For the record; I fucking HATE mushrooms. I didn’t start it. Mushrooms hate me.

There was a reason I was out in Central Park in the middle of this glorious midsummer night. One of my girls, Candy (the lizard featured mutant who ran my purchasing department) had reported being chased and harassed by a gang of punks, not an actual street gang, but one of those groups of overprivileged dweebs who decide its cool to form packs to harass and prey upon anyone they can look down on. Since they look down on everyone except other rich spoiled brats, they don’t need to look hard to find something to set them off. In Candy’s case, it was the whole mutant thing. Someone is going to have to sit down and explain to me how they qualify as normal human, and Candy doesn’t. Sure she regenerates nearly as well as I do, has slit pupiled eyes, lizard fangs and claws, and has a body temp that argues she is pretty close to functionally cold blooded, but the changes of adolescence can be hard on everyone. She just drew the extremely short straw. For that reason they think they get to chase her through central park with baseball bats? If she decided to stay and fight, half of them would be dead, and the other half running. SHE would never hurt anyone by choice, but sure, they are the “real humans”.

That had been why I thought I came. Maybe I was wrong. My first clue was subtle, understated, so small you might have missed it.

“HEY, GIMMIE BACK MY GUN!” I roared as a pixie picked my pocket. Not my actual pocket, my underarm shoulder holster for my gold plated .50 Desert Eagle.

I was a goblin, and faster than any pixie. I lunged towards him, and he spun. My claws closed on his body as my pistol arched to the air to the first gnome.

“Hup!” He tossed it to the next gnome.

I dropped the pixie and lunged for the second gnome.

“Hup!” He tossed it to the next gnome.

“Whee!” A swooping pixie snatched it from the gnome’s upraised hands and flew at speed deeper into the glade.

I gave chase, accelerating as the stupid pixie tried to bet its wing speed carrying a fully loaded .50 caliber heavy pistol versus the ground speed of a hunting Goblin King in a straight away. I began laughing as the stupid pixie looked over its shoulder in fear, and its wings beat in desperate flight as it sprinted at a pace it couldn’t hold for more than another few heartbeats as it entered the clearing. I was half a step behind, and as we broke from the trees into the moonlit glade under the midsummer night sky I leaped with all the power of a true predator. Moving close to 80 kph I snatched my gun from the terrified pixie and as our eyes met, I prepared to give her my triumphant grin when…..

I hit a wall. It was my own fault, in my chase of the pixie I had ignored my surroundings and I had hit the fairy ring, the mushroom circle by which the fairy can pass from world to world down the twilight road before dawn and after dusk. I hit the circle, and the circle hit back. The mushrooms HATE me. I am an abomination in their eyes? Spores? Whatever it is, they think I am the wrongest of the wrong, and they don’t just lock the gates to fairy against me, the hurl me back with the fury of their ancient magic. In this case, I face plant on an invisible wall of force that Sue Richards from the Fantastic Four would love to claim, then get blasted across the clearing by a mass of lightning that seems to come from the whole of the circle, blasting me with dozens of whips of azure and cyan hatred to land twitching at the slippered feet of the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

I lay covered in crawling lightnings, burning and twitching helplessly as she sipped her tea. Her gown was forest green and cut deeply to show expanses of temptation that had no doubt spelled the doom for many men. Honesty, anyone who did not look up into those smug cat like eyes and the too sharp teeth set in that porcelain perfection of a face, who did not see the endless weary contempt with which she viewed the whole of the mortal world, and all those powers, thrones, and dominions who thought they ruled it, then they deserved what happened to them.

Raising her cup, she inclined her head very slightly, and offered a simple greeting.

“Kind of you to accept my invitation, nephew.” Morgan Le Fay, binder of Merlin, Enchantress and Fairy noble.

You have to be very careful in fairy. There is safety only in perfect reciprocity. To owe or to be owed creates a tie across which fairy magic can bind. I am the Goblin King, but I am new made. She is Morgan Le Fay, her legend stretches back a thousand years, and more than that in broken enemies. She has killed more legends than there are words in mine. Her invitation was a trick and a trap, a reminder that we are both changelings who lived. Her the mortal raised in Fairy, me the Goblin left in place. Each of us had lived beyond the roles the Elvish Lords and Ladies thought to use us for, we were toy and tools that rose in power to defy our makers, our masters, and become lords of our own fate.

