“A curious tale in the least,” said Lúnàras as the words all finally became captivatingly indelible upon his mind. “That Bogroo creature – astonishing! A keeper of the dead, fascinating; singular by all accounts. But even more so the happenchance encounter of Cezzum and Filburn; I can but wonder at the fortune involved to make such an event!”
The cordial loran stood, tugging at his robe to make sure it was properly in place, and teasingly raised an eyebrow at the dwarf. “I thank you for the verse dear brother, but the fire grows cold, and by sight and smell you could do with a bath; that is where I we shall head.”
Palodar scoffed at the remark and vehemently rejoined, “Just you wait until you have seen the unsightly innards of a creature of death! Then we shall see how kindly your peachy odour shall be.”
Lúnàras snorted. “I flee death, not embrace it!”
Palofar felt suddenly content with the courage he had shown; he wore it too proudly. The loran laughed, clapped him on his haughty shoulders and said, “There is a divine spring but a short distance from here; I myself could use a good cleansing as well, must have been three days past since my last outing there.”
“You lorans – always clean. I remember my trading partner in your city, bathed every eve! He even had a tub in his home for doing just that - what madness,” said Palodar cheerfully, walking at the magician’s side and leaving the tower behind them.
“As my father always taught: ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’.” Lúnàras orated the last with a vast weep of his hands.
“Ack!” jested Palodar in response. “Then I must be a cursed demon at this moment.”
“Nay, merely a category of mire fungus.”
Palodar bellowed something in his throat and the two interlocutors left the bailey of the tower and strode through the forest thickets.
“I must tell you Palodar,” continued Lúnàras, “of the descrying process that Cezzum is now enduring, for I am certain that is what Casena intends. And, upon our return to the tower, I believe there is someone you would like to meet, especially considering this marvellous fascination of yours with the wondrous. But I will explain the scrying that your friend now undergoes once I am soaked to my core in a warm bath.”
Palodar nodded, trying to fathom what scrying meant and what his friend was presently enduring; he hoped his goblin companion was not being hurt in the process. For now, however, the dwarf was content enough to walk along the seldom used, grassy route that lead to the spring, simply delighting in all the sights of the forest. Lúnàras merrily began humming a tune to himself as the palliative effect of nature drove away, to the corners of his mind, the daunting challenges that he knew still lay ahead.
“What song do you hum? I am quite fond of ditties!” declared Palodar eagerly.
“It is a humorous verse I acquired on my last trip to the border town of Acrin.”
Palodar enthusiastically cried, “Indeed! Please, let us and the woods hear the words.”
The mage, with a flamboyant grin, dramatically cleared his throat and broke into verse:
The hearth and fire has a soothing glow,
That settles every worry like an evening blow.
But I’d rather have an ale tankard in my hand,
For it settles the head like a troubadour’s band.
Some might say they’d prefer a comely wench,
To end the dusk with a stride, on a tavern’s bench.
But I, my friend, prefer to wake after noon;
With a head as foggy as a scurvy sailor’s doom.
Palodar congratulated Lúnàras on a well intoned tune and jested that the bard must have either spent too much time at sea, or in dwarven tunnels. Out of his own repertoire, Palodar recited for the loran a dwarven folk song that was considered by his people to be less than vulgar but more than scandalously scintillating. After a few minutes the two broke out into a shared, lewd limerick. As they walked to the spring their laughter filled the trees, bushes and the air with a joy that not many had heard in that part of the forest for a long time indeed.
Cezzum stood atop the world. The entire lands known to him sprawled out beneath his vision. The once great elven cities bustling in the west, vast trading ships docking at southern trading ports, a hovel of a pioneer in the east, all were seen so clearly that Cezzum thought himself omnipotent. He could see below the ground, into the majestic dwarven halls and towns and tunnels; his eyes took hold of the golden telopian city of Meygtelar gleaming brightly in the radiance of the sun. Pearl white and marbled gates and towers and beautifully slopped edifices, far to the north east, marked the province of Kyn-Lor and the awe-inspiring capital of the lorans. Even further to the west the outer isles could be seen, those inhabitants of the land that felt no love for their own race and preferred to live under their own regime. Every inhabitant of the soil that Cezzum called his home could be seen, heard and felt palpably, from a sole baby wailing for its mother to a terrified captain upon a vessel lost at sea, writing a loving farewell that would never be delivered. The millions of people below were but a single, legible map of the living, one that the goblin knew as instinctually as the need to drink water was.
