I blinked. “Gods? What about gods?”

The two shared that same glance again.

“Anything. Everything.”

The shackled Hob seemed to notice my confusion. “Humor us. We know nothing of what knowledge has survived on the surface.”

I nodded. “Well, gods are the insanely powerful beings who created the various races of the world and granted them their powers. The human gods granted them their Levels, the elven gods granted them the gift of magic and so on.”

Khavik shrugged. “You’re not wrong.” He glanced over at the other spirit. “Right Kimakt? You know more about this than me.”

Kimakt bit his lip, then shook his head. “Accurate, sure, but hardly complete. The gods are far more than merely some races’ patrons, and not every race has a god.”

I knew that part. “Like the goblins.”

The two spirits exchanged that look again, over my head, but not above my notice. Khavik broke out into a broad grin. “Not anymore.”

Kimakt matched his fellow spirit, exposing double rows of needle teeth to the air. “Damn straight.”

I glanced back and forth between them, but they didn’t seem inclined to explain further. I had just about worked up the courage to ask when we stepped through to a wide chamber beyond the cramped confines of the tunnels and were bathed in blue light from the thousands of crystals embedded across every available surface.

And for some reason, a massive tawny cat lying in one corner.

“Behold!” Khavik swept up both arms, as if to envelop the room into a hug. “The Chamber of Memories!”

Kimakt smiled at his companion’s exuberance. “This is where the most critical memories of our history are locked within the crystal matrix, eternal and unchanging without the distortions of a thinking mind to affect them.”

“And this is the last known record of what our gods once were.”

“And how we killed them.”

I gaped. “Killed them? You can’t kill a god!”

Khavik fist punched the air. “Then you aren’t trying hard enough!”

Kimakt shook his head. “Mortals cannot kill the immortal, but that does not mean no one can.”

“Oh, and were ancient goblins immortal now?”

Kimakt chuckled. “Hardly. No, we may not have dealt the final blow, but make no mistake: the gods of goblinkind met their end because of goblinkind, not anyone else! It was our struggle that exposed them to their enemies, it was us that brought them low. If another can claim the credit it is as an executioner at our command, nothing more.”

I nodded slowly. “Are you seriously claiming the ability to command other gods?”

Kimakt tried to flick my ear and I twitched it out of reach. Nice try, but my sensitive ears had been twisted enough as a child for me to see that coming a mile away. Add in my Stats and I no longer even needed to move my head to dodge it. “That isn’t what I meant and you know it. The choice was in our hands and we took it.”

Khavik smirked. “If anything, the better metaphor would be throwing the gods into a pit of rabid dogs. Sure, the human and elven gods are the ones who did the deed, but it was exactly what we expected them to do.”

“At any rate, that answers half your original question.” Kimakt said. “Why is Iartukt so afraid? Because we weren’t the only things trapped down here. If the barrier broke the lights would do more than go out, they’d go out and leave us down in the dark with one of the horrific monsters we helped betray.”

Seeing my look, Kimakt quickly clarified. “Not one of the gods. Those really are dead, thank the stars, but their creations don’t share that fate. The victorious gods weren’t about to hunt down every little secret their enemies left behind, but they did seal off a few of the worst.”

“Like our friend over there.” Khavik jerked his head feathers in a direction that could have been anywhere, but was probably supposed to be towards the hollow sun. “It was one of the gods foremost servants, enjoying immense power and prestige from the suppression of its fellows.”

Yes. Of course that’s only the first of your questions Zhen, but sometimes to answer a question you must first ask one: The question remains,” Kimakt said, “if the power of humans is Levels, and the power of elves is magic, what power did goblins get from our gods?”

“Nothing?” I guessed. It did seem like our gods had been assholes.

“No!” Khavik and Kimakt shouted in unison.

“What did you think the Hob metamorphosis was?”

I scratched my head. “Um, biology? The Hob transformation is nice, but nine times out of ten it just gives you a bigger, stronger goblin, and that’s when they survive. A good half don’t, that’s not the work of a go— oh. I think I get why you killed them now.”

