The Good Goblin

by C M F Eisenstein

  The dragon continued to plod through the woods, without a single rising of a scaled eyebrow to suggest that Cezzum’s words had been hearkened. There was little suspicion that the goblin was not heard; this brought comfort to him. Satisfied, Cezzum fell back to the rear guard of their troop. As Amyia passed him in the line, a countenance of acrimony still persisted; it caused no end of worry for him. Apart from that, he thought, the child could indeed use a bath; life in the wild had not been kind to her and with all the traipsing through the forest she continued to grow increasingly more sullied and odious with each passing hour.

  As Palodar overtook Cezzum, the ever-felicitous dwarf sent the goblin a reassuring look: eyes closing to little slits, puffy cheeks and a grand smile. Cezzum could feel the heaviness of Palodar’s heart – for indeed the same heaviness was incumbent upon him – but there was something about the dwarf’s gregarious way that always brought a grin to Cezzum’s face in spite of the rigours that lay constant; he pondered these things as his step fell in.

  Tac’quin’s forward foot snapped over Amyia’s mouth.

  “Again!” the dragon commanded. She blinked her eyes dramatically with disbelief at the unyielding winged-creature.

  The scaled and padded palm of Tac’quin’s claw drew back from her lips and Amyia mustered herself again and said, “I-!” As she was on the cusp of pronouncing her customary plural form, her lips were suddenly once again smothered with dragon feet.

  “That is where you halt,” instructed the dragon; “no further than that is necessary, let alone accepted.”

  Amyia had made a fatal mistake half an hour ago. After her temper had cooled, she was convinced that conversing with a dragon, just like ones appearing in her stories, would be a dream come to fruition; little did Amyia know that Tac’quin would hurl her fancy from the realms of dreams to that of nightmares.

  The dragon took it upon itself and bore the onus to correct the flaw that it considered a schism in her upbringing. Amyia managed to utter no more than a single short sentence before being brought to an abrupt halt whereupon her grammarian tutor sought to use physical manipulation to correct the metaphysical.

  Cezzum and Palodar stopped behind the duo; the long walk had enticed the dwarf to revel his friend with another tale of his grandiose history. It was the middle of the afternoon and Cezzum considered that they were making good time; he let the theatrical drama between the dragon and the girl continue before ordering the march for the final stretch of their journey for the day.

  Amyia grunted in frustration.

  “Again!”

  The air was warbling; only the dragon could sense it. The blowing of a breeze that brought with it spaces, voids, smells that spoke fathoms in but whispers and strands and specks.

  Tac’quin’s wings burst from its sides, as if a sail had sprung from the mizzenmast that was its body; its three followers stopped dead in their tracks behind it. The dragon tilted its head to one side as if it were somehow able to perceive the invisible gaps in the air, in the wind. Amyia, Cezzum and Palodar all stood in guarded silence, attempting to glean the spark that had ignited the dragon’s senses. But it was futile; to them, the early morning forest whispered naught but serene tidings.

  The deadening air began to take form; a tableau of characters sprung to life. Tac’quin remained still. The wind took a sudden turn; it became vociferous; before, it had stemmed from a different direction filled with faint notes; with the change, the pit of its orchestration was thunderous and bright.

  Tac’quin spurred itself into action. Tongues of crimson, magenta and sun-born flames were contemptuously spoken to the forest floor. The withering and dried detritus could not withstand the dragon’s invectives and burst forth into a crackling inferno. But as valiantly as the ignescent debris attempted to coax the greenery of tree and shrub into flame, they could not; nor could the dragon dedicate another moment of time focusing its attention on the resilient trees. Tac’quin’s wings curled across its body as it turned to face the rest of the party. “Let it burn for but another minute, and snuff the flames. Disrobe and smother yourselves with the ash; hasten then onwards to the south!” barked the dragon stridently, its voice left no opening for rebuke. The chattering flames billowed outwards as the mighty thrust and snap of wings ripped the very air apart; Tac’quin bolted into the firmament.

  It was a sense, left in the wake of the dragon, which accentuated the direness of the situation. The three terrain-bound members of the group remained silent, staring at each other, bewildered, for what seemed an eternity; only the cackling flames breaking the abrupt silence.

