Gribble crept around the moss-smeared huts, his bare feet squelching in the muck. He hunched down behind an overturned cart as a pair of goblin sentries lumbered past, their spears thumping the muddy ground. Gribble's heart pounded like a war drum against his ribs. Sweat prickled his brow despite the chill fog. He had to escape the village. Get away from his tormentors before they crushed the last spark of hope from him.

The crude fence posts loomed ahead, gaps showing between their splintered planks. Gribble sucked a breath, coiled his scrawny legs, and sprinted. Twigs cracked underfoot. Gravel jabbed his soles. The mist swallowed him as he plunged into the Wild Woods.

Gnarled roots ripped at Gribble's ankles. Thorny vines whipped his face. The musty stench of rotting leaves choked his lungs. Darkness pressed in, broken only by the faint glow of luminous fungi clinging to decaying stumps. Gribble pushed deeper into the tangled woods. Even the forest's dangers were kinder than the cruelty he fled.

Exhaustion buckled Gribble's knees. He doubled over, ribs heaving, spittle dangling from his chin. Forcing his head up, he scanned the dense trees. There, just paces ahead - a gap in the brambles opened to a small clearing. Gribble staggered forward, nearly tripping on a moldering branch.

Gribble shuffled to the clearing's center. The leaf-carpeted ground felt soft under his blistered feet. Mist curled around the boles of towering evergreens. No goblin voices carried through the murk. Only the twitter of unseen birds and the chirr of insects clinging to lichen-crusted bark.

An idea sprouted in Gribble's mind, feeble but persistent. Like a weed pushing through flagstones. He could build his own shelter here. A sanctuary from the bullies' barbs and fists. He dug his claws into his palms. This could be a new start - if he had the mettle to seize it.

Gribble scoured the woods' detritus, gathering armfuls of sticks, vines, and slabs of shaggy bark. He dragged the materials to the clearing's edge, where a pair of maples leaned together like tipsy comrades. The spot between their trunks would serve well.

Gribble drove the sturdiest branches into the spongy soil between the tree roots, forming the hut's ribbed skeleton. Sweat trickled down his temples. His arms quivered from the effort. But he ground his teeth and pushed on. Anything to delay returning to the village, to weathering more insults spat by sneering lips.

The sun dipped below the canopy. Gloaming shrouded the trees. Still Gribble toiled, determined to have a roof over his head before night swallowed the woods. His fingers fumbled as he wove vines to lash the branches. Pain shot through his raw palms as he hauled slabs of bark onto the angular frame for walls.

Darkness fell like a shroud. Gribble's arms hung leaden at his sides. His spine curved like a bent twig. But as he stepped back, a flicker of pride kindled in his sunken chest. The crude structure looked like a lumpy toadstool hunched between the maples. But it was his. The first thing he had ever built that was his alone. No other grubby goblin paws would tear it down.

Gribble army-crawled through the low doorway and slumped onto the dirt floor. His muscles throbbed. Blisters pulsed on his hands and feet. But as he lay in the close dark, the forest's loam cool against his cheek, a long-forgotten feeling stole over him - peace. Away from judging eyes and biting words. Alone with the croaks of frogs and the breeze soughing through swaying branches. His taut nerves slowly unwound.

Sleep gnawed at the edges of Gribble's mind, dragging him toward oblivion. But he resisted its pull. For the first time in untold moons, he had found a sliver of solace. And he wanted to savor it before it dissolved like morning mist under the sun.

Slants of light peeked through the chinks in the hut's walls. Birds trilled their dawn chorus. Gribble uncurled his stiff limbs with a groan. His stomach pinched with hunger, but the thought of slinking back to Darkmire turned the saliva in his mouth to vinegar.

A breeze whispered through the clearing, caressing Gribble's mottled cheeks. Carrying the loamy scent of the woods. Hinting at treasures woven between the roots and leaves. Herbs to fill his belly. Mushrooms sprouting from rotted logs. Tubers to dig from the clinging soil.

Gribble heaved to his feet with a wince and shambled out of the hut. The forest hummed with life - squirrels chittering, bees droning between drooping foxglove blossoms, millipedes scuttling over mats of moss. Plenty here for a scrawny goblin to glean.

Gribble spent the morning scrounging. Chewing stringy wild onions. Sucking bitter juice from plantain stems. Shoveling handfuls of wood sorrel into his mouth, savoring the tangy crunch. A poor feast compared to the roasted venison haunches the village warriors wolfed down after hunts. But out here, he answered to no chief. His survival hung on no one's whim but his own.

