The Very Incredible Adventures of Majur

Majur walked through the field of broken glass like a ghost, her reflection fractured and splintered by the crystal shards that dotted this region. She ignored them, for the most part; the sparkling crystal was useless for arrowheads (she’d tried, but they shattered against any reasonably made armor), and her iron-toed boots kept her feet safe.

A dog barked somewhere up ahead. Majur ducked behind an outcropping and began to inch forward, sliding her bone-white mask down over her face. The lenses clicked and whirred, happy to serve their purpose, and Majur’s vision went a dull green. Shapes began to define themselves; blue and yellow and red, each marked with a mystic rune. That one meant a small animal, like a dog. Those two were human. And that one…

Majur stifled a groan. That one meant a construct. She could hear its joints clicking and whirring as it stomped closer to her hiding place. She pulled her crossbow from the leather sling on her back, loaded a bolt, and spun up to fire.

The construct was a cyclopean monster, iron and brass plates nailed over a humanoid form with broad shoulders and a neckless, lumpen head. Its single lensed eye focused on her just in time to see the crossbow bolt coming at it. The bolt, crafted specially of deep-iron at great expense, went straight through the construct’s eye, head, brain core, and sacred parchment before exiting through the back of its skull. Majur caught a brief glimpse of the bandits reaching for guns before she ducked back down to reload.

“Come out,” said one—Erikl? The bandits she had been hired to kill were Korvian brothers named Erikl and Kirill— “Come out and we’ll shoot you quick.”

“Stay there and we’ll find you, gut you, and leave you for the glassbeetles,” said the other brother, who was both taller and hairier.

Majur smirked, elbowing her way along the ground. They still thought she was near the smoldering wreck of the construct. She crawled behind another crystal spike and opened one of her belt-pouches, pulling out a metal object the size of a grapefruit. She struck a match with her fingernail, lit the fuse, and threw.

“Got you—Hey, she’s gone!” said Erikl, peering down behind the rock where Majur had been. He spun around, only to see his brother get hit in the head with something. Kirill went down as if poleaxed, the still smoldering bomb on the ground next to him.

The brothers didn’t even have time to curse before the explosive went off.

Majur winced as the sound echoed off the crystalline formations around her, and scratched the dog’s head. It panted.
“Job well done,” she said.

“Who approacheth the glorious walls of Dyarbak?” came a stentorian cry from the eponymous walls, which Majur judged decidedly less glorious and more ramshackle. “Speak now and prove yourself a friend, or face the Dyarbakian Guard!”

“It’s me, Majur,” said Majur. “I left from this very gate not two hours ago. Do you not recognize me?”

“It’s traditional to ask,” said the voice from above in a rather more petulant voice. “All right, open the gates. She can come in.” There was a screeching, groaning sound of iron scraping along the worn stone of the road, overlaid with the low snarls of the lizards chained to the windlass. Majur walked under the low archway and into the city.

Dyarbak: a cramped, bustling border town on the edge of the glass fields. Rusted walls dragged together from sheets of iron and brass, each standing twenty feet high and topped with mounted guns, cannon, and ballistae. The streets, narrow and cramped, studded with hatches and manholes leading into underground shelters, every corner occupied by a coughing beggar afflicted by some nameless disease. The people—Korvians, fork-tongued Glyssians, Fhel, Rurikids, Hakobins, and dozens of other nameless mutants and aberrations—crowded around Majur, offering her rats-on-a-stick, magic charms, gunsights, and all manner of other gewgaws and trinkets for varying prices. Majur ignored them all and shoved her way towards the Factor’s palace, a rusted heap that towered over all the rusted heaps that made up the city.

In the square in front of the palace, market was in full swing, including an execution and a demonstration of sorcerous power from one of the Dyarbaki sorcerers. Majur stopped to listen to the litany of crimes the Fhel nomad had allegedly committed, and clicked her tongue as he struggled and choked his last on the hangman’s rope. She thought it highly unlikely that he had done even a quarter of the crimes he was charged with, but the Factor of Dyarbak was notably corrupt. She wondered who the poor man had angered before heading on past the sorcerous exhibition.

