“Foreseen my— what do mean?” I spread my feet and lowered my center of gravity, ready for a fight. I don’t know what he meant, but prophecies were never good. People always felt strongly about them, and there was no telling what someone might do when they cared.

The shaman brought one of the incense bowls to his face and breathed deeply. When he did deign to speak he did so in slow, measured tones, smoke spilling from his lips. “Do you think us fools? I watch the ancient tombs, I see the rising smoke and know the eddies that move it. One such eddy was you.”

I scowled. That wasn’t a proper answer and we both knew it. The shaman could guise his knowledge in mysticism, but at the end of the day it was just another kind of magic. “No time for riddles. How?”

The shaman shook his head. “You have already been told. As defense shaman it is my duty to monitor the mana that gathers at the lightbirth trees. Should they suffer, so shall the tribe.”

I nodded along. I might not be a fan of his manner of speaking, but you could hide truth in any phrase. I just needed to translate it. “So you sensed the teleportation scroll?”

“Tell-e-pore-ta-shun.” The shaman sounded out the human word. My basic understanding of the Old Tongue didn’t cover advanced topics like magic, so I’d reverted to my mother’s tongue without thinking about it.

“And a scroll you say?” The shaman shook his head. “A shame you did not do it yourself. I would have loved to reclaim the secrets of far-walking. But yes, I sensed your arrival and followed the ripples of your passage as best I could. There were few, but the death of an ancient is difficult to hide.”

I shifted on the balls of my feet. Maintaining a constant state of tension after my struggle and injury was starting to tire me, but if they revered the old Hob…

But when Selyra turned to me it was with wide eyes, and the shaman raised his bowl as if in toast. “Needless to say, I am more than impressed. Better men than you have died to the crypts. Cousin Goblin, it is my pleasure to welcome you as a guest of the tribe. Wenir gea, kai nai Takahrah.”

I let myself relax fully. There was no love lost between them and our trapped ancestors. “Wenir gea, kai nai Zhen.”

The shaman blinked slowly, finally breaking the rippling pools of blood in his eyes and crying red tears. He didn’t seemed alarms by the disturbance, simply fumbling one-handed to pick a small bowl up from the ground as he gestured with the other. “Sit children, and tell me Zhen, what far off tribe do you hail from to have such a halting grasp of our speech?”

I froze halfway down before forcing myself to continue the movement. Despite the horror stories, few Hobs killed their subordinates for disrespect, at least not the accidental kind. Quite frankly, I suspected most of the rumors that spread through the human work gangs and goblin grunts alike were started by those very Hobs, precisely so they never had to actually kill someone who could be worked to death productively instead. Takahrah was just curious.

Probably.

“We spoke a different language. I was only taught the Old Tongue, we never spoke it.” Except when Ol’ Gobber made us practice, obviously. He would send us through all manner of deathtraps blindfolded as he shouted instructions in the fastest Old Tongue his withered lips could spit out.

“And where? To have far-walked here, it must be quite a tale.”

It really was. “It really isn’t. Some idiot adventurer tried to cast a spell at me and it misfired. I was lucky not to die.”

Takahrah seemed skeptical, but he didn’t call me on it. With that bit of bullshit out of the way, I asked my own question. “What other paths lead upwards, besides far-walking?”

Takahrah scooped his bloody tears from his cheeks into his little bowl, nodding. “Eager to return to your tribe, yes? The ways up are numerous, and each deadlier than the last.”

I shifted nervously at the mention of my tribe. I suppose the shaman wasn’t all that far off though, I’d definitely be ‘returning’ to them, in a sense. I’d just have to find whichever of these paths was least deadly for me, and maybe see if I could solidify my Skills and levels a bit too. “What paths are there?”

The shaman turned to the rear of the tent and placed his bowl of red tears by a second flap in the leather. “Just as the jungle canopy is porous enough to let dappled light dance across the forest floor, so too is the sky canopy far above riddled with holes. Just as the beasts and dark things filter down to feed, so too could a brave goblin sneak up to escape.”

