The literal sea of green little critters was definitely a sight to behold. It vastly exceeded anything the party’s more experienced members had even dared to expect. Typically, the goblin tribes were quick to turn to war with one another or find some other way to limit their population. The constant choir of screeches and other goblinoid noises were almost deafening when the adventurers warily approached the edge of the horde.

Anastacia didn’t know much about goblins, as they were scarcely mentioned by necromancers for some reason, but she was definitely intrigued by their little dances and flailing.

Gilbert had some experience with the critters and took it upon himself to make the first contact with the nearest group of goblins by the edge or the swarm. Seeing him approach, one of them ceased its flailing and greeted the old adventurer.

“Man of huge, come meet god?” It asked and pointed towards the fortress.

“Sure.” Gilbert quickly agreed. “Is that why you’ve gathered here?”

“The goblin come meet sleeping god.” The critter explained, surprisingly coherently for its kind.

The old adventurer sought answers from the devotee in their party with a quizzical glance, as Emilia likely had the most expansive and up to date knowledge on deities out of the adventurers. However, the shrug on her part suggested that this ‘sleeping god’ wasn’t one she knew off hand.

Trying to extract further information from the critter proved extremely tedious, its answers either made no sense at all, or were far too simple to be of any real use – that is, assuming the goblin itself even really knew what was going on. Though it likely wasn’t capable of coming up with lies, there was only so much weight one could give to the words of one of its kind, after all, the world rarely worked like goblins thought it did.

After a good while of trying to decipher and formulate a story, Gilbert figured he had more or less gotten the rough gist of it. “Here’s what I think might have happened: a hunting party from one of the tribes nearby wandered a bit too close to the fort, managed to somehow avoid the traps and even found a way inside. In there, they found something or someone they decided was this ‘sleeping god’ of theirs. From there, the tale spread among the tribes like wildfire and they all slowly ended up here, too preoccupied with their god to turn against each other or end themselves in some other way.” He explained to his party.

“Such typical goblin nonsense.” Xamiliere scoffed. “Their god is probably nothing more than a shiny rock or a stick with a bug on it – and these pests just flock to it like the morons they are.”

“Hold your tongue, Xammy.” Maximillian quieted the spriggan’s critique. “Flaunt the possibility of a grounded deity to humans, elves, dwarves… what have you, and they will gather in a very similar manner.”

“Whatever. Now we know why they’re here and can leave this goblinoid varmint nightmare!” Xamiliere exclaimed and immediately started walking back towards the direction they came from.

“Don’t be hasty now.” Gilbert said and grabbed the spriggan’s shoulder as she was trying to leave. “We should see if we can figure out what their god actually is. It could be a deactivated simulacrum or something worse, and I don’t think I need to tell you why we should make sure the goblins aren’t accidentally going to reactivate this whole fort. Not to mention we need to start making a camp as well, turning around now would make for an inopportune camp site for the night.”

After Anastacia managed to convince the party’s nature spirit to stay, if for nothing else, to protect the necromancer from the green menace, they made their camp a bit further away from the horde to make sure their gear remained in their own possession. Some of the more curious goblins approached the camp to ask questions of their own, but the relations between the groups remained civil. Maximillian even managed to barter a deal with a few goblins for an exchange of two pheasants the critters had caught in return for a copper ring with an enchantment that had faded ages ago and was trivial to replace.

To make themselves useful while the rest of the party guarded their gear and cooked, Anastacia and Emilia decided that they would make a quick incursion closer to the fort itself. Perhaps to find out where the goblins had gotten into it. Gilbert saw no harm in it, but warned them about the ancient traps that were likely littering the ground around the fortress. Luckily the ones that were still functional were no doubt easy to spot thanks to the piles of goblins that had failed to learn from one another and had fallen victim to them.

On their way towards the fortress, the pair passed through the sea of goblins and got a prime chance to enjoy what passed as culture for the critters. The first thing they noticed was the stench of rotting food emanating from the piles of scavenged odds and ends the goblins had piled everywhere. Stolen tools, vegetables, tree branches, rusted equipment, flowers, rocks and everything else they had run across in their journey to the gathering. The goblins jumped and danced around these random assortments of mostly trash, just as they jumped and danced around anything else in the area, including the adventurers, broken pieces of the machine fortress and unfortunately for many of them, around the piles of their dead brethren that had died from the traps they had managed to activate or just from general incompetence at life. The noise they caused was nothing short of deafening, as screeching seemed to be both the default reaction to basically anything as well as the main method of communication between them.

While observing a few of them in more detail, Anastacia found out that the goblins seemed to be unable to remember how to do more than a single thing at once. Whenever one started to dance, it had to relearn how to walk normally a moment later, waving around a piece of moldy bread caused the same issue, as did simply standing still for more than a few seconds. Despite the smell, noise and just complete inaptitude at everything, the necromancer rather enjoyed watching the little critters go about their life and chatted with a fair few of them on the way.

