Gribble hunched over the array of fungi splayed across the dirt floor of his hut. His bony fingers brushed aside the stringy black hair hanging in his face, yellow eyes wide, nostrils flaring. The earthy stink of moist loam and sodden bark mingled with the bitter alkaline tang of the mushroom caps. Poisonous, most likely. But the orb’s power had armored his guts against such paltry venoms.

He sifted through the trove with the keen eye of a gourmand selecting the finest morsels from a feast. A blood-red bolete with a velvety cap, glistening with beads of sap. An elegant parasol with a lacy white veil and delicate gills. A puffball the size of his fist, its bruise-mottled surface taut and shiny. Each one bursting with primordial energies waiting to be unleashed in his flesh.

Gribble plucked a fat indigo Russula from the pile, rolling the nubby stem between his gnarled fingers. Stroking the plump gills, he could almost taste the earthy fluid beading on his tongue, feel the familiar tingling rush building behind his eyes. Soon its strange virtue would be his. One more brick in the impenetrable fortress he was building of his body.

He reached for another robust specimen, but froze, fingers hovering. The hairs on his neck prickled like cold needles jabbing up from his collar. The air pressed against his pointed ears like a stifling blanket, thick with a tension his newly heightened nerves knew all too well. Dread uncoiled in his belly like an icy serpent.

They were coming.

Gribble squeezed his eyes shut, breath rasping in his throat. He pushed his awareness out into the gloom of the Misty Forest, fumbling for the invading presences. The lurching mass of their auras buffeted his psyche like a fetid wind. Krub and Griz. His tormentors. His nightmares given greasy, reeking flesh.

They had never come this far into the woods before, never dared disturbing the solitude of his exile. Their jeers and taunts were for the village square, the foraging treks, any time Grimrock summoned him to grovel at his iron-shod feet. Out here, among the furred and fungal things that slaked his growing hunger, Gribble was untouchable.

Until today. Until this.

Gribble's arms trembled in his ragged sleeves, his whole wiry frame quaking like a lone stalk in a storm. He could feel them blundering between the trees, trampling ferns and saplings, fouling the forest with their brutish stink. They crashed into the clearing around his hut, blunt weapons thudding into their meaty palms, laughter wet and cruel. Booted feet stomping nearer.

The pitted skin above Gribble's jutting collarbones gleamed with a sheen of oily sweat. His heart battered his breastbone like a panicked sparrow in a cage. This was how it always started. The looming presence, the spittle-filled insults, the rough hands seizing his scruff and shaking him like a corn-husk doll. Pain would come next. It always did.

Gribble's ribs throbbed in remembered agony, his limbs aching with the echoes of a hundred past beatings. The sour tang of his own fear-sweat filled his nostrils, salty and bitter on his tongue. How many times had he tasted that same rank flavor, spat his own blood into the dust at their feet? Too many to count. Part of him almost welcomed the familiarity of it. What was one more handful of welts and bruises to his patchwork flesh?

But that was before the orb. Before the change crept through his scrawny limbs, knitting his sinews into hemp-rope cords beneath mottled skin. Before he gorged himself on the wild vim of the forest and felt the power blooming like a black lotus behind his eyes. He was stronger now. Maybe strong enough to take a stand. To show his tormentors the mongrel cur had grown fangs of its own.

Gribble's jaundiced eyes snapped open, flickering to the mushrooms scattered at his feet. The bounty of might nestled among the humus, begging to be plucked and savored. His tongue poked out to wet his cracked lips. He could cram them in his mouth by the fistful, crunching and slurping, taking their strange virtues into himself. Grow too terrible to touch in the space of a few wet swallows.

His gaze darted to the rusted dagger at his belt, the wicked point winking in a stray shaft of light. He could draw it forth in a tarnished blur, lunge at his bullies in a whirlwind of slashes, and show them what a cornered rat could do. Pay back every weal and welt in gouts of hot red blood.

But even as the defiant fantasies bloomed in Gribble's mind, the clammy claws of doubt dragged him back. The orb had remade him, true, but was it enough? Enough to overcome a lifetime of cringing servility, of huddling like a beaten dog, muzzle to the mud? Enough to best two brawny louts weaned on brawling and savagery?

