A peculiar symbiosis developed between Rem and Aconitum. Aconitum assisted Rem with gardening and preparing various herbal teas and ointments. She found that her curious questions like, "What is this, what does it mean, what will it do?" were welcomed and answered, albeit with a smirk and frequent reminders of her supposed stupidity. In return, she received a roof over her head and food. Rem made her a bed on the floor in the storage room. Or rather, a pile of straw with a blanket. He told her that since she was still growing, it wasn’t worth making her a proper bed. Despite sometimes being itchy from the straw, she found it comfortable enough. The storage room had such a pleasant aroma that she often fell asleep quickly and soundly, free from dreams. Rem contributed to this by leaving some containers of calming herbs open, so she inhaled their soothing vapors.
Only occasionally did a nightmare wake her — a dream of murky water swallowing her, preventing any movement, as suffocating mud engulfed her. In these nightmares, her chest tightened with anxiety, a pain like a knife stabbed through her, making it hard to breathe. She would wake up crying and screaming, wishing for her mother to come and hug her. But her mother never came, and Aconitum suspected she had met the same fate as her father.
Rem never came into the room to comfort her either, but she didn’t expect him to. The goblin was biting and irritable. Even though she tried to remember everything he told her, he never praised her. If she made a mistake, he would slap her and threaten to sell her at the market. She didn’t fully understand what this meant. She had been to the market in Rovisk with her mother many times but had never seen people being sold there. Her mother bought meat and vegetables, so Aconitum concluded that markets sold things to eat. From this, she deduced that Rem intended to sell her to someone who would cook and eat her. Though the idea seemed silly, she partially believed it. Therefore, she tried to learn everything Rem taught her — she didn’t want to be eaten.
One of the first things Rem did was cut her hair. She cried as he cut it short, like a boy's. Light brown locks fell to her shoulders and then to the floor, and she looked at them sadly, sniffling. Having short hair felt strange, as if her head was suddenly lighter. But when she realized she didn’t have to fight tangled knots every morning, she was grateful. Rem himself was bald, and there was no comb in the house, so she had futilely tried to untangle her hair with her fingers each morning. Eventually, she appreciated the short hair during work and meals — it didn’t fall into her soup.
She gradually built her own microcosm: learning to work in the garden, gathering herbs, working around the house, and sleeping. Rem sometimes took her with him to the pass or the surrounding areas if he needed to gather wild herbs. However, most of the main herbs he cultivated in a vast garden where Aconitum spent most of her time.
Rem never took her into the village among other goblins; he only showed her the surroundings. The settlement was a small port at the foot of hills rising from the sea. The houses were terraced around the harbor. Rem’s house was above them, built where the hill created a saddle. If she climbed to the top of the hill, she could watch the small figures of goblins in the port trading, loading boats, or strolling. Everything seemed tiny compared to Rovisk. Rovisk was the largest human port city and the capital of the human kingdom. When she went to the port with her mother, there were so many people and ships that she couldn’t see where the port ended. Here, in the goblin settlement, there were only two piers where small boats docked.
One evening, Rem told her they would wake up before dawn and go to the swamps for herbs. Aconitum’s heart pounded, she felt a strange pressure in her head, and her hands trembled. She felt she couldn’t breathe, her chest tightening as if gripped by water and mud. She clenched her pants, fighting the urge to vomit her entire dinner. Rem watched her silently, tapping his finger on the table. She glanced at him fleetingly — he was watching her with a raised eyebrow. She was afraid — afraid of the swamps, but also afraid to refuse Rem. Suddenly, fear began to fade, replaced by anger. Strong and persistent, as if it wanted to protect Aconitum from unbearable pain.
"I don’t want to go," she said in a choked voice, trembling even more.
Rem stopped tapping his finger and just stared at her for a long time.
"Go to bed," he said without further comment.
Her vision darkened as she stood up and stumbled to the storage room. There, she collapsed onto the straw, and the tension in her body eased. She suddenly felt exhausted and weak. She hugged her knees and quietly sobbed until she fell asleep from exhaustion.