I eyed the flap uneasily, suddenly conscious of snuffling breaths on the other side. “That’s one path. What others?”

The shaman chuckled. “That is many paths little cousin. Thousands. Any pillar-tree might be scaled in a dozen different ways, or you might trek the full distance to reach the edge of our realms and climb the great curving sides of our home.”

Takahrah’s words were interesting, but my mind cut off sometime before fully processing the full implications of the cavern walls. Instead, I was staring straight at the massive snout peaking through the rear tent flaps. I could only see the very tip of its grey-flecked snout, but it was already significantly larger than the boar I’d rode in on. The beast slowly worked its way over to the bowl and licked at it with the heavy slab of muscle that was its tongue.

The emptied bowl flipped over and tumbled a couple feet inward to knock against Takahrah’s back. He turned and smiled, reaching up to scratch the boar’s snout. “Who’s a good piggy? Is it you?”

The boar leaned into Takahrah’s touch, bringing its full head into view. “Yes it is!” Takahrah crooned, and the beast’s eyes crinkled up in contentment.

“Er, is it wise to give them a taste for goblin blood?”

Selrya looked at me in shock and outrage, but Takahrah just waved away my concerns. “Foolish cousin. Our boar-brothers are as much a part of the tribe as any goblin. They drink of our blood, and we drink of theirs.”

That hadn’t really answered my question, but fine. I wasn’t going to push the envelope that far. If the tribe’s shaman thought it was a good idea to exchange blood with wild animals, then that was their business.

“Er, sure. Which path would you recommend taking upwards?”

Takahrah chuckled. “None. But that wouldn’t satisfy you, would it?”

I shook my head. It wasn’t as bad down here as I’d first thought, but that didn’t mean I wanted to live the rest of my life down here. Even absent that, I had unfinished business back home.

Takahrah sighed. “I suspected that. You are too concerned with your travels to accept an answer so easily. Will you at least stay for some time before you pass on? It would be nice to see a new face for once.”

I drummed my fingers on my leg. Did he really care about having a guest, or was there some other motivation for his invitation? I couldn’t say, but it only made me want to be gone faster. A shame, because the very fact that he’d raised the question brought the idea into my brain, and I couldn’t dismiss it so easily. Taking some time off to solidify my third Skill and maybe gain a level or two would really do wonders for my odds of surviving the long way up.

I eventually settled on an appropriately noncommittal answer. “I dunno. If you could tell me any more details, maybe I could make up my mind?”

Takahrah grinned, and I could tell he knew my evasive answer for what it was. Anything as old as he looked surely had picked up all manner of cunning. Nonetheless he relaxed, leaning back into the boar and idly scratching between its eyes with one hand. “Of course. We only know so much about what dwells above, but enough for a few warnings. The first barrier, obviously, is getting up there.”

He gestured upwards with his free hand. “Any climber has what boils down to two options. You can climb a tree, or the cavern walls. The trees are the lifeblood of this place, rivers flowing down them. You can still scale their branches, but to do so is to stare into the abyss inches from your face. Even to brush up against the torrent will surely drag you to your death.”

I nodded. “And the cavern walls curve, forcing me to climb upside-down.”

Takahrah snapped his fingers. “Exactly! Doomed whichever way you take, even before you get eaten. And you will get eaten, there is no hope for a goblin traveling alone. Our only strength comes from the tribe, from the spirits. No mere goblin could hope to survive the journey alone.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I can.”

Takahrah stopped, just looking at me until the boar, dissatisfied with the lack of scratches, grunted and bumped against his hand. Takahrah resumed his ministrations, and his speaking. “What strength do you have, to think yourself mightier than any Hob?”

I shook my head. “Sneakier.”

Takahrah snorted. “Not enough. The Snatchers will see you, the Howlers hear you, the Spinners feel your movements. They are not blind, to be easily fooled, they are deadly predators, to see even the smallest prey. You are not better than them.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. The shaman wasn’t all wrong. The chameleon-owl hadn’t had too much trouble spotting me. Not under the best circumstances admittedly, but only a fool counted on ideal circumstances for success.

