It was a longer climb than I remembered, and no more pleasant. My camouflage couldn’t entirely fool the local wildlife, so my climb had to wind its way between the crooks where alert eagles made their nests and sat on their squalling spawn. They were actually less threatening like that. An adult would warn you off with a hiss. A lone chick was not only harder to see, it could panic and spew its stomach out at you with little warning.

I started looking when I reached a hundred feet above the tree line. There were dozens of little caves that would take me where I wanted to go, but most of them would be occupied. I’d need to pick my choice carefully.

I kept an eye out as I climbed, avoiding any cave with too much life or smoke around it. The natural cracks that ventilated the warrens below were a good emergency entrance, but if I picked the wrong one I’d end up eating smoke. Even narrowing it down it took a half-dozen tries, and one very carefully backing away from a sleeping bear, to find one that looked promising.

What initially looked like a mere crack failed to end, simply continuing into the dark and I knew I had found what I was looking for. I wriggled in as the tunnel shifted downward. I slipped a little on the smooth rock before my claws caught purchase. I’d need to be careful. The crack was more than narrow enough to press me in on every side, so I could only fall if I was stupid.

I shuffled down the shaft, moving really slowly. Like reaaaallly slowly. I frowned. I wriggled.

I slid down another half an inch.

Oh. I suppose I was just a bit bigger than the last time I’d been here.

I sighed and resigned myself to a painful descent. It cost me three hours more than I’d planned for, most of my waterskins emptied as lubricant, and more than a little skin, but I did make it.

I tumbled from the last stretch of tight tunnels like a hefty sack, hitting the ground flat on my back. I stared up at the ceiling. I’d tried to flip midair, but with my new weight it was like trying to perform acrobatics with a sack of lead hanging off my bones.

The comfort of the ground called to me, but I shook it off. To my bruised body the hard stone was as comfortable as any bed, but I’d not approached with the subtlety I’d have preferred. Far from it.

I rose to my feet and reached into my bandolier of pouches. Aside from a tied loincloth to shield my more sensitive bits from the stone it was all I wore. A draping cloak over layers of overlapping rags was all well and good for lurking in the shadows, but it wasn’t exactly ideal for tight squeezes even before my increasing bulk. Afterwards? Not happening.

Even with the nakedness it hadn’t been an easy climb. I was really hoping I’d be able to avoid this kind of crap when my final Hob form took shape. I took the opportunity for a nice long stretch as I got dressed again. Fortunately, I could do a lot more than hope.

There were dozens, if not hundreds of formalized Hob forms, let alone the possible mutations, but I could only memorize so many. I’d mostly focused on the kind of thing that seemed possible to achieve. Nothing that required elaborate rituals, consuming a hundred pounds of human flesh, or, tantalizing as they were, the powerful magical forms. Those had been a shocker, the overwhelming majority of surface shamans were goblins. I’d eventually come to the painful conclusion that if all the most skilled surface spellcasters had failed to get a good magic form, then I novice like me had little hope.

So ultimately I simply settled on getting a really good mundane form. Getting a chance to plot out their form was something most goblins would kill for, and I’d picked out one that met my needs brilliantly. The durak, an assassin form.

The more I approached my transformation the more I valued the grace and dexterity that I’d lost along the way. Hobs were universally bigger than their past selves, but I had no desire to become trapped in the body of some clumsy hulk. No, I wanted a form that would preserve my agility.

Which made it all the better that I’d found one that would increase it.

The durak had been created to kill, yes, but its grace and beauty was no lesser for it. Tall as a man, but lighter, leaner, a thing of sinew and bone. I’d not be any wider, so I’d ultimately be better at squeezing at the end of my transformation than at the beginning.

I may have taken the painful squeeze a bit personally.

I glanced around the cave as I shucked off my bandolier and began to put on proper clothes again. There wasn’t much light, but after the true blackness of the crawlspaces above my eyes were as acclimated to the dark as it was possible to be. It wasn’t possible to travel too precisely in the cramped ventilation shafts, but I should be somewhere near the top of the warrens, something confirmed by the heavy smell of smoke. People didn’t come up here often.

The faintest light came up from below, only forming a coherent image where it bounced off the specks of mica in the wall. Sparkling above a mica-less floor, they looked like distant stars over an empty world.

Hmmm. After I finished tying the scrap of rope that held up my pants I crouched and ran a claw over the ground. The sharp nail sounded off a rapid series of clicks as it caught and snapped off of a multitude of minute grooves hidden in the dark. Curious.