She scoffed silently at the rubes and gawkers who surrounded the swirling sand-creature the sorcerer had summoned. No substitute for a good sword, she thought. Can’t trust it not to turn on you.

Majur had never cared for sorcerers, and the Dyarbaki sandspeakers, with their smearing of wet clay and ugly tattered robes, were no exception. She made her way out of the market square and into the blessed shade of the Factor’s palace grounds.

“Ah, Miss Majur,” said the Factor’s assistant, offering her a cup of local wine. “I trust you are here to collect your bounty?”

“That’s right,” said Majur, looking around the room. It was nice; the Factor’s assistant collected ancient idols and artifacts, and kept them in carefully reassembled stained-glass cases. Every wall was pockmarked with small windows to allow breeze in but block as much sun as possible.

“And you’re sure you won’t take off the mask? It did so unsettle the Factor last time.”

“I’m afraid it’s necessary for my health,” lied Majur. “It guards me against an evil spirit that I was cursed with by a previous bounty.”

“Well, far be it from me to expose you to supernatural retribution,” said the Factor’s assistant. He smiled greasily, revealing that his teeth were entirely false and etched with arcane golden symbols. “Especially when ordinary retribution is so close at hand.” He snapped his fingers and the door burst open, revealing two Rurikid toughs—short, wide-bodied men in steel cuirasses and with brass knuckles on their hands. They only came up to Majur’s shoulders, but they were solid muscle.

“Don’t move, ma’am,” said one. “We got you dead to rights.”

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Majur, you are a woman of business. And recently, one piece of business you undertook was the killing of a close personal friend of the Factor’s.” The Factor’s assistant spread his hands wide and smirked.

“Oh, good,” said Majur. She raised her hands above her head and let the toughs shackle her.

Later, in the rank stone-walled dungeons below the Factor’s palace, she thanked her lucky stars that they hadn’t been overly thorough in searching her. Hidden in the sole of her boot was a set of lockpicks. The cell door’s lock was simple, and Majur had it undone in a matter of minutes, her brow set with concentration.  There was a guard in the hall, holding a spear and whistling tunelessly. He opened his mouth to shout, his eyes widening in surprise, and Majur kicked him in the stomach.

“I know it’s hot down here,” she said, striding past him towards the untidy pile of her stuff that sat in one corner of the guardroom, “but if I were you, I would consider wearing armor.”

Mask on. Crossbow loaded. Hand crossbow loaded and clipped to her bandolier. Pouch of bombs on one side of the belt, canteen and sword on the other. Majur walked up the stairs just as the guard recovered his breath enough to shout.

“Escape! Help! Escape!”

The Rurikid toughs from before came rushing down the stairs, followed by three other members of the Dyarbakian Guard. Majur tripped the first one, ducked under a clumsy punch from the next, hit him in the elbow, and shoved his knuckles into the brickwork of the wall. A spear jabbed past her, and she grabbed the haft and pushed, sending the next one of the guards stumbling backward. She sidestepped another jab from a scar-faced Korvian woman and shoved the last guard down into her.

“Shouldn’t have tried to stop me,” she said, looking down at the pile of groaning bodies at the bottom of the stairs. That done, she set off through the narrow corridors of the Factor’s palace in search of his assistant.

The palace was a kicked anthill, in more ways than one; the red and black livery of the guards and the sand everywhere certainly added to the image. Majur ducked through side passages and servant’s quarters, heading towards the center of the palace while staying out of sight.

It seemed that word of her escape had spread, and when she arrived at the Factor’s assistant’s room, there were no less than four hulking mercenaries in front of it: three more Rurikids, identical in bullet-headedness and square-jawedness, and one axe-dragging lizard, her scales and fanged mouth out of place here in an otherwise human settlement. Majur ducked back behind the corner, out of sight, and began to prepare.
“I don’t think she comes,” rumbled the lizard as Majur began to screw a bomb onto the tip of one of her bolts.