  The minute passed. Cezzum and Palodar set to tamping out the flames; Amyia watched on after having scalded herself without proper footwear.

  “So much for my bath!” grumbled the dwarf largely to himself, although Cezzum smirked at his discontent. The smirk soon transformed into a grimace as a searing swish was heard overhead. Further talk was curtailed and both the incipient brothers stripped off their dwarven garb, bundling it up under their arms, and began wallowing in the ash field. Amyia remained stationary, watching the naked, flailing figures dousing themselves with ash while clumsily attempting to preserve the relative cleanliness of their apparel. Cezzum halted his camouflaging and sent a hard, imploring look to Amyia. The child gathered a small degree of prescience; she discerned the urgency that lay within the goblin’s face. Swiftly she removed her tattered rags and set to charring her skin. A score of heartbeats later the three ashen-imbued companions dashed off into the forest, a scent of scorched life lingering behind them.

  No sooner had Tac’quin taken to the air than a quintet of arrows coursed by, narrowly missing its outstretched wings. A score of figures scampered in the forest below, jet and jade figures momentarily flitting into and out of view beneath the vermillion canopy – another band of phagens and goblins were marshalling to the east.

  The dragon immediately recommenced its plan, propelling both slivers and billows of flame in a multitude of directions; its snout gaped widely as vast torrents and precise bolts erupted. Long, undulating and weaving streams of fire swept the forest floor; instantly igniting numerous trees, bushes as well as the forest’s canopy. The ash, Tac’quin conceived, would mask its companions’ scent and make good their flight within the patchwork of the burning woods.

  Tac’quin’s attention was misplaced for a moment as it searched the moving speckles of the forest to ensure no pursuit was in evidence. An arrow ripped through its wing. The scaled leather buckled under the punch as a tailor would wimble a piece of cloth. It grouched at the pain, for a debilitating blow it was not. The archers among the malign foes below concentrated on the dragon; the others had begun to disperse in various directions at great speed; the ash had befouled the enemies’ tracking. A more gallant phagen stood in a small dell as to clear its view of the target. Tac’quin twisted to the side effortlessly, as a fish in the ocean would do; the arrow missed its mark. Before another was nocked, the dragon’s fiery liquid wrapped itself around the phagen, the flame taking much glee from the slaughter of its victim as it bore deeply inside. Harrying arrows became more numerous as fellow archers took to the fray; one struck true on the dragon’s flank, but it was shivered by small scale, cracked and clinging precariously to Tac’quin’s body.

  Of the entire goblin and phagen company all but three seemed to be scurrying towards the south. Tac’quin weaved through the fusillade of missiles and clasped its wings close to its body, leaving only a small fraction of them outwards for flight; it became a veritable dragon projectile. Its speed was far too great for the arrows to track and a few moments later Tac’quin boomed through the periphery of the forest canopy, the leaves erupting with the dragon’s path.

  The phagen and two goblins scantly had the time to recognise the sound as danger; their attempts to turn towards it were wasted. Tac’quin manoeuvred its body slightly, angling upwards; in the last moment of the airborne assault its claws were brought down upon the foe. In a blazing in
stant, the dragon’s keen talons ploughed into the phagen’s back, ripping deeply into the sable flesh, before the immense momentum slammed the phagen into the forest floor. A sickening crunch of bone and sinew pierced the air and flesh as the creature was crushed between the woodland ground and the hurtling dragon; the life of the phagen was snuffed out in less than a single beat of its slayer’s heart. Tac’quin flared its wings violently out to the sides. The leftward goblin moved deftly and only by the smallest space avoided the sweeping blow; his ponderous rightward companion was bequeathed with no such luck. With a sonorous thud, the dragon’s iron-hard bone careened into the goblin’s maw, shattering the jaw and staggering the creature; the sweeping leather of its wing rushed over the three-foot-foe, bowling the fiend to the floor. Tac’quin’s tail roared into the air, the tapering tip becoming harder than stone as muscles were innervated into furious contraction; the tail plunged downwards in absolute conviction of the malevolent and the condemned. The organic spear’s point pierced the prostrated goblin’s armour as easily as tin; it flowed fully into the halflings being, rending all organs in its path; Tac’quin felt its tail punch into the ground below. Only a murmur in Kig’n acknowledged the passing of the fell goblin.