The two Hobs stared down at me, mouths open. I shuffled backwards awkwardly, ensuring I could keep both in my sightline at once.

“Half?” Khavik lips barely opened, the exuberant chieftain’s shouts reduced to mere whisper.

“How could you survive?” Kimakt bore an intense look, eyes flicking back and forth as if struggling to keep up with the thousand things flashing through his brain. “With half as many Hobs how could you possibly fight the armies of men?”

I stared at him. They used to have more? “With goblins. We may be small, but by sending a horde of us against an enemy they can be softened up for a Hob attack.”

Khavik fell to his knees. “No. Nononono.”

“We… send them children to the front lines before us?” Kimakt’s voice was deadly quiet.

I let my cloak fall about my shoulders, silently slipping a vial of holy oil from my pouch. “Yes.” I said slowly, carefully. “Those above do. They always have.”

Khavik snarled and I jumped back, leveling my spear at him. “That isn’t right! We are the Hobs, the strong, it is our duty to bear the burdens others cannot! We…” He trailed off as he saw my readied weapon. “You’re afraid of me.”

Kimakt nodded. “Of course. I’m an idiot for not seeing it sooner. We saw him slay a slaver in memories Iartukt dredged up from his mind. We didn’t stop to ask: why was there a slaver to slay? Is this what we have become?”

Khavik opened his arms. “Brother, you know I would never hurt you?”

My eyes flicked over his kneeling form, mind running over all the ways he could kill me. Sure, he looked sincere, but he could easily possess my body, consume my soul, or simply wrap his arms around me and let the chill of the grave sap the life from my bones.

I didn’t move.

Khavik slowly let his arms fall back to his side, lowering his head to stare at the ground. “This isn’t what was supposed to be.”

Kimakt sighed, and somehow that simple sound carried all the weight and regrets of an endless unlife. “No. This wasn’t what I died for. But sometimes you don’t get to choose the world you create.”

I shifted my vial to my right hand, cupping it between my palm and the shaft.

Kimakt sucked in one lip and worried at it with his teeth as he stared at me. “Sometimes… you have to leave it to the next generation to change the world.”

I shook my head as I realized what he was getting at, but Khavik was already raising his. “You! You’re alive, you can escape this place and bring our people the words of their ancestors!”

I backed away, hands raised as if to hold off their words. “Oh no, no you don’t.”

“You could change the world!”

“The world’s a big damn place! Far bigger than me and more than strong enough to crush me to paste without so much as noticing, so don’t you try to make me your prophet!”

Khavik raised his hands placatingly. “But we could give you the ancient ways to restore our people!”

“Restore them to what? You yourself worked to overthrow the very gods who created us, don’t try to pretend it was some kind of utopia just because there were a few more Hobs!”

Kimakt stepped between us, holding up both hands. “Alright, alright, let’s all calm down. We’re talking past each other here, we need to set aside whatever we think needs to be done in the future and start explaining things from the beginning.”

He turned to me. “Explain the Hob transformation as if we were complete morons who knew nothing at all. Then we’ll explain the past as if you were a complete moron who knew nothing at all. Deal?”

I returned my spear to rest, setting the butt against the ground. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d come here to learn after all. I wanted better odds of escaping and nothing would do that quite like learning goblin secrets alongside my stolen human ones. “Deal.”

“Hobs are the strongest of goblinkind, elevated to be the equals of other races. It begins when a goblin is stricken with a ravenous hunger, and immediately begins eating everything in sight, but it's never enough.”

Khavik frowned and opened his mouth, but Kimakt waved him off and I continued. “After some time of this the transformation kicks in and they fall unconscious. At this point they begin to sweat terribly, tossing and turning as if trapped in a nightmare. The sweat begins to harden slowly, coagulating into a stretchy membrane. This is the…” I searched for the word. “The transformation sack. Everyone’s looks a bit different, but they all work the same. They’ll house the goblin until the process completes or they die, whichever comes first.”