“You’re probably right,” said one of the Rurikids. “Still, the boss wants us here, and who are we to disagree with the words that come from on high?” He rolled his eyes. “The old fool’s as paranoid as his master.”

“Oh, fuck,” said another, who had just seen Majur step around the corner, crossbow raised and the fuse already smoldering. She fired.

After the dust from the explosion settled, Majur walked past the unconscious bodies of the mercenaries and into the office. The Factor’s assistant was there, a look of surprise on his face. A splinter of the hardwood door had pierced his torso, right through his white silk wrap.

“Serves you right,” she said, and began looking around to see if any of his rune-etched teeth had survived the explosion.

“Come out, Majur! We have you surrounded!” Someone yelled from the hallway outside. Majur left off her search and waved a hand in front of the door. Six crossbow bolts thudded into the back wall of the room, narrowly missing her hand.

“Don’t think so,” she said, and dived through a window.

“Excuse me,” said Maarto, a sergeant in the Dyarbaki guard and a Glyssian expatriate, his arms covered in writhing tattoos of snakes. “Have you seen a woman wearing a bone mask? Something like this.” He held up a drawing one of prison guards had made.

The young woman in front of him—a typical Hakobin, brown skinned with a great curly bush of black hair and an easy smile—looked the picture up and down thoughtfully and shrugged.

“Can’t say I have,” said Majur, her mask (and the rest of her armament) hidden safely under a poncho she’d stolen from the back of a merchant’s wagon.

Maarto sighed. “Thank you for your time,” he said, and walked off in the other direction. Majur turned back to the Fhel caravan host she’d been talking to.

“How much did you say it would be for passage?”

The long train of wagons began to crawl through the desert, grunting, straining scaled beasts pulling six-wheeled wagons full of salted meat and brass wreckage. Fhel priestesses danced alongside, smearing blue paint for good luck and green for wealth along the sides of the great beasts. Outriders on horses kicked their mounts into gallops and sped off to watch the road, and Dyarbak dwindled into the distance, its bronze and iron walls no prison for Majur.

“The glass desert never suited me anyway,” said Majur to the caravan leader, a spindly-limbed Fhel with one creaking mechanical arm. A swarm of dirt imps crawled up and down his arm, cackling, jabbering, and occasionally applying oil to its critical joints. “Where did you say you were going again?”

“Fhel plains,” he said. “On the home circuit.”

“Sounds grand,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we stop.” Majur pulled the mask down and tapped the side, letting it know that it was time to sleep. Her vision went dark as the lenses closed.

Dwarf Poem

First blood, splashed on the stones. The first coming of dawn. The cave-mouth, the gaping maw belching us forth, all but those who were willing to stay and talk to the gods.

Can't hear on the surface. For a while, couldn't see, and we were forgotten. The tall ones gave us their secrets and we gave them ours. Sometimes they killed us and sometimes we killed them. It was easy. Not like home.

Home was never easy. Gnawing stone and bleeding iron, copper wire twined around bristle-black hair, the glow-worms like stars, candles rendered from the fat of blind fish.

The Vault Keepers smashed small comforts like fossils. We fought for a hundred years. We lost for a hundred years. They cut off our head and watched us writhe and snap at nothing until they were tired. They took God away from us; the black bones of the earth are not known to us.

Now it is the axe, and the hammer, and the pick, and the endless stare of the eye.

We have endured the tall ones' folly.

We have endured the dead.

We have endured the splitting.

We have built our small comforts here; broken bones and broken wood, teeth on chains, the glitter of gold in the eyes of the tall ones, the bright dancing flames of the fire.

Our Gods come up one by one from below, and we endure their unkind touch, even as we change and are changed.

Soon the Vault Keepers will come to smash our small comforts again. They will not hear. They will not see. Will fear the endless stare of the eye.

Always ready.

The gleam on the edge of the axe. The scrape of the whetstone. The stars, brighter than glow-worms ever were.