When she woke up in the morning, she found herself alone in the house. From that evening, Rem never mentioned the swamps again, and she didn’t bring up the subject either. The world beyond the hills ceased to exist for her. Only the house, the garden, and the goblin settlement by the sea remained.
Months passed. News from the big world trickled into the goblin settlement — political crises, tensions, reconciliations. The Arali Swamps officially became neutral territory, but the Union effectively controlled them. Rem was not pleased. He saw how the Union was plundering such a precious area. They were draining the swamp and extracting soil, which they then shipped away by boat. He didn’t want to be involved, but he couldn’t avoid hearing how the Union had gained the territory — they killed a human family in the swamps. It was supposedly a sylph attack because the found arrows bore their marks. The blame thus fell on the Elders. To avoid open conflict, they quietly ceded the Arali Swamps to the humans.
Rem suspected the truth but said nothing. The truth wouldn’t change anything, and Aconitum was safe. He claimed to the goblin village that he found the child washed ashore — such things happened, and the goblins showed little interest in orphans who usually ended up on the market. He first took Aconitum to the settlement only when he realized his shirt and trousers were becoming too small for her. She was growing, though more slowly than Rem had expected.
Aconitum widened her eyes as he nudged her into a small shop by the harbor. Goblins passing by looked at her with indifference or mocking grins. An ugly human child. Aconitum felt uncomfortable under their gazes. The goblins were diverse, and she was surprised to see that some had hair, even complex, brightly colorful hairstyles. She had assumed they would all be bald like Rem. Their skin tones varied too; some had nearly human-like skin, others were brown like decaying wood. They walked barefoot, their large feet slapping against the stone path. All of them had earrings in their large ear lobes. The tailor Rem brought her to had six earrings in one ear. Aconitum stared at them, trying to count them over and over again, first from top to bottom, then from bottom to top.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Rem wanted her to learn to count. At every opportunity, he asked her questions like: "How many trees are by the fence?" or "If you have six bundles of herbs and need three for a potion, how many are left?" He claimed that everyone needed to know basic arithmetic, even a stupid human girl. She quite enjoyed counting, so she practiced it mentally, even by herself.
While she counted, Rem conversed with the tailor in goblin language. The other goblin had skin the color of old, dry lichen. His earrings jangled as he nodded his head. Suddenly, he jumped at her, startling her. He smirked at her expression and pulled a string from his shirt pocket, knotted at regular intervals. With this string, he began measuring her shoulder width, arm length, and height. All the while, he continued talking to Rem, who frowned more and more with each word.
"Do you want a dress or pants?" Rem suddenly asked in the common language.
She hesitated. She liked wearing dresses in Rovisk when it was hot. They were comfortable and airy, but impractical for gardening.
"Pants," she finally decided.
The tailor smirked again and winked at her.
"He understands me?" she asked, surprised.
"Of course," Rem confirmed. "Everyone understands the common language. Except maybe trolls, but they don’t understand anything."
She pondered. She hadn’t heard of trolls before and didn’t know what they were. But she was surprised that everyone understood the common language.
"Then why don’t you speak it?" she asked the tailor directly.
He frowned at her and spat, saying nothing.
Rem sighed and spoke for him. "You stupid child, the Elders don’t want to speak the common language because humans invented it."
"Why don’t the Elders like humans?"
The tailor laughed harshly and said a few words in goblin language. It sounded like a chair scraping across the floor. Rem waved his hand and replied to him, but said nothing to Aconitum. She felt offended and asked no more questions.
The tailor finished measuring, Rem gave him a few strangely shaped coins Aconitum had never seen, and they left the shop. He led her up the hill back home in silence. Only after they passed the last house did Rem speak.
"Humans evolved later than other races, so they started calling us the Elders, but we don’t like that term."
"Why?"
She watched him curiously. No one had ever talked to her about races before. In Rovisk, she occasionally saw non-humans, but everyone treated them the same as humans. Her father had told her there were Elder races living in different parts of the world. Her mother had sometimes told her stories about wicked sylphs and nereids who drowned sailors. But she had never been very interested.
