I was born in the summer season. The midyear whelps are expected to be particularly large and active, following the abundance of the spring raids. I was neither.

My mother, Roochu[1], was steeled for disappointment. While each of her sister-matrons wrangled and fed their dozen mewling, climbing children, she fruitlessly shoved food into the three pale lumps she had spawned. Each was clearly deformed, with heads nearly as tall as long (compared with the elongated ovals expected for one of our kind), eyes far too large, and oversized muscles that nonetheless could not support the whelps' own weight. The other matrons looked on with greed at the easy meals they knew would feed their own broods in the culling pit.

The rest of the year, Roochu joined her sisters in producing new sons for the warren, three strong litters in three seasons. But for the last three summers, she had dedicated her whelping to something different. Birth Magic was something known to all the matrons, passed on from generations earlier, but few still attempted it. She had a goal in mind, and so my brothers and I were born that summer.

My brothers met the same fate as our siblings from the previous two summers, dead in their mothers' nest before they could lift their own heads. But I survived, growing fat on the flesh that Roochu had hoarded for these formative days. Carefully, with great tenderness, she carved my brothers into bite-sized pieces that I consumed with even greater gusto.

My development was delayed compared to the other whelps, but my growth was not. Despite my strangely rounded cranium and enlarged eyes, I had been born with the same two rows of sharp teeth that fills out any goblin's maw. My four-fingered hands were strong, easily clutching anything placed in my grasp. And while I was often content to sit still rather than crawling and grabbing at everything like the other whelps, I watched my mother alertly. I listened when she spoke to me.

"You must learn to move on your own," she would coo to me as she pushed a gobbet of flesh past my back row of teeth. "In the pit, I cannot feed you. I cannot protect you from your cousins." If I understood, I showed no sign.

But I did start to crawl on my own in the third week, even as the other whelps were starting to stand upright. When it was time for the culling, I could pull myself up to a height that was head and shoulders above the other whelps, even if I could not let go of my support to walk independently.

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The culling was a simple process. The lot of us, over a hundred whelps in total, were pushed into an area of the warren with no other exits. A small stream provided water, but the only food in the area... was us. Two weeks was usually enough time for half of our number to be eaten by the other half. The survivors, now grown to nearly full size, would receive another month of the matrons' attention before joining the warren.

The whelps weren't told any of this, of course, even if they could have understood it. The beldams[2] believed that males should exhibit three traits of strength, one of which they called "hunger" (a more accurate term might be "viciousness"). The culling was designed to ensure that only those with the tenacity to survive at the expense of their brethren would make it to adulthood.

My earliest memories are in the culling pit. Roochu had made sure I was among the very first to enter the area, and I recognized the dangers immediately. I crawled quickly to a hutch with a small, defensible entrance and waited outside of it. I propped myself against the wall, making sure to keep both my stubby hands free. I was, frankly, terrified.

Most of the whelps moved in groups, crawling over each other and exploring the area. At first, they kept their distance from me, but as the hours wore on, there was more interest given to this one whelp who stayed by himself in the little hole he guarded. Finally, pushed forward by some of his siblings, a whelp toddled towards me, hands extended, maw open in a sign of play.

He never had a chance. As soon as he was within my reach, I grabbed him thickly by the throat, bashing him against the wall over and over again until he stopped twitching. The left side of his head was the first thing I bit into, avoiding his teeth. The others watched warily as I backed into my hole. That one meal lasted me three days.

No whelps approached my hole for the remainder of the culling. As hunger made the others more vicious, they broke out into frenzies of mass violence. I could sneak out during this time to grab a wounded or freshly killed whelp to sustain me or to make a trip to the stream. Even a handful of them working together could certainly have killed me, but they were quickly beyond considering any such concerted effort.

When the matrons called us out of the pit, I was gratified by the satisfaction in Roochu's eyes. "Mother is proud of you," she murmured to me as she guided us back to her nest.

"Proud of you," I echoed to her. She stopped in her tracks, looking at me in surprise.

"Mother," I said to her uncertainly.

"Shhh," she hissed, "none of that." She kept a hand near my maw (itself a rather dangerous action) as we made our way back to her nest.

Goblins don't usually learn language until their second year. I had just given Roochu my first real indication that her gamble could finally pay off.

Now she had barely a month to teach me how to hide my nature from the others, surviving long enough to make use of it.