form a hook and caught the stick that way. The two worms squirmed, splintering the wood between them as they competed for position. The area around the base of their spikes opened, revealing circular mouths ridged with nightmare teeth. The mouths flared open and the spikes clashed.

My breath caught, and I was suddenly very glad I didn’t just walk up to them. I looked for the third worm, but it hadn’t moved. Was there a limit to the range of their senses? Had it only faced me, because the others had? I didn’t see any sense organs.

I crept around the dung, moving as slowly and quietly as I could. The two worms fighting ignored me, but the one I was hunting spotted me when I got to within five feet, just outside of my spear’s range. Its spike pointed at my heart. I held my spear in a death grip, which was a mistake, so I took a deep breath and forced my hands to unclench. I held the spear with light hands and aimed at where the worm would go.

Ack! The worm shot forward while I was still psyching myself up. My jab turned into an awkward “get it away from me” swing.

The worm curled around the haft of the spear and wriggled towards my arms. There was only a split second to make a decision. Either abandon the spear or… I jabbed, aiming at the worm’s tail as it searched for purchase on the spear’s haft.

I pinned the worm about two thirds of the way down its body. Undaunted, it surged at me, tearing open the wound. A bright yellow liquid spurted out, like a balloon popping, and the worm fell to the side, thrashing. I stabbed it twice more.

The segments around the wounds tightened to keep the liquid from leaking out, so I kept stabbing until it stopped moving. All my attention was on making the thing dead, and I didn’t notice the loser of the other worms’ fight for dominance coming my way. Not until I felt the stab in my back and saw the tip of the worm’s spike poke out from the front of my shirt. It had gone all the way through.

The worm curled up and around my body. The only thing that saved me was that it wasn’t quite long enough to wrap around me more than once. I was able to pull it off, the spike sliding out my back. It coiled towards me, about to wrap around my arms, when I started to spin, the centrifugal force keeping it away temporarily.

I was getting dizzy, but whenever I eased up, the worm came after my arms. New plan, emergency plan--I stumbled over to one of the nearby trees and swung the worm at its trunk. The worm instantly curled around it, mouth flaring. I went back for my spear and stabbed the worm until it was dead, this time keeping an eye on my surroundings.

The last worm died in a hail of sticks. I stabbed it as it tried to coil around them. Ugh… I wished I’d come up with that strategy from the beginning.

I limped to the water’s edge and plopped down. Blood flowed from the wounds on my front and back, soaking my shirt, but there was no pain. The worms probably used a numbing agent to keep their prey unaware while they were being eaten from the inside out.

The wound looked bad, and, even worse, I had no way to control the infection that would surely come from it. The worm had been living in dung. There was no way my wound wasn’t going to become infected.

I was so optimistic earlier, and here I was about to die again. I grit my teeth and checked the relevant sections of my Status:

Hit Points 3/8 Conditions Bleeding (I), Poisoned (I), Infected (*)

The otter swam over and considered me with serious eyes. She pulled a stone bowl from a pocket in her fur. I wanted to tell her that it was sea otters that do that--river otters don’t have pockets--but given that she was a spirit or the avatar of a spirit, I didn’t think the biology lesson would be helpful. Besides, I’d seen that bowl before. I held my breath and waited to see what she’d do.

The otter filled the bowl with water and gestured for me to take off my shirt. The water was cool and tingled on my skin. There was a brief moment of pins and needles, and then the coolness spread into me, easing the sudden pain.

I watched as the wound on my belly closed. “Wow.”

Not quite finished, she poured the remaining water into the pool and refilled the bowl. This time, I watched closely and saw the water flash with light before she used it.

The otter splashed the water onto my shirt, and the blood slid off onto the ground. She wrinkled her nose at me and dumped the rest on top of my head. A little too enthusiastically.

She sniffed and was pleased with her handiwork. The otter patted me on the knee and dived back into the pool, flicking under the water to go back behind the waterfall.

I checked my Status:

Hit Points 8/8 Conditions

I took a long breath and let it out. I wasn’t going to die. And I’d won my first fantasy fight. Dazed, I wondered if I earned any experience points, but there wasn’t a section for it on my Status page.

I felt a little proud and a lot chagrined. Yes, I won the fight, but would’ve been dead afterward if it hadn’t been for the Spirit of Ikfael Glen. That was a sobering thought.

Now that the excitement was gone, the flies surrounded the dung again. There were new areas exposed where the worms extracted themselves. That’s when I saw metal glint in the sun.

Just because there were no experience points, it didn’t mean there was no loot.