I spent that day and night running for my life. Every bird call seemed to come from a griffin with a knight on its back and every bush seemed to contain an ambush. But no attack came from the sky or the ground so eventually I stopped late on the second day for the first time, with the exception of short rests, and thought about my situation.
As it was I had no idea where exactly I was, only that I had moved closer to the mountains, but neither did the inquisition as they probably thought no one would be stupid enough to venture into the wild alone. Even a group of experienced adventurers could meet opponents in this vast forest that would have no trouble with making them into its afternoon snack.
But I in my headlong flight had only thought about the dangers behind me and not the ones that I was running into. As it was, I decided that I would continue on this way as it had proven save so far and it was too late to turn back now anyway. This decision sparked another question in my mind. What would I do, now that I was a wanted by the inquisition. I could not expect help from other humans as the Inquisition stretched through all of the human kingdoms and had agents in some of the more open non-human cities.
As I had no answer to this question at hand I started making a fire by collecting dry wood and igniting it with a quick cantrip. Food was found quickly in the form of an unsuspecting quail killed by an overload of its lifeforce capacity. The later of the magics was something that was normally used by mages in group rituals to share power, but it could equally kill something with low mental resistance. While eating the nearly burned bird I started thinking about what lay and awaited me in the east and I started to form an idea that would sound ludicrous to most people, but they had not been exiled by their own ignorant race.
I fell asleep for the first time in days with thoughts of ruling.
Chapter 2
The next days were filled with me reading books on the great wild forest and its known and suspected inhabitants. As such the seemingly empty first two days now became two days filled with luck that I didn't know I had. I now realized that I had passed the hunting ranges of multiple wild beast, including that of a basilisk.
Stone pillars that looked strange before now looked like half eaten corpses of surprised victims. With the comprehension of this horror another came, a small part of myself didn't see a horror. Still shuddering I promise to myself to never again travel without information on the region that I travel in.
With that insight I started to review what I knew about this region of forest and mountains. I knew that goblins came through here to raid on human frontier villages, but as far as I knew the only settlements of any sentients are housed in the mountains. The flight of dragons are the most impressive but far from the only with an old under-city of gray dwarves and countless goblin clans being far more numerous.
As I remembered these these things a smile started to grow on my face, one many would have found disconcerting. I had found my destination, the under-city Karash. I only needed some kind of gift for the gray dwarves or they would not open their stone gates for me.
I spent the rest of the week in contemplation and travel. It proved to be a far harder thing than I originally thought. To find a fitting gift for a dwarven king is hard, as the things a dwarf likes most are his gold and jewels and a king has both of those en masse. Near the end of the week some thing finally happened that through me out of the monotony of reading books, eating badly cooked game meat and wreaking my brain on what to gift a king.
It was near midday that I stumbled into a clearing having fallen over a hidden root.
As I looked up I saw a group of goblins. A group of goblins pointing makeshift spears and bows at me. A group of goblins that were on the verge of sticking me with a lot of pointy things.
My first reaction was a rather dumb “huh” but after that I remembered two things about goblins, their clan leaders are the most cruel and strong of the tribe or they are magic users who are feared by the rest of the tribe. As a result of those inclusions I attacked a few of them with rather flashy magic including a ball of fire and a spear of ice, with the former being quite a bit more destructive as its explosion not only killed the archer I aimed at but also the two goblins in front of him, ice spear only pierced on goblin then fell to the ground. After that the goblins still pointed their weapons, if you can call them that, at me but now they were shaking like leaves.
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In my rather crude understanding of goblin I told them that they should lay down their weapons or they would and up in a similar position as their former brethren who now where nothing more than ash. After this they immediately dropped their weapons and took a good-sized step away from them as if they were going to eat them. With the disaster averted I finally had the time to stand up and inspect my surroundings. I find myself in what I would later come to recognize as a fairly shabby but common goblin raider camp, but at the moment it looks to me like an assortment of tattered rags held up by sticks and a couple of campfires between them. As I saw all this I started to see this as an opportunity and not a calamity. These goblins could be influenced easily as long as I showed them that I was the boss and any that said differently would end up in the goblins stew pot.
After a few harsh words in broken goblin and the demonstration of another goblin death I had a dozen goblins call me boss-man and master. When we were through those technicalities I finally learned that the state of their camp was the result of a failed raid on human settlement from which they had only escaped with a third of their number. But now that they had no loot or slaves they could not return to their clan without being turned into stew. I ask their leader, whose name I learned is Garbash, where their clan is at the time and how many goblins it had.
It turns out that the clan lives in a big cave the foot of the mountains and that their clan numbered around forty goblin hands, which turns out into a hundred and sixty goblins for those who are civilized. After that I asked him if he would like to be chieftain and left him alone with dreams of goblins bowing to him. After I laid a spread of nasty wards around my sleeping area outside of the goblin camp as their smell of drowned dog didn't agree with me.
When I woke up the next morning I found a dead goblin which had with the problem of having his heart displaced out of his chest. I had expected this as one of the most common traits of goblins is treachery. As they didn't say anything about their dead comrade I did not mention that either.
As everything was calmer this morning I had the opportunity to inspect the gear of my goblin underlings and I was shocked. Their spears where littlte more than shanks of crude iron bound to a stick with rope and their bows little more than a elastic branch tied with its end tied together by animal sinew and arrows with fletchings of different bird feathers and scrap metal as points. I thought to myself that they must have gotten the worst of the clans equipment and said so to Garbash but he assured me that they had gotten the best the clan had, most other would be lucky to own a small knife.
With this information in hand we started moving further east. I spent the follownig days learning about the finer points of goblin society and hierarchy. Their society is first split into those that are capable of magic, with those that are taken from the rest and being raised as shamans, similar to those among the common people in the empire whose children get taken away at the age of three. Those among the goblins that are not capable of magic get taken care of in a communal nursery until the age of seven in which they start their adolescence. For the next three years they are introduced to goblin society, which mainly evolves into a lot of treachery and a third of their generation dieing by a swift stone smashed into their head or a myriad of different poisons.
When they are adults they either become badly skilled craftsmen or badly skilled soldiers and the most cruel among them becomes a badly skilled chieftain. But the reason why goblins are a problem for the eastern part of the empire is that there are so many of these badly skilled goblins.
With this in mind I began to think about the possibilities I would have if I had thousands goblins calling me master. Finally after two weeks of travel we reached the foothills of the World-Ridge-mountains. And I had a plan, for if a the king didn't open his gates freely I would make him.