Rem frowned, his mouth a tight line. "A better term is the Originals. We ruled the world, but not as tyrants. We lived in harmony with nature and its cycles. Our lives are very long compared to humans, and we have few offspring. We never grew to unbearable numbers. But humans live short lives and have ten children in that time. And those children, barely out of their childhood clothes, start having more children. You’re like rats."
Aconitum listened intently, though she understood only some of it.
"When humans arrived, they started changing the world. Nature and other races. Some of the Originals were delighted by humans, seeing them as a refreshing change and helping them develop — like the elves. They realized too late that humans are greedy and malicious, wanting only to conquer and consume, breed and dominate others. Their mindset infected even other races that changed under their influence."
He kicked a stone by the road in anger. He didn’t continue until they reached the house and went inside. From a shelf above the door, he carefully took down a very old-looking book. Aconitum couldn’t read, but Rem just wanted to show her something.
"Do you see this?" he handed her the book and tapped his finger on a picture that filled an entire page. The picture depicted a beautiful landscape around a sea bay. "That’s Rovisk. In Goblin, it’s called Mored, Moh-Raet — Enchanted Place. Your human city was one of the most beautiful places in the world before humans came. Today, it’s a stinking cesspool; you discharge sewage into the sea and then catch and eat fish from it. You’ve deforested the surrounding woods to build ships, burned the land, and turned it into fields. Gwaech."
Aconitum stared at the book, not even noticing Rem’s curse. The picture fascinated her. She remembered little of Rovisk, mostly the sun-scorched stone streets that reflected the heat, making a person feel parched after a short time. You couldn’t go out barefoot during the day, or you’d burn your feet. She also remembered the port’s smell — a mix of fish, filth, and salty water. The hills around Rovisk were bare, covered with yellowing grass — nothing like the picture in the book.
Rem sat heavily in a chair by the table and sighed deeply. "I was in Rovisk before the Great War when humans still pretended to be a pleasant race. That was the last time I felt tears on my cheeks, out of despair at what you humans had accomplished. I swore never to set foot on human territory again and went south where you didn’t have colonies yet. But then the war came, and humans took over the entire continent. I moved here to Riob, thinking the sea was vast enough that humans wouldn’t cross it. But now —" he paused and gave the girl a strange look.
Aconitum shivered. She felt his gaze crushing her, felt his hatred and anger surrounding her, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Then he shook his head, and the air felt clearer. She took a relieved breath.
"And now you’re in the swamps too. Some goblins even trade with you, claiming to be neutral." He punctuated his words with another curse and spit, but Aconitum was struck by something else.
"What does neutral mean?"
The anger in Rem’s eyes gave way to fatigue. "By all the gods, I keep forgetting how stupid you are," he sighed. "It means they pretend to like both humans and the Elders."
"So, am I neutral too?"
He looked at her again, this time with mild curiosity. Then he slowly said, "No, you’re just Aconitum."
It didn’t make sense to her. Only many years later, when she learned the meaning of her given name, did she understand what Rem had meant.
She lowered her eyes to the book and turned a few pages. The book was filled with tiny writing that curled and twisted. It looked a bit like the knotted string the tailor had used to measure her today. She couldn’t read, and neither could her mother — reading was taught in boys’ schools. But suddenly she had a desire to decipher those strange knots in the book and find out what it said about humans and Rovisk.
"Will you teach me to read?" she asked.
Rem burst into laughter. Then he grew serious and thoughtful. "Why not? Why not indeed."
image [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/5316f675-86a3-4234-b094-1db7fbdb3237/dhwls14-11525095-ddb0-4f36-b29a-0ca7ba51878e.jpg/v1/fill/w_1280,h_1792,q_75,strp/chapter_3_by_blueberrypanini_dhwls14-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.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.0PkRBzDsysveQc24WnMrFPEl7lnNgPtxvd-5PXEPmqs]