Khione POV

I rode down the streets people parting before us, some bowed as they moved about their daily business. The people flowing from one place to another shopping and mingling, laughter filled the air as children played about, running around the streets with a leather ball kicking it about. We trotted through, my destination was the old district. The almost uninhabited portion of the city, part of it had been cleared and used in the building of the first Colosseum. It would be some time before it was completed, however the underground foundation was finished and the first two rows of seating.

The building rate in here is astoundingly faster than compared to the world I am used too, given a few months it will be able to seat about fifty thousand people, half that in trolls. The structure or foundation is the most complex part. Based completely off the original in my world, it has a stone base of six acres, with aqueducts connected to allow flooding for water battles and a rotating and separating base so that it can have terrain. The way the separation works for example to create a hill, raise one section up ten feet and slant four more up to create the slopes. Sand is used to dump over everything to both protect and cover it up. Lower than all of this is the housing portion for the fighters.

Even before the goblins, this had been planed out as well as a series of other forms of entertainment,

besides the Colosseum I have plans to build a amphitheater, also fashioned after Romes structure. In it the first chariot races took place, and about two thousand years later NASCAR came about, However the the only rules in chariot racing is to complete the laps and win, if you happen to flip others into walls or ride them down all the better.

Now violent sports have their place, but the one thing more popular than both through out history has been two things, music and theater. These I would let take their own course, with a bit of funding to get started and a few buildings for performances, soon I had no doubt that they too would have their own guilds. The most important thing about these two things however is that they show what the public op pinion is about everything government or otherwise.

The crowd grew thinner as we got closer to the more unpopulated area, only teams of workers and shipments of materials paced through here. The manual labor supplemented with the strength of goblins. This area was also very well guarded with almost two hundred regulars patrolling about, they bowed as I rode past before continuing on. We rode on I circled through the area looking at all the abandoned buildings.

Turning to one of my knights

me- Lucius how many families of goblins do you think would be able to live in a single house?

Lucius- hmm a house in the city can house two troll families comfortably, so it should house four to five goblin families based on their size. Might I ask why ?

me- I have an idea, you see slaves don't work for anything more than survival, they earn nothing and become nothing; They have little to no opportunity. Have you ever heard the phrase fight fire with fire?

Lucius- no we don’t really have that many fires around here...

I blush slightly, embarrassed; duh frozen waste, fire doesn't really rampage out here...

me- right well its meaning is simple, to put out a fire there is a few normal methods, dump water or sand on it too put it out or controllable fires, which are called 'back-fires', to remove any flammable material in advance of a larger fire and so deprive it of fuel. That is the literal 'fighting fire with fire' way. However the fire I speak of is goblins. They reproduce faster than any other race and consume everything including each other. I want to start a slave brigade, I think that if given an opportunity to escape the harsh manual labor on the roads and building projects, as well as a chance to do something to improve their lot in life and a chance to rise above, to be something, they will seize upon it.

Lucius- I see what you are saying my lady, but in my opinion I think that they are were they belong right now.

me- they are paying what is owed yes, however if I want to secure the rest of my land, I must first deal with the rest of them. But that problem can be ended if I train arm and dedicate a steadily growing fighting force, with some training and iron weapons a goblin of mine will be on fighting grounds as three to four of theirs.

Lucius- even if they do all take your terms, start their lives in this city, you only have three thousand goblins.

I smile at him

me- no I have about four thousand two hundred, I told you goblins reproduce quickly and whats more they reach adult hood in a matter of a few months, I will take only the strongest top two thousand, the best of each family will be fighting tomorrow in a series of duels, each family that wins will be offered the choice, the losers will remain as laborers. That way both our military and work force will grow, then once every four months we can hold a ceremony to pass individuals into the brigade.

Another thing I didn't mention is I want the old city rebuilt, to restore its old glory, and over seen by the guilds the goblins that made it there would do so, at a much more comfortable rate, their own houses, and as population grows more will be rebuilt.

He just stared at me few a bit before nodding.

Laughing, I rode through the district for another hour or so before returning home...

Eric POV

we moved forward slowly, not really because we wanted to move slowly but it is almost impossible to go at any reasonable speed through this mess. Struggling forward the light was slowly getting closer, it didn't seem to be moving.

