“Oh. Right. I meant, she sounds terrible.” He looked at Tiggy and shook his head, mouthing amazing as if none of us could see him.
“One day, Naag became pregnant,” Mama said. “And a thousand snakes began to grow inside her, all potentially capable of becoming just like their mother. Had the children been born, they would have poisoned and then consumed the world, slowly but surely. So it was decided that she had to be stopped. And in the end, her head was severed from her body and she died, as did her unborn children. But even though her heart had stopped, her head was still capable of biting, so it was burned.”
Mama sat back, looking pleased with herself.
I stared at her. “These were the stories you were told as a child?”
“Explains a lot, doesn’t it?”
“It really does. I don’t know whether to be horrified for you or awestruck. I think it’s a little of both. I mean, like, snake babies died and everything.”
“They did.”
“Can I be honest?”
“Aren’t you always?”
“Eh, I’m sure a couple of people here would disagree with that.”
Ryan coughed like an asshole.
“Okay, but, so. I don’t understand what that has to do with what we’re talking about.”
Mama sighed.
“It’s obvious, Sam,” Gary said. “You need to find Naag’s head and then use it to poison Myrin. Or something.”
“But is Naag even real?” Justin asked. “I mean, I always thought that was an allegory. Like, it was supposed to teach children a lesson.”
“I suppose there are truths to those stories,” Ryan said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. “I mean, they have to come from somewhere, right?”
“Right,” I said. “So, we find a giant snake head and then… what. Bite Myrin with it?”
“My gods,” Mama said. “You are idiots.”
“It’s the youth of today,” the King assured her. “Always looking down at their parchments.”
“This isn’t news to us,” Randall said.
“Rude,” I said. “Also, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Not real snake head,” Tiggy said. “Symbolic.”
“Of what?” I asked, confused.
“Cut the head off. Body dies. Babies die.”
“Thanks, dude. I got that part. That still doesn’t explain where I’m going to find a gigantic head or—”
“Myrin is head,” Tiggy explained slowly.
Which explained nothing. “So we cut off his head and we use it to poison—ohhh. Wait. Guys! I have an idea! You know how Myrin’s in charge of the Darks, right? What if we defeated him? Then wouldn’t all the Darks just… die? Or stop, at the very least, because they wouldn’t have someone to stand behind. Like, think about it. It’s like that story Mama told us all that one time. You cut off the head and the body dies.”
“Wow,” Gary said. “That’s actually a really good idea for once. How the hell did you come up with that?”
“You know how it is, dude. You go into the woods with five dragons and get bad-touched for a year, and then you come back a wizard. I’ve got so many good ideas. Like, remember the firework corn? Okay, just stick with me here. What if we had firework zucchini. It would be the same thing as the corn, except it’s zucchini.”
I waited for rapturous applause.