“Not constructive.” I ended up grumbling.

The shaman laughed. “You wish for me to refine your madness? Then come. There is a manner in which you might learn to overcome the dangers.”

Takahrah stood, unfolding to the full height of a Hob. He was gaunt as a skeleton, but his lanky limbs still carried him past us to throw the tent flap open without betraying any hint of weakness. Selyra scrambled to her feet and I soon followed her as I realized the shaman was setting a brisk pace. He might be old, but there was life in him yet.

Selyra and I scurried after Takahrah, struggling to keep him in view as he wove his way through the packed tents of the camp. Still, I had more than enough breath to ask questions. “Why are we moving? Where are we going?”

Takahrah patted me on the head and I choked down the urge to shake him off. “If we are to welcome a new guest, should we not do it properly?”

I scowled. Were clear, concise answers too much to ask for? “How?”

“A formal introduction is required. It is a busy time, but you have arrived at perhaps the best moment within it. With the migration complete and the fire set we must simply wait before the planting. Nonetheless, it will take some time to convene.”

Planting? I hadn’t known they were farmers, though I suppose burning everything to the ground was one way to clear land. “Who convenes?”

“The elders.”

“And the chieftain?”

Takahrah glanced down at me. “No.”

I quieted. Things would become clear soon enough. I was a bit nervous about meeting whatever other Hobs ruled the tribe, but I wasn’t about to back off now. Besides, Takahrah seemed like a nice enough sort. He sure liked the sound of his own voice, but that was forgivable. I’d meet more than a few Hobs, and if the most you had to fear from one was annoyance you could count yourself lucky indeed.

Takahrah took us to the true center of the camp, a cleared circle of hard-packed dirt. The ground was as unyielding as stone and I immediately knew that this place had been here a lot longer than the scorched clearing. It was simple, with only a few carved pillars and simple hewn benches for decoration, but even that said a lot. If this tribe was semi-nomadic as Takahrah had implied then any permanent structure was significant. The place had been stocked with a few scattered bundles of supplies around the edges, and someone had taken the care to place a pile of firewood near the center.

Takahrah stopped at a fire pit dug in the circle, sitting down calmly.

“Would you like any tea?” Takahrah asked as he picked up a handful of twigs and began building a little pile in the fire pit.

I bit down a reflexive refusal and said yes. Takahrah didn’t need to poison me to kill me, and manners were important. Life-savingly important.

Takahrah nodded, as if my acceptance was a given. Maybe it was to him. Sharing food was a powerful symbolic gesture at times, and I had no idea how seriously this tribe took it. He nodded to Selyra and she immediately scurried off to drag out a basket from beneath one of the benches. When she returned she set the basket down in front of him.

I looked in the basket, but it was essentially what one would expect. A little clay teapot amidst various bundled leaves, presumably the tea itself. Takahrah took out the teapot and set it to the side gently as Selyra picked up where he’d left off, building up a fire bundle from the twigs he’d set down. As she built her way up to wrist thick logs Takahrah held out his hand over the teapot and whispered an indiscernible word. I perked up my ears, but even my honed senses weren’t enough. The word simply flitted across my mind without finding purchase.

The additional attention to my senses was hardly completely wasted though. My ears might be incapable of truly registering what I’d just heard, but my mana sense, as weak as it was, certainly could. Just as the air trembled with the sound, so to did the ambient mana all around us.

I focussed on my mana sense as soon as I realized that Takahrah was casting a spell, but whatever the effects were they were too subtle for me to sense after the initial casting.

At least with my mana sense. It became obvious the actual physical effect was far more blatant as I blinked my eyes back into focus. Water was beading up all across Takahrah’s hand, condensing from the air as it might on cold metal, if far faster. It only took a handful of seconds before the water grew too heavy to cling to his hand and began to trickle down into the teapot. If it wasn’t going to be boiled anyway I might reconsider drinking the tea, who knew what manner of drugs and herbs a shaman’s hands had handled.

