by Eric Ugland
It was summer, and I’d taken a long ride north on the bike, about four hours of riding with the wind in my hair. Naturally, I didn’t bother with things like a helmet. The girl had gone to her parents, off to have another weekend fight, she said. The Club didn’t have anything planned for me, all my accounts were paid up at the moment, and the product we were distributing was being held up at McAndrews. So I was free to go off on my own, to do whatever I wanted, and what I wanted was to go fishing. The sun was shining, and it was just an impeccable day.
And up at the lake, the locals didn’t really care that I rode my too-loud bike past their lakeside homes. No one came out to look at me or challenge me — I was just a dude with a scraggly beard and a fishing pole. I tossed the line into the lake, and I waited on the shore. There, I might have also had a few cans of beer cooling in the water of the lake, but otherwise, things were remarkably similar. There, I’d also slipped into thoughts of the past, and then of the future. I thought of the ring in my pocket, the one I’d found in a pawn shop and gotten for a song. A platinum Tiffany band with what I thought was an absurdly large diamond. I thought about the original owner of the ring, how the ring must have been a symbol of happiness that wound up being an ultimate sadness. How the ring must have meant something to someone once, and now, it was mine. And I was going to give it to someone else, and I knew she’d say yes because she’d told me a million times we were going to be together forever. And it was something I believed. It was a brief moment of bliss, that afternoon along Black Lake.
Then came the phone call that changed everything. The call that set everything in motion, that led to me standing on the side of a lake mid-way up a mountain during a sunny moment on a quest to murder a bunch of talking bears.
A great splash brought me back to the present. Something hit the water with an impressive amount of force. Waves washed against the shore, and I immediately reeled my line in, eyes peeled for whatever had just spoiled my erstwhile relaxing fishing moment.
Skeld and Ragnar had spears out on either side of me, about ten feet distant, also focused on the lake.
Tarryn looked into the sky.
Meikeljan had taken a knee twenty yards back from the shore, but I could see his tiny eyes darting about, ready.
And Amber had an arrow nocked into her bow, but had yet to pull it back.
Wulf, for his part, was nowhere to be seen.
Slowly, I slid my rod and reel back into my bag, and pulled out an axe.
And we waited.
And waited.
Then a very particular nightmare of mine came true, when up popped a very large bird. A goose? But it was the size of a goddamn horse. With eight heads. And all eight heads, with their sixteen beady fucking eyes, looked right at me.
“Gah-buh-lin,” it said. The thing spoke. Sort of. Each head made a noise, and when they were all together, you could do the ear version of a squint and kind of parse out a phrase from it. Or a syllable. But it didn’t make much sense to me.
“Aw, fuck,” I said, feeling like this was going to be a shit day. “Fritz?”
Eight heads nodded.
“Well, fuck.”
Chapter Eight
“Gah-bah-lin!” Fritz the eight-headed goose said.
“It’s Fritz. everyone,” I said. “Put your weapons down.”
Something whacked me upside the head.
It was a big fuck-off wing.
“Gah-bah-lin!” Fritz said.
“Why are you saying Goblin?” I asked.
“Com-ing.”
“Well fuck,” I said. “How many?”
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then what I can only assume was the goose equivalent of a shrug.
I looked over at my team, and tried to gauge their feeling.
“You guys want to run or fight?” I asked.
“How many goblins?” Ragnar asked.
“No idea.”
“More than I want to deal with,” Amber said, leaning over the edge.
I walked over and took a peek. It wasn’t pleasant. A quick count put the approaching greenskins around fifty, with a big ol’ dude leading them. Tromping up the hills without a care in the world. Which, to me, meant they weren’t looking for us.
“They don’t know we’re here,” I said, stepping away from the edge of the hill. “Let’s keep going. Double time it, if we can.”
Amber nodded, already moved quickly along.
“And somebody find Wulf,” I said, “remind him we’re going.”
Ragnar darted off as the rest of us started hiking. Fritz waddled next to me, his heads towering over, each one looking in a different direction. Then they’d all change.
“Not exactly the form I thought you’d have taken,” I said.
“Pun-ish-ment.”
“Typhon not keen on you switching up so often?”
“Bing-go.”
“Well, nice to have you back all the same.”
He just honked at me.
“You want those goblins to find us?” Amber hissed. “Keep fucking talking.”
I waved a sorry with my hands, and focused on walking up the steep slope. We weren’t quite jogging, but it was that point right where walking became an Olympic sport. Uphill. We needed to find another rise or something to block the upward view from the goblins — otherwise we’d be spotted and the chase would be on. Not that I was super concerned about it, since I could probably take on fifty goblins myself and still come out ahead. But it could very well cost a member or two of my crew, and that was not at all worth it.
I kept my eye on the weather. What had been a partly cloudy day with some mist and fog was now on the cusp of becoming nasty. Dark clouds were pushing in from the west, and I had that feeling in the back of my head that it was going to get superbad supersoon. Those are technical meteorological terms, by the way.
Up and up we went until Wulf, who’d darted out of the trees to rejoin us without a word, held up a paw and bent over.
