Blink was who knows where, when Lannah woke me up for my shift. The smaller moon was halfway through the sky, which meant it was close to midnight. I had been asleep for about 6 hours.

I got up, knowing I had another 6 till dawn. I made myself a cup of tea and then went and sat on the ledge looking downriver. I mostly didn’t care what happened above me since that was far enough of a fall that I didn’t think they would jump down anytime soon.

I was through the tree line with my back to the camp. I was doing everything I could to see as far downriver as I could. Squinting, slowly moving, but above all, I was keeping my eyes from the fire. If I moved, then I could see it, and that would ruin my night vision.

About 4 AM, I heard the goblins or perhaps gremlins set off the first of my traps. The thing was, it wasn’t like last time when one went off, and then they stopped. Nope, they had found enough evidence to know that we were here. So it was a full charge across my traps.

I myself was both happy and scared. The traps were doing what traps should do. I was hearing the yelling of pain and the screaming of the goblins’ war crys as they charged. I was happy the traps worked but scared that they found us.

I ran over and woke up Lannah. She should be awake for this even if she didn’t have much in the way of fighting skills. She told me that she could use a knife and a spear, and so that is what she got. I had given her my short spear and the seax before either of us slept.

She was up in a jump and came to the ledge low to watch what was going on. They swarmed down the riverbank as they came to my home. I knew they had sharp claws, so I wasn’t sure if my efforts to smooth out the rock face would be enough.

As they got closer fewer of them were injured by my traps. I had built a safe place close to the ledge because that was how I came and went. When my diminutive enemies got to the cliff face, they stopped. They had nowhere to go, so they started to bunch up twenty feet below me and about 4 feet in front of the ledge.

The gremlins in the group all threw their arrow-sized spears up to try to hit us. Unfortunately for them, the spears that didn’t bounce off the ledge went short. Those that were short fell right into the horde that was milling around at the base. This, in turn, caused a fight to start among the green monsters.

The fight ended almost as soon as it started with the arrival of a group of goblins. The goblins were all at least twice as large as the gremlins, and after just a moment, the fight ended. I watched to see what they would do.

Lannah asked, “should we be doing anything? Like trying to climb out the back?”

“What’s your climbing skill at?”

“4.”

“4 and you are in that dress. I don’t see that climb happening. We need to beat them before they get up here.”

“So what do we do?”

“For now not much. I want to see if there are clouds in the sky before we start. Unless they figure out how to climb all the way up here. If they figure that out then I have rocks and spears we can throw.”

“Why clouds?”

“I need them for a spell, if there are clouds I can call the rain and add fire into it. Might not get all of them but I am sure that I could get a bunch. That’s why I don’t want to start attacking yet. I want to see if they are going to stay bunched up.”

“What if they spread out?”

“Well if they do before light then, we still will wait. If they leave or if they climb up then we will have to react.”

The goblins were able to throw the gremlins up to the first level. Happily, it wasn’t easy for them to get up. Their smarts didn’t help them out; once they got a few up, they wanted to arm them. So they threw spears up to them. They could have just passed the spears, but the gremlins on the ground threw. So several of the gremlins that made it up the first step were killed or wounded by their own side. This whole fiasco took until first light.

As the light came up, I saw how great my field of traps had done. While I only had been able to dig in 6 pit traps and they all appeared to have triggered. I had also put in many smaller traps that were just a foot deep hole with a sharpened stake at the bottom. The goal of those was to get a spike into a foot.

Looking at it, I could tell that the gremlins were used even worse than someone would treat dogs. They were just sent wherever the goblins wanted bodies, and no matter what, they went. There were at least twenty of the little guys dead from the traps, and likely about that number because of the crushing force or the horde when it hit the wall.

Now that we had light, we could tell that the goblins hadn’t given up. The horde was massive. It seemed what I had seen in the village was, as I feared, only a fraction of the mess. I couldn’t get a good count on the number of gremlins, but the goblins appeared to have about 40.

While I had hoped for a smaller number, I felt like we stood a chance if they couldn’t climb up. The gremlins were too dumb to figure out how to climb up to the second landing on their own and so would need the goblins to get them up. The goblins, at least right now, seemed to be unable to figure out how to get themselves up. So, for now, we were safe. We hoped.

Once I had enough light to check out the sky, I saw that there were some clouds. This meant that I could use my runes to call a fire rain. However, I had only done it one time, and that was with a lower level of mana than I was planning on using.

I pulled out my one-time use runes. My hope was that I would do enough damage to cause kill a bunch of the goblins. If not them, then at least some of the gremlins. Unfortunately, I had not used the fire rain in combat, and since it wasn’t a spell I had, I could only guess what it did.

I concentrated for a few moments starting with the mana from my weighted skirt, and then rolled over to my personal mana. I would have enough with this to call a large area attack. I felt the power go out of me and head up to the clouds in the sky.

I watched for the few minutes it took for the clouds to move to just overhead. It was one of the oddest things I had watched in a while. The closest clouds all gathered over, and as I felt them align with me, I felt my primitive runes skill kick in and have me toss the two runes I was holding over the edge at the gathered horde.

As the runes hit the ground, the rain started. I had seen this once before, but it was still a fantastic thing to see. The rain was brownish red as it fell. Magic was odd. Rain typically cooled the air as it fell and would make everything kind of muggy if the temperature was warm enough. This was a fire that fell from the sky, but it was rain. So it cooled the air as it fell and added humidity.

Lannah came up next to me, “What have you done?”

“I just used the shaman rune magic I had to call fire rain.”

“Fire Rain… I have never seen anything like it.”

“I am sure that the other wild humans have used it in the past. It seemed like the next step to the call rain spell. I just used the runes to make it happen.”

The screaming started about then. It was rough to listen to, even if they were monsters, and earned every bit of my hate. The spell area covered a good 10 x 10 square. What was scary, however, was that, like water, this pooled and ran and soaked in. The monsters in the target zone got soaked. Which turned into second and third-degree burns on them. However, the ones just outside the area started to get wet as the fire pooled. The whole horde moved back.

I saw the gremlins in the area start to fall as the smell of burning monster started to rise up. The extra mana I had pumped into the spell added length of time. I had been expecting about a 10-minute attack at the longest. However, we watched for at least thirty minutes the fire fell.

I only saw a few of the goblins fall from the attack. Several of them jumped into the water, and it appeared that the fire rain would float. Which meant that they had to move out from under it before they could come back up. The ones that went in never came out.

With as great of an attack as it was, the fire rain only ended up taking about a third of them. I saw in the back of the mass of monsters a group of three. Each one with a stick and feathers.

One pointed at me, and the other two started to hop back and forth on their stubby legs. Looked almost like when a 5-year-old was asking to go to the bathroom.

Then there was a crackle, and I saw a lightning bolt appear.