Book 2: Dirt Diver’s Dance

Royal Flush Ch: 49

The lady of the house woke up ravenous and desperately parched… even so, she first checked her husband’s status, in her own Interface gift. He was doing even better than she had expected or hoped… His Stamina and Mana pools were topped up fully, while his red health bar was nearing three quarters full. She sensed he was still sleeping peacefully, so she left him to rest, while she went down to the common room.

Shai finished her beer and gasped, thunking the waxed pearwood mug down onto the bar with a satisfied gasp. “Fie!” She grunted happily, heedless of the foam on her upper lip.

“Me boy’s stats are ticking up bonny fine and fast now… He’s turnt a corner!” She crowed, heading for the grotto with a smile on her face and a basket of batspider wings tossed in buffalo sauce under her elbow. “He’ll most likely be up and around ‘ere long, cravin’ summatt spicy.” Her satisfied sigh drifted through the room and made the instruments hung on the walls sing in gentle harmony.

“Nice! I didn't even notice he’d gotten out of the pool.” Becky mumbled, checking her own map of the house, behind her eyelids. “How did he get upstairs without us noticing?” She asked a moment later, an expression of concern on her dark, cherubic face. “Shai… where’s Gary?”

#

The frantic search led the family all over the compound… with no result. Shai and Becky could feel him on the main inn grounds, somewhere, but where exactly was shrouded in an impenetrable fog.

Shai’s ‘live feed’ of his status screen showed a slow but steady improvement in his condition… and yet.

“I checked in the workshop and storeroom, he didn’t bottle himself again.” Becky announced over the search party channel. “I’ll dredge the baths, maybe he sank?”

“Attic and rafters are clear… though I smell an animal, or something.” Ivy broke in a few seconds later. “Otho is tracking it.”

“Uh, guys, we have two light cult sailors at the gate begging to surrender…” Dannyl announced across the chat, drawing all ears. “They look like the bugs drank them almost dry.” His dark chuckle echoed around the room as the family enjoyed that bit of scabby, scratchy, itchy news.

“Tallum, meet me at the gate, we’ll see about prisoners. Everyone else, keep searching, but keep it low key. We don’t want the Clown-Shoes to find out.” Liam ordered calmly. “Or worse yet, the Ragamuffins…”

#

Ghnash was snoozing in an apricot tree, lost in a half wild seeming, yet splendidly fruitful temperate orchard… On a tropical island. This place was powerfully magical and cheerfully rejected ‘Objective Reality’, ‘Physical Laws’ and ‘magical Rules’ along with any sane suggestions as to the proper way of things, with a careless and cheeky attitude.

A soul home was a very rare gift, even among the greatest rarities, his own among them. Such houses were always a reflection of the holder’s true personality and soul…

A cagey witch or wizard, with the right spells and gifts could learn much from the magical workings, hidden behind what mortal eyes saw and fleshy hands could touch. Ghnash tickled and teased the swirling network of magical threads and tendrils, so like his own spells, learning more about the master of the place.

This one was delightfully mad and haunted, so very damn haunted, by ghosts, shades, fae, even divines… a buttload of divines. With his green face pale and waxen, Ghnash slipped free of the weird ass witchcraft and occult weirdness percolating through the strange house. Whoever this place belonged to was far stranger and more deeply haunted than the witch doctor felt ready to deal with… The poor creature was simply lousy with outside influences.

The garden, though, that was very nice! He’d sampled the fruit near the burial site and was deeply impressed by the depth and breadth of the garden’s abundance.

Just within a few dozen yards there were nuts, berries, stone fruits, gourds, legumes, edible flowers and herbs…

“Oh! Avocados! Need cilantro, a lime… and chips chips chips…” He whispered, a runnel of thick, clear drool on his chin.

People had been roaming the woods, seeking him no doubt, but he was a sly old goblin… And this place seemed to embrace him as fully as his own home did. Whoever’s soul home this was, they were strong and very very skilled… but far too accepting, which explained a lot.

All the doors and windows answered his touch, the hedges let him pass and the wards admitted him with just a gentle request…

‘Only a very great fool would be so open and unguarded.’ He thought, while he was halfway up the avocado tree, selecting a supply of the green, knobbly fruits and contemplating taco Tuesday at the palace…

When he sensed someone approaching, he scuttled to a particularly leafy bough and settled in, his green skin and brown robes melding into the dappled sunshine, twenty feet up. Someone large was moving through the orchard forest, stealthily and skillfully; but Ghnash picked their movements out from his lofty perch.

