Father Viker had a saying: stupidity should be painful. Usually he said it after he’d given me a clout to the back of the head for doing something wrong during a writing lesson, and usually it was followed by his second favorite saying, which was ‘quit your sniveling.’

Though I wanted to shank him at the time, I now realize that the expression carries the uncomfortable weight of truth. While mistakes may be inevitable, the pain that often results from making them is the best way to ensure you don’t make them again.

An effective Evil Overlord will offer effective corrective measures to his minions, is what I’m driving at. It’s in their best interests as well as his or her own. As long as the lesson is proportional – I mean, it’s really hard for someone to learn from a mistake if they’re dead.

The guys to the right and left of the cooling corpse tend to gain a little wisdom, though.

~ ~ ~

When I came to, it was dawn. My face hurt. Honestly, my everything hurt. Also I was very cold. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes.

I discovered that I was very cold because I was naked. Well, my ratty old blanket sort of half-covered my private parts, but everything else was exposed to the cold air or the colder ground. Unless you counted where I’d been bound at wrists and ankles, which I did not.

I looked around, blearily, and saw that Catapult (of course it was Catapult, Nuk wasn’t smart enough to be that viciously even-handed) had propped me up against the same boulder that I’d propped her against before the tables had got so despicably turned. The rock worms were still there, and still dead. So were the three coworkers of Nuk and my new worst enemy. But there was no sign of my clothes from what I could see. Or anybody else’s clothes. Or anything else remotely useful, like a knife.

Which meant she’d taken my pack in addition to everything else.

Which meant that she’d also taken Hrazz’k.

Even though I’d already gotten the power it had to give, and therefore didn’t strictly need it for more than the occasional bit of advice, losing Hrazz’k stung. I’m not going to lie.

“Well,” I said to myself, “with any luck she’ll free it and then it’ll bite her head off.” But I very much doubted Catapult would do anything that stupid.

I squirmed around and used the boulder to get to a standing position, and saw that Catapult had left me one other thing. The ax, blunted all to hell, lay atop the boulder.

It was better than nothing. I grabbed it and positioned it so that I could start sawing at the bonds on my ankles, and once my legs were free I was able to more easily squat down and brace the ax in such a way that I could cut the strips of cloth that bound my wrists. Once that was done, I wrapped the blanket around me, skirt-like, grabbed the ax, and started out into the Debatable Lands proper, keeping the rising sun at my back.

What followed was a months-long tour of hell.

I’m not going to go into great detail about all that I suffered, because I’ve mostly succeeded in blocking out that miserable period of my life. Nature is an unfeeling, ruthless thing, red in tooth and claw, and to survive it you have to become one with it. Or I did anyway.

But this time period is simply too important, too formative, too pertinent to my transformation from hapless fool to the man I am today to gloss over completely. So as a compromise, I offer this montage of suffering:

*

I am tying bark around my bleeding feet using stems of long grass, as a pathetic approximation of sandals, when a thing like a squirrel (if squirrels had two-inch fangs) flings itself from an overhead branch and starts to scratch and bite the fuck out of my face. I manage to get it off me and strangle it to death. Its death rattle calls half a dozen more, because apparently these little assholes are pack creatures.

*

I am cooking asshole-squirrels over a campfire. I am drooling slightly. There are dozens of gashes all over my face and torso. I am wearing a necklace made of squirrel tails, and have substituted the bark sandals with fur booties. You can’t see it, of course, but the stench from the uncured skins is simply brutal.

*

I have discovered a small pool of cleanish water at the bottom of a rocky gorge. I’m bent down over it, bringing handfuls of water to my mouth, when on the opposite side of the gorge appears a short, greenish-skinned, pot-bellied, long eared creature. It is wearing a loincloth and carrying a stone-tipped spear. It also has on a necklace of what looks suspiciously like dried ears in a variety of species, some more sentient than others.

The more experienced among you would recognize the creature as a goblin.

I freeze. It freezes.

I offer a tentative, ‘let’s be friends shall we?’ smile, and it howls and rushes me with its spear.

I burn it.

Three more arrive from the direction the first had appeared from, all of them howling and brandishing crude weapons.

I burn them.

At least a dozen more pop up from pretty much every direction. Their screams echo back and forth from the rocky walls of the gorge.

I burn, like, five more? And then the fire stops coming when I call it, exhausted for the time being.

I pick up my ax and run.

*

It is night. I have found a bog and am hiding in it. Everything but my nose is submerged. Even though my ears are beneath the mud line, I can still hear the howls of the goblin hunting party.

*

I have found a cave, and am sitting in it in the dark. My arms are hugging my knees, and I am rocking back and forth. I am crying, but very quietly, for the same reason I have not lit a fire. Fucking goblins.

Dawn brings with it enough light to see deeper into the cave. I realize I have been sitting within twenty feet of a hibernating bear all night.

As I creep from the cave, I think about all the things I am going to do to Catapult when I find her. None of them are boob related.

*

Covered in dry, cracking mud, I have come upon a mountain lion. It is in a hollow and I am behind and above it. It does not notice me, because I am downwind of it, its entire focus is on the deer it is happily munching away on, and I am learning to move stealthily, because goblins it tuns out have fucking great hearing.

The mountain lion is a huge, tawny beast with very big teeth and very sharp claws, but by this point I would sell my mother into slavery for a single bite of venison.

I decide to try the same trick I’d used on the rock worms and cook the lion from the inside out.

I learn that starvation is a very harsh curb on my power. The lion burps and shakes its massive head, then continues to feast.