I leaned the rest of the way over as I redid my leg wraps, far enough I could lick the floor. Which is exactly what I did. It bore the rough texture of crudely hewn wood, but the mineral taste of a limestone. I swallowed down the taste and focused on dressing. I’d definitely found the right mountain.

The strange wood-stone was something my old tribe had been famous for. At some point in the distant past our shamans had figured out how to supernaturally accelerate the process that formed a caverns natural stalactites and stalagmites. I’d have doubted their claims that solid stone-stuff could be transmuted in and out of water, but my mother had backed them up.

My willingness to trust a human slave over them hadn’t earned me any affection from the tribe’s shamans.

At some point they’d used their magics to surround a wooden frame work with a stone shell. Depending on how hard they’d been trying, they might even have fossilized the wood itself into a rocky form. When they didn’t try they tended to produce little more than rotten wood inside a hollow shell of brittle stone. Naturally, it was near impossible to be sure of the difference.

This was good because only an idiot would spend undue time in this tunnel.

This was bad, because that idiot was me.

Still, if my landing hadn’t sent me falling in a rain of splinters then dressing certainly wouldn’t. I had no logical choice but to suppress my inner urge to scurry off into a friendly shadow and put on some damn pants.

Multiple pairs in fact. I’d be stretching the very limits of my paranoid comfort zone soon and I intended to take full advantage of my [Rag Armor] when I did so. I wound layers of wrapped scraps over the more solid sections of limb, leaving the joints with loose cloth for flexibility. I doubted it would stand up to any real punishment, but I doubted I’d be standing around to take any either. It would turn a hit into a graze, a graze into a miss, and there was nothing more I’d require of it.

I was trying damn hard to convince myself of that. I forced myself to finish dressing and move the fuck on before I could dwell any further.

I kept to the edges of the petrified wood as I walked. There were plenty of truly black places beneath the mountain. This wasn’t one of them, which meant…

A jagged hole revealed itself as I came around the corner. I could see the hollow stone of the edges, broken boards gaping like smashed pottery.

I blinked away the tears in my eyes from the sudden light. Faint though it might be, goblin eyes could get quite sensitive when acclimated to darkness. It was one of the tricks that adventurers loved to pull on us. Willingly fall into our trap of darkness impenetrable to human eyes only to spring their own with sudden eruptions of mage-light.

Always kill the mage first.

I crept up to the hole and peeked over just far enough to make out what lay below.

More wood. It was just another tunnel, maybe one of the paths to the higher outlooks. After waiting for a handful of minutes I dropped down, lowering myself out over the drop with a single hand to dangle as low as possible before I let go. My new weight still drove me into the ground with unexpected force.

I sighed as I rose, trying to stretch out the new ache in my knees. It worked well enough to surprise me for a second. Huh. I hopped up and down, forcing myself to get used to the new force pushing me to the ground just after landing as the jiggling fat caught up with the rest of me. I’d need to be operating at full capacity for what came next, and in a stroke of good fortune my weight wasn’t nearly as inhibiting as I’d feared.

I suppose for all the fat I was still far lighter than most humans, and some of them still managed to be fairly nimble. It was a grudging admission, but painful truths were the most important ones.

Ahead of me I could see the tunnel walls falling away. A glance behind me revealed nothing more that those walls stretching on until they wound out of sight. Satisfied that I hadn’t dropped down right ahead of some sneaky bastard I turned back to the front. Not much could catch me unawares, but there were more than a few goblins here sneaky enough to give me a run for my money.

And at least one Hob.

I shivered. If I got in and out nice and quick I wouldn’t run into him.

As I reached the edge of the tunnel all the warrens stretched out beneath me. The stone under me shifted to wood stretched out over the warrens, timbers anchored into the walls with sideways stalactites grown out around them. More common then fully petrified wood, the technique was quicker and allowed for far lighter structures. An insignificant advantage when it came to a single building, but when you built your city layer by layer atop itself every ounce mattered.

The warrens themselves were far beneath me yet, nestled deep within the hollow mountain my old tribe still called home. Countless structures of shaman-grown stone and haphazard wood wormed atop one another like a writhing heap of snakes, each built with no regard for the others and an active disdain for organization of any kind. Tiny lights sparkled from across it flickering like the candle lights of a noble’s chandelier.

It was beautiful.

I let out a halting breath. Damn, I’d missed this place. But I wasn’t here to sight-see, wasn’t coming to meet up with old friends.

I’d come here to kill.