I cut off a hasty retort, but that didn’t mean I was about to let his claims go unchallenged. “And what source have you drunk from? I’ve already been to two of the three tribes, and I don’t take you for a Rockbrother who’s spent his life mining in a hole. What are you really following me for?”

My eyes centered on his chest, knowing that was the best place to catch any hint of movement across his body. [Rag Armor] was at the tip of my tongue, claws weren’t known for their penetration, so when he closed the distance to attack I’d have enough time to respond. The spear had failed me, he healed too damn fast. I needed precision, so I’d let him close to melee and then take a dagger to his brain—

But the Hob merely smiled. “I see no one’s told you about the fourth tribe.”

I—... the what? I rotated my ears around to scan for sound, just to double check that he wasn’t dropping this on me in hopes of setting up an attack.

But no, there was nothing. Of course there wasn’t. De-escalating a violent situation was always difficult, it was hardly worth the risk when he could have just attacked. His intentions were probably sincere.

Probably.

“Why would they hide an entire tribe from me?” I couldn’t think of another answer. The Lifefather’s could have forgotten something in theory, but they’d been pretty clear at the time.

The shapeshifter scowled. “The stodgy bastards never held any love for my tribe. The deaths of my fellows only gave them an excuse to pretend we no longer existed. But I’m not dead yet, and so long as one Cattaker still breathes the tribe lives still.”

I blinked. That was a… surprisingly simple explanation. No lying, just a difference of opinion. A strong difference of opinion, but that’s how tribal politics tended to be. The real question was what beef the Lifefather’s had with the Cattakers, but I wasn’t about to walk into that. “They all died?”

The evident sole survivor glared at me. “I just said that. You are not too weak, try not to prove yourself too stupid.”

I scowled right back at him. “Yes, you did. Now impart whatever wisdom it is you value so much and let me move on.”

The Cattaker growled deep in his throat, the sound reverberating through his chest with the guttural strength of a beast. “Fool goblin. You are violent and paranoid, but I will share my knowledge for the sake of the world, if not for yours.”

Violent and paranoid… he said that like it was a bad thing. Maybe it was, but better bad than dead.

The Cattaker swept his hand out over the landscape, although the jungle obscured nigh-everything from view. “This is not the only ruin of the ages, not by far. My tribe delved into the ruins more than any other, and I’ve spoken with what spirits have retained their sanity from the ancient days. This place is far too small to possibly contain what once was wrought.”

That was interesting, but the real question was… “Why does that matter?”

The Cattaker huffed. “What, doesn’t the history of our people matter to you?”

Not really. I guess it was interesting in an academic sense… “You don’t track people through the jungle just to share your passion for history. You certainly don’t forgive attempted murder for it.”

The Cattaker paused. “True. Tell me, have you gazed into the Hollow Sun?”

An involuntary shudder ran through my body as I remembered the gaping emptiness at the heart of that shallow light, but I suppressed it to the barest shiver. Going by the Cattaker’s look that hadn’t stopped him from seeing it. “What’re you trying to creep me out fo…”

My words trailed off as my brain caught up with my mouth and I actually got to analysing what he had to mean. “There are others. Like that?”

The Cattaker shrugged. “Like that? Who can say? Each of these things was handcrafted, a prototype for the masses of lesser spawn that our gods would go on to create. To call them the same would be folly, but to call them alike is true in a sense.”

“So the gods, in their infinite wisdom, decided to lock up some nasty shit rather than bother dealing with it permanently. That’s fine right? I mean, sure, its shortsighted for an immortal, but either of us would be long dead before something inevitably breaks loose and starts wrecking shit.”

The Cattaker just stared at me.

“Why are you— Oh, you cannot be serious! How would you even know?!”

The Cattaker smiled, but tragically it was in an all too serious manner. More smug than joking. Fuck. “I told you that we had mastered the secrets of our ancestors more than any living tribe.”

I scowled and opened my mouth to demand a proper explanation, but he was already reaching into a pouch to withdraw something. It was a small bone trinket, half the wishbone of a bird with a crystal grown into one end. “This was one of the many magical artifacts we devised based on the excavated ruins. It allows one to speak across great distances. We used it to coordinate our great hunts and gather prey from wide swaths of jungle.”