  The remaining adversary had recovered its balance and wasting not a trice, leapt at the dragon, blade rearing to thrust; the goblin was ill-prepared for the adroitness of the target. Tac’quin’s tail curved within the soil below, anchoring it solidly to the ground, and with great might flexed every muscle that ran from its mantle to the terminus of its spine. The result was that the dragon’s entire body rapidly spun to face the bounding foe; regret was expressed clearly in the goblin’s widening eyes. A thousand razor-edged teeth and fangs caught the goblin’s neck in flight. The entrapped, flailing foe shrieked mournfully as dark, viscous blood wept from the shoulder and neck. Tac’quin’s jaw snapped shut; the goblin fell to the ground, limp and lifeless. It was not a meal fit for voles, but the blood that dripped down the dragon’s gullet was too appeasing to be refuted; with a quick gulp, the dragon slid the ripped flesh that remained in its maw down its throat.

  Extricating its tail from the perforated goblin, Tac’quin gave the immediate area a swift, cursory glance. It decided that a touch more ash could only benefit its plan; it suffused the three corpses and all the surroundings with the hottest writhing fire it could muster. The dragon grimaced, for it fathomed that taking back to the air would only likely result in their pursuers to gain purchase as to its party’s direction. Tac’quin strode southwards at a brisk and consistent pace, flaming trees whisking by.

  The afternoon shadows had grown long and the border of the golden disc just began to tease the peaks of the forest trees to the west when Tac’quin emerged from the woods proper and entered their eaves. It was that marvellous waning of light when borders between the expiration of the day and the trappings of night briefly meet and come together; where diurnal fauna saunters home to their coverts and, passing them, the nocturnal prepares for life – it was the most bustling, most tranquil period within the forest.

  Adding to the vibrancy of the early eve were three figures rolling and splashing in the waist-deep river that coursed its way through the forest, breaking the woodlands into two folds. Two bundles of near perfectly ash-preserved clothes and a pile of raggedy garments rested neatly on the bank of the river. For a fleeting unseen moment, Tac’quin smiled at the scene before it.

  Palodar, drenched, clean and with a water-matted beard, emerged from the river first. “Hail Tac’quin!” he cried, gleefully crossing over to the dragon. “We were beginning to worry-” Palodar started to utter his concern when he noticed the dragon’s fangs filled with fleshy bits and its blood-begrimed tail. Throwing his eyes along its body, reflecting the warming red hue from the setting sun, Palodar gleaned the fragmented scale and pierced wing, globules of blood still seeped slowly from the wound even though it had mostly ceased. “Tritchin be cursed!” bellowed the dwarf with dire solicitude, once again invoking the god of ill-luck. “What befell you, friend?”

  Tac’quin glimpsed the true concern in the dwarf’s beaming eyes, who rushed to the dragon’s side and ran his hand over the shivered scale.

  “It is naught,” it replied tersely; “Wounds of battle are to be expected.”

  Tac’quin stepped passed the dwarf offering ministration and headed for the river. A newfound respect loomed inside Palodar, his imagination well aware of the gallant deeds undertaken by the dragon for the protection of their flight. Silently Palodar praised Tac’quin as he tugged on his hose and ensconced himself under one of the more daring forest trees which had planted itself beyond the woodland eaves. In the thinning veil of soothing light, Palodar removed from his knapsack the pieces and sheets of canvas he had packed earlier, along with a small sewing kit complete with scissors, needles and a strong skein of thick tawny thread – a spindle that Palodar had managed to procure from Lúnàras after much haggling and the latter’s great despair at the persuasive capabilities of the dwarf who maintained a staunch point: that competent tailors were harder to be found than barrels filled with gems. Removing one of the strips of canvas, he sedulously brought the full might of the sewing kit down upon the material; with a stolen, quick glance up, he saw the dragon slip silently into the shallow river.

  Cool water swirled in eddies around Tac’quin’s as it descended. With tongue and water, flesh and blood could no longer cling to the dragon; its marks of triumph slowly, gradually, lilted away as a thousand tiny flecks tincturing the water; for but a heartbeat, a sickly shadowy hue tainted the water before it was swept away entirely.