With surprise, the goblin king realized it was a human woman, a giantess with red hair… and soft, pale skin…

Her low cut bodice and his perch, conspired to give Ghnash a glimpse of the woman’s pale, lightly freckled, milky white milkers... They jiggled and bounced as she walked through the woodland, seeking something.

Those boobies, that face.. They were the ones that had been haunting his dreams, ever since he was a little gobbo yobbo, scrabbling for grubs on the forest floor.

He disbelieved her presence, seeking to banish the fetch or haunt that had come to mock him in her form. The sight of her was difficult, but when he caught her scent on the breeze an electric shock blasted through every part of him, shaking his Will and Mind to the core.

“Sh… Shai?” He stammered, standing up on his branch to address her; suddenly confused, overjoyed and crushed… And filled with a mind shattering hope. Memories he’d tried so hard to suppress overwhelmed him as he balanced on the bough, his hands full of pilfered fruit, staring at her tits...

The world spun and flipped wildly, he noticed abstractedly… ‘I must have slipped from my branch… That’s why I’m dreaming.’ He thought.

‘I hope I don’t mash my ‘cados. That would suck.’

After that, everything went black.

#

It was dark, quiet and peaceful, wherever he was. Gary drifted in an endless nothing, untroubled, unbothered, alone and perfectly satisfied with that situation. Free from mortal senses, there was neither heat, nor cold, just the endless now and the void.

Slowly, sound returned, then pain. His head and neck hurt… and it was super, double double too bright, wherever he was.

Gary tried to sit up, but he was bound, strapped to a table in some awful, bright place of pain and torment…

“H… Hospital?” He rasped the question hoarsely. He remembered the hospital… but he’d gotten out of there, survived foster care, escaped juvie and lived homeless… Then lived again in another place, a place of magic, wonder and… and the family he’d lost.

In desperate, mindless panic, he thrashed and strained at his bonds, too thoroughly blinded by the awful lights to have any clue where he really was.

“Wake up, goblin…” Said a voice so familiar that it warmed every fiber of his being, despite the speaker’s tone being sharp and cold as an obsidian blade to his throat.

He gasped, struggling against his bonds again as he remembered the forest and the fights for survival, supremacy and booty… He recalled his daughters a few seconds later… and his beloved Sabrina, his goblin queen.

Ghnash peeled open his eyes, wondering how he’d gotten caught up in a nightmare… There she was, the goddess of his dreams; the Shai he’d loved and lost… and believed gone forever.

“Shai… baby…” He sobbed, tears and snot welling up in a tidal wave from his face holes.

“It’s me… Gary… Your Fool.”

He never saw the slap coming… and it all went dark again.

#

“I’ve done some research on this, as a curiosity, really.” Ace muttered, looking into the clean, white plastered room holding a metal bed; to which a small green man was bound.

Bright lights were placed in each corner, above; and oddly, below the bed. No other furniture cluttered the room, just a single door and the window they were watching him through.

“From the moment of my ‘arrival’, I possessed a nearly complete memory of my past life on earth, unlike most of my brothers…” The puppet creature said quietly.

“It has to do with how mature a species is at birth… I hatched out a fully formed adult, there was no confusing, infancy phase for me. Hermit too, possesses a nearly complete memory of earth… Too bad he didn’t come along.”

“And that’s why the more human Garies are so different?” Becky asked gently. “Their own childhoods interfered with those prior memories?”

“Exactly. Goblins reach maturity at six or seven years old, but they are born with nearly the full cognition they will ever develop… Out here on the fringe of things, farther from the prime worlds, things get a little less… stable.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Ace shrugged eloquently. “I gather your Gary popped out of the void fully grown; that’s weird, but hey, I’m an octopus…”

“Please focus, Ace.” Becky scolded him. “One of ours is missing and this one is a prime suspect.”

“Ghnash would never hurt any of the Garies, he values his family above all else, the lucky little bastard.” Ace mumbled, sounding deeply conflicted. “He also claims to remember another life, lived after our shared time on earth. He doesn’t talk about it much, but he feels… deep grief and sorrow from that life.”

“My brother is missing and he knows something, Ace. After we find Shai’s husband we can worry about his problems.” She snapped coldly.

Ace held his wooden hands up in surrender and shook his head. “All right, you win, you can be bad, cop. I’ll be sexy, mysterious cop, with a hidden sensