The only real choice was to confront Rose. It perhaps would have been wiser to wait for longer… but the desire to know nudged Amir once again. He had to find out where his friend stood. Once he did, he could make his mind up from there. Therefore, he only managed to hold himself back until the lunch crowd wound down and mostly left.
“Gramma, would you spare me a few minutes?” he waved at her
“How is the spell going,” she sat down with a smile and Amir felt a pang of guilt about the conversation he intended to have.
“Suddenly out of molasses, though real progress will probably still take a few days,” Amir nodded. “And I really appreciate what you have done to help me with it. Yet..." he hesitated.
“Sounding so grim doesn’t suit you,” she sighed. “Out with it.”
“You know, I recalled something today. Back when I first started working at the Lohart workshop you disapproved. Do you remember?”
“Yes, and I still do,” she nodded firmly. “There are risks a young man like you need not take."
“And I argued that there has not been a serious accident there in years,” Amir said. “Master Lohart is obsessed with safe procedure, I now know that much better than then.”
“Unlikely is not impossible,” she shrugged.
“It occurs to me now, you never quite specified what kind of threat you wanted to ward me from,” Amir started with an implication.
“If you are implying something, it is only polite to say it out loud,” Gramma said, though she sunk a little.
“Do you harbor certain biases towards goblins?”
“What a roundabout way to ask a simple question,” Rose chuckled darkly. It was a side of her Amir could not remember seeing before. “I could just lie, you know.”
“I hope that you would not.”
“Then yes, I think goblins are a danger to all of us,” she admitted. “And I think the late King was a fool for letting them in.”
“Yet they are people,” Amir. “Just like us. Individuals.”
“Oh, I see that perfectly well, Amir,” she just outright accepted his point, startling him. “What is that surprise for? Do you think I am a senile sow that thinks green is a bad omen, that the gods had ordained a minimum height, or that ears grow because of ancestral evils? No, it is not some superficial trait that makes me say this. It is because I understand their nature. That deep down something dwells, just waiting to be awoken.”
“If that is the case, then I do not comprehend the source your stance,” Amir said. “You confirm their subjectivity in the same breath you condemn wholesale them as a race.”
“Of course, you cannot comprehend. You are so young,” she sighed again. “You apply logic but lack all the facts. I do not hold that against you - so few us still remember the war.”
“The Briar War ended 40 years ago,” Amir said. “Should children bear the sins of their forefathers?”
“Do you know how that war had started, Amir?” she said instead of answering directly, her eyes were not angry. Merely… sad.
“No. No, I do not,” Amir reluctantly admitted.
“Once upon a time goblins were just one of the demi-folk. Living in their foothills, on stretches of land not fertile enough for anyone to bother contesting. They were not unlike the ursine in their deep woods or the merra in their seaside alcoves. Maybe there was the occasional scuffle, a missing livestock, a dead hunter that encroached too close… but not so much to make them more than a footnote. Not enough for worry.”
“Then one day, Awful the King arose among them - that is literally what he called himself. Without warning, without remorse, he arrived at the city of Resquem, then drowned it in thorns and iron. Out of thousands, less than a hundred managed to survive. Then he just continued. City by city, army by army. Hobgoblins, shamans, saboteurs… they seemed unstoppable. So many died in their wake I don’t think anyone ever came up with a number.”
“And the goblins themselves… I cannot properly describe it. When they fought for their King, it was not how soldiers wage war. Those were not conscripts or hirelings. They were zealots and crusaders. Fanatics. The kind where even spilled guts would not make them flinch. The kind that would bite at your ankles when their limbs were shattered beyond use. The kind that only stopped fighting after death and not a moment sooner.”
"We have been played for absolute fools. The Treaty which had ended the War was a trick. A terrible gambit made by a man that would willingly claim the name Awful. There is something dark within them just waiting to be awoken. And when the next ruler arises to pillage and raze, he will again steal them away in that same frenzy I have seen. And this time, they will already be within our walls.”
Amir stared, rendered mute by the unexpected proclamation.
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“Some think less of me for it. Some agree to disagree and we never speak of it. Many even raise their opinion because of this, though a lot of those have died of old age by now. It is up to you to make up your mind. I will not blame you for whatever you choose."
Then she stood up and left, leaving Amir behind with his thoughts.
----------------------------------------
For all he was acutely aware of his deadlines, Amir still went to the libraries and began to research. Was what Rose had told him subjective? Pure bias or modicum of Truth, Amir realized he did not have the base of knowledge to make the distinction. So, if he were to confront Pebblethrow and Gobsmack, he desperately needed to educate himself.
His search ultimately yielded three books: ‘On goblin magic, redacted edition’ by Grand Magus Holly, ‘A brief summary of the Briar War’, and ‘The Treaty of Two Kings’ which he knew marked their end.
Given his recent interaction with his elven senior, Amir was mayhaps a bit biased in the reading order. That being said, the book turned out to be both enlightening and not so much. It was exactly what it advertised: A treatise of goblin magic. For the most part, it delved into identification, analysis, and dissection of the underlying principles of spells the goblin arcanists - or shamans as seemed to be the proper term - had used during the Briar War.