I made a mental note not to use my mana sense anywhere too dangerous. I didn’t have any Skill to take off the mental focus necessary for a novice like me to get anything useful out of it so I’d just end up staring off into space and missing important information.

“Why don’t you drink the lake water?” I asked.

Takahrah rolled his eyes. “What am I going to do, lug a bucket all the way there and back? Not with these old bones, no thank you.”

Huh. The shaman back home was so casual about magic, even minor magic like this. Was he just guising petty tricks in ceremony to inflate his own ego, or was Takahrah just that much better?

A triumphant cry interrupted my thoughts and I turned to see Selyra coming back with a wriggling piglet held above her head. I glanced over at Takahrah, but he seemed more amused than anything else. Didn’t they worship the little bastards?

Selyra sat down in front of her little campfire, which she’d finished while I hadn’t been paying attention, and brought the struggling piglet down into her lap. It calmed a bit with something solid supporting it, but Selyra’s cradling arms still cut off any escape. Selyra scratched it behind the ears and murmured soothing words at it.

The pig sneezed. Selyra immediately crooned words of encouragement, and I began to get an idea of what was going on here. The little piglet exhaled at the assembled firewood, blowing a few strands of tinder out of place, but as Selyra continued to urge it on the little beast’s breath took on a new sound and the globs of snot spraying out turned into a rain of sparks.

Selyra raised her arms to celebrate her success and the pig took the opportunity to hop out of her lap and trot off. Selyra ignored the escaped piglet to focus on stoking the faintly smouldering embers into a proper fire. It didn’t take long for the flames to spread and Takahrah to set his full pot on top.

“That fire-breath is handy.”

Takahrah nodded sagely. “Our boar-brothers truly are a blessing.”

I nodded along. “They certainly seem to be.” I could only imagine how goblins alone would live down here. I doubted sprawling camps and laughing children would be a part of it.

The ground quivered beneath my butt and my muscles tensed, freezing every micromovement of my body to complete stillness, save for my right ear, which swiveled to face backwards. Slowly rising above the volume of the background clamor was the clear sound of heavy footsteps. Bipedal footsteps, coming directly towards us.

I glanced over at Takahrah with my eyes alone and neck still frozen as a statue, but the shaman was perfectly at ease. I relaxed slightly, still tense, but no longer fully frozen. I was certainly confident enough to look backwards, if Takahrah wasn’t worried then it wasn’t likely to be a predator at all, let alone one ravenous enough to pounce at the slightest movement.

It was a Hob, the largest I had ever seen. The polar opposite of Takahrah’s tall gauntness, this Hob towered at well over two meters tall and at least one across the shoulders. Hobs came in all manner of shapes and sizes off course, but this guy was still pushing the limits of what I’d thought possible. That kind of bulk was something I’d expect of a troll, not a goblin.

He was clearly more than willing to take advantage of his bulk, as evidenced by the massive club he carried rested on one shoulder and the puckered scars just beneath his collarbones. The club grew thinner towards the bottom and carried a vicious fang embedded at its bulbous head. If he wasn’t the tribe’s chief he’d be their second hand, that thing looked like it could punch clean through drakehide. Even its thinnest part was as thick around as my wrist.

He thumped his club down on the ground and sent a final reverberation through the hard-packed dirt before he kicked it over to lie on its side and sat down on the head of his club. He looked almost comical with his knees going up to his chin, but I wasn’t about to laugh.

“Takahrah.” The new Hob gave a slight reverse nod towards the shaman before he turned his gaze on me. “Is this youngling the reason you’ve summoned us?”

I swallowed, futilely trying to moisten my dry throat.

“Yes.”

I turned to Takahrah, putting the huge Hob out of my direct line of sight. I didn’t want to look at him, and peripheral vision was just fine for spotting sudden movements. Whe- if someone like that attacked me, it wouldn’t be subtle.

