DAY 2

If I dreamed, they were forgotten as soon as I awoke. Or maybe this was the dream. Hadn't some scientist said it was possible to have dreams that felt like they were months or years? It was late afternoon, and I had to mostly peek between my fingers and hide my eyes from the sun but I could see. The sleeping goblins were eerily quiet, just the faintest of breathing could be heard when I poked my head into the hole. I had expected them to be stereotypically snoring, especially since most of us looked like prime examples of facial deformity. Maybe wide mouths were good for the sinuses and airways or something.

I took advantage of my relative isolation to stuff my face with berries and think about if I wanted to stay with this group or try to leave. Individually we weren't very impressive. It was hard to gauge scale since my hands were disproportionately large, but I was probably just over half my old height and weight. A kid with a stick, or another goblin, could beat me to death pretty easy. The others didn't really seem friendly, but didn't seem overly hostile. Cannibalism aside, they seemed content to leave me alone. I had the advantage of a stick, and two brain cells to rub together, so that was a bit of an edge over the others. If this nightmare followed the tropes, as soon as I set out alone I'd encounter a monster hunter who'd take my ears as trophies.

After a while of eating berries I felt a little more familiar with the bottomless void in my gut. While hunger could be satisfied, a gnawing appetite remained. I rubbed my hands in the dirt to clear off some of the berry juice, and then ate a few handfuls of it. Like the tree bark yesterday it wasn't bad, but wasn't really satisfying either. I looked over at the hole the others had half eaten and half dug. There was clearly something supernatural about how we could eat more than our own bodyweight and not be even bloated or feel full.

Sunset was starting, so I decided to try climbing a tree to see if I could see anything in the distance. The claws made it surprisingly easy, and much like a squirrel I quickly climbed far enough up that the branches bent dangerously under my weight.

I could see more trees in every direction. A thick and vibrant forest that might be approaching autumn. No sign of civilization anywhere. No distant skyscrapers. No radio towers. No planes overhead. Assuming the sun was setting in the west, there was a clearing to our north. That seemed to be the only landmark. I squinted at it and spent a while trying to make my eyes focus better. It got easier to see as the sun got lower, or maybe it was experience. My compass that still floated in the corner of my vision was at least accurate, saying the sun was setting in the usual direction.

A faint trail of smoke was rising out of the clearing. Someone was out there. Someone with fire. Could goblins figure out fire? I looked down and some early risers were already crawling out of the hole. They stumbled around and yawned impossibly wide, showing more teeth than any one creature should have.

“Hey!” I called down to them. They yelped in surprise and flailed around. It took a few more tries but they eventually looked up, pointing excitedly at me.

“Up!”

“Smoke.” I pointed towards the clearing. “Over there.”

“Smoke? Fire?” This one seemed pretty bright. It was also a bit shorter than the others, with skin more of a mottled orange like mine. The others didn't seem very interested once the novelty of someone in a tree wore off, and they walked away.

“Fire.” I agreed. “Maybe a camp?” I started climbing down. Once I was back on the ground we regarded each other carefully. He seemed curious, and there was a spark of something in his eyes, perhaps a second braincell.

“Camp?” He rolled the word around a bit. This seemed as far as could follow the train of thought.

“Come. Go look.” I reached down to grab my club but was stopped short. Someone else had grabbed it while I had been distracted. He was a larger one, head and shoulders above me. If I remembered correctly, he had been the second goblin to attack the one I had beaten, which meant he was the first to survive. If so, he had grown at least half a head taller since yesterday. Was it because he had eaten the most meat?

“Mine.” He sounded ready to fight, so I carefully scuttled away.

“Yours.” I agreed. Plenty of other tree branches in a forest.

“Where?” he called after us, as the smaller smart one and I started walking away.

“Smoke.” I pointed a bit left of where it would be. The same general direction we were going, but hopefully enough that if they followed they wouldn't come up behind us. They seemed to be getting smarter and stronger by the hour. We passed the diggers. They seemed larger than they had been, hands wider, legs proportionately smaller. They had started creating a branched tunnel in the hole. Was it a coincidence that they were the ones best suited for digging, or had spending time digging done it? They seemed more earthy coloured, browns and deep greens. A few others were starting to climb the trees, and they might have been more green skinned. As the sun set it got more difficult to identify colours. In the gloom everything seemed monochrome.