“I think we need a break,” I said, as I stopped, and turned around. We’d been hiking for a good long time. I could barely see the little lake down below, but there, spread out around the shore, were the goblins. They were bickering, but also starting more than one fire, and seeming like they were setting up camp.
“Yo, Tarryn,” I said. “You think you can cast a spell or something from here, crush some of those fools?”
Tarryn walked over, and squinted down at the lake.
“I could,” he said, “I think. Might be out of range, and if there’s a magic user down there, they’ll know I did something, and they’ll come up here after us.”
“Can you tell if there’s a magic user?”
“If I could see better, maybe.”
“We need some binoculars. Or a telescope.”
“A what?”
“Ragnar,” I said, “take a note: I need to invent the telescope.”
“Take a note?” Ragnar replied. “How about I take a note that you can kiss my ass.”
I shot Ragnar a look, and saw him shooting me a middle finger.
“Nice,” I said. “You know I’m your lord and master, right?”
“Want me to take a note about that too?”
It wasn’t the time for a discussion on lordly respect. And frankly, it just wasn’t that important to me.
Watching the goblins was fascinating, seeing them pull canvas tents together and set up for the night. Sure, they were efficient, but I couldn’t help but think they were lazy. They’d stopped to camp even though here was still plenty of daylight left.
Then the weather hit.
Snow started to fall. Hard. Within minutes, I couldn’t see the goblins. Then, I couldn’t see, well, much of anything.
“Tie your goose in,” Amber shouted, wrapping a rope around my waist. “We need to find shelter.”
The white-out blizzard consumed us in seconds, while I was still trying to figure out how to tie a rope loop around a giant goose.
Chapter Nine
Fritz pecked at me with his eight beaks a time or two and then thwacked me on the head with his wing. Like almost all geese, my special monster was an asshole in his goose form.
“Fly-ing,” he honked, and spread his wings, letting the wind lift him off the hillside.
His departure made me want to yell at him, tell him he was a coward for abandoning us, and maybe he should have flown a few of us on his giant back. But yelling this close to the goblins was just inviting trouble, and the blizzard was going to be a big enough problem by itself.
I thought I’d be fine, thanks to my darkvision and tremorsense. But the combination of snow and wind did a stellar job to make it impossible for me to see or sense anything. I was stumbling along with only a rope to guide me. At the front of the formation, something I could see on occasion during momentary lapses in snowfall, were Amber and Wulf. They walked side by side, grumbling at each other, Wulf trying to guide and Amber trying to keep us alive. It was an interesting dynamic.
There was still grass underfoot, but barely. It was quickly being subsumed by the sticky wet snow, which was also doing a fantastic job of Santa-fying me. You know, if Santa was addicted to steroids. But still had a giant white beard. Made of snow. Okay, so the Santa metaphor wasn’t the best. But with someone else doing most of the work, all I really needed to do was walk wherever the rope tugged me.
Which was how it went for the first thirty minutes or so. By that time, there were a few inches on the ground, and footing started to get a little dicey. The verdant hills were all of a sudden slidey death slopes. I had to walk with my feet in first position, a skill I knew thanks to my one ballet class while trying to get into Jasmine Sims’ tutu.
The others in the rope-line didn’t have my extensive ballet training, and perhaps that’s why they slipped. Well, Tarryn slipped, running into Skeld. The combined weight of those two pulled poor Meikeljan off his feet, and then there were three of them sliding down the hill. Ragnar, Amber, and Wulf had no chance, and all of a sudden it was a free-for-all.
Except for me.
I just leaned uphill, kicked my feet in, and held on. The rope snapped tight around my waist; Amber’s knot held. I hauled them back to their feet, and dusted the snow off them.
“Thanks,” Ragnar said.
“No problem. You take note of that?”
He gave me an evil smile.
The stop gave us a moment to huddle together. “What’s the plan?” I shouted.
“Shelter,” Amber replied, also shouting.
The wind hurtling around us was loud enough to make my ears hurt. The cold also made my ears hurt, and I felt a real good headache coming on.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“That way,” Wulf said. “I think. I got turned around in the tumble.”
“He says it’s uphill,” Amber added.
“But with the snow, we need to watch for snarrets,” Wulf said.
“What the fuck are snarrets?” I asked.
“Bad news,” Wulf replied. “They like to hunt in whiteout conditions. They will trip you and paralyze you.”
“And they’re, what—?”
“Snarrets.”
“I just don’t—”
“The longer we wait in this snowstorm, the more that will come out and hunt. We need to keep moving.”
“Uphill,” I said.
“Uphill,” Wulf replied.
Lead on,” I said.
Amber nodded, and headed up.
I waited for the rest to get ahead, take a little slack out of the rope, thinking that there might be another slip and fall.
There was.
Two more.
It was mostly the same deal, sliding down until it got to me, and then I served as the anchor and pulled everyone back up. There was the brief discussion, that I should take lead, but then Ragnar pointed out that if I wasn’t ready to catch a fall or if I slipped, we’d all go down. So, once again, we trudged into the wind and snow.