I lose my shit, take up my ax in both hands, and throw myself on it from above. More from luck than any kind of skill, I bury the ax in its skull.

It still comes within inches of disemboweling me. The ax is lodged in its skull.

I finally dispatch it with a large rock, slamming it on the lion’s head while screaming “Just! Fucking! Die! Already!”

*

I am squatting next to another campfire. Hunks of deer meat are sizzling on a flat stone in front of me. My face is smeared with a nasty mix of mud and deer blood. Across my shoulders is draped the skin of a mountain lion, and it reeks, and I am beyond caring. I have added a few of the lion’s claws to my squirrel tail necklace, and I am attempting to sew myself a pair of pants using deer skin, mountain lion guts, and a thorn. The results are a travesty.

When they are ‘finished’ I wear them proudly, if itchily.

*

Snow has begun to fall, fat bastard flakes from a leaden gray sky. I snarl at them, having all but forgotten human speech. I am still traveling westward, more or less, when I remember to - though I can’t quite recall why. I have grown a beard. My hair is long and matted, and home to various creatures.

There are goblin ears on my necklace now, in addition to the claws. In the pack on my back are lumps of smoked meat wrapped up in leaves. You do not want to know what kind of meat.

I am traversing a ridge. In the crevasse below me, to my right, I see a goblin scout slinking along, shadowing me. I point my ax at it and snarl, and it disappears. They do not hunt me anymore, much. Not since I started hunting them.

My ax is sharp now. I have learned how to hone it on the stones that the Debatable Lands have in abundance.

*

I came upon a… thing. Like a game trail, but bigger, wider. Flatter. Slowly, sluggishly, my brain offered up a word: road.

I squatted in the undergrowth and observed this new thing. If there is one thing the Debatable Lands had taught me, it’s that new things are usually dangerous, and cause for deep suspicion.

My brain burped up a slightly more specific description: dirt road.

Roads led to places. Places had things. Things like alcohol, and Catapults. And food. And alcohol.

Lots and lots of things I hadn’t thought of for a long time started to come back to me, faster and faster. The feral, goblin-hunting creature I had become retreated – not all the way, but enough – and Gar once again came marginally to the fore.

I stood, stepped onto the road, chose a direction, and started walking. I had remembered the most important thing, you see.

“Coming for ya, Catapult, yes I am,” I croaked to the trees, throat and mouth unused to forming anything more meaningful than a growl.

* * *

During my months in the wilderness I had managed to bypass Mudhelm entirely, it turned out, and was actually fairly far to the west and north of it. The terrain, while still a nightmare by the standards of most settled places, was far less awful than what I had been surviving in for the previous months. There were actually a few patches of ground big enough and flat enough for farming, for one thing, and for another much of the terrain that wasn’t level was still gentle enough that you didn’t have to scramble up and down using both hands and feet.

I walked down the road for perhaps an hour before I saw my first sign of civilization. It was a turnip field. It was a shitty turnip field even by my family’s standards, with no notion of planting in rows and with boulders sticking half out of the soil, but it was a turnip field. I was intimately acquainted with turnip fields, having spent a goodly portion of my childhood de-rocking them, planting seeds in them, weeding them and then pulling turnips out of them.

I like turnips about the same as I like getting slapped in the face, but I had long before learned not to be picky. I pulled up a handful and started munching as I continued on.

The farmer’s shack appeared around the next bend in the road. Its owner, an old man, was sitting outside it on a stump. He was busy plucking a chicken and muttering.

“Which way’s Mudhelm?” I croaked. He looked up, saw me, screamed, dropped the chicken and ran inside his shack. I heard a bolt being thrown.

“Thanks for the chicken, I guess?” I said to the door.

“Take it! Take it and leave!” came the muffled reply.

“Alright. But which way’s Mudhelm?” A chicken was good. Finding Catapult would be much, much better.

“Keep going the way you’re going!”

“Cheers.” I continued on my way, half-plucked chicken and a few turnips the richer.

I came across half a dozen more isolated farmsteads much like the first on my way to Mudhelm. Much like the first, the inhabitants of the farmsteads did not greet me with open arms. At a couple of them, everybody ran screaming into the woods, which I took as an invitation to peruse their belongings and take whatever caught my fancy. (nota bene: isolated dirt farmers have fuck-all, generally speaking.)

Three other farmers did more or less as the first had, barricading themselves in their hovels. One fellow threw himself down his own well. I was starting to find these responses to my presence somewhat hurtful, actually. But it wasn’t until I ran into the last self-sufficient farmer that I twigged to why I wasn’t more popular.

“You smell like ass and look like shit on toast combined with death on a stick. Go away.” This fellow had a way with words. Also he was obviously a half orc – the tusks were a big clue – and his ax was a lot bigger than mine. He stood at the gate to his steading, and behind him I saw three or four kids peering at me from various hiding places.

“Thanks,” I replied. “How far to Mudhelm?”

“Just keep walking. You’ll get there by morning, goblin killer.”

“Eh?”

He pointed to my necklace.

“Oh.”

“You want a little advice, you’ll put that away before you get into town. Your reputation precedes you.”

“It does?”

“Yeah. Most folks ain’t exactly cryin’ about what you been doing, but them city goblins ain’t gonna throw flower petals in your path, if you know what I mean.”

“…no?” I meant that I didn't know what he meant, but he took it the other way.

“No. Now piss off, eh? Flies are gathering.”

I shrugged and continued on. I didn’t care about goblins, city or otherwise. I didn’t care about smelling like ass. I just wanted to find Catapult.

Obsession is both a wonderful and terrible thing.