Auntie Bloat

Dead · The swamp witch of Bellhollow

First named	Session 7, by her own sister
Operated from	A lair in the mire beyond Bellhollow
Sister	Granny Spindlejaw
Held	The Crooked Molar, and the first planar anchor
Killed	Session 9, by Krunk

The reason Bellhollow had kidnappings and a poison fog that never lifted.

How the fog was made

Granny Spindlejaw gave up the process without much prompting, and it was worse than anyone guessed.

The process

Auntie Bloat kept captive people.

She fed them thunder roots.

She then harvested and distilled their flatulence to produce the fog.

The kidnappings weren't a side effect of her work. They were the work.

The party found the machinery for it — villagers strapped to beds with a feeding tube at one end and a collection tube at the other, watched over by boloti overseers and a mudmutt.

What she fed on

She ate shame.

The invisible thing locked in a birdcage in her own lair told the party as much on its way out:

"She eats shame. Laugh at her and she hates it. Forgive yourself and she starves."

Her pantry was full of jars labeled with small kindnesses — holding the door, giving up your seat — things she had taken and could not digest. She fed on the negative and nothing else, and the good she collected sat on a shelf, useless to her.

The party drank them like potions.

The dining hall said the same thing in a different register: a poisoned banquet laid for them by name, and a painting of each party member going about their business with her standing behind them, laughing.

The sister

Granny Spindlejaw is Auntie Bloat's sister, and they were feuding — though Granny's objection is worth reading carefully.

She is not especially opposed to torturing villagers on principle. Her disagreement was with how her sister went about it.

She never said what she would do differently.

How she fell

She fought beside the planar anchor with ten gremlins and a pit of sludge between her and the party.

She hit Arthas with a ladle the size of a greatclub. Then she turned around and released a cloud of noxious gas that dropped Gerald outright, and the gremlins put two arrows into Niko for an earlier fireball.

Two down, a second cloud coming, and the fight very nearly lost.

The small mercy

A jar from her own pantry let Krunk jump the initiative order.

He raged, took out his axe, and killed her with what she couldn't stomach.

The Crooked Molar

It wasn't in her pantry. It was lodged in the planar anchor itself.

Pulled free, it began resonating with the Saint's Splinter — which raises a question nobody has answered about what she actually was, and whether the tooth was hers to begin with.

Vashkultha was waiting outside the lair to collect on the deal. Arthas talked her into a deposit and a deferral.

Worth remembering

She was a problem in her own right, but she was never the reason the party came to that swamp. The anchor was — and she was floating next to it, guarding something she may not have understood any better than they did.