Aranya and the quest for the sacred purple potato

Aranya wandered the blistering edge of the Scorchwind Deltas with a burlap sack and a determined gleam in her eye.

The sun hung crooked in the sky like a busted halo; she consulted the dowsing tablet in Old Druidic she barely remembered learning.

They had told her the purple potato only grew once a century, behind the third waterfall that fell upward near the Sentinel's Orchard.

By the time she reached the orchard, twisted trees bearing the ribcages of fallen cartographers, she’d shed her cloak and at least one moral certainty.

A unicorn with a lawyer’s voice tried to barter for her liver in exchange for the purple potato; she told it she’d already traded that to a pickle selling dwarf named Reginald, back in the city of Moabi. The sky waterfall moaned backward, vomiting whistling fish and timepieces.

And there it was, hovering above like a starchy grail, the purple potato, pulsing with rhythmic savor.