“The sack swells up a bit, sometimes by a lot. That’s a sign of a particularly big Hob. At any rate the membrane continues to contain the roiling mass of flesh within for about a week on average. Sometimes they’re as fast as a day, sometimes it can stretch out for a month or more. If the stars were right, a new Hobgoblin bursts free then. If not…”

“One of two things happens. Either the transformation has stretched longer than the stored energy can sustain and the body begins to cannibalize itself, or what bursts free can’t be called a Hob at all.”

“In the first case things are still salvageable, they poor bastard might survive anyway, just not nearly as strong as he could have been. You’ll have to help him cut himself free when he’s ready, and make sure he gets plenty of food, but once its all over you’ll still have a perfectly good Hob . The other option is much worse. If the transformation stretches too long, the sorry son of a bitch may have left more than goblinhood behind, he might just have left any dream of a functioning body behind too.”

“If you’re lucky a fatally malformed Hob will just kinda plop out in a dead mass of cancerous flesh. If you’re not it’ll explode forth in a berserk fury and kill dozens before it can be brought down.”

“Of course even successful transformations have deformities, but those are small things like one leg being longer than the other. Nothing like the true failures. One in ten of the lucky bastards sometimes even get a ‘deformity’ that’s actually helpful, like thicker skin or longer claws, and once in a blue moon you’ll see someone who has multiple helpful mutations built on top of each other.” I was less than sure that that was all true, but the point was to establish what I already knew. If I was wrong they’d tell me.

The two ghost Hobs just stared at me for another few seconds before exploding forth with questions when it became clear I was done.

“But how does the transformation trigger?”

“They can’t possibly be entirely random, right?”

“If you can’t control when it starts how do you choose what kind of Hob to become?”

I squinted. Different kinds? Sure, no two Hobs were identical, but that phrasing implied something more than mere individual variation. I shook my head slowly. “This is exactly what the mutual idiot explanation was supposed to avoid. I don’t know what you mean by that, and I won’t until you explain it. Why don’t you take your turn, and we can compare the two then?”

Kimakt sighed. A deliberate expression of emotion, considering he hadn’t been breathing up to that point. “Yes. In the ancient days it was as Khavik said.”

He waved his hand at his fellow ghost. “We were crafted as warriors. Every god who crafted a race did so for their own reasons, and that can be seen in how they were made. The elves gained the artistry of magic, to create wonders of beauty, the humans gained Levels, to carve their own path and seize their own destiny, but the goblins were inspired by the monsters of ages past. We were given the ability to consume and grow, evolving ever stronger.”

Khavik grunted. “Perhaps that is why we still live. Without training the gifts of men or elves are useless, but the bestial instincts of the transformation cannot be forgotten, even if the wisdom to survive it can be.”

Kimakt shrugged. “Perhaps. We were always intended to cling to life like locusts,” He smiled. “Although I think the gods would not be happy to see the fruits of their labour!”

“They took inspiration from beasts in more ways than one. Much like the caterpillar we can seal ourselves away and emerge stronger, the Hob transformation. It is triggerable by a variety of methods, but once it is impending any goblin can tell. Then they are presented with a choice. The hunger is extreme, but what they eat and do will decide what they might become. All things are recorded in the annals of the soul, and the transformation is spiritual as well as physical.”

I nearly opened my mouth to question at that, but I forced it to stay shut. They’d given me the courtesy of hearing me out, I ought to do the same.

“It is critical that a prospective Hob be deliberate in their actions as they near their transformation. Their form will adjust itself to fit their actions, and if their decisions grow too muddled they…” Kimakt scratched the back of his head. “Well, if the transformation is pulled multiple directions at once you get a form that isn’t good at anything. Or worse, the transformation just can’t find a way to accommodate the conflicting drives and spits out a muddled mass of flesh rather than a Hob.”