“When did you summon him, before I even came?” I’d expected to see him send Selyra off to gather the other tribe elders, but he could well have summoned them in anticipation of my arrival.

Takahrah smirked. “The council works as one, what one knows will be known to all.”

The large Hob grunted. “A leaf hit me in the face. Almost took an eye out.”

Takahrah scowled. “Raas, you’ve wrestled saber-cats. How would a leaf hurt you?”

Raas grunted again, but marginally more irritated this time. “It was a sharp leaf.”

I was only half paying attention to their bickering by that point. However impressive it might be that Takahrah could mouth off to Raas and get away with it, the approaching figures were far more important.

I could hear two sets of footsteps, but when I turned to look I saw four goblins. The eldest among them, and perhaps the oldest goblin I’d ever seen, rode atop the shoulder of a young Hob. You could tell from the stretched look of the skin around his joints that he’d transformed within the last handful of months. Fitting, most Hobs wouldn’t want to spend their time carting around some geezer, especially one weighed down with all the ornamentation this one had. Garlands of burning vines hung around his neck, smouldering against his bare skin, and his long staff was braced against the Hob for support.

I bet that was painful, the whole thing was covered in bumps and ridges for grip.

The other two were closer to what I might expect, both female Hobs. The first moved with the uncanny grace of a stalking cat, entire body rolling with lean muscle, while the second was covered in stains, some from deliberate dyes, others from what looked like failed alchemical concoctions. I broke away from staring at her very sexy nose to examine the first one more closely.

Fundamentally her gear wasn’t much different from Selrya’s, but everything bore the touch of personal care, each spear slung from her back made just so. Most impressively, I couldn’t get a sound from her. A slight rustle of cloth perhaps, but nothing that couldn’t blend into the leaves in the wind. Of her footfalls I didn’t even have that much; they were completely silent.

I glanced down at the ground. My mother had always taught me to respect the boundaries of women, and observation of the female Hobs back home had made it clear that the practical consequence of pushing that boundary was broken bones at best.

And that was when other Hobs were bothering them. The same kind of force could easily kill an ordinary goblin.

The other three council members reached the fire and exchanged greetings with Takahrah. The young Hob reached back to take the elderly goblin off of his back and set him on the ground with the kind of gentleness and care that most Hobs reserved for a paper-thin crystal decanter of fine elven spirits.

The brightly dyed Hob smirked at the elderly goblin. “Sure you want to sit on the ground, mate? You might catch a cold.”

The elder’s staff reached out and bonked her lightly on the forehead. It was slow, as slow as any old man with a stick would be, but she did nothing to avoid it. The acorns and nuts tied about the head rattled as he returned his staff to rest. Strangely, I noticed that the bumps and grooves across it weren’t carved into its surface but were composed of hundreds of seeds embedded into the wood.

Somehow I doubted that was natural. A humble goblin sitting as an equal among Hobs practically screamed shaman, and the smouldering vines he wore didn’t seem to be burning out anymore than they were burning his skin.

The other female Hob slipped her quiver of javelins from her back and set them off to the side so she could stretch out freely. “Someday someone’s gonna take real offense to you, Jurakra.”

“Someday.” Jurakra leaned over the fire to glance down at the leaves Takahrah had started grinding up in a bowl made from someone’s skull. “Smokeleaf tea? We really have to teach you how to have fun one of these days.”

Takahrah smirked. “Oh, certainly. Someday.”

Jurakra laughed and sat down cross legged. “You got me there old man. So what have you got for us today?”

The old shaman sighed and I saw visible heatwaves spill from his mouth, air rippling as it did above a furnace. “You younglings are so hasty. The meat of the matter will wait until we have drunk, as it should.”

The withered old shaman glanced at me. “Still, it wouldn’t hurt to know which tribe is asking for our help.”

Takahrah grinned. “Oh, you’d be surprised. This child is from the surface.”

The entire circle went dead silent, five goblins staring at me in mute shock.