He balled his hands into white-knuckled fists, feeling the sickly conviction leech out of him like watery bile. The old lessons died hard, graven as they were into his bones by clubs and boots. Keep your head down, don't make trouble, bite your tongue till you tasted copper. Those were the laws that had kept him breathing.

Gribble's resolve guttered out like a wick drowning in its own tallow. His shoulders slumped in their familiar cringe, chin dipping to his bony chest. He would be as he'd always been—a meek smudge hugging the shadows, forever scrabbling on the margins of goblin graces.

The hide curtain serving as his hut's door tore aside with a gasping rip, letting in a flood of wan forest light. Two bulky silhouettes eclipsed the opening, broad and hulking. Apelike arms crossed with ropey muscle, knobby with scars and crude tattoos. Thick necks sporting bobbing Adam's apples and jaws bristling with yellowed tusks. Krub and Griz, unchanged and unchangeable.

Look what we have here, Griz, Krub spat, split lips pulling back from tombstone teeth. Seems Maggot ain't so run-off as we figured.

Griz's snicker slithered out from behind the curtain of greasy locks swinging past his jug ears. I reckon he thinks he's something special now, holed up out here. Like putting a crown on a rat makes it a king.

Gribble's bowels shriveled to a fist behind his navel, icy sweat crawling down his ribs. His tongue lay in his mouth like a shriveled slug, bloated and useless. He watched mutely as the bigger goblins shouldered into the close confines of the hut, their bulk seeming to fill the whole space. Krub's bloodshot eyes fell on the mushrooms littering the floor and widened above his hairy cheeks.

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So this is how you get your jollies now, Maggot? Scrabbling in the dirt for your supper like a good little worm?

Gribble swallowed hard, tasting the sharp copper bite of his simmering humiliation. His vocal cords strained in his throat, beads of stinking sweat crawling into his eyes.

I—I'm still loyal to the clan, he croaked, voice little more than a thready rasp. I just wanted a place to call my own, to—

Griz cut him off with a mirthless bark of laughter, spittle flying from his cracked lips. The clan's got no use for worms who forget their place. The clan puts the boot to 'em until they get it through their thick skulls.

Gribble cringed back from the bigger goblin's advance, raising his hands in feeble supplication. Please, he bleated, feeling hot shame twist his guts at the mewling sound of his own voice. This has nothing to do with the clan. I swear it on the Black Spear.

Krub lunged forward, one meaty paw lashing out to seize Gribble's jaw in a crushing grip. Runnels of saliva oozed between his bared tusks as he pulled the smaller goblin up on tiptoes, glaring into his panicked face.

You listen to me good, Maggot. This clan's held together by fang and claw, not by worms crawling off on their own. You get any big ideas about going solo, and Grimrock'll have your tongue for a bootlace.

Gribble's whole body sang with wire-tight tension, tendons creaking in their sheaths. His lungs burned, black spots crowding into the edges of his vision. He could smell Krub's rancid breath wafting across his face in a warm foetor, see the spiderweb of broken blood vessels marbling the whites of his eyes.

A small, red coal of rage kindled to life in Gribble's chest, smoldering through the fogbank of his fear. He knew this sensation all too well, this sick mingling of helpless fury and craven dread. It curdled in his marrow, sloshing in his skull like spoiled gruel. The heat of it begged to be stoked, fanned into an inferno that would blacken bone and boil blood.

But that was not the goblin way. Rage was a luxury for warriors and chieftains, not for the lowly dregs crushed beneath their heels. Gribble had been schooled too long in that bitter lesson to unlearn it now. The coal within guttered and cooled, drowned out by the tide of his own despair.

Something in Gribble's face must have betrayed his capitulation. Krub's grip slackened, letting him slump back to the dirt floor like a string-cut puppet. But the light of malicious glee still danced in his bloodshot eyes, a carnal hunger not yet sated. He turned to Griz, head cocked, one scabrous brow arched in wordless query.

What say you we do a little redecorating, Griz? Make sure Maggot here don't forget what he owes the clan?

Griz's answering grin was a jagged slash in the green expanse of his face. His knuckles popped like dry kindling as he flexed his fingers, lips skinning back from yellowed tusks.

I thought you'd never ask.

They fell on Gribble's meager belongings like twin scythes sweeping through a wheatfield. Their heavy paws sent his mushrooms scattering, delicate caps splitting with obscene pops under jabbing thumbs. Vials of foraged decoctions smashed against pitted floorboards, leaving sucker scars of fermented sap. They put their shoulders to his rickety furniture, hooting as stools and shelves splintered into jagged ruin.