I rolled to her feet and pressed my lips upon her slipper, and then, upon her ankle.

She smacked my head for the audacity, but we both laughed softly as I took a liberty of my own to show my acceptance of her jest, and my willingness to return it in kind.

She waved her hand and a chair appeared across the table from hers. I looked and tried for the life of me to remember if there had always been two cups of tea there, one for me and one for her, or if one just appeared now. It mattered. In fairy, everything mattered.

“Please nephew, be my guest, and grace this old woman with some company on this most magical midsummer’s night.” She made reference to her great age as if she was some aged crone, some ancient doddering maiden aunt come to look in on a wayward boy who had wandered far from the home hearth and into the wide world of wickedness.

Ah. Here we go. To eat or drink fairy food will bind you forever under the hill, to bind you forever inside fairy. Do not eat or sleep, do not accept or give any gift unanswered or you will find that having strayed into fairy you may never leave. Until they tire of you, and even then you may find that a century or two has passed, and the world you knew was as dead as your loved ones thought you were.

I cast my senses around, and I could feel the Nevernever on the other side of the fairy circle, I could feel the magic of it on the other side of those fucking fungi, but not here. I was not in Fairy. Fairy would not even let me in. This was a game of Morgana’s but she was infinitely older, wiser, and probably straight up smarter than me, so I could not see it. Hospitality is the oldest game, and it has rules. Fairy is all about rules. Dad raised me right, he taught me the old stories, so I knew the game, but she was there when they wrote the rules.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I took my cup of tea, and I raised it to her.

“To the most beautiful, wisest, and most powerful of all the Changelings who have ever graced the Seelie Court. For this gift of hospitality, for the grace of your presence, the gift of your beauty, and the wisdom of your counsel, I offer this unworthy trinket.” I say as I pull from the pouch at my bet the trump card I had been holding against The Beast, the greater demon that offered immortality to the assassins of The Hand whose hearts I had been eating by the dozens in the last year.

“A pretty to bind your hair, for it is lighter than a ribbon, yet stronger than fate.” I lay before her the work of the last six months. “Woven of the noise a cat makes when it moves, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird, a cord fit to bind the Fenris Wolf himself.”

The original is called Gleipnir. And bound the real Fenris Wolf. You can tell it works, on account of we are all not dead yet. The legend is real, and everything ends. Fenris is the sign that all stories are finished, and the world has grown tired of the telling.

Morgan laughed long and deep, causing her cleavage to do things that made me regret how much moonlight lit the clearing, and how well it defined certain curves.

She gestured, and the table was filled with fruits and meats, pastries and what looked like a human tongue set upon a rye wafer. She took that, and bit delicately. I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s something called Rule 34. Apparently if a story is told anywhere, then someone will reduce it to porn. This fellow found my own story to be one to try his wit on. When I asked if telling such tales of me was wise, he asked if I couldn’t think of a better use of his tongue than talking, and do you know what? I think I can!” Morgana laughed, and I laughed with her. No one but an idiot calls powers of her level with anything but respect unless they wish to end part of her tale.

Her face turned serious, and she turned to me.

“Your gift is a princely one, but then, you have styled yourself a king. Do you know what that is, for us? For the Fey? Do you know what we are? How I still am, when so many of the pure bloods themselves have faded away?” Morgana asked me, her voice somehow filling the glade, the raven that perched on the trees above us cawed loudly, as if laughing at my ignorance.

“Please, my most beautiful and wise of aunts, would you instruct this poor one, raised in a fallen and ignorant world, of the truths we fools have forgotten?” I asked, laying it on thick, as praise is a gift, and the more I gave with her acknowledging my gift already exceeded hers, the more she would be compelled to offer to balance the scales and leave me no power over her.

“Oh that was pretty. You human parents, they were not wholly useless. They managed to beat something like grace into you; enough that you retained it when your goblin self arose. They must have told you so many of the old tales. You must have found a place in them. Enough that you felt the need to play hero here, in this place of caped fools running around in pajama’s playing at games that were old when Troy burned, when Camelot fell. Very well, listen to this, child of two worlds, CHANGELING, our kind are bound to both worlds but we are bound by our fairy nature to one thing beyond all, we are bound to the story, to the legend that we choose to live.”

I looked at her blankly. She was speaking in metaphor, but I am a goblin, not an elf. We are better with entrails then entreating, better at pornography than poetry, better at carnage than courtesy.