“Do you think we could barter for some of the things they have? Some of it might be valuable.” Anastacia suggested and pointed at fairly intricate-looking sword in one of the piles.

Emilia looked around, marveling at the sheer number of the damned things they were surrounded by. “Honestly, I wouldn’t. From what I understand, anything here could be ‘holy’ to them by now, and I wouldn’t risk insulting them by asking for a trade.”

Thinking about the devotee’s answer, Anastacia started to notice an alarming number of dangerous items the little critters were waving around. “Yeah, you’re probably right…” She agreed.

The fortress itself consisted of a larger main building that was surrounded by five smaller, almost tower-like buildings. The ground around them had been replaced with large stone tiles with curious patterns carved on their surfaces and several brass-colored metal patches, many of which seemed to activate the traps near them. All of them had seen better days and the eons they had stood out in the elements was visible in the cracks and overgrown plants in the seams between the stone blocks used to build them. Rusted spikes and blades jutted out from the ground here and there in places where the traps had gotten stuck long ago, and chunks of stone that had fallen off the buildings littered their surroundings.

The adventurers walked around the main building once, looking for anything that could have been an entrance. The architecture of the ancient fortress was completely different from anywhere else in the world, and finding a purpose for any given part was difficult. The monolithic structure only had straight walls with no windows or details of any kind, no obvious doorframes or even signs of moving parts – only flat, smooth stone and evidence of old age.

Anastacia ran her hand along the weathered stone wall as they walked by it, more out of boredom than anything, but luckily, it was the right move. The tips of her fingers felt something strange as they walked past a part of the wall that looked no different to any other part, but the seam between two large slabs of stone was uneven. This hadn’t been the case for any other seam, and despite thousands of years of wear and tear, everything had been perfectly in place.

She stopped and ran her fingers across the seam again. “There’s something weird about this one.”

“Oh?” The devotee said and immediately whacked the wall with her mace causing a small flash of light, but the weapon simply bounced off the stone like it was nothing, barely leaving a mark behind.

“Did you just try and throw your god at this?” Anastacia chortled.

“It was worth the try. Not much is beyond My Lady’s reach, but her powers are spent elsewhere for the time being.” The devotee shrugged and started looking around. “Maybe there’s a mechanism somewhere nearby, I’m going to take a look.”

While she looked for some type of a mechanism or even a keyhole of sorts in the ground tiles around the seam, Anastacia inspected the wall itself. She took one of her daggers and poked its tip into the seam a few times, concluding that the further down she moved, the more uneven and wide the seam became. At the very bottom, only a couple of centimeters from the ground, the tip of the dagger hit something at the back of the small opening. The necromancer wiggled the knife to see if it did anything – which it very much did. With a mechanical thunk and a whirr, the stone tile under Anastacia’s feet gave out and tilted open, sliding the unprepared girl into a dark hole below the fortress.

Emilia heard the noise and managed to lunge at her friend, but was just out of reach and had to watch the trapdoor close before her. To her credit, she didn’t hesitate for a second before jumping into action. The knife she carried was far too thin and fragile to repeat what Anastacia had done to open the trapdoor, so she started to look for anything sharp. A rusty old dagger, haphazardly wielded by a nearby goblin caught her eye and the devotee rushed to grab it, but only a couple of steps later, the tile under her foot made an ominous click. Suddenly, a large blade swung at her from the thin gap between the tiles, and before she even realized what had happened, she had caught the ancient corroded blade with her armored gauntlet and the shaft of her mace.

The thin piece of worn-down metal snapped off from whatever mechanism that put it into motion and Emilia could toss it aside to catch her breath after very narrowly avoiding being sliced into two.

However, something was different. After a moment of clearing her thoughts, the devotee realized that the entire goblin horde had gone dead silent and was now staring at her without a single blink to be found among them.

“Woman of White Iron deny sleeping god’s judgement!” One of the critters screamed from the top of its lungs. Soon the scream turned into a chant the entire mass of goblins took part in. They screeched and grabbed whatever they could before charging at Emilia, who had seen things go south and was already booking it towards their camp. “JUDGE! JUDGE! JUDGE!” Echoed from behind her.

Gilbert poked the campfire with a log, trying to expose the embers more to hasten the cooking. He was proud of how well the pheasants were prepared and couldn’t wait for them to be ready. While waiting, he gazed towards the hill between them and the fortress, thinking that it was nice to have such an easy quest for once. No fighting huge creatures or running through swamps. He spotted Emilia running over the peak, waving her hands and screaming something.

About 10 seconds after Emilia, A flood of goblins poured over the hill, screeching and throwing rocks or whatever they had on them.

“Everyone! TO THE RIVER!” Gilbert ordered the party as the devotee dashed past them.