Gunfriid and the Troll

One cold evening, the kind of night when all wise folk should be inside with their doors locked, Gunfriid was walking from Tralheim to Knorr. She had heard that a giant lived in the mountains to the north of Knorr, and she was determined to ask it if it knew the way to the Baba Yaga's house, for as you remember, she still sought to find out what had happened to her brother and sister. The path was dark and overgrown with trees, but Gunfriid was enjoying her walk, using her spear as a walking stick and staring up at the moon, for the night air was cold and clear; a perfect time for traveling. Gunfriid wasn't too surprised when another traveler walked down from a side path and joined her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow in a long, black cloak that obscured his face entirely. Gunfriid nodded as he began to walk in step with her.

"A fine night," she said. "A bit cold for my tastes, but the air is clear and the night is peaceful. What say you, stranger?"

"I like the cold," said the tall man. 

"Fair enough," said Gunfriid. "Where are you headed? Up to Knorr?"

"I go where I please, woman," said the tall man.

"That's a bit rude," said Gunfriid. "Still, I suppose your business is your own." The tall man nodded, and they walked in silence for some time. At last, however, they reached a small clearing in the trees from which there went forward two paths, one straight on through the forest and one up into the hills. Gunfriid stopped in dismay. The folk in Tralheim had not told her there were two roads, and she did not know which was the right way. The tall man began to walk up the path towards the hills, but stopped and looked back at her.
"What is wrong, woman?" he said. 
"Do you know which of these is the right way to Knorr?" said Gunfriid. The tall man considered for a moment, and put up a hand to stroke his unseen chin. Gunfriid noticed he had very hairy arms, but she didn't think it would be polite to say anything. 
"Both paths will take you to Knorr," said the tall man after a while, "But the hill path is faster."
"Then I shall go that way, if you do not mind me accompanying you," said Gunfriid.
"I do not," said the tall man. "But I must warn you, it has been said that a troll lives in the hills and attacks travelers. That is why the forest road was built at all."
"I have never seen a troll, but I should like to meet one," said Gunfriid. "and I am in a hurry to reach Knorr." the tall man shrugged his shoulders and continued up into the hills. Gunfriid followed him. 
They walked for some miles across the tops of the hills, dipping in and out of small valleys and between the pines, until they came to the top of a ridge with a small cabin built on it. The tall man turned to the cabin and stopped again. "This is my home, here. Knorr is down the ridge--see those lights over there?-- you cannot miss it if you only follow the path." He made as if to head inside the cabin and then hesitated. "The slope is dangerous in the dark, and if you prefer, you could spend the night in my cabin. I have a bedroom for guests."
"I have walked many miles this night, and though at first you were rude, you helped me find my way this far," said Gunfriid cheerfully. "And I am very tired." The tall man nodded and she followed him inside his cabin. It was small and dark, even when he lit a foul-smelling candle, but Gunfriid knew the value of hospitality and she said nothing, not even when the tall man offered her a joint of rotting meat to eat, nor when he spread a bloody bearskin on the ground by the fire pit for her to sleep on. "I am afraid I have nothing to give you in trade as thanks for your hospitality," she said, siting down and trying to avoid a clot of blood, "But i you would like, I can tell you the story of why I have come here, so far from my home."
The tall man said nothing, and only nodded, so Gunfriid began to speak in a sing-song voice of how her brother and sister had been stolen away in the dead of night and her father and mother enchanted, levying only her to find them. And as she spoke, she saw the tall man's hood slip back farther and farther until his whole face was revealed, squat and sullen, with great tusks and ram's horns and a bronze ring through the nose--the face of a troll. But Gunfriid was very polite, and she said nothing, only finished telling the story of how she sought the Baba Yaga who knew all secrets and might know where her brother and sister were hidden. Where she had finished, she said good night to the troll, turned over, and fell asleep in the blink of an eye.
The next morning, when Gunfriid woke, the troll was nowhere to be seen, and on the bearskin next her was a small pile of gold coins. Gunfriid took them, walked out of the shack, and headed down the ridge towards Knorr, whistling as she went. After all, she had always wanted to meet a troll.

Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery

My adventure began in the least portentous way possible: an invitation from an old University acquaintance by the name of Gregory Shaw to attend a meeting of "Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," a society that he had joined in the years since our parting. I was surprised to hear from him after so long, for although we exchanged Christmas cards, we had not met in person in nearly ten years, having gone our separate ways after our time at Oxford. The last I had heard, he had been living in Scotland, but the address he included in his letter was far closer to home, a small coffee shop in the outskirts of London. 

On the appointed day, I took the train down to the area and met him. We talked happily of things in our pasts, drank tea and coffee and ate small pastries, simply passing the time as we waited for the hour, later in the evening, when this so-called lodge was to meet, in a private house nearby. Gregory, good-humored as he had been in our earlier days, nevertheless dodged all my questions about the lodge or indeed his involvement with it, saying only that he thought I would enjoy my time with his fellows, and I pressed the matter little, for I was happy to simply chat with him once again. Although, to be completely truthful, it must be said that even then I noticed something a little off about him. He had never been a fat man, but now he was almost skeletally thin; his eyes darted around, and though he often smiled the emotion did not reach his nervous stare; and he had taken up smoking.  At the time, however, I put it down to his vague protestations of working a "government job" and his natural worry about the business on the Continent. I could not have been more wrong.

As evening began to fall, Gregory and I at last left the little coffee shop and headed up the street towards the house where, he told me, Sharpe's Lodge held their meetings. We stopped outside the door of a small row house and he turned to me and spoke, quite seriously.

"Now, Charles." he said. "You may see things in here that will, ah, surprise you."

"I've seen surprising things before, Gregory," I said, "But thank you for the warning. Shall we go in?" Gregory didn't move.

"I mean it, Charles. If you want to leave, I won't blame you. You can go, and we can meet for coffee again tomorrow before I head north again."

"I suppose I'll have to be the judge of that myself, shan't I?" I said. I will admit that at this point I was beginning to have reservations; Gregory's behavior was so unlike how he had been in the coffee shop earlier. My concern was entirely overshadowed by my curiosity, however. What could Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery possibly hold within its shabby halls that made Gregory so loath to enter?

Gregory waited for another moment and then smiled, a great, genuine, smile of relief that put me completely at ease. He opened the door and we stepped inside the house's front room, a large and almost completely empty space, floored and roofed with wood slats that smelled of ancient must. The only furnishing was an elevator car, newly installed, its brass and iron railing glinting in the dying light that filtered through the cracks in the curtains. Gregory boarded the thing and beckoned me alongside, then hit a button to start the mechanism. We immediately began to descend.

"I have to say, this isn't what I was expecting," I shouted over the squeal of metal. 

"You'll be saying that a lot, Charlie," Gregory shouted back. Then we broke out of the narrow shaft into a large and brightly lit space, and for a moment I forgot how to speak. 

The headquarters of Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery lay beneath north London in a shelter built during the Great War, a hastily-converted series of root cellars and basements linked together into one cavernous space. In the center was a series of generators, providing power to the lights that arced and flickered overhead, as well as a number of more strange and esoteric devices ringing the edges of the cave. Wooden panels divided one section into offices and private rooms; another was lined with steel cages that appeared to have ben sunk into the floor. There was an echoing bang and I flinched instinctively; Gregory, seeing my discomfort, slapped me on the back and pointed to the far end of the space, where a man was shaking some kind of rifle at the ceiling in celebration. The elevator juddered to a halt and Gregory stepped out, a huge smile still plastered on his face. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," he said.

"Name?"

"Charles Wentworth."

"Age?"

"Thirty-two."

"A bit young to have seen action in the big one, eh? No matter. Know how to handle a gun?" The man across from me was white-haired, white mustached, and possessed of one glass eye. He was currently using his real one to fix me with a stern stare. 

"I've done a little hunting," I said. "My uncle used to take us on trips at his estate."

"Well, that may come in handy." said the man, who was dressed in a military uniform of some kind, although adorned with no badges of rank. "Have you ever handled a pistol."

"I never have," I admitted. " Why exactly are you asking me all these questions?"

"Didn't Gregory tell you?" said the man, surprised. "I swear, these recruiter lads get more and more lax every day." He stroked his mustache and thought for a moment before speaking again, picking his words carefully. "Any man with eyes can see that the Hun is up to his old tricks again, eh? The Germans and the Italians are planning something, and if things keep heading the way they've been going, we'll be at war here before too long." I nodded reluctantly. "Now that's the easy part. You look like a bright boy, so I won't bore you with explanations, but suffice it to say that the next war will not be fought solely on the battlefield, slogging through the trenches and all that."

"The advance of machinery, tanks and the like." I said, anxious to seem like I knew what he was talking about.

"That's one way, aye," he said, and stood up suddenly. "Maybe it'd be easier if I just show you. Follow me, Wentworth." He walked out of the office and back into the bustle of the Lodge. I saw Gregory speaking to an engineer engaged in some sort of repair on the generators, and tried to catch his eye, but his back was turned. The military man led me across the cavern to the banks of cages and down towards the end. It was dark here, the lights above sparking and sputtering. 

"We keep it dark back here on purpose," said the military man conversationally, pulling a service revolver from somewhere inside his coat. "We think it likes it that way."

"What likes it that way?" I said.

"That." said the military man, and pointed with his gun at a crumpled body lying in the cage. It was shapeless and pathetic, the husk of a human being. Clearly, it had been dead for many years. It didn't even have a smell that I could detect over the pervasive motor oil stink of the cavern. I turned away, bewildered and a little disgusted. "A dead body?"

"Not quite," said the military man, and slammed the butt of his pistol into the bars of the cage. There was a dull ringing, and the "corpse" turned its head to face me, its eye sockets empty, its jaw missing. It raised one skeletal hand and reached out towards me, its wasted, mummified flesh slithering across the broken concrete. I stood transfixed, unable to look away, until at last the military man clapped his hand on my shoulder. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery, Wentworth." he said, and pressed his revolver into my hand. "Keep this. You'll need it."

Forest of FEAR

“We. Do. Not. Go. Into the forest.  Ever, do you understand me?”  The chief sighed, running his hand through his mass of red hair.  “It’s too dangerous.”

“Why?  What’s wrong with it?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the forest, but what lives in it that’s wrong.  Enemies.”

“So we should fight them.  We fought Grovna and his clan, and sometimes we fight the cave-folk, if they try and cheat us.”

“Not the kind of enemy you can fight, son.”

“Why not?”

“So many questions!  You’ll grow up smart, mark my words.”

“I don’t care about growing up smart.  I want to be a warrior.”

“I have plenty of good warriors.  It takes more than just that to be a chief.  Now, if you’re so curious about what lives in the forest, I suppose you could go ask Thorkil.  He’d know better than anyone.”

“I will!” said his son, and turned to run off, back away from the edge of the forest towards the village below.   The chief called after him:

“Be sure you’re quick, though!  I must meet with the cave-folk later, and I want you to come with me.”

Everyone in the village knew Thorkil was mad, or at least half-mad.  Some said that the potions and poultices he mixed had gotten into his brain and addled his wits; others were of the view that he had been hit in the head in some forgotten battle.  No one had proposed either theory to the old man’s face, however.  For all his oddities, the man’s remedies worked more often than not, and the clan suffered only lightly from plague and disease.  He looked up with a smile as the chief’s son entered his hut.

“Ah, young Arnulf.  What brings the son of the chief here on such a fine day as this?”

“My father caught me trying to go in the forest and I asked him why we don’t go in there and he said I should come ask you.”

“Did he now.” said Thorkil flatly.  “Well, I suppose it will do no harm to tell you.  Although the truth will not satisfy nor please you.”

“Well now I must know,” said Arnulf eagerly. “How can I not, with an introduction like that?”

