We’re hunkered under this humongous crooked shelf of rock that cuts a generous lightless swatch out of a bitch of a high noon sun. We’re in the desert. Been out here maybe two hours, riding tired old hogs the size of garden sheds out into the blinding nothing.

Chased them through the jungle, caught them straggling back from the herd. Goblins have a weird way of getting beasts like this to do what they want. Like high-tailing it into the Bleach with a crew of gobbos clutching their fur tight enough to split it. I think we speak the same language.

I can speak to a goblin’s uncanny practicality and talent with regard to this blithe sort of savagery. By the time the hogs toppled down dead, we only had to drag them a good forty feet or so. To this rising cliff face cutting cool bits of shade. It's where they chop and hang these animals they’ve ridden to death. Old bits of rope and older blood marked this as a regular spot. None of this crew had made this trip before, never been to The Bleach, I’d never seen them ride a boar until now. They didn’t carry around maps or reckon on the direction they hoofed it to. But nonetheless we dropped these hogs dead right where we needed them.

See, there's a demonstrative element to goblin behavior. You see one do something, and if you keep an eye on them it's both glaringly obvious what they’re doing and easy to figure out how they’re doing it. The state and substance of this shady underhang told a wild story.

One of the crew fiddled with the bones that had piled up, discerning and testing. He liked to pierce the tusks through whatever willing body part might be offered up to him for decorative rupture. Next we use some of these old bones, probably the boar’s granddaddy, to spill and collect the blood.

They’re good at shredding. I haven’t been goblin-shaped like this long enough to get the hang of it, but it has a wild appeal to it. These claws. You can pass your hand through a boar’s ass like it was plastered paper. I just haven’t figured out the rhythm to it yet.

They’ve got these bodies butchered to ribbons, with the skin intact and what would be bleached white bone in a few days. Left for the next crew passing through.

We all slop the boar’s blood across our bodies. A thorough coating. Scant clothing, so we’re able to really get it all over.

Grisly, without a doubt. But practical. I cannot say with any conviction that what I’ve just done in the company of these green creeps has ritualistic elements to it, any direct reverence to the lives of the animals they claim, or if they think of the resounding ancestral imprint they erode into the places they go.

I can say that the jungle we left probably could’ve used some culling. That the boars whose last ticket we punched looked sick and struggling, that they were likely a burden on the rest of their pack. That they looked wild and alive in their galloping last moments. Free, maybe. Sophisticated stuff was happening, and the ones doing it were in no need of understanding any of it. We were just moving forward.

Heavy lathered blood kept our spindly marching bodies cool as it dried in the vacuous pressure of the sun’s gaze. Some had meat curing on their backs, ribbons of it worn like shawls. The Head had the still wet skins pasted to his shoulders and arms.

We marched toward something. Nobody asked questions.

*

So we’re stumbling along with this flash-fried pig’s blood starting to flake off of our lanky appendages. There’s some brain-poaching effect to all of it. Maybe it’s the mollifying stink of ritual magic from the butchery back there. Maybe the particular breed of giant hog whose blood we’re wearing has natural psychotropic attributes that can be absorbed through skin. It could be the sun here in the Bleach: a cruel swath of the continent where there’s little atmosphere or deific mercy, the way the chalky drifts of stark white powdered sand throw the light and heat right back at you a second time.

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Having a good time, regardless. There’s a mushroom back in the Thimble Thatch called a gummyspore that induces a similar giddy anticipation when under its effects. I’m stuck in the moment between when the world meets your eye, and when it throws a knowing wink at you.

The whole crew’s got needly grins and their eyes have glazed over with a translucent bluish slime. Another aspect of the goblin anatomy until now unwitnessed. Time breaks, we keep putting feet forward like this whole desert is the main cobble-walk in Middleguff and we’re cheeky teens past midnight tasting thimblewine for the first time. We own the place.

They don’t have these points of reference, I know that, so at once the feeling is spoiled and heightened to my transmuted observation. This isn’t like anything to them. It just is.

I started to feel the pull before the mountain peaks popped up on our horizon’s view. We were the lead of the pencil scraping World Script on bleached parchment. It was the Green Gravity. The massing of gobbos. We were all getting our asses dragged by the universe of some gobbo god to the same spot.

I know the language, and know it rarely involves words. But they share words sometimes, and for the first time with these creeps I get in the mood for a little conversation.

“I’ve gotta crack out a monster shit, if you’ll excuse me.”

*

Turns out we all had to paint the Bleach brown. The first time I took a shit in this body I wanted to kill myself. The pain, the smell, the feeling of enacting a war crime and tangibly worsening all society. Like every other piece of goblin constitutional behavior, it was violent. I grew to appreciate it though.

It was a good metric on telling whether we intended on eating something. If we didn’t blast our ass salvo at something we were in the process of killing, it was going in the gullet.

I might add, I did recognize the traces of real ritual magic in the circles we pissed around our camps.

The most green freaks I’ve seen since becoming one at one time is maybe seven. I’ve got it in my head now that wherever we’re going it’s bound to be hundreds. It’s going to be an absolute trip.

Understand: there’s this simbiosis to the goblin crew. I don’t feel like somebody, I feel like somebody’s leg, or butt cheek. An aspect. Then to consider being an even smaller piece of an even larger creature, whatever demi-deity might blink its eyes for the first time. I mean, fuck, its going to be a real ride.

One of us goes down. Drops to his knees, which are wet like jelly. The powdered sand sticks to them with a whump as he hits the ground. His eyes have popped and are dribbling solid blue down his face. The skin shrivels as his pores are sweating heavy blood. His lips have disappeared and his face is limp facing sunward. It’s a thing of beauty. The saint gives his flesh.

We know what to do and we do it with gusto, because if we don’t we’ll be just like him. I’ve seen it, even the bones lose substance when a goblin kicks it. Like I said, jelly. Then powdered jelly. Drifting and scattered in the Bleach.

We threaded our teeth into precisely spaced parts of his goopifying body and sucked on him like a peach. Wet, refreshed and ready to beat feet once again. It wasn’t long till we spotted the spiny crags of a mountain range and not long after that before the blushing green tufts of forest canopy after that. What a trip.

Now something else.

Its a vitriolic, uncouthe, dilapidated, ornery, despicable, disturbed, fecund, savage, disorienting, villainous life I’ve stepped into. But I’ve never till now felt so entangled with purpose as to not recognize it as separate from myself.

There’s a curl of curated chimney smoke way off in the distance well past the tree line.

Onward, gangling, slapping our big dumb feet on scalding powder, we marched with genuine pep. We were about to ruin some lives.