They arrived to the call of a fretful peasant girl with tattered clothes and a mess of hair. However, her belly was large and her tear streaked cheeks were quite plump. Merlin thought it curious that a girl who claimed to be so poor would have such a cumbersome body.
Those questions were answered, however, when they arrived at her village.
The entire town was buried. Not one house could be seen through the mass that consumed it. But it was neither mudslide nor avalanche that stole the village from view. No, it was porridge – lots and lots and lots of porridge.
Arthur, Merlin, and the knights looked on with mouths agape at the sight before them. How so much sweet broth could have accumulated in one place was beyond them. Even Merlin, with his understanding of magic, could not fathom what might have caused this.
The girl, however, was babbling and sputtering through her tears an explanation.
"What happened?" Merlin asked.
After taking a much needed moment to compose herself, she swallowed her tears and said, "I was gifted a cooking pot by a kind witch. She enchanted it to obey a mortal's tongue. So, whenever I said, 'cook, little pot, cook' it would produce such sweet porridge that neither me nor my village would ever go hungry. When I was away . . . someone must have tried to use it. They must have forgotten how to make it stop. They did not know the words and . . . when I finally bid that the pot stop the porridge, it was too late."
She then collapsed into a mess of tears and porridge. Merlin had never heard of such childish magic before, being commanded by silly rhymes as it was. But he knew that that pot would have to be destroyed to avoid another disaster.
Unfortunately, it would seem that they would have to eat their way through to it.