Gribble huddled against one wattle-and-daub wall, arms wrapped tight around his drawn-up knees. Tears of rage and humiliation burned in his eyes, blurring the carnage into a smear of havoc. Every snapped slat and sundered clay pot was a blow against his soul, flaying him to the raw quick more surely than any cudgel.

He couldn't look away. Not even when Krub seized his prized possession—a round of scavenged mirror glass—and smashed it over one lumpy knee. Seven seasons of bad luck, the old goblin superstition went. For Gribble, it seemed his luck had already reached its dregs, a bitter draught he thought he'd bottomed but that kept dredging up new and fouler tastes.

The minutes crawled by like flies wading through sap, each one an eternity of petty destruction. Finally, chests heaving, knuckles skinned and bloody, Krub and Griz stepped back to survey their handiwork. Gribble's hut lay in shambles around them, a battleground of spilled-gut chaos. Not a single furnishing stood intact, not one bauble or trinket undefiled.

Griz turned to him with a nasty, smugly satisfied sneer, one ham hand still wrapped around the dagger handle jutting from his belt. That ought to help it sink in, Maggot. Next time you get a hankering for home sweet home, remember you already got one. And you'll toe Grimrock's line and like it.

Gribble said nothing, eyes downcast, still hugging his knees to his chest. The red coal that had flared so briefly in his breast was little more than a guttering ember now, drowned out by the choking grey smoke of resignation. He had tasted a fleeting freedom and seen it smashed to flinders before his eyes, ground under the heels of his own people. The clan would have its due, would bind him in its rusted chains until the last drop of spirit bled from his poxed green skin.

Satisfied that their object lesson had sunk in, Krub and Griz turned to leave, Griz making an elaborate show of wiping his boots on the filthy threshold. Their laughter floated back as they vanished into the misty murk of the forest, a sound like rotted leather tearing. Then Gribble was alone, marooned in a sea of splinters and shards, breath sawing in his throat.

Slowly, like a crabbed old man unfolding arthritic joints, Gribble uncurled from his huddle and crawled across the debris-strewn floor. His gnarled fingers shook as he scooped up a fistful of soil and mushroom tatters, letting them sift through his grip to patter back to the floorboards. It all felt so pointless, this endless cycle of reaching and losing, building and seeing it smashed to ruins.

Gribble's shoulders shook, silent hitching sobs wracking his scrawny frame. Tears made clean tracks through the grime coating his cheeks, dripping from his pointed chin to spot the shattered crockery. He'd dared to dream himself a sanctuary, a bastion against a world that had only ever shown him misery and scorn. But stone by stone, the fortress of his hopes had been torn down, ramparts and towers pulverized to mortar and grit.

Gribble knuckled the brackish tears from his eyes with the heel of one sap-sticky hand. He pulled himself up to his knees, bony kneecaps cracking like snapped twigs. His gaze wandered the wasted expanse of his refuge, taking in the flotsam and jetsam of a life upended. He'd always known this moment would come, deep down in his curdled heart. Known that the clan's clenched fist would find him in the end, no matter how far or fast he fled.

But even as that bleak truth settled over him like a crushing stone, Gribble felt something else stirring beneath its weight. A small, stubborn coal of defiance, still glowing a sullen red in the depths of his being. He had tasted power in the Misty Forest, gulped its heady vapors and felt them ignite in his blood. Krub and Griz could grind him underfoot, but they could not quench that fire, not fully.

Gribble's hands curled into loose claws at his sides, unseen muscles jumping in his jaws. He would rebuild, starting with the shattered beams of his resolve. Brick by brick, splinter by splinter, he would raise this sanctuary from the ashes of its ruin. And he would fill its crude clay pots and woven baskets with a new harvest of might, gleaned by fang and claw from the forest's bounty.

Gribble's eyes gleamed a feverish yellow in the hut's close gloom, teeth bared in a feral grimace. The clan wanted him cowed and cringing, forever scrabbling at the feet of his betters. But he would show them the truth of an old goblin saying: Fear the worm once it grows fangs.

One day, a terrible reckoning would come to Darkmire. And when it did, all the chiefs and champions of the clan would tremble before the snarling beast they themselves had made.