I continued to break the path as we moved forward, at least in-till I was tapped on the back and I switched out with the guy behind me.

Breaking the path as well call it, is the job of the first guy as you go it makes the way easier for those behind you, you cant really pick you leg up high enough to take steps so you just wade through.

Honestly I don’t see how the goblins even survive out here, the snow is not hard enough to take their weight and at their height its up their waist, they have no good clothing or natural fur to keep the cold at bay, a lot don't survive we find the bodies from time to time. Well we run into them; they sink down into it and we stumble over them.

Looking up I realized we were almost there only another forty meters at most, motioning the others up and into line horizontally we prepared ourselves, training dictates that we use crossbows to thin them out first, but we cant see far enough for that to work, so we just readied our maces. Looking about and checking we were ready I motioned for the forward advance.

Twenty meters, and I could make out shadowy shapes cast about by the light.

Fifteen meters I smelled it, the smell of burnt flesh, sweet and repugnant. Yet with my shield and mace I couldn't spare a hand to block out the smell.

We came upon them like ghosts, they had stared into the fire far too long, eyes dilated from the light in this darkness. Five goblins but one was on the spit cooking over the fire, and the fifth was tied and laid against a snow back they made. We swept in killing one before they could even focus,

as the realization hit the other two scrambled towards the darkness and safety, switching to crossbows we fired the preloaded shots at them hitting one twice and the other three times, the other half flew past into the blizzard. Even if the shots hadn't killed them the blood loss would so we went back to the fire and the captive...

upon closer inspection it was a female, and pregnant, the one on the fire was rather small only a third of the size of the three males, A child it had to be nothing else could be that small...

goblins mature at around three months old or at least that’s when their reproductive organs are functioning, they live for about thirty years, if they make it that long, the male elders anyway. The females we learned are usually dead before their seventh birthday, this mainly because of the constant births, which cause a depletion of nutrients and continuing damage to the urethra, which makes stopping the bleeding from giving birth very difficult. A goblin is usually pregnant for three to four weeks in which the unborn child consumes massive amounts of nutrients in order to prepare in such a short amount of time, if they aren’t directly available they take it from the mothers body fat then muscle tissue, this is the reason goblins require a constant supple of food, even more so than your standard races, such as humans (nine months), elves (few years due to immortality also explains why having a child with elves is so rare and special this fallows up with pretty much all myths except England which likens elves to small fairies only slightly larger than pixies). As their food consumption rates are much higher.

Now the reason I know this is because we are required to learn it in officer training before I could take this post, why because say you lay siege to a goblin hold of ten thousand and about three thousand two hundred are its defenders, what would happen if as a normal siege takes months, you don’t know that its fighting force can double even triple in that time. That is just a basic example...

I had hated the class mainly because they were about as exciting as watching paint dry, but I needed them and they did prepare me for my post, as I look back I know that its was very prudent move from the Queen.

Focusing back on task I look at the girl, I have to decide weather to kill her or take her with us and send her to the capital, if I leave her she will just add to the problem we are facing... in the end I felt that even if slavery was bad, but it had to be better than death, and what those three had been using her for.

Untying her I asked her name in broken black speech ( kinda stole this from the lord of the rings language of Mordor, seems fitting ) (he is a shape shifter so acquiring languages of different races is easier for him)

Drevita- mi name es Drevita

kneeling down to her height

Eric- I have decided to let you live, but I cant let you leave. So I will take you with me to a post and have you sent to the capital where they will decide what to do with you... ill write a note explaining that will be sent with your escort.

She nodded and I helped her too her feet. It would take a long time to get back. Getting the men into a vertical line again I placed her in the center of it and we started back to our post line where we would continue to post ten...

authors note

form now on a few more mature themes will be starting to show in the story i will not detail anything explicitly, but it

will be mentioned and hinted at.

also as most of you will have noticed this story is very loosely based on RR and i will be deviating more in the future, the game said it had a 90% realism i take that in the literal sense and leave the other 10% as digital, fantasy and sci fi.

hope you all enjoy :) and thanks for the support so far