  The dragon surfaced from below and stood, the current rushing over its lower limbs, regarding the two companions still adamantly attempting to efface the ash sprawled across their bodies, a process, thought Tac’quin, that seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time; it quickly discovered the cause of their lingering when Amyia thrust a spear of water at the goblin who reciprocated in kind with a retributive wave of his own. The dragon watched the two closely. The hatred within Amyia was no less virulent; pain was still evidently sown across her brow in lines that had never fully ceased, but there was something intangibly becalming about the girl who frolicked in the stream with the kin of her aggressors. Tac’quin let a small ring of smoke waft upwards from its snout. Its flank began to shake. The quarter where Tac’quin’s scale had been shattered rumbled violently until the hewn link of armour broke from its chain and fell into the river with a dull plop. Swiftly the scales around the barren space shifted, steadily nudging their way together until a circle, but the size of an inch, remained; the trappings of a new scale could already be seen seeping out of the leathery skin beneath.

  Cezzum and Amyia finally noticed that Tac’quin had slipped quietly into their bathing pool; they waded to the shallower edge where the dragon was poised, for even to a halfling and a child, a two-foot deep river was a bracing peril. Raising its wing Tac’quin curled its head to peer at the puncture. A fine transparent film had stretched across the tear; when held against the light, darker lines could be seen in the new membrane as sundered links and tubules of life reattached themselves.

  It is born in misconception, the rumours of dragons; any common denizen, be it human, loran, dwarf, telop or elf, if asked what element dragons claimed their birth right to be, they would unequivocally reply with fire most foul. Although dragons had come, in some circles, to be understood and even welcomed, communal ignominy relegated them to a place of wickedness; this is not to say of course that dragons do not appreciate this view point, for while their society is large, it is insular. But such false belief of dragons being born of but fire is a fallacy of the highest order; dragons were indeed the spawn of all the elements. While fire gives unto them the means to be a powerful aggressor, water sooths, heals and rejuvenates; water, for dragon-kin, is liquid convalescence. Air gives them means to travel, to fulfil their flight-bound nature. But all such facets would be for naught if they were not
channelled into their beings and it is through the earth that this occurs. Dragon eggs, when offered to the ground, sit atop its mantle and for its growth become part of the land. Roots sprawl from the egg, their hue changing to match its location – earthen browns, verdant greens, sandy yellows would be but a few – and it is into these roots that all the elements pour their might, their boons and their benedictions. Thus dragons, the worldly creatures, are born into existence.

  Amyia reached Tac’quin first. “Tac’quin!” she cried, “Are you’s alright-” She stopped herself, looked sheepishly at the dragon and said, “Are you alright?”

  Tac’quin was charmed by Amyia’s words, internally of course. “Our foes are slain and I still pull breath; all is well.” Cezzum joined the two conversationalists.

  “After we’s- we- started to run I saws some the arrows aboves us an’ then heard you-urs fire – we was worried!” stated Amyia with much gesticulation. She placed her hand soothingly on Tac’quin’s neck. Cezzum smiled at the dragon; his thanks, akin to Palodar’s, was conveyed without voice.

  Tac’quin shook off the hand and strode further into the river, its back to the two companions. Amyia appeared jilted. Cezzum watched attentively. The dragon paused when water arose to the height of its shoulders. Without turning it said, “The tale I will tell for you this eve.” Tac’quin disappeared under the water. Amyia beamed at the prospect. Cezzum touched her arm and indicated the reclining dwarf. “We had best kindle a fire; we have a tale to hear!” With that, Cezzum and Amyia left the river, their bodies mostly clean, but completely invigorated; they were liberated from all the most significant tinctures of ash.

  It was odd for a warm breeze to blow at that time of year; the Ber’gen winds were more common in the height of summer. Regardless it blew, all the way from the heights of the southern dwarven massif to the most northern coast, remaining true to its title with each yard. It was named after the eccentric dwarven general whose breathe was always strong, warm and laced with mead when he drilled or led his troops into battle; naturally, when he decided to show up on time to a battle that is, for the general was often bibulous to the point of a unbreakable slumber; yet once upon the field, a mightier warrior there was not. Even though the wind was occurring when it was not considered by all good folk to course its timeworn path, it nevertheless blew gently through the forest bringing with it the faint, sweet smell of the honey-cone plants which upon the dwarven mountains grew.