Meaningful Salt has been on a lifelong quest to bring home the creatures that roam about her interior life. The feral slivers of consciousness, born from savage abuses perpetrated against her by The Father as a child, are sentient creatures, of that much, she is sure. But not all of them are children and she is beginning to think that many don't even belong to her. Over the years, she has perfected a questing process she calls The Charming and Shadow Mistral Show. This particular weekend, Meaningful Salt has pitched her camp in a rural West Virginia county, home to matrilineal relations only recently made known to her through genetic testing. The Shadow Show magicked the Appalachian forest, including the local spiders, the families MacDonald, Payne, and Farrell, and the ghost children that inhabit the abandoned coal mines to join the Salt family on its heroic quest to retrieve The First Casualty from the Lethe River. The Salts navigate dragons and monsters; the Appalachians begin their journey to reconcile their contributions to unsustainable land practices and to find new ways to prosper in health and love in their beloved mountains.