The midday sun hung in the sky like a fresh, juicy grapefruit. A soft breeze blew through the sparse woodlands, bringing with it the scent of spring grass.
Henry watched from his position on a small hill as a couple of women weaved together strands of plant fiber, purely by hand, to create crude cloth, which would presumably then be fashioned into clothing. This could be considered a very ordinary scene, if it weren’t for the fact that the women possessed green-skin, large triangular ears and catlike eyes. They were similar to humans in body structure, but were only approximately four feet tall at adulthood, and had distinctively childlike proportions, besides perhaps wider hips and fuller chests.
Although it was a meaningless translation, Henry liked to refer to them as goblins. No, perhaps the more correct pronoun for Henry would be we, for he was now one of them. It’s already been four years since he had been reincarnated as a female goblin named Uma.
The change in sex, surprisingly, bothered him magnitudes less than the drastic degradation of living conditions, especially considering the goblins’ social structure. He was her now, and she was fine with it.
“Uma! Uma!” Uma was pulled out of her whimsical stupor by a voice calling her name. She saw a young goblin girl with a frizzy head of shoulder length hair running towards her, and waved at the girl slightly.
“Hey Sela, is something wrong? Ah! It must be time for the midday rites,” said Uma, in an exercise that was both vocal and gestural. The curt goblin tongue had a much more limited vocabulary compared to the human languages of Earth, and required an extensive use of body language to convey certain nuances, such as tone.
“Geez Uma! Why do you keep forgetting? The sun is almost at the peak!” Sela alternately pointed at the celestial object and at somewhere very close along its trajectory, while waving her arms in exasperation.
Uma shielded her eyes and attempted to grasp the nuances of this natural time telling technique that most goblins seemed to possess, and merely came out of the experience with a pair of throbbing retina. She was one of those people who couldn’t function without an alarm clock back when she was still human, and that terrible sense of time seemed to remain with her even in a new body.
“Sorry Sela, but I’m just not very good with time,” said Uma as she compulsively mussed Sela’s wooly mane. “But that’s why I need you, right?”
Sela attempted to return the favor, but Uma’s tightly knit braid left little room for modification, causing the goblin girl to pout in annoyance. “Ugh, Uma. Why do you wear your hair like that? It’s no fun at all!”
“It’s because I think my hair looks better like this, don’t you?” Uma flicked around her waist length braid, and then used the end to tickle Sela’s nose.
Sela reflexively drew away and rolled her eyes: “Well it doesn't look bad, but I still think it’s weird! And it’s unfair! Anyways, get going!”
At Sela’s prompting, Uma picked up the straight, plain wooden staff which laid on the ground beside her, and headed towards the largest structure in the tribe, a tall, decorated leather tent.
The insides of the tent were much darker than the outside world, and smelled of raw hide and medicinal herbs. The only light came in from the entrance flap and a window opening at the top of the tent. At the center of the room was a bubbling stone pot which emitted an acrid smell, and a thin, ostentatiously dressed middle-aged goblin woman who was tending the fires.
“You’ve arrived, Uma. Just in time to get me a limpbeet root,” said the middle-aged goblin woman, the current High Priestess of the tribe and Uma’s master, Goma.
Uma ceremoniously lowered her ears, a sign of deference. “Yes, Mother.” Goma wasn’t Uma’s biological mother, but in the goblin tongue many types of superior-subordinate relationships are encompassed by the same words that are used to describe familial relationships.
The sides of the tent were lined with stacks of baskets which held various types of herbs, both fresh and dry. Uma intimately knew the contents of each basket through her two years of study, and thus was able to quickly fetch the item that her master requested.
“Slice it into the pot half a finger’s width at a time,” instructed Goma.
“Yes.” Uma had already done the various steps of this particular recipe many times. She took the sharp flint knife from the nearby workbench and flawlessly completed this, and all the subsequent steps that Goma demanded of her. The soup in the pot gradually turned from its original leafy green to the color of honey, and smelled of malt.