The two of us left the group behind pretty quickly. I thought about marking trees to find our way back, but the smell was quite noticeable. I hadn't paid attention to it until now, but the absence of goblin musk was striking enough that I didn't imagine any trouble finding our way back. Once we were a few minutes away I paused to gnaw another branch off a tree. I picked one slightly longer than I was tall. If that big guy wanted to be an asshole with my old stick I wanted something that would give us roughly equal reach.

“Stick? My companion asked.

“Spear” I knocked it against another branch. “For you.”

He seemed quite happy with his long stick, stabbing at branches and strutting a bit as we walked, while I found another one for myself.

“Have a name? I'm Karl.”

“Name? Abe.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Good meeting you, Abe. Don't try to eat me.”

“Don't eat you.”

I wasn't entirely sure if he was just repeating words, but it was progress. While walking we passed scent trails of unfamiliar creatures and a mixture of hoof and paw prints. I could not see any foot or boot prints. I had no idea what a deer or bear might smell like, having never had a remarkable sense of smell in my previous life. We also found some mushrooms growing around the base of trees. I didn't really care if they were poisonous, we ate them anyways.

After what might have been a few hours the smell of smoke was getting quite noticeable. I stopped for a quick strategy meeting.

“Abe. We're just here to look.”

“Look.”

“Yeah, there might be hunters.”

“Hunt? Sneak?"

“Sneak.”

We slowly made our way through the brush to the edge of the clearing. The fire was painfully bright, making it hard to see what was near it. The smell of roasting meat wafted through the air. I wanted it more than almost anything. Abe was twitching and starting to whine like a puppy, so I dragged him around to the side away from the breeze. Some other smell was mixed in, not goblin. A shape moved near the fire, humanoid but I couldn't tell for sure from this far away. There was just a bundle nearby, maybe it was a backpack. Goblin eyes weren't very keen at distance and it was mostly silhouettes against the fire light. Whatever it was, it seemed about twice my size. We circled around the edge of the clearing, towards the other smell. Was this a human? Goblin? The question was lost from my mind when we got to the smell. It was a trap line of snares. Several of which had dead rabbits in them. Abe and I pounced on them, and he ate the snare wire as well, slurping it down like a noodle. I wrapped my snare wire around my spear. Part of me wanted to run into the clearing and beg for help, but a larger part of me wanted to survive. After a bit more searching we found another two dead rabbits and I carefully removed them from the snares. Maybe these could buy us some good will with the rest of the group. Abe was reluctant to not just eat them right now.

On the walk back a light drizzle of rain started up. These goblin bodies definitely didn't feel cold the way I was used to, it was barely an annoyance, but was affecting the scent trail. Abe was walking with his mouth open to catch the rain. While we were a short distance away I wanted to try an experiment. Carefully I skinned both rabbits as best I could with my claws, giving one to Abe to distract him while I ate both skins and scooped up rainwater off the ground to wash it down. I had a suspicion that these goblin bodies were changing at very rapid rates. So far we were all hairless, so I wanted to see if eating the rabbit furs would do anything. Maybe I would feel less naked if I had some hair.

We got back to the group and I presented the rabbit to the big one who seemed to be taking a leadership role. He seemed extremely pleased, which was great up until he dragged me into the burrow. It had been expanded significantly in just a few hours. The entrance was now almost a mud hut. The diggers were chewing dirt and then spitting it back out and molding it. The mixture seemed to dry quick and retain its shape even when wet. Inside was a downward tunnel. Past that was a maze of tunnels and small rooms, many of which were dead ends or looped back on themselves. Were they smart, or dumb? Where were these ideas coming from if they didn't remember their past lives?

The big one dragged me down into a central cavern. The entire group must have been working on it all night, because it could house all of us and then some. He gestured around proudly.

“Big.”

“Very big. I am Karl. Who are you?”

“Who?” His ugly brow got even uglier as it furrowed up. “Grob.” He seemed a bit surprised by it, as though he hadn't even considered a name until now. He shook the stick at the ceiling and shouted it a few times.

"Why not use the old cave?"

"No. Bad." Grob shook his head, and the others who heard me seemed alarmed. There was a nagging fear in my mind. Some part of me hated even thinking about the old cave, was it the same for the rest?