My eyes widened in horror as my mind raced through every Hob transformation I’d ever seen or heard of, reinterpreting it in light of this new information. The lazy Hobs who were walking walls of fat? Of course, they’d gorged themselves in fear before their transformations. Those who’d withered away in their cocoons? They were being dragged back and forth between multiple conflicting goals, burning up energy all the way.

“So you’re saying all we had to do was stick to one thing and not only would we survive, we’d be incredibly good at our specialty?!”

Khavik shook his head and Kimakt waved his hand in a so-so motion. “Not quite. Over focus can lead to its own problems, and portions of the process will always be random. The best way to do it is to aim for a specific combination of actions that causes a known transformation. For example, if you spend the time hunting and eating non-goblin humanoids you’ll become a Barghest. It sounds like your people are not only going it alone, which was incredibly risky even in my time, but they’re doing it without even understanding the basic underlying mechanics.”

“How do known transformations become known?” I knew I had promised to shut up and listen, but I was just too curious to contain myself.

“Mostly? Trial and error. Some brave fool will attempt to make his own form, and if he survives somebody will eventually try and copy him, especially if he actually managed to get something good. Add a few generations of that and people start to home in on the most reliable way of getting that form, if there is one.”

Interesting. That meant that not only were some forms better than others, but some were harder to get. Not surprising if they were based on what you did. The more impressive the actions, the more impressive the form.

At least in theory. The more greedy parts of my brain were already going through how I might use my Levels to go beyond what a normal goblin could hope to do and cheat the system. Yesterday I’d had no thought of becoming a Hob, now I was scheming my way towards becoming a super-Hob. I really was a greedy bastard.

“So back in your day goblins could choose when to transform and what they wanted to become.”

“Yes.”

Khavik nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! And if you return this knowledge to the surface it can be this way again!”

“No.”

“What!?”

I thumped the but of my spear on the ground for emphasis, feeling the vial press reassuringly into my palm. I doubt I’d have the the courage to talk back without that ace up my sleeve. “They don’t deserve it.”

Khavik gaped at me, clearly failing to process my words. “But, the death! The suffering…”

Kimakt stared down at me with sad eyes. What thoughts were churning beneath the surface I could only guess at, but his emotions didn’t seem as explosive as Khavik’s. That made him less likely to burst into violence, but if he did it would be far more dangerous.

Fortunately Kimakt burst into words instead. “You could change it, Zhen. You could restore our people to far more than power, you could end the suffering of failed transformations and forced slavery alike. If they are not yet deserving, then make them so.”

I scowled and shook my head. “First you demand I ferry forgotten secrets to the surface, now you want me to change the face of the world? Seize power over all goblinkind? You are mad.”

Kimakt shook his head, words growing louder and more impassioned. “It is not beyond you! You’ve already accomplished incredible things as a goblin, with our help you could easily gain a form of incredible might! You’d be a great leader, a hero for generations to come!”

I jabbed my spear at him, growling from deep in the back of my throat. “Hero!? I’ve seen what happens to heroes. They die, and the world is worse for it. The world is too big to change. The best we can hope for is to survive it.”

“How can you say such a thing?” Khavik burst out. “Even if you fail better to burn gloriously than flicker and fade away!”

I turned my spear to him, but Kimakt was already shaking his head and denying Khavik’s words. “Dammit Khavik, your defeatism isn’t going to change his mind! This isn’t some vain noble gesture, we can actually do this!”

“Argh!” I threw my hands up in the air before slamming my spear down again. “No we can’t! Hells, there is no ‘we’ in the first place, we all know I’d have to do it entirely on my own!”

“You’d have a proper Hob transformati—”

I batted away his suggestion with my free hand. “Don’t give me that crap! Do you think no Hob has ever blundered into a transformation of note without your knowledge? We might not have known how they happened, but they did happen. Forms of legend, just as you promise me. Do you know what happened to them?”

Kimakt hesitated. “They failed. But that doesn’t mean you’ll have to!”