The Cattaker glanced sideways with narrowed eyes.“The Lifefathers still use the same technique to organize their fires. The bastards might demonize us, but that doesn’t stop them from exploiting our teachings.”

I sighed and waited.

“Anyway, our creations were only ever pale shadows of the originals. There were great crystals capable of connecting clear across the jungle, and in the central temple there were greater crystals still, crystals that we never found the matches for.”

I frowned. The center of this place was the hollow sun, not some temple, and for all its life giving properties, I wasn’t eager to go near it. “Isn’t that a bit too close to be safe?”

The Cattaker snorted. “Since when is safety greater than progress? If we cowered in our huts we’d never have tamed the great cats, never have mastered our forms, never accomplished any of what makes us who we are!”

Dead? Far be it from me to disapprove of taking risks, I did the same for all that I hated doing it, but there had to be a balance. It was looking like the Cattakers had come down on the wrong side of it. “Sure. So you found pairless crystals beneath the hollow sun, and you figured they connected to somewhere else.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “I know it. We were too vast to be contained here alone! There are over a dozens of crystals there, a network of great cities like this one!”

“An empire.”

The Cattaker continued on, oblivious to the scathing tone with which I said that word. “Yes! Who knows what treasures they could contain…”

I resisted the urge to put my face in my hands. “If you want someone to live out your delving dreams through vicariously, you’re looking for an adventurer, not a goblin. As fruitful as this has been, I’m not above to hurl myself into a divine prison in search of hypothetical rewards.”

I sighed. “Not on purpose at least.”

The Cattaker gave me a broad grin, filled with as much schadenfreude as razor teeth. “You should be less concerned about going in, and more concerned about what might come out.”

I froze. The only thing worse than stumbling into a monster den, was when the monster followed you back out… “That— nothing could possibly escape from a divine prison like this!”

The words were desperate, even to my own ears. Raas had certainly been worried enough about something getting out, and my damn paranoid brain was already running through all the ways that something could do just that.

The Cattaker just snorted. “Never said anything ‘escaped’. Just said that you ought to be worried about it, is all. I can’t say what caused it, but one of the long distance crystals got broke and that means something, somewhere, got fucked up.”

I bit my lip. “So you’re saying....” No, start at the beginning. “What happens to your little crystal communicators when their partner breaks?”

“They go dead. Dark and spiderwebbed with cracks. Just like one of the massive long distance crystals was. Recently too, only a few dozen burnings ago. I was damn well shocked when I saw what happened.”

I let out a breath. “So someone in the prison broke one crystal.” That wasn’t so bad. Hell, if he was measuring time by the Lifefather’s crop cycles, then ‘recently’ meant at least a decade ago.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The Cattaker shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe the entire prison blew up. There’s a reason I wanted to talk to someone who’d been on the outside. Only you can puzzle out the clues to this mystery.”

“If the entire damn thing blew up, we wouldn’t have a problem.”

“Enchantments can be broken by more than just physical force. If the wards went down then the feedback could easily bring down every enchantment for miles around.”

I lifted one hand to rub at my temples. “So you’re saying that…”

“That nearly anything could have happened. We just don’t know.” The Cattaker paused. “I’ll never know. But you might. Just… surely you can keep an eye out there when you reach the surface? To delve or not to delve is your choice, but if the ancients were truly loosed upon us this could be the doom of all goblinkind.”

I sighed. “A group to which I happen to belong. I can’t make any promises… but I’ll see if I can do some digging.” There were precious few leads, but I still had a few in mind. I’d not exactly been a ranking figure back in my tribe, so just because I’d had no idea about any of our history didn’t mean nobody did. Ol’ Gobber might know some legends of buried cities or something.

The Cattaker nodded. “Good. You seem like a dick, but it would be a shame to let every surface goblin suffer for your mistakes.”

“Mistake. Singular. I only stabbed you once.”