The goblin had no body; whatever he was, it was merely his essence, his consciousness, which loomed in the firmament. His mind wondered, lost in a stupor of new, overwhelmed senses. No. He must not lose focus. He must not lose his purpose. Bringing himself back from the edge of the mental schism, Cezzum framed the name once more in his mind, for indeed it was the only name he knew, the only name he remembered. Names, in this place, were foreign, lost, unknown and inconsequential. The goblin perceived the thoughts of every being below, but names remained elusive; they were unimportant. Yet some fey art had woven into him a single name, a phrase of which he was certain he needed to think upon; a deep nettling pinch pricked at him, intimating that those few syllables were of a paramount importance. Cezzum focused. His mind became pellucid. It felt vile and wicked; there was an empty sickness to him as he attempted to conjured the words branded into his mind: “Bledun-Deorc.”
At once, whatever he was floating in the air above, he started to soar at a speed only dreamt about in the wildest imaginations of eagles and dragons alike. In but an instant he stood upon the place known as the Fallen Leas; time was not as it seemed. The Leas were different. Verdant fields flourished where yellow acres of tainted grass had grown; water ran in torrents through streams and springs where before none were evident. Where was he? A laugh caught his attention. Cezzum coursed through the air to find a child frolicking with his mother. The time was different; was it a forgotten epoch? The naked child ran apace with a butterfly between the grassy folds, while his mother ran playfully next to her son; she wore naught save a small cloth and a rudimentary garment clasping her breasts against her chest. A sense of foreboding touched Cezzum; something else was glowering at the scene. A few feet away, sitting utterly dejected amongst the tussocks, sat another, younger child as naked as the first. There was no doubt that the smouldering child was the younger brother of the one that skipped about the fields; the facial and physical attributes were striking. However, no smile adorned his face; rather his eyes were locked balefully upon his brother and birthgiver.
Quickly the younger of the two stood up, unable to restrain his rage any longer, and ran over to his sibling, crashing into him with his small shoulder, bowling both of them to the ground. Their mother, a dozen yards away, ran as swiftly as she could towards them; it was too late. The flailing naked bodies of the children writhed and squirmed as they struggled against one another. Blood flew from their noses as the brawl took its rapid toll. In a few seconds the younger had the advantage, managing to pin his elder with his legs; with his unburdened hands, he clutched the older brother’s arm, pulling and bending with all his might until the faintest snap sounded within the scuffle. The once merry child wailed in pain, blood and tears mixing upon his visage. The woman drove herself into the affray. Wrenching her injured son from the clutches of t
he younger, she drove her heel into the chest of the youth that tried to stand in conceited victory, collapsing him to the embraces of the soil as hastily as a swallow speeds into its nest. Not a single tear glistened in the young boy’s eyes.
The mother cried out in a language unknown to Cezzum, or the meaning of the words were of less import than the action he witnessed; he did not know which was true. What was true was that the child was spurned; cast out, no longer kin to the race of woman or man, of humans. With the howling babe pressed tenderly against her breast, the mother took flight back towards her home, leaving her own son to seek death within the grassy fields. The only sign of any emotion from the child merely came from the ochre welt growing upon his chest from the savage blow he had received. Coming to his feet, the black-haired boy walked off in a direction directly antipode to his mother’s; he struck a southern course. Cezzum was compelled to follow.
Days lingered by for the child as he trudged across the land, growing more savage with each passing hour. Bathing no longer concerned him and all the prey he could catch with his bare hands, with fingers bearing nails of a vicious length, were eaten raw; blood bedecked the boy’s face as if the liquid were a trophy to be prized. It was a transformation that was so swift in nature that it became a regression; an overwhelming primeval was surging within and without. There exists but a simple line that distinguishes man from beast, and in the flicker of a heartbeat that line can be broken. It was this chasm the young boy had fallen into. The two weeks that ravished and stole away the boy’s humanity sped by in a flutter for Cezzum; the knowledge, the tableau, seemingly depositing itself into his mind without every moment being recounted at length.