“They died!” I snarled. “Less than a decade ago Aras Drakul was ascendant, a legend like the earth had never seen! But he wasn’t legend enough. He died and his goblin unification efforts died with him. What can you promise me that he didn’t have?”

“The means to elevate others with you. The power to give power. You’d leave the dungeon alone, but you wouldn’t stay that way for long! With this there’s no telling how many goblins would flock to your banner!”

I— of all the stupid things! There was an idiocy in that suggestion beyond what could be put into words, but twitching in apoplectic anger didn’t seem to be getting the point across, so I would have to try. “That’s fucking dumb as bricks!”

There, that would show them.

Apparently not. “Your brethren—”

“My brethren are half the problem! You can’t reform a fucking society by promising power you dumbass.”

Kimakt came to a stop. “I… there has to be something you can do.”

I shook my head as I started backing away. “Yeah. Survive. Live my life as best I can without the world stepping on me or martyring myself for an impossible cause.”

I kept both of them in view as I started walking away, giving me a clear view of Kimakt’s face as it shifted from depression to confusion. “Brother? Where are you going?”

I eyed the two specters warily. I wouldn’t do what they wanted, but I didn’t think they had the spite to kill me for it. “I need to go. I won’t throw my life away for a lost cause and I sure as hells don’t aim to sit about and wait for my own death when the Hob transformation comes for me. I need to look through the memories and glean what wisdom I can.”

Khavik cocked his head and Kimakt looked at me funny. “The memories are just that: memories, designed to hold steady a record without the inconsistencies of a conscious mind, but also without the mind’s ability to reason or respond. You’ll never learn as well from a record as you will from a thinking teacher.”

I growled deep in my throat. As if the benefits of their teachings outweighed the suicidal risks they demanded. “I already said no! If I can learn the Leveling of the humans based on a single eavesdropped lecture then I can figure out the secrets of the Hob metamorphosis from some records too.”

Kimakt blinked while Khavik flinched, fully taken aback. “When did we threaten to deny you our help?” Khavik was the first to recover. “Do you really think we’d be so petty as to abandon you? I want to save the entire goblin race, sure, but if helping out a single one is the best I can do, then you better believe I’m gonna give it my all!”

Kimakt nodded. “We’re not about to abandon anyone. You can count on our aid whatever you aim to do on the surface. But can we get back to that bit about leveling?”

Khavik shrugged. “Is it really that surprising? Elves aren’t the only ones who can use magic after all, so why couldn’t other races steal the humans’ gift too?”

“Human’s can’t transform like a goblin, why would a goblin be able to Level?”

I bit my lip. Might my human ancestry have something to do with it? I doubt that fessing up to a mixed ancestry would be a bright idea, but they evidently where still planning to teach me, and maybe sharing information would make them even more cooperative?

“It’s an elixir. Anyone who can drink it would Level.” The best of both worlds, the truth, but not all of it. It would bite me in the ass if they ever got their hands on elixir and it didn’t actually work for goblins, but ghosts couldn’t drink shit anyway so I figured I was safe.

Kimakt smacked himself in the face. “It was seriously that simple!? Lazy-ass human gods…”

Khavik sighed heavily and heaved himself to his feet. I knew the feeling, when it felt like your body weighed a thousand pounds, and I sympathized even if I wasn’t sure how a weightless ghost could experience it. “I think you’ll find the Hob transformation harder to master… but not beyond you! With help from a couple of old hands like us I’m sure you’ll catch on in no time!”

Kimakt nodded. “And our help comes without any conditions. Just… at least think about what we’ve said. I would never demand you throw your life away, but if you see a chance to help out a fellow goblin here or there, at least consider it.”

That was a condition, stupid. But it was a condition I was more than willing to agree to, so I nodded along. A paranoid pragmatist I might be, but I liked to think that I wasn’t a total dick. I was happy to consider helping people, hells, if it was safe I would even do it!