“Well done my daughter.” Goma showed much satisfaction as she rubbed the top of Uma’s head. “Although you do not need the Spirit Elixir to commune with the Great Spirit, there might be a day when you will need to take a daughter who does not have your level of affinity. That is why the Spirit Elixir recipe is a tradition that cannot be forgotten. A tribe that loses their High Priestess is a tribe that has lost their identity, fated to be absorbed by other tribes or fall to ruin.”
According to what she has heard from her master and other older goblins, goblins had a maximum lifespan of around thirty years and the life expectancy of the average goblin was even shorter than that. Accidents, disease, famine, wild animals, they were all legitimate threats, and so a successor was something that every goblin had to think about much sooner than a resident of a 21st century developed nation.
Uma felt a tinge of melancholy.
A year in this world was around 388 days, with the length of each day comparable to an Earth day, so her new life was only to last perhaps a third or even a quarter of what she expected herself to have back when she was human. But then again, she could’ve been reborn as a mindless slime or some sort of slave, being both sentient and free was something to be thankful for.
“Mother, isn’t there any way to live forever?” Uma asked in a whimsical fancy. After that experience with reincarnation and souls, the unthinkable suddenly seemed very possible, although the goblin priestess was probably the wrong person to ask.
The High Priestess craned her head back at Uma’s question, and searched her memories:
“If you train hard, you might be able to extend your lifespan with the Great Spirit’s blessing. Legends speak of the Grand Priestess who was so powerful she lived to the extraordinary age of fifty, she lived to see the birth of her twelfth generation grandchild.”
Great. The ripe old age of fifty.
But then again fifty was more than thirty, and there was no telling whether fifty was the true limit, so there was hope. Maybe she could eventually figure out a way to live until sixty.
The news instilled Uma with a new sense of vigor as she and her master continued with the rites. As the student, she was to begin the communion before her master, which consisted of sitting on the ground and concentrating on the feeling she had become familiar with.
Almost immediately, Uma’s senses of the physical world faded out, and her awareness expanded, covering the entire tribe and beyond. She could sense each and every goblin as a hazy but distinct presence, and a great nebula of energy swirled and ebbed in the space between.
The cloud of energy seemed chaotic, but wasn’t entirely without order. There were weak currents of varying magnitude that formed directly between each and every goblin, with the strongest ones leading towards her and her master.
After taking a bit of time to reorient herself, another nearby will started to assert its presence, and established a counterbalanced harmony against her own. Her master had successfully entered her trance, and with her master taking the lead, their synchronized wills started pulling off strands of power from the greater nebula and winding that power into themselves like a ball of yarn.
Extraction, layering, compression, those three steps were endlessly repeated to homogenize the ownerless power, gradually increasing both the quantity and quality of their spiritual existences. The rate of improvement was comparable to the slow and deliberate process of dripping water into a bathtub.
The strain of this activity was immense, and after a half an hour or so Uma’s concentration started to waver. The mass of undifferentiated energy, which had been as pliable as an orange peel, now felt as tough as steel, and everything started to become hazy.
Uma knew it was time to stop, but the upcoming part was the worst of the ordeal. She clenched her figurative teeth and pulled her consciousness back, and was immediately assaulted by an intense vertigo, a sensation akin to being woken up in the middle of the night.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Her eyelids were as heavy as lead. It took a concerted effort to force them open, and when she did, it took more effort to keep them that way. It was an experience that reminded her of the worst moments of law school, and it happened twice a day every day.
The good thing was, the terrible feeling didn’t last, unlike the caffeine crash after an all-nighter. A few minutes of rest was enough to recover.
Just when Uma was about to get up and stretch, her master’s eyes shot open and turned towards the doorway.
“What’s wrong Mother?” Uma asked. Usually Goma could hold out for a while longer, and so it was abnormal that she ended when she did.
“Yala’s approaching, panicked,” replied Goma grimly.
Uma instantly tensed up. Yala was the runner of one of the patrols, it was never good news when she or any of the other runners returned prematurely, especially not when she was in a state of emotional distress.
A hunting accident? A forest fire? Perhaps a pack of feral beasts?
Whatever it was, it meant that there was a high chance for casualties.
It was hardly a minute before a little green face peered through the tent flap and was met by both Goma and Uma’s gazes. It was the face of Yala who they had been expecting. As a rule, Yala made sure to check that Goma was not occupied before speaking, as to not disturb priestesses during their rites.