He bared his teeth. “Go, before I change my mind.”

I needed no second warning. Really, his restraint was impressive. I wonder if he was used to identity mishaps, what with the shapeshifting?

Either way, I still backed up carefully, unwilling to break eye contact without reaching a safe distance. The Cattaker merely huffed and turned his back with a contempt I couldn’t help but believe was deliberate. Almost enough to tempt me to put a spear in his back just to teach him a lesson, but even at my dumbest moment I wasn’t that dumb.

He leapt from the branch and his cat pelt enveloped his body until it was indistinguishable from his skin. By the time he landed on a branch below the muscles and bones beneath had lost their humanoid frame and become fully feline. He shot me one last glance before padding off into the jungle.

Huh. It seemed he was a bit quicker when it came to cats than he had been at birds.

I let myself relax, at least enough to close my eyes and roll the kinks out of my shoulders before I turned back around and resumed my journey.

Things weren’t so eventful after that. Some monsters, a few close calls, but no fifth tribe appearing to make dire but unverifiable claims about the future. I hardly had the patience left to deal with that at this point.

Instead, I stared up at the almighty pillar-tree. The thing towered at what felt like miles above me, but I pushed aside my automatic intimidation to focus on more practical aspects. The mighty plant was, ironically, quite difficult to see as it was buried beneath a thousand clinging parasites. They were thick enough to form a vertical canopy of greenery over the trunk, and that made them more than thick enough to provide ample hand and foot holds.

But first I’d have to reach it. Like all the great pillar-trees, it served as a vital conduit for water and nutrients. The water of the surface world clung to the side of the trunk, forming a strange waterfall hidden behind the canopy that terminated in the turbulent mists that roiled around the tree’s base.

It was fairly similar to the place where the Lifefather’s had set up camp, with a shallow lake spreading outwards from the base. Unfortunately that meant I was going to have to get a little wet. Not something I was afraid of under most circumstances, and even less so here. This damn place was hot as balls and I was almost looking forward to the chance to take a dunk.

Almost, except for the near certainty of vicious aquatic predators that were more adapted to the murky water than a landlubber like me could ever hope to be. Add that to the chill of the water and I figured they averaged out somewhere south of even.

Of course, I was getting ahead of myself. I crept down to the water’s edge, double checking [Beggar’s Disregard] and keeping an eye out for any suspicious looking logs that might turn out to have teeth.

When I was close enough to have water lapping at my feet I unbuckled one of my pouches and gently tossed it into the water. I eyed the ripples expectantly.

Nothing.

I waited another half a minute.

Still nothing.

I nodded and stuck out my spear, fishing around in the muck with one end of the crossguard. It was quite the pain to try and rake the pouch back towards me without actually looking directly at it, but I managed it eventually. The added movement hadn’t stirred up any threats, so there probably wasn’t anything hungry in my immediate vicinity.

I picked up the thoroughly filthy pouch and—

And that was a patch of slimy moss. I leaned forward and dug out the actual pouch, which, to be fair, looked just about indistinguishable by this point. I undid the snap and stuck a hand inside. Damn, they were wet, no wait, that was just my hand. I brushed off the mud on the contents (Garrett’s clothes) and rifled about until I found a fresh bit.

My grin widened. Yup, they were dry. My extradimensional storage was well and truly waterproof. That meant I wouldn’t have to worry about holding shit above my head just to keep my food from spoiling, and just as importantly…

I grabbed a handful of silt and slapped it over my face. Ahhh, that was the stuff. I rebuckled the pouch full of Garrett’s old clothes, aka my spare rags, onto it place and began lathering myself with mud. The muck helped with both the heat and the occasional insect brave enough to make it through my protective layer rags, but it would serve even more important purposes later.

There was some risk of picking up a leech this way, but what are leeches if not snacks kind enough to attach themselves to you? Wait, I couldn’t eat stuff from down here, fuck. I guess they were pure liability then.

I rubbed in the mud thoroughly, making sure to work it into the rags so it wouldn’t just slough off when I started moving. Only a handful of places were exempt. The pouches for weaponry, both physical and alchemical, were left relatively clear for ease of opening, and while I gave a good lathering to the backs of my ears I left the inside clean and clear. I wasn’t a savage after all.