It was in the beginning of the third week that the boy exited the south eastern border of the Leas, bedraggled, wayworn and besmirched with his own filth; he could hardly carry himself on his own accord and each of his footfalls felt as if they carried the weight of death upon them. That evening, mere steps beyond the border of the Cev’rain, the youth collapsed. Ague took him; a fever, relentless to its bitter extreme, wracked his body as he lay shivering and convulsing on the ground; the luminescent heavens above seemed to laugh at his folly. What was that? A sound? A glimmer? In his paroxysm the boy gleaned something tangible, yet beyond his grasp, looming about him. He called out to the shadows, to the darkness and waited. Seconds oozed past, then a dozen silhouettes, cast against the speckled welkin, rose above the child. Cezzum saw they were no more than three-feet in height; yet, to the boy, they appeared as gigantic redeemers – the goblins, with the child borne between them, disappeared into the night.
What followed were years, a decade, perhaps more, of torture, of malice; the unadulterated injection of decadence and animus and vitriol into the boy. As such, evil warped the boy’s body as much as it altered his mind. The child grew among the goblins as one of their kin, learning, killing, pillaging, raping. Darkness and wretchedness coursed their way through his veins; his lineaments changed; he was no longer a boy. Time has tormented him into a man, if it could so be called. The giant amongst goblins no longer donned the hallmarks of pale skin, but rather had turned a pigment that resided between in jet tones; his veins bulged from the skin in sickly blue ridges and valleys that throbbed with a violent passion. Feral teeth had come to replace those previously known to him and ferocious fangs jutted from his mouth. His eyes too were reformed, bulging and contorting their once serene hue to a cloying yellow. Limbs that would have become muscular and sleek became wild, lanky and sublimely powerful. The goblins adopted and dubbed the man as their kin, as their creation, bequeathing unto him the Kig’n word symbolising giant of kin; the name was Phagen.
Years drifted away and Phagen grew from strength to strength. Through sheer will and temerity, the boy of old became the ruler of a goblin horde by dint of cleaving the erstwhile leader’s head from his shoulders and regaling himself in the fallen’s blood. Phagen did not merely have hitherto unknown physical prowess, but garbed as he was in blood, stood in command of the most powerful goblin host that existed: the Deorc tribe; ancient Kig’n for of the dark. But Cezzum could not fathom the words and what meaning there might have been was lost upon him as new sights ordered his attention.
Thousands of vistas shot past Cezzum’s vision; a veritable montage of imagery pounded his flitting conscience. The Deorc horde raided, cast their depredations and sacked every living creature around their mountainous home; none who dwelled in its vicinage were isolated from their merciless slaughter. Nomadic humans, bewildered telopians and lorans, who had only just begun to unlock the potential of their magical abilities, fell to the crude blades of the Deorc horde. Phagen murdered and slew and slaughtered and raped all those that stood before him; those unlucky women, regardless of race, became victims of his zealous malice and will, borne away, by his commanding schemes, to his lair; whereupon Phagen’s return from conquest would proceed to defile their flesh until seed took hold. Years drifted past again, as before, and slowly his essence was sown into the womb of every creature that was able to bear his kin. A new race, in Phagen’s image, spawned from the wombs of the broken enslaved; his children were born; the phagens clawed into existence.
Suddenly Cezzum’s vision shifted, he stood upon the Leas once again, but for a third time, it was different. The grass had grown long and brown; cattle had been driven to feed in the northern reaches of the human province; the priorities of the Cev’rain had changed. A man appeared on a small hummock just to the west of Cezzum. He was built solidly and stalwartly and stood unwavering upon the crest of the slope. A full head of grey hair and a thick beard adorned his face. In his one hand he held a great, bronze shield, in the other, a sinister spear Cezzum. His chest was clad in a crudely fashioned cuirass and his legs covered with greaves that looked too cumbersome, only the strongest of men could set foot before foot within them. The man was familiar, something about him struck Cezzum; the goblin knew what it was. There was not a mote of doubt: the man was the boy who had that one day, so many years past, had frolicked in the fields with his mother. Creases lined his brow, formed from a lifetime of hardship and worry, but a gaze as imperious as Cezzum had seen ripped through the cloud covered windy day. Two more men rose onto the hummock, taking positions of honour at either side of the King of the Cev’rain; their visages so alike in resemblance to the king’s – they were the scions of Arcun’son.