“Great Mother, it’s an emergency! Tall-goblins! Tens of them, just a half day’s journey away!” Sala exclaimed with exaggerated gestures. Tall-goblins, as Uma understood the term, referred to a variety of humanoid races who were, quite literally, taller than the average goblin. As Uma had never seen a tall-goblin personally in her four years of goblin life, it was difficult to judge what they looked like precisely from oral tradition alone.
“Tall-goblins! It’s been generations since we’ve seen any of those! Did you see what those tall-goblins were wearing and where they were going?” Goma seemed almost solemn upon hearing the news.
“Shiny metal shirts, Great Mother, and they seemed to be heading towards our tribe.” Yala was a young goblin, close to Uma in age. She had only been frightened by the sheer stature and numbers of the tall-goblins, and did not recognize the gravity of what she saw.
“We must call for council,” said Goma, having quickly regained comportment. “Yala, go call all Matrons, representatives, and Priestesses, we will gather at the bonfire. Uma, come with me.”
Besides the High Priestess, there existed four normal Priestesses in the tribe, but the difference between the two was that without the prefix High, it meant that they lacked any spiritual powers. With goblins having only a purely oral language, the normal Priestesses were the keepers of the lore, responsible for passing down knowledge and tradition, and remembering important events in the tribe’s history.
The High Priestess picked up her own staff, a curved stick of wood adorned with feathers, and headed outside. Uma followed wordlessly, lost in thought.
The bonfire referred to the large stone pit in the center of the tribe which the tents of the tribe surrounded, which served as a gathering place for both meetings and celebration. As it was still during the day and there was supposed to be nothing special happening, the pit remained extinguished.
The High Priestess was the most important position in the goblin tribes that had one, and so her master’s tent was situated right beside the bonfire. Uma and her master naturally arrived before everyone else, and took their positions north of the fire pit. They were not alone for long as the extraordinarily wide-hipped Matrons gradually arrived one by one, walking as fast as their distorted physiologies would allow them.
It was important to note that goblin society was a strict matriarchy, with the smallest subunit, a family, typically consisting of three to five goblin women, and all their male and childless female children. The adult goblin women referred to each other as sisters, with the Matron being the one that held the responsibilities of childbearing and leadership, and the others assisting the Matron with nursing, child rearing, administration, and skilled labor. The men handled manual labor, and were traded to other families temporarily when necessary, or other tribes permanently during matching season.
This arrangement was possible because goblin women were able to produce litters of six to eight children at a time, with only a gestation period of a season. Even taking into account neonatal mortality, that comes out to an average of twenty surviving children per year per woman, more than enough to share between all the women in the family.
Typically the strongest and smartest of the sisters would be made the Matron, and so it was natural that they also served as the leaders of each family. It was such a contrived but logical arrangement that it made Uma wonder if it was by evolution or design.
When all representation was finally present, with those of lesser clout sitting further away from the bonfire, Goma briefly described the situation that she had heard from Yala, along with some personal commentary.
“…and so we must quickly form a war band from every able body, and destroy the approaching tall-goblin.”
Wait, wait, wait!? How did you even come to that conclusion master? Should extermination really be the first option!?
…is what Uma would have liked to ask, but Uma wasn’t one to challenge authority, at least not right here with everyone present.
The Matrons murmured amongst themselves. The so-called tall-goblin were a popular boogeyman in many goblin folk tales, so some exuded excitement, other worry or even fear, but none seemed against the High Priestess’s decision. Such was the power of authority, Uma thought.
In light of this utter obedience to the High Priestess, there only remained one question.
“Who will be the Warboss?” asked Sha, the Matron of the Weaver family, one of the larger families known for their fine cloths. The Warboss was the commander-in-chief of a war band, if leadership of a few hundred individuals even deserved the title commander-in-chief.
“I will be Warboss,” declared the High Priestess without fanfare.
There was murmuring amongst the Matrons once again, this time more excited than anything else. “The Great Mother will lead us to victory!” Cheered one of the Matrons, with the rest following suit in a disarrayed cacophony.