I even muddied up my spearpoint, just to be on the safe side, though I did make a mental note to clean it off later. Wouldn’t do to have the thing rust away practically as soon as I’d gotten it.

With my preparations complete I stalked forward into the water…

Only to have my precious mud start dissolving immediately. I sighed and resigned myself to redoing it all once I dragged myself back out on the other side.

Being out of my element like this made me more than a little anxious, but I forced myself to move slowly anyway. Each exactings step sent off ripples anyway, but they were as smooth and subtle as I hoped I was. I sent the butt of my spear out in front, prodding the lake bed to ensure I didn’t step on anything irritable or poisonous.

Or, more likely, both. I’d only ever been in the one Dungeon, but every tale emphasised their tendency to produce creatures that would be considered insanely aggressive by the standards of anywhere else and my experiences thus far hadn’t exactly done anything to disprove those stories.

I kept an eye out ahead while by spear prodding covered my feet, both for threats and to pick out my route. Making a plan on the fly wouldn’t have been my first choice, but that was where the dice had fallen. The mists billowing out from the waterfall obscured all sight beyond a certain point, making any further planning from the safety of the shore an academic exercise.

The ground fell out from beneath my feet as I progressed and I switched to an awkward three-limbed paddle before thinking better of it. Backtracking to semi-solid ground, I lifted my weapons pouch above water for long enough to dig out a dagger. I gave the blade a quick once over before nodding and gripping it in my teeth. It would do.

Emergency short-range weapon secured, I proceeded back out onto the open water. Although that did feel a little grand for this glorified puddle.

The awkward three-limbed paddle wasn’t the greatest swimming technique, but it was the one that left my best weapon free, so I made it work. It didn’t take me long to brush up on the edges of the mist, and I squinted through the constant spray of droplets.

Yup, there! A handy little island where I could plant my lazy ass for a bit. Get a good look ahead while not worrying about what nightmare fish this place might give rise too…

I picked up the pace a bit. As long as I wasn’t lifting my paddling arms above water level I wasn’t really creating any splashes, right?

I slowly pulled up on the island. Judging by how long it was taking I might even be able to make out the pillar-tree from it. It was hard to judge the true opacity of the mist without any reference points inside, but now it was looking better than I’d feared.

I clambered up onto the island without much trouble. The sides were pretty steep, but far more solid than I’d expected. There was some sort of fibrous texture beneath the mud, presumably whatever detritus that gave the mound the strength to withstand the current.

I scrambled up the spine of the island, looking out between the old warped tree trunks at the front of the island to squint at the dim shapes at the edge of my vision.

There was something out there, a texture to the mist. It wasn’t easily to make out, but it looked like there might be some branches dangling down towards the water. That would be perfect, so a part of me immediately pitched in the thought that they were probably the feeding tentacles of something with far too many teeth.

I shook off the idea. If it was true, I’d climb my up the squirming monster with a knife in both hands before stabbing my unwilling ladder to death. Failure wasn’t an option. I jumped off the island and resumed my swim.

The sound of crashing water became nearly deafening as I neared the waterfall’s end, but sound wasn’t my primary sense here. As I drew closer it quickly became clear that there was plenty of plant matter dangling into the water, though they were more like roots than branches. Made sense I suppose, plants needed to drink too.

Roots or branches, they’d be climbable easily enough. Getting to them on the other hand…

The current fanned outward, spreading in all directions. Thanks to half remembered geometric laws as well as common sense I knew that meant the area grew incredibly quickly, slowing as it moved. Just like a broad and lazy river that narrowed into intense rapids, the water pushed back against me worse and worse as I got closer.

Luckily I didn’t have to reach the trunk itself, which would surely be as turbulent as any waterfall and pull me down to my death, but while reaching the trailing edge of the roots wasn’t impossible, technically, but… well, let’s just say that the awkward three-limbed paddle wasn’t up to the task.