She sighed.

“Stand.” She ordered. I stood. She clucked her tongue.

“Stand straight, what was that human phrase, oh yes.” She paused. “ATTENTION!” She snapped in a parade ground voice that brooked no argument. By reflex, I snapped into rigid attention, my spine straight enough to mark with a laser or plumb line.

My dear sweet Aunty poked a finger, and traced the bare skin between my shirt and my pants. The then ran two, then three fingers along the line between my cuff and my wrist. Spriggans and gnomes began examining how high my pants sat on my legs, where the knee and waist were and clucking disapprovingly.

“Have you not noticed that you have grown taller?” Morgana asked innocently.

I muttered less than intelligently “Sugar said something about that, but I ignored her because I stopped growing at 19. You don’t restart that past twenty six!” I laughed.

She smacked me.

“You are my nephew, but I swear you were dropped multiple times as a child. You are an idiot. You came here to play hero and as a hero you did not grow. As a hero there was no need to grow. What did you name yourself?” She demanded.

“Goblin King.” I answered, and as I said it, I felt the fairy magic of the Midsummer Night swirl around us, in the case of the pixies, literally.

Morgana smiled, and it was the cruelty that broke kings, that shattered dreams, that ended legends. “You named yourself King and you were not enough, so you grew.”

I blinked. “Is that how it works?”

She sighed. “We are the story we make, the story we weave. We are its master and its slave. We are shaped by the legend we weave, even as we grow stronger for lesser legends we consume, and grow tainted by twisted legends we allow.”

She turned to me. “Listen well. I am Morgana Le Fay, yet once I permitted another to use my name, to use my legend. Morgase, later named herself Morgase Le Fay, and her incestuous child Mordred. Her legend and mine became entwined and her deeds, her choices, her shame became mixed in my legend, became mixed into me. You have no idea the suffering I have caused, that I have experienced, because I did not think her legend could taint my own. I was Morgana Le Fay, the greatest enchantress in all of Fairy, what could the deeds of some noble tramp with succession plots do to me simply by living out her own stupid doom?”

It suddenly made sense to me. “She tainted your legend. She tainted you!”

Her hand slapped me so hard I was laid out at her feet as I had been when the lightning struck me.

“Why do you permit that Goblin to live? Do you not know how he taints you legend? Do his plots not leave corpses at your door, of your own people? How long will you permit this PRETENDER to poison your legend. If you are the Goblin King, how long will you suffer this pretender to live?”

Her voice was like thunder, her eyes crackled with power. This was the Midsummer Night, she was a Seelie Enchantress a Summer Fey as I was and Unseelie Fey of Winter. She was a human made elven by the magic of the Change, as I was a goblin made human by the same. I love my mother and father, they are my true parents, but Morgana Le Fey is family in a way that goes beyond blood and into legend.

I knelt at her feet, took her hand, and kissed it in reverence.

“I thank you for your hospitality, for your beauty, for your wisdom. I hope that when my legend next reaches your ears, you will have no cause to be ashamed to call me kinsman.”

She rose and stalked away, stepping into the fairy circle. As the light flared around her, and the dark of her gown, hair, and eyes were the only points in the storm of lightning that I could see, she called out. “Prove your kingship, claim your legend, and let the fate of the pretender wash it clean.”

I approached the fairy ring, the gate to the birthplace that denied me, or that I denied. I reached out a hand to touch the gate my aunt just used to cross, and a static bolt sparked to my hand in a shock of pain.

“Fucking mushrooms!” I swore.

I remembered Molten Man, who brought fire and death to my people talking about how Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin had created him and loosed him upon the world uncaring of the consequences. I thought about how often I saw the Green Goblin tossing his high explosives into crowds, into school busses and trains to force the heroes to choose between saving innocents or stopping him. The Green Goblin did not care about the little people. He cared only about his power and position. I was the Goblin King, I existed to protect those little people. Not the rich or powerful, just the forgotten people who asked no more than a chance to be safe while they worked for a tiny piece of happiness they built with their own two hands. There was not room for both of us.

If I was to grow into my legend, and remain the man my parents tried to raise, I could not permit the Green Goblin to taint my legend. I was a goblin, a creature of fairy. The legend shaped me as much as I shaped the legend. If I let that murderous psychopath live, sooner or later his darkness would taint me. I was the Goblin King, I would permit no pretenders. The Green Goblin must die.