At the far end of the room was a largeish rock, which Grob went over to sit on and survey his subjects who were mostly smearing their spit onto the walls. A few shapes I had thought were rocks themselves stirred a bit and spit up a copious amount of liquid dirt for the others to grab. These must be the original diggers, and now they looked like golems. Grob seemed to have forgotten about me, so I took the opportunity to scurry away. On the way out I noted that they had apparently shaped the ceiling first, and then hollowed out the room downwards. Had any of them thought about a cave in, or had this just felt like the right way to dig a big hole and structural integrity was a happy accident?

Abe was waiting for me outside, stuffing feathers into his mouth.

“Catch a bird?” I looked around in surprise. It didn't seem likely that one had just flown down close enough to grab. He brought a claw up in front of his lips. The gesture was unmistakable. Then his eyes went upwards and I realized there were two or three goblins lurking in the trees overhead. They were now a deep mottled green and brown, with longer limbs. They blended in almost perfectly to the vegetation. Barely even a full day old and they seemed perfectly suited to their environment. They could probably just sit there waiting and a bird would land right in front of them. Abe followed me as I started walking away. There was still a few hours of night left and something I wanted to investigate.

It didn't take much searching to find the trail leading back to the cave we had been born in. Why had we all been compelled to leave and dig a new one? The closer we got the more uneasy I felt, by the time we were in front of it I had to physically force myself to keep going.

“No.” Abe grabbed my arm, trying to stop me.

“Why? Do you know?” He shook his head.

“Bad.”

“Do you remember? Before?”

“No before.”

“Why can we talk? Where did we come from? Parents?” This seemed to be going over his head, so I just shook mine. “I'll go alone.”

He retreated a bit, and then squatted down to stare at me.

I leaned heavily on my stick and went into the cave. Now that I was looking for it, I saw the marks of goblin hands that had dug the cave. The smell was thick with goblin musk, blood, and something even more foul. Various insects swarmed, but ignored me in favour of the scraps on the ground. I had no way of telling which pod had been mine, all the smells were mixed together. The ones closest to the front were pulverized and chewed. The ones farther back were in better shape, due to not having had traumatized baby goblins dragging themselves over top. I circled one a few times, using the tip of my stick to shift things around. It was a dead goblin, withered except for the bloated and torn abdomen. From the looks of it, they all were, and we had eaten our way out. How long did we have until it happened to us? How did it happen, with no sex organs? Dismissing that disturbing train of thought, I continued searching. A few sticks, fragments of what might have been bone, and on the back wall in the corner scratches on the wall. It was a crude shape that might be a building, and a line of scratches underneath that might be words but I couldn't read. I had carved my name into a tree the other day, so I knew I could still read. Or had I just made up a language on the spot, would I even know if I was looking at English? I traced a claw through all the lines, trying to memorize it. I turned to go and something shifted under my feet. It was a loose patch of dirt, not the hard packed goblin spit. I ran a hand through it, finding a bundle of leather tied up with a rough twine. I sniffed it, hard to tell in here, but it might have been goblin skin. Inside was a book. Well, it was thin sheets of some sort of metal, bound together with several rings. It was quite light for its size, with only ten sheets. The same sort of unknown writing was on each one. I skimmed through the pages, looking for anything familiar. It wasn't any language I could recognize even a little bit. I wrapped it back up and carried it out with me. Who left it here? Had they been like me, aware? It didn't make sense that a regular goblin would make, or leave, such a book when there was such a strong compulsion to not re-visit the birthing cave. Or was it meant for someone else, someone other than a goblin, and they left it in the one place that might stay safe?

When I got back outside Abe was still waiting for me.

“Back?” he asked, shaking with nervous energy.

“Yeah. Back.”

As we walked he kept glancing at the bundled up book.

“Eat?”

“No. Book.” I unwrapped it to show him. “Can you read?”

He touched it with a claw, and then shook his head. “Hard.” Then he leaned in and sniffed the goblin skin wrapping, rubbing a hand over his chest. “Book in me?” He asked, eyes wide with panic as he poked his abdomen.

“No.” I wrapped the book up again and picked up my stick. I really needed to find some sort of backpack. Or at least a belt or something. I walked slowly on the way back, Abe kept rushing forwards and then circling back to me. I had no idea how to tan leather. Would that be one of the things the others would just instinctively know, or was there a low limit on what things we knew? It wasn't like we needed clothes, except maybe if it started snowing.

“Think it snows here?”

“No snow.” Abe looked around suspiciously.

“Nevermind.” We headed back to the burrow.