Struggling against the surging water, I wasn’t confident that I was either. With the ache growing in my muscles, I gave up and let the water carry me back. It was surprisingly restful like this, going with the current instead of fighting it.

I guided myself back to the island with slow strokes, letting the current provide the actual momentum ready to catch my breath. I’d need a moment to plan my way around this. Maybe I could get a rope or hook to extend my reach and snatch up one of those roots.

My feet hit the island and my claws dug into the soil to arrest my momentum, slipping past the fibrous underlayer of the island to hit something solid beneath.

The island rumbled beneath me.

That was not a good sign.

The front of the island pivoted upward, tossing me backward like so much rags. I landed and rolled on the higher part of the island, coming up to my feet and spinning around to face whatever new threat was arising.

Then the ground beneath me started to shake too. The earth beneath my feet rocked back and forth, wriggling upwards by feet at time. I kept my balance by the thinnest of hairs, wildly looking for safety to jump to.

There was none to find. Only murky water awaited me, wild waves hinting at some unknown threat within.

My indecision left me no decision at all as the ground moved again. I could keep my feet as nimbly as I wanted, but that couldn’t save me when the caked mud I stood on gave way. As the island began its final surge upwards the outer layer broke and sloughed to the side.

The mudslide carried me with it and we hit the turbulent water at the same time. Battering currents tossed me about like a ragdoll and I lost all sense of direction along with the hope of ever breathing again. I gritted my teeth around the knife still clutched in them to ward off the mud and water, cutting my lips on the blade.

I forced my eyes open through the stinging silt, but it was pointless. There was no light here, no up or down. The swirling grit stung my nose, and my ears could hear nothing but the roar of the current and the pounding of my heart as it struggled to pump oxygen I didn’t have.

Sight, useless. Scent, useless. Hearing, useless. I wasn’t about to open my mouth and taste it, so that left touch. I tightened my grip around the one point of reference I had, my spear, and worked my hands up it.

I hit the crossguard and gripped it in both hands, pulling the spear against my chest before thrusting it outward with all my strength.

It rippled through the empty water, accomplishing nothing.

I pulled it back and thrust the butt outward in another random direction.

The shock of impact reverberating up the haft was the sweetest sensation I’d ever felt. I heaved on the weapon and as it drove deeper into the silt of the lakebed my body hurtled upwards to break through.

I gasped as I felt the air rushing across my face, then choked and spat. Even that moment panic couldn’t truly sour the moment as I coughed out water and sucked down precious air. It tasted better than a thousand strips of bacon.

I found my feet again and shook the water out of my ears. The current had carried me into embarrassingly shallow water. If I’d been able to find the ground I could have just stood up without any need of the spear.

Water was more dangerous than most gave it credit for, but as the water cleared from my ears I heard something more dangerous still.

Oh shit. I blinked the silt out of my eyes and looked again at the moving island. It was shadow in the mist, a shadow shaking itself like a dog throwing off water and spraying mud in every direction.

I stood very still. Don’t notice me, don’t notice me….

The mass snorted, huffing like a beast. The trickles of blood running down my face became a lot more noticeable as the sniffing creature slowly turned to face me. It was still no more than a silhouette, but it was a strangely familiar one.

I squinted up at the creature and, more importantly, the shadows stretching upwards from what I thought was its face, but I needn’t have bothered. The beast was rapidly approaching, resolving into a definitive shape as it grew closer.

The tusks became visible first, engraved with runes and stretching forwards like spears. Then the snout, broad and flat like a boar, then yet more tusks, a second pair that curled upwards like a ram’s horns.

I swallowed. “Uh, good piggy?”

The boar surged forwards and I leveled my spear, but its tusks cleared me on either side and as its maw opened it wasn’t fire that came out.

It was a tongue.

The muscle was as massive as any other part of the beast, and as it licked across me I was pushed back by a full step from sheer weight alone.

But it was weight alone, the boar simple hadn’t put any real force into it. I’m pretty sure the damn thing could have sent me sprawling with a single lick if it really wanted.

I held up one hesitant hand. “Uh, good piggy?”