With that, the Matrons all went back to their tents to select their warriors and delegate command to their trusted lieutenants. The Matrons themselves were not combat worthy despite their status as the best of their family. Pregnancy warps a goblin woman’s body to a shape that is able to withstand the prodigious productivity that they were capable of, reducing their physical endurance to that of a two year old goblin child’s.
While that was all happening, Uma privately asked the High Priestess the question that had been pressing on her mind. “Is it not possible to negotiate with the tall-goblin? Surely, we must learn the Common Tongue for a reason.”
Part of the Priestess training was the language called the Common Tongue, which was purportedly understood by the vast majority of the sentient species in the world. It had a more intricate vocabulary and highly difficult pronunciation mechanics that made it impossible for all but the smartest goblins to learn.
The older goblin shook her head. “No. Although I have yet to teach you about the other sentient races as I have not expected you to need it so early, the tradition of the High Priestess says that the metal tall-goblin cannot be reasoned with. It would be unwise to deviate from this wisdom.”
Uma felt frustrated that was the case, but gulped down any further suggestions on that front. “Shouldn’t we tell the Matrons and children to evacuate? In the worst case…” Her voice trailed off as she looked towards her master, afraid that she might be angry at the prospect.
Goma, however, was unperturbed by Uma’s suggestion. “If we lose, a portion of us will hold the enemy off, while the rest escape and bring the tribe into hiding. Without the protection of able-bodied warriors or the camp, the Matrons and children would just be prey for the beasts.”
Having had only four years to learn the ways of this world, Uma was still inexperienced and she once again had to recognize that fact.
Without any further words, Uma and her master went back to their tent to gather their equipment. As her master’s successor, tradition stated that she had to follow her master in case something happened. Because of this, it was also tradition that the High Priestess typically took two disciples, but there had been no one other than her that had potential to succeed the position in several years.
As two of the most important goblins in the tribe, Uma and her master donned the best armor the tribe could offer. However, the best that the tribe could offer was disappointingly just a full set of hard leather. The important parts were reinforced with wood, and in the case of the forehead and chest, strips of metal. The metal parts of the armor already showed considerable wear, and were an ill fit for Uma’s body shape, making it slightly uncomfortable to wear.
The armor was probably a relic of the past that had far outlived its recommended usage, but the tribe had no metallurgists or even smiths who could maintain and refit the armor. Likewise, her sidearm consisted of a short sword so excessively whetted that it resembled an icepick more than a sword. As pitiful as it looked, it was still probably the best tool available for Uma to stab through metal armor in the event that she had to do so, but looking at it further reinforced Uma’s desire to eventually acquire the technology of metal working for her tribe one way or another.
A bag of rations, a bag of herbs for wounds, and finally, an item of Uma’s own innovation, a wooden canister full of shuttle shaped darts made from pieces of heavy stone.
She was ready, as much as she could be. It was unrealistic to say that Uma felt confident, but she was going to defend her family, something that she was always ready to do, even in her past life.
The High Priestess was dressed similarly, except her hard leather cap and armor were better decorated with baubles, paint, and feathers. It made her very noticeable, for both friend and foe, with all the benefits and drawbacks that came with that.
Uma wanted to say something about it, but once again held her tongue. The High Priestess probably knew better than her what it meant, and that was a choice that her master had made.
After an untold amount of time, probably less than half an hour, the goblin war band was ready. A hodgepodge force, armed with flint spears, repurposed metal implements, slings, short bows, wicker shields, and armored with leather, or sometimes just the clothes on their back.
The only thing that looked impressive about the goblin army was their four hundred strong numbers. Pretty much every able body in the tribe was here, be it man or woman. Only a handful remained to protect against unexpected incidents.
Several more runners had arrived while the goblins had been preparing, so the High Priestess had a good grasp of where the enemies were. The tall-goblins would pass through a lightly forested region on their way to the tribe, a perfect location for an ambush.
The goblin army split up into subunits based on family, and headed towards the battlefield as per the High Priestess’ instruction, with Uma and her master trailing in the back of the force. When they were close to the designated battlefield, Uma could finally see what the tall-goblins looked like, and she was stunned even though she had already vaguely anticipated something like this.
The enemies, they looked like humans.