TVisTV Book 3: Epilogue (Patreon)

Epilogue

Hergolith was having a bad day. Not that anyone could say he had ever had a good one. From the moment he had clawed his way into the world, life had been little more than a brawl without pause. He had fought his many siblings for scraps of food, for a patch of dry ground, for the right to close his eyes without waking to teeth in his flesh. He had not always won. That was plain enough to see in him. He was small, narrow in the shoulders, stunted even by the sorry standards of his own miserable kind.

Hergolith was a Goblin.

His hunt to find food as he traveled had gone to rot before it had truly begun. His bow, a bent and ugly thing he had made with his own hands, had snapped, loosing one and his precious stone-tipped arrows into the brush. As if that were not enough, he had caught his foot on an unseen root and pitched hard across the forest floor, face-first into the damp leaf mold. By any honest measure, it had been a foul day, and it was not yet done with him.

Still, he shook his hair and let the air move through the thick strands to let himself breathe deeply of the forest air. It gave him a little strength. Not much. Just enough. Hergolith had suffered enough bad luck to break stronger creatures than him, but he was wrong in the head for a goblin, and he knew it. He liked to think of himself as an explorer, an adventurer, something grander than a starving little creature with split nails and a belly that never stayed full. When a creature had little to lose, risking everything stopped feeling like courage and started feeling like habit. He had lived with danger and disappointment so long that neither made much impression anymore. He was not brave. He was simply inured to failure and pain.

And pain, in this world, was a tutor that never slept. Struggle hardened a creature or killed it. It rewarded nerve, spite, and the willingness to crawl one step farther through the mud than the next Goblin. Hergolith had that in him. A mean scrap of hungry iron. That was why, even while the animal part of his mind hissed that this was folly, he kept moving toward the place where the “red thing from the sky” had fallen.

Goblins knew how to live on the leavings of stronger beasts. They skinned what could kill them and wore their hide for armor. They tore horns from the lumbering forest Kronir and made spear-shafts of them. They hammered Tree Laur teeth into their weapons to give them a cutting edge. That was the law of the world he lived in. Take what is stronger, and then survive by cunning and basic ingenuity. 

So what might a Goblin make from a thing that fell burning from the heavens? Armor no blade could bite. Weapons that split bone like wet, rotten bark. Wealth enough to buy obedience. Wealth enough to become a chieftain. Let his enemies hack at him until their arms failed and their weapons shattered uselessly against his hide. It was a key to doing more than just survival. 

They would speak about him around the fires for generations.

The thought of it struck him low and hot, a hard flash that twisted in his gut and sank lower still into his groin until he nearly lost his breath. His pale green skin flushed dark with it. He could see it already. The finest females. A breeding line a hundred strong. No, two hundred. A name that would be truly remembered. A grave avoided for more than one season.

But dreams were only the fuel for the engines of his desire. Ambition was driven by action.

Then there were the whispers.

So Hergolith pressed deeper into the woods, his feet steady if never sure, carrying him deeper into the ancient forest. This was no trimmed wood, no tamed place shaped by careful hands. This was a place of the old, wild, and raw. A place where roots writhed under black through the soil like the trees and buried those below in darkness. 

Not even Goblins, for all of their bestial nature, could pretend mastery in a place like this. The forest was older than tribes, older than fire pits, older than the oldest of their names. It did not care what walked beneath its boughs. 

Still, the dream drove him on, gaudy and swollen in his mind. He was so busy feeding it that he caught another hidden root and went sprawling again, pitched forward in a graceless heap. He fell hard, but he fell well. The Goblin knew better than to cry out in a place like this, for the fiends of the forest were always listening.

He was close. He could feel it.

Goblins had no maps. They had not yet found a use for such things. But they possessed an unnerving sense of direction, one that served them as well beneath the earth as it did above it. On some dim, instinctive level, they could feel the faint electrical skin wrapped around the world through the long hairs that served as much for breathing as for touch. They could sense the pull that drew things to iron and copper.

There was the smell, too. Burned trees. Freshly unearthed soil not yet settled. And fear. The sharp stink of creatures that had learned death could come screaming from the sky. It hung over the place like a stain. A wrongness. A pressure that pressed against the oldest, simplest parts of even Hergolith’s mind.

Then there were the whispers.

He slowed, letting stealth carry him where the force of his miserable weapons never could. But it would not be Stealth that won him this day. It would be what passed for bravery in a goblin like him: not noble courage, but something more primal, wild, and tempered by a deep greed.

Fires still spat and guttered here and there. Unnatural smoke coated the air, thick and bitter, barely stirred by the weak wind that slipped between the towering trees. Even those giants had been brought low, as if some titan had kicked them down for insolence, flinging them aside like playthings. Their corpses opened space for new growth.

And new growth had come. It had waited patiently for the fall and the fire. Aspiring saplings thrust up through ash and ruin with verdant desperation, clawing for every scrap of sun, eager to choke out whatever proved too slow, too weak, or too late. It was this whole savage world in miniature, life feeding on death with no pause for reverence.

But the Goblin spared none of its time for the dark poetry of life that was unfolding. His eyes were fixed on the heart of the devastation, on the place where green had still not dared return. There lay a giant of red and gold, its chest split open to the world.

Hergolith crept closer, low to the ground, moving with the abject caution of a creature born near the bottom of every food chain. He sniffed, drinking in the alien scent of something from a distant past. It smelled of fire. Of death. Of a thing his people had been taught to fear so long that the lesson had sunk into blood and bone. It smelled of Dragon.

But that was not enough to stop him. Hergolith had come too far and gone too long to turn back now. Even if death waited at the end of it, and nothing really mattered. Sometimes fickle Fate threw scraps to those mad enough to reach for them. Sometimes she only needed to be challenged from a different angle.

He was close enough now to feel the heat leaking from it, the last warmth of some fallen glory. He scrabbled up over the thing, dragged toward the yawning cavity in its chest. Goblin eyes peered down and found something that made him freeze.

No organs. No ropes of viscera. No blood. No bone. Metal.

The same hard, worked substance the Tall Ones sometimes carried. And lights, too, flickering weakly like summer fireflies. There, near what he could only think of as a fallen chair, stood a rod of metal crowned with crystal.

Something spoke to him.

An incessant rattle. A dry, hungry murmur that slid past his ears and straight into the black little core of him. It did not come from around him. It did not come from the air. The words, or perhaps the suggestions, were simply there inside his skull. And they were coming from the stick.

No. A scepter, Hergolith corrected himself. Or perhaps the whispers did.

It did not matter. The stories always said power came at a price, but Hergolith had nothing worth keeping. For a goblin like him, that made the bargain easy. As his hands closed around the Scepter of Wisdom, he felt the connection take hold.

The stories, however, said nothing about the pain.