I appreciate your trust. ^^ I think what killed my enthusiasm for fetch quests is how pointless they often seem. In one game I was asked (multiple times) to bring animal skins and other resources gathered from respawning enemies. It usually involved almost no storytelling ("we lack meat, we won't explain why we can't get it ourselves, go get it, here's your coin"), and completing these quests had pretty much no impact on the story or the state of the world. It felt like a recycled structure, in which voice acting most likely costed more than the rest of copy-pasted code with hardly any innovations. And having a flexible motivation such as "we need help, do a chore for us" was also removing many possibilities.
I think about my experience with games such as this one a lot.
In my mind, Asterion is less of an object to fetch and more of a MacGuffin with a personality, kind of like R2-D2 from the original Star Wars movie, but he is present in stories and the results of his actions even before PC finds him. : )