As the sun arced overhead, Gribble's thoughts wandered to the ancient shrine. The mystical place where he had unearthed that ebon dagger. That discovery had stirred such a flare of hope in his shriveled heart - a hope quickly snuffed when Grimrock's meaty paw snatched away the weapon. Gribble's fist clenched. His knuckles ached for another chance, another artifact that could lift him from the muck. Propel him to a higher place in the goblin hierarchy. Somewhere above the boot heels forever grinding him down.

Gribble found himself retracing the winding path through the Wild Woods before he consciously chose to move his feet. Brambles scratched his legs. Burrs clung to his loincloth. But he plodded on, eyes narrowed, following some primal hunch.

The weathered stones of the shrine rose from the shadowed undergrowth. Lichen-splotched and vine-strangled. The ancient markings swirling over their pitted surface seemed to writhe in the weak forest light. Gribble's neck prickled. The same eerie aura that had halted him last time shimmered like heat rising from summer soil.

Gribble crept forward. Roots snagged his toes. His heart thudded against his breastbone. He crouched before the cracked stone slab of the altar and began scrabbling. Clumps of humus flew from his digging claws. His breath came in ragged huffs. Desperation drove him, flaying away his dread of the shrine's eldritch energies.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

No glint of metal winked from the dark loam. No hilt protruded from the weed-choked ground. Gribble's shoulders slumped. His eyes stung with the grit of thwarted hope. The dagger must have been the shrine's only treasure, its makers too long scattered to dust to leave anything else of worth.

A bitter laugh scraped Gribble's throat. Even if he unearthed another weapon, his atrophied muscles would never wield it. He would forever scrabble in the dirt, fated always to be crushed under a chief's boot heel.

Gribble rose to leave, brushing soil from his gnarled hands. As he straightened, a glimmer caught the tail of his eye. There, jutting from a gap in the shrine's far wall - a small orb. Scarcely larger than a sparrow's egg. Pulsing with a wan, unsettling light.

Gribble's breath stilled. His guts coiled tight as a snake. Should he flee this arcane thing, birthed from eldritch stone and shadow? Or seize it in his all-too-mortal fingers, and risk its alien power?

Something deep in Gribble's bones drowned his caution like a kit in a rain barrel. A yearning, long-buried under layers of cringing fear. To grasp something greater than himself. To draw some sliver of meaning from his woeful life's lot.

Gribble's feet carried him around the shrine. Vines snarled his ankles. His heart hammered in his hollowed chest. He reached up a quaking hand and closed it around the orb. Its surface was fever-warm and glassy smooth. As his mottled green skin met the surface, the orb's light flared. Searing cold raced up his nerves. His senses whited out as if scoured by lightning.

Power. Raw, unfettered, raging. Gushing into him like the wild torrents of snowmelt that churned the forest rivers to froth each spring. Roaring in his skull until he thought it would split like a rotten fig. His scrawny frame spasmed as the uncanny energies reshaped muscle and bone, kindling sparks in cells long-dampened by despair.

Gribble fell to his knees. Twigs jabbed his shins. Leaf mould seeped wetly into his loincloth. He retched as the maelstrom inside him crested. Strange symbols danced behind his screwed-shut eyes. Forgotten words garbled in his long-pointed ears. Inchoate insinuations of the orb's purpose, who had wrought it, what mighty hands had once clutched it and bent primal forces to their will.

Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the torrent ebbed. Gribble hunched on the forest floor, skin steaming in the cool air. His lungs seized like a landed trout's. But as his heaving gasps steadied, a new awareness tingled through him. The orb's last gift before it crumbled to ancient dust between his slack fingers.

He could absorb the essence of any creature. Draw the marrow of their strength into himself with each bite of flesh. His goblin gullet, so long accustomed to subsisting on rotted scraps and bitter roots, now transformed into an instrument of metamorphosis. A crucible in which to forge himself anew with each beast or bloom he consumed.

Gribble shoved to his feet, bark rasping his raw palms. Crisp energy crackled along his limbs. The weariness of his endless cringing years sloughed away like a snake's dingy skin. He raised his hands, studying the scraped green knuckles, the jagged nails black with ancient loam. These were no longer a scavenger's paws, but a thief's. Quick, nimble, able to grasp his own fate and choke until it yielded.