“Very well.  Long ago, when I was only a little older than you are now, and Kazko was chief...”

Thorkil shivered in the cold.  It was a bright spring day out in the fields, but here under the trees, the air was cold and damp.  He heard insects, chittering in the underbrush, and tried not to think of centipedes crawling up his legs.  So preoccupied was he that he very nearly screamed when a meaty hand clapped him on the shoulder.  It was only Garveg, though, a boy a little older than him, who said cheerfully:

“Isn’t this exciting?  Our first real hunt!”

“I-it certainly is, Garveg.” Replied Thorkil, his teeth chattering a little.  “I wonder what exactly we are hunting, though.”

“Some beast or another.  Bear, sabre cat, elk, it matters not to me!”

Thorkil shrugged and nodded as Garveg burst into laughter.

“Quiet, lads.” said Kazko, just a bit of an edge in his voice.  “We’re coming up on the hunting ground now, and we don’t want to give ourselves away, do we?”

They both shook their heads and fell silent.  One of the other hunters chuckled, until Kazko turned his eye on him as well.

“I gave these boys leeway, as this is their first hunt.  But now, it seems, even my seasoned warriors seem to think there is something to make light of.  Mark my words, this is no simple search for food or killing of a beast.  We hunt a monster, and if you are not careful, it will kill every one of us.” He turned, and walked into the forest without looking after him.  After a moment, they followed.

Thorkil was last in line, and had never been particularly tall, so it took him a moment to see why they had stopped.  Ahead of them was a break in the forest, some kind of clearing.  And in the center of it... Some kind of stone man?  No, not a man.  He craned his neck to see, and caught a glimpse of horns, and strange holes where eyes should have been.  At that moment, however, he was distracted by something else; a figure, emerging from the trees across the clearing.  And then another.  And another.  The rest of the band had seen them as well.  Kazko pointed, his bronze sword out.  Them. They all turned once again, and saw.

The things emerging from the trees were not human.  Superficially the right shape, they were nevertheless malformed and misshapen.  Even their flesh was the wrong color, an angry red across much of its surface.  After a moment, one of them stepped forward and  raised a stone knife in salute to the figure.  Thorkil held his breath.

The knife came down, and the creature staggered for a moment before beginning to fall.  Two of its compatriots grabbed its arms, holding it up at an angle as the blood ran out of its body and splashed at the feet of the stone man.  Thorkil watched in horror as the flow became a trickle, and then at last, finally stopped.  The man-creatures didn’t move, though.  They sat, staring at the statue, eyes closed.  A low hum began a sort of whisper through the clearing.  The hunting party waited, every man tensed to pounce, until at last, with a terrible creaking noise, the head of the statue moved, slowly rotating until its eyeless face stared directly towards them.  There was a great croaking, a sound like frogs, but infinitely louder.  It was only just barely that Thorkil even heard Kazko shouting the command to attack.  He grabbed his spear, and ran forward into the clearing, shouting incoherently.

The thing was nearly free of the stone now.  Had it been imprisoned inside?  Was it transforming from the rock?  Had this merely been a gigantic egg?  Thorkil knew not, and he had no desire to.  The stone head remained on, with its terrible eye-spaces, but much of the rest was gone, leaving a fleshy green mass, flailing and lashing out at any who came near.  Kazko was the only one who dared.

The frogmen, or whatever they were, had been surprisingly easy to defeat.  After but a few spear thrusts, most of them had scurried away into the shadows beneath the trees leaving the warriors to finish off what remained.  Now they stood in a cautious half-circle, watching their chief battle against the thing. A forest of tentacles waved before it, but each one that it projected towards Kazko was cut off by his flashing sword.  The rest of the warriors had just begun to advance towards it when all hell broke loose.  Tired of the game, the thing threw forward all of its appendages at once.  Thorkil caught a glimpse of three clawed feet beneath its body before he was plucked from the ground and held screaming upside down.  Fortunately, he was facing towards the creature, and so was the only one to see what happened to Kazko.

