With Jack working in tandem with ARRRGH!!!, the troll army ransacked the Gumm-Gumm lair. While Jack single-handedly dispatched dozens of lesser trolls and commanded his legion of warriors with unflagging vigor, it was Johannah ARRRGH!!! who took on the Hungry One. It was a battle long in the making: eleven hundred years earlier, Gunmar had lost an arm to Remmarah ARRRGH!!!, Johannah’s grandmother, in a fantastic midnight skirmish along the Austria/Hungary border. Since that night, Gunmar had not only sworn his revenge, but had also begun to notch each kill on the makeshift wooden arm he’d rammed into his still-bleeding stump.

The first wave of the onslaught was bleak. Gunmar, a beast so indescribably awful that he cannot, at this particular moment, be described, toyed with Johannah ARRRGH!!!. It was only when Gunmar embedded a boulder in the hairy troll’s cranium that the tide began to change. Instead of killing Johannah ARRRGH!!!, the injury seemed to squash whatever small amount of hesitation existed in her brain. She became an uncontrollable, rampaging beast who came at Gunmar in a tornado of teeth, claws, and fur. One of Gunmar’s eyes—the Eye of Malevolence—was torn out in the fray. Soon Gunmar fell, his minions were killed or captured, and it was left to Jack, the human hero, to deliver the killing blow to the Hungry One.

Exhausted of bloodshed, Jack instead banished Gunmar into isolation among the deepest of earth’s caves. Gunmar slunk away, swearing revenge upon Jack, Johannah ARRRGH!!!, and all of their offspring. These curses were difficult to understand, for Gunmar was chewing upon his tongue in rage. Every sound he released hissed like a serpent: SSSSSSSSS.

Jack’s mercy was a success in one sense: the remaining Gumm-Gumms swore to switch to a four-legged diet and enlisted in several eleven-step programs to keep them on the non-human-eating wagon. Festivity reigned in the troll kingdom for months. As a sign of respect, trolls began referring to Johannah by her last name alone, and parent trolls would hold up their babies when ARRRGH!!! passed by so that the young ones could touch the boulder still sticking out of the back of her skull.

(“That chunk of bedrock remains there to this day,” Blinky said. “It is the reason for my friend’s impaired speech.” ARRRGH!!! agreed: “Rock make unhappy talk.”)

What Jack realized too late was that he’d doomed himself to a subterrestrial life. His mercy had been a distinctly human thing—no troll would have hesitated to destroy Gunmar—and so he felt a responsibility to keep watch should Gunmar ever return. If Jack returned to the human world, he would grow older, and eventually the doorways to the troll world would be lost to him. He would need to stay young to defend against Gunmar, and the only way to do that was to remain underground.