Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 – Episode 5

The farmhouse was very quiet.

It was too quiet.

Generally when people say it’s “too quiet,” it’s a prelude to a monster with a lot of teeth jumping out of the grass. In this case, however, since the only thing that could qualify as monsters with a lot of teeth were the goblins themselves, it was just plain too quiet.

The farmhouse was a small sod building—and that was odd, too, since there was a whole forest right there, and who builds out of sod when they have wood?—and the fences were the low dry-stone affairs that look cute and quirky and charming until you realize they’re made of all the rocks that some poor farmer had to haul out of a field by hand.

There was wood, but not much. The timbers were in place only where nothing else would do. A few scattered tree stumps around the farm showed where they had probably come from.

It was a neatly kept yard, with a thatch roof and a small henhouse and a pigpen. Around back, a low stable held three empty stalls.

It was very, very quiet. (Continue Reading…)

Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4

Sings-to-Trees stood on his porch, a cup of tea in one hand, and frowned into the darkness.

He wasn’t particularly scared of the dark. He knew most of what lurked in it, and had occasionally removed thorns from their paws. And although he was careful never to rely on it, he was fairly certain that there was an understanding among the smarter denizens of the forest that he and his farm were off-limits. He suspected he’d been lumped in with the little birds that pick the teeth of crocodiles, something too useful to waste on a whim.

For the predators that went on two legs, there were always the trolls. A desperate man had come to the farm once, and he’d been much more desperate after the trolls got him cornered on the roof and the gargoyle sat on his head. He’d been positively grateful to see the rangers when they came to take him away.

Sings-to-Trees had lived out here for years, more or less by himself, and never had any particular cause to fear the dark.

Still…

There was something odd about the dark tonight. (Continue Reading…)

Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 3

All wizards are crazy.

Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense. Not “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the bend.

This is because magic is a form of psychosis.

Forget the bearded men wearing robes covered in stars trying to sell you bargain spellbooks. Nine times out of ten, it’s a scam, and the tenth time, they really can do magic, but it’s not something they can teach⁵. (Continue Reading…)

Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 2

Sings-to-Trees’ morning began slightly after dawn, when the hen crowed.

She was a black hen with a fine gold eye and a blue sheen to her feathers. She laid quite large brown eggs. She also mounted the other hens occasionally, an exercise in bafflement for everyone involved. And every morning, she crowed.

As far as he could tell, she seemed happy, so he’d resigned himself to getting up at hen’s-crow most mornings. He hadn’t wanted a rooster, anyway. His farm was located on the edge of what were nominally the Elvenlands. A small human settlement lay less than an hour’s walk away, where woods gave way to farmland. The humans viewed him as falling somewhere between the priest and the village idiot, and thus required feeding either way. Depending on the time of year, gifts of flour or cheese or bacon were always turning up, and they dumped excess chicks on him year-round. He had a hard enough time keeping up with donated chickens—had his small flock been producing more on their own, he’d have been hip-deep in fowl. So he was somewhat grateful for the confused hen, after all. (Continue Reading…)

Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 1

It was gruel again for breakfast.

It had been gruel for dinner the night before, and it would be gruel sandwiches for lunch, a dish only possible with goblin gruel, which was burnt solid and could be trusted not to ooze off the bread. It usually had unidentifiable lumps of something in it. Sometimes the lumps had legs.

Once, Corporal Algol had found an eyeball in his gruel, the memory of which he carried with him like a good luck charm and inflicted regularly on his fellow soldiers.

“Did I ever tell you guys about the time I found an eyeball—”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

Algol wasn’t a bad sort, really. He was bigger than usual for a goblin, a whopping four foot ten, with broad, knotty shoulders and enormous feet. He had the ochre-grey skin of a hill goblin, and he wasn’t all that bright—but then, he was a goblin officer.

Smart goblins became mechanics. Dumb goblins became soldiers. Really dumb goblins became officers. (Continue Reading…)