The ground shook as close to ten thousand men rallied behind their liege and princes; all were similarly garbed, donning simple metal-wrought helmets that sought to protect the neck more than any other portion of the head. Behind the forest of spears and roughshod armour, a gathering of women and children, thousands strong, waited, all clutching poultices, ointments and swathes; each ready to dart into the impending fray and aid their beloveds. A few of the more forthright women and elder youths stood at the van of the healers, brandishing weapons from elegantly carved swords and javelins to simple boughs. No other races stood with them; elves, dwarves and telopians were all still in their infancy; still unable to draw a bow or scribe a word, and lorans were a reclusive and a reticent race, preferring to remain detached from the world in their tip of land to the far north. The men and women, with their children, stood alone.
Not a sound was uttered; no cheer, no song, not even the slightest murmurings defiled the air. None present had ever fought in such a battle before; the notion of war, the waging of death for the protection of land, of a way of life, was new to the humans, and none present knew how to orate this to another. Several spears quivered in the hands of those who carried them, while others perspired profusely as their florid faces hinted at the dread within their hearts.
At first it was but a faint contour, a dark wisp of an outline that shimmered over a rolling knoll, but soon it developed into something far greater. A sea of black and green and grey steel marched over the plains, settling a few hundred yards before the army of humans. Cezzum felt his heart sink, although in his current form he knew not where it was. No
less than twenty thousand foes despoiled the land before him. But not only goblins stood upon the Leas, nay, for thousands of phagens too stood between their halfling kin. A towering phagen stood at the fore, bedecked in armour that was so insidiously woven that the splintered metal wrought into it would speed an enemy into their doom by its mere collision. The remainder of the host wore less extravagant armours, being comprised from any item that could be salvaged: bones, leather, vellum, wood and scraps of metal were woven together. Weapons as fell as they appeared were held in hand - creations that ranged from sharpened bones, wooden poles and crude swords to clubs made from the skulls of the fallen. The commanding phagen strode to the centre of the field; the King of the Cev’rain did the same.
The two stood implacably before one another; a malevolent glower passed between them. It was in that moment they each truly knew the other and what had brought them to battle. It was nothing more complex than unfettered hatred for another kind... the hatred of a brother; a simplicity of ire, for it was nothing more and nothing less. No words passed between the two leaders. Phagen’s fangs oozed and a black sludge slowly slithered down them, drip dropping onto his armour below. Arcun’son spat at the feet of his repugnant brother. Phagen’s sword flew from his hip and swept over in an arc to come crashing down on the human liege. Arcun’son ducked nimbly bringing his shield up; Phagen’s blade crashed off the bronze, sending the aggressor’s arm reeling. Bringing his spear to bear, the king thrust it upwards to impale his brother; Phagen stepped to one side and clutched the haft under his arm and with his hand grasped further down the haft, pulling Arcun’son closer. The two of them were weapon locked; their faces nigh on but an inch apart. The ground and clime, history itself, shook and rumbled as both armies, set to purpose upon the brawl of their lords, launched themselves onwards. The brothers said not a word to each other, for indeed there was naught to be said. Phagen dropped his sword and clutched Arcun’son’s beard and ripped it from him. The king lost the grip of his spear as pain shot through his face; he cowed for an instant but no more. He drove his fist into the jaw of Phagen; a loud crack indicated he had utterly broken the bone. Their lock was severed. Phagen drew another weapon from his side; as did Arcun’son. Before they could begin their fraternal, charnel duel, their armies overwhelmed them, clashing into each other only a foot before where the human king and the phagen war-leader were embroiled; the collision forced them away.
The Good Goblin Page 15