There was a sense of timelessness in the blizzard. You couldn’t see where you were going or where you had gone. If we weren’t following an uphill direction, we’d have been lost. My footsteps were filled in almost immediately, and the combination of wind and snow meant I couldn’t even find Ragnar’s footsteps. Though he did have tiny little feet. As the snow level rose, I started to worry for Meikeljan, given his wee form. It wouldn’t take much for him to end up under the snow entirely.
We crested the hill we were on and came to a rocky bit. Which meant we were on flat ground. The rope in front of me slackened, and I saw Amber peering into the whiteout, doing her damndest to figure out where the fuck we might be going.
“We must move!” I heard Wulf bellow. “We are being hunted already!”
“Which way do we go?” I asked.
Wulf just pointed. I was pretty sure he’d just picked a random direction.
The wind howled, the snow came down, and we walked. Mostly forward. Theoretically. There was no way to tell.
And then, something wrapped around my ankle, pulling tight and then tripping me.
I face-planted into the snow, not even thinking to put my hands up and break my fall.
As soon as I hit the ground, or the snow, small creatures surrounded me. They looked like weasels, all white, bodies about a foot long with very thin, lengthy snouts filled with tiny needles for teeth. They had stupidly long tails that had to be at least seven feet long, and stubby little legs ending if fat wide feet.
I saw one snout pop open and try to bite me. I snapped my hand out, grabbed it, and squeezed.
There was a momentary hesitation before I felt a pulpy pop.
GG! You’ve killed a Snarret (lvl 6 Beast).
You’ve earned 50 XP! What a mighty hero you are.
Another one of the creatures bit me, and I got a flash of a notification, which I think was the paralysis debuff. But maybe because of my constitution, it barely registered. I felt a flicker of a tingle. So I just started thrashing around wildly, and after I jellied three more, the creatures decided I wasn’t worth the effort.
I swung myself to my feet and followed the slack line up to the next in the row. Tarryn. He was down in the snow, immobile, snarrets already munching on his paralyzed form. His eyes were wide open, and I could see the fear and panic in him.
“I got you, buddy,” I said. Then I played a quick game of whack-a-snarret, punting some of them off my mage while squishing the others.
He had small bites all over him, and some spots where chunks of flesh had been torn free. But he wasn’t moving.
“Just, uh, chill here,” I said, with a wry smile.
He did not return the smile. It was a bad joke, so even if he wasn’t paralyzed, he probably wouldn’t have returned the smile.
Up to the next.
Meikeljan was worse off. I was very worried he was dead already, so I picked the little guy up gently and carried him under one arm, dragging the inert form of Tarryn behind us.
I worked my way up the line, a bringer of death and jamification to the snarrets. They seemed to have gotten all of us, but they were quickly frightened away, leaving six paralyzed bodies and one me. So I just started dragging them all behind me, heading in the direction I thought might be the right way to go.
Which, you know, always works out fine. After about five minutes, I started to feel someone behind me moving the rope. A massive shadow loomed up out of the blizzard, and roared right in my face.
Chapter Ten
As hot, fetid breath melted snow around me, I got a good glimpse of the creature’s throat. And uvula. And tonsils. And probably some of its last meal, considering the half of a kobold arm I could see stuck in between some of the back teeth. The creature had plenty of saliva, thick ropes of the stuff vibrating as it yelled at me.
My first impulse was to throw my little ID spell at it, but considering what happened the last time I tried to cast a spell, I went in a different direction and, instead, I pulled a spear from m
y bag, and then screamed right back at the thing.
The scream either surprised him or scared him, because the monster shrank back a little and just stared at me out of one of his massive eyes. I noticed his very long eyelashes blocking the snow from causing any vision problems. For the barest of moments, he seemed to wait, to assess me.
Then he roared again and moved even closer.
I threw the spear as hard as I could right at the top of the creature’s mouth. The soft palate.
The spear shot forward like a rocket — hey-ho super strength — and it basically just disappeared into the creature. The creature semi-halted. Then, with its mouth still in roaring position, it tipped over, slamming into the ground with a heavy thud.
GG! You’ve killed an Abominaball (lvl 11 Beast).
You’ve earned 1250 XP! What a mighty hero you are.
And trapping the seven of us under the creature.
Actually, though, not that bad of a thing. Because the creature had a big fuck-off mouth, and it was wide open, so it was kind of like being in the most disgusting tent you could imagine. Still, it provided a break from the storm.
I pulled the other members of the group into a more relaxed position in our mouth-tent, and untied our guide rope. Immediately, I noticed someone missing.
Wulf.
The line had been cut quite neatly.
I sighed. This guy was either a grade-A coward or had something seriously nefarious planned.
As for the rest of the group, I set them out on their bedrolls and got them comfortable. Then, I examined everyone, and used a healing potion sparingly, putting a few drops on each of the open wounds. Within, say an additional ten minutes, the other six were up and about.
“This is disgusting,” Ragnar said.
“But warm,” Skeld countered.
“And we’re not getting lost,” I said.