The chief, grabbed by one arm, was howling ferociously as the thing held him in front of its stone helmet.  Al around him, his warriors were being thrown to the ground and dashed to pieces on the rock, and there was nothing he could do about it.  Well, no.  There was one thing...  His sword arm still free, Kazko lifted his weapon high and smashed it down on the stone.

Thorkil was preparing himself for impact as the sword hit the creature’s head.  He felt the tentacle spasm and suddenly go limp, and he fell to the ground with hardly a bruise.  He picked himself up and began to run towards the edge of the forest, stopping only to help a delirious Garveg back to his feet.  The last thing he saw before leaving the forest forever was the monster, still holding Kazko above its head, begin to lumber into the trees.

“...And that, young lad, is why we don’t go in the forest anymore.” Said Thorkil, and sat back on his heels with a sigh.

“But what happened afterwards?  Did you get back to the village?”

“Of course we did.  I’m here, aren’t I?  At any rate, we made it home, and now the forest is off limits.”

“But what if Kazko killed the thing?  And what happened to his sword?”

“Even if he did, he must be dead as well, for he never returned.  Now stop asking me questions.  Your father wants you to go with him to meet the cave-folk.”

Arnulf ran out of the room at that.  Thorkil sighed as he left again, and went back to the business of mixing up potions. 

And from the forest, eyes watched the village, waiting for the right chance to get their revenge.  And something that had no eyes at all...

Grofnarg The Goblin

Gather round, young goblin children, and let me impart to you the tale of the greatest goblin who ever lived: Grofnarg the goblin necromancer. Grofnarg was born and lived most of his life much as you do today; spending his days chained to the mine face in search of new metals for the Orcish war machine, and his nights eating grubworms, vandalising Orcish pay phones, and doing sweet flips onto his bed.  But he dreamed of bigger things, dreamed of the day he would no longer be forced to lick the Orcish bootheel.  And he watched and waited, always looking for his chance to escape from the mines, until at last his moment came. An Orcish black mage visited the mines, looking for goblins and mine-spirits to perform weird dark magicks on or something, and as he passed Grofnarg’s station, something fell from his pocket.  It was his magical wand, made from the shinbone of Halfgar the totally Badical, a great warrior of the frigid Northenlandr tribe who had only been defeated at the hands of the Orc King himself.  Grofnarg could not believe his luck; he seized the wand immediately and concealed it beneath his highly unfashionable mine-rags.  After all the other goblins were asleep, he took it out, found a secluded shaft, and began to experiment.

At first, he simply tried pointing it at the walls and shouting things, but all this produced was a few bouquets of Orc-Flowers, which are brown and smell like a troll with dysentery AND gingivitis. After a moment’s thought, he realized that the wand was made of bone, and so might have something to do with bones.  He grabbed a nearby rat skeleton and tapped it with the wand.  To Grofnarg’s delight, the skeleton began to move, following his every command.  He had to try his newfound gift out on bigger beasts! Grofnarg returned to the sleep caves, found a sleeping goblin that no one really liked very much because of his terrible taste in cave wall posters, and slit his throat.

He dragged the goblin carcass back to his hiding place and tapped it over the head with his wand. The goblin rose, his eyes glowing, and moaned in a terrible voice

“I am yours to command, Grofnarrrrgh.”

Grofnarg smiled, his gross goblin teeth pointing every which way.  At last, here was his chance for revenge.

Grofnarg’s reign as Necromancer-King of the mines lasted for about fourteen hours before he was deposed and de-headed by the Orc King, Grimbolg.  In that time, his legion of zombie goblins killed dozens of Orcs, hundreds of mountain goats, several goblins by accident or because Grofnarg didn’t like them much, and a passing elvish T-shirt vendor who was late for his stall at the music festival down the road. Grofnarg may have died an inglorious death, but his memory and his Elvish Presley T-shirt have always stayed with us as a symbol of goblin resistance to Orcish oppression.  And so, young goblins, keep this story close to your heart, and leave me alone for a while.  I’m trying to watch the Blood Bowl game.