Except the vast majority of that information was redacted. As a pre-graduate Amir would have to request special dispensation to access them which would lead to a whole slew of questions… Not to mention it would be more to sate his bottomless well of curiosity than actually provide relevant factoids. The pages did, however, contain a few points Amir could take into account:
Shamans tapped into the arcane differently than what the Academium taught. Rather than focusing on individual mastery, they could involve entire tribes in their magic. Other exact details were hidden, but from what Amir could read, he surmised that such an ability seemed very powerful, and probably had debilitating disadvantages as to never have been mentioned during his whole education so far.
The Grand Magus surmised that the goblins had possessed an exceptionally high number of powerful shamans. Exactly 13 who could match a Magus and one who could match even a Grand Magus directly. She noted that such is extremely unusual for nomadic and/or tribal societies and implies that either goblins were exceptionally magical creatures despite showing no outward sign of it, possessed longevity multitudes longer than was common wisdom, or had plundered an benefited from a great magical heritage for decades before the Briar war started.
Moving onto their Brief History, Amir quickly found what was meant by ‘brief’. It seemed closer to an amalgamation of vaguely related factoids about the war rather than the month by month exacting account he had hoped for. Alas, while there were other sources those were all focused on specific topics rather than the overall picture. Researching piece by piece would take him days, too long. Therefore he had to read a lot of nothings to extract what mattered into something resembling a timeline.
First the name: Briar War. It was apparently coined only almost a year after the conflict had ended by a bard, before then it was simply ‘the Goblin War’. It had started when the King Awful attacked the border city of Resquem seemingly out of nowhere, ordering their presumed best shaman to destroy the defenses with a massive walls of thorns. A method used many times over during the war.
The entire conflict lasted merely two years, with 17 major towns and cities being sacked in that time, as well as many smaller villages. Usually, the goblins had left as few survivors as they could. No mercy for women or children, but - Amir noted - no captivity and associated abuses either. Simply a slaughter. Having to read between the lines, Amir found that 15 of the 17 bigger settlements were actually taken during the first half year of the conflict as the kingdom struggled to mount a response to such a sudden threat.
And a threat it was. Hobgoblins had reigned there, as large as humans with twice the strength and skin that could often stop iron. Such an army marching by thousands, supposedly completely unafraid of death - all of that with the support of shamans that focused purely on the lethal aspects of magic. How these hobgoblins came to be, Amir did not learn, only that the Treaty of Two Kings had forbidden any new ones from emerging for 100 years… 57 left if Amir was counting correctly.
One factoid that certainly caught his attention were the ‘Briar Names’. It was… not a fad, but Amir struggled to think of a different word. Simply put, the scarce survivors of the cities the goblins had taken would still lose everything. Therefore, they very often chose to abandon even their names, taking to calling themselves after thorned flowers and such. That gave Amir pause.
Rose. Hawthorne. Even Holly. And a dozen other examples he would not have given a second thought. Old men and women he remembered bore such names. He had not thought much of it before, perhaps considered it just an ancient naming convention from six decades prior - after all, they were usually not toddlers when the war had erupted - but with that knowledge, his perspective shifted. When he next time met an old sir going by Barb, could he separate it from the knowledge? That the old seamstress was likely called Needle not for her craft but for an atrocity?
With such heavy thoughts, Amir moved to the Treaty itself. Awful the King and King Asterios III, both signed down on the meager two pages of ink, marking the end of the most brutal war in mortal memory. The terms were not quite those of a capitulation, but close. By the end of the Briar War, the goblins had been losing and it was apparent in what they had agreed to.
That all remaining shamans of note would be put to death. That any recognized hobgoblins could still be hunted down for 10 years after signing. That for a century, no new hobgoblin would emerge. That everything plundered during the war would be returned, down to the last coin. That no goblin who had fought in the war would ever teach anyone to wield weapons. That Awful would be publicly executed on the steps of the royal palace.
In exchange, all the humans had to agree to was that normal goblins could not be hunted and would be allowed to all emigrate into human cities with legal rights equal to other species.
Down at the bottom, signed in blood, two kings, and a vague promise that the terms would be enforced by powers greater than men, written in strange floating ink. Like that a War had ended. But the consequences had just begun there, hadn’t they? Wait… was that actual blood? Amir stared. Was that a faithful recreation? Or did he accidentally get hold of the original? Both excited and shocked by the prospect, he brought it to the librarian on their shift - a blond woman and a fellow pre-graduate. Rather than excited, she seemed outright panicked and scrambled to quickly get hold of someone more senior.
As it turned out, it was not the original - kind of. Every member of the peerage present at the signing - which was hundreds, apparently - received a copy that was sympathetically linked to copy the signature when the actual signing happened. The Academium apparently came to posses a dozen of them, enough that they were available even in the student-accessible libraries.
A wonderful tidbit that let him take his mind off of what was next. Armed with new knowledge, he sincerely hoped it would not end up being seen as a sword.