The woods rustled around him, suddenly rife with new promise. Each branch and bramble thrummed with potential. The mushrooms sprouting from sodden logs, the grubs wriggling in rotten stumps, the snails oozing glistening trails over moss-capped stones. All of them vessels of secret strengths, waiting for Gribble to tap their hidden depths and craft himself into something more than a skulking wretch.

Gribble started with the plants, the lowest and meekest of the forest's residents. He plucked a sprig of greenbrier, studded with hard green nubs. As he chewed the tough leaves, the fibers grinding between his peg-like teeth, his senses unfurled. Drinking the essence of the vine's tenacity, its power to weave through the densest thickets and slowly, inexorably, strangle the mightiest trees.

With each plant he sampled, Gribble felt a new trickle of strength suffuse his stringy tissues. The resilience of crab grass. The indomitable drive of bamboo. The ancient, patient knowing of the moss that weathered boulders to meal over epochs. He gulped them down, stuffing his face like a lord at a feast, gorging himself on the subtle might of root and rhizome, leaf and loam.

But it was the beasts whose flesh awakened the truest stirrings of hunger. The hot, salt-sweet taste of sinew and blood on his tongue. The intoxicating thrill of tearing life from bone to build his own brutish self.

A wood mouse was his first foray. Snared in a snicker-snack of claw and goblin cunning. Gribble cradled the soft, panicked body. Felt the delicate ribs surge against his rough palm. A pinch, a crack, hot gush of copper.

Then teeth in yielding meat. Heart to gullet to power. Quick, twitchy wariness. Scurrying speed over brush. Bright black eyes that missed no frond-flutter, no snapping stick. Another brick in the rising fortress of his flesh.

Snakes came next. Lashing from camouflaged coils to sink hot fangs home. But no match for goblin hands made strong by mouse-stealth and briar-sap. Crack of spine, bulging eyes, jaw wrenched wide. Forked tongue wagging, last sibilant hiss bubbling through rent throat. Swallow the still-writhing length, savor the cold pulse down, down to guts remade. Now scales sheathed Gribble's thoughts, smooth as oil, glinting with cold patience. Venom dripped from each measured deed.

Birds gifted swift grace. Fox brought cunning. Weasel stitched a new wild meanness through his veins. Skunk spray sacs popped pungent, wafting a promise - wrong him, and Gribble would unleash a stink to make the hardiest warrior retch. Maybe not a stink of musk and sulfur. But oh, he would brew fouler. Subtler. Secrets that would rot the roots of Grimrock's power and leave none the wiser until the chief's hut collapsed in a shambles of bluff and bluster.

But Gribble was no fool. He did not let the hot blood-thrill master him. He bent each beast's boon to his own ends, smelting their raw instinct and reflex in the forge of his kobold mind. He would be predator, not prey. Glutton, not meal. Each sparrow heart or vole liver was just another cobble mortared into his rising wall. The battlement from which he would one day laugh as Chief Gribble. As Lord Gribble. As Gribble the Mighty, who let no insult lie, no slight slip by unchallenged.

Soon his hut became a charnel yard. A sanctuary where not just his hunched form found shelter, but his growing hoard. Mounds of feather and bone picked clean to chalk-click. Pelts stretched to dry, supple and sleek. Claws to carve, fangs to gouge, quills to fletch black-shafted arrows of a hundred stinging dooms.

And scrolls of bark scribed with his own crabbed hand. Cataloging each consumed creature, each scrap of sinew that now wound through his cords and fibers. Calculations scrawled in blood and berry, scheming out his next move. The next beast to bag, the next essence to quaff. To fan his flickering ember into a hungry wildfire that would sear the sneers off every face that had ever mocked him.

Many moons turned while Gribble pursued his furtive apotheosis. Still he emerged to forage and skulk at the village fringes, playing the servile part as always. But each sundown saw him scuttle back to his hidden hut. To crouch in his reeking fane and take his new sacrament. To suckle on the teat of the wild, wringing out its secrets to fill his cup.

His limbs, once scrawny as dead twigs, began to cord with ropy muscle. His lank hair wove itself to glossy whorls. He stole a rusted blade from the charnel pit where the goblins flung their battle-broken weapons - the first edge he had ever dared to grasp. Night after night he gripped the hilt until the calluses on his palms grew hard as old oak. Sparks flew as he hammered the pitted metal straight. Until it shone like the waxing moon, bright as the rising fire in his belly.

The time was not yet ripe to throw off his caprine cloak. To bound up before his clan and demand the respect owed to him by blood and brain. But the day would come when he tired of the taste of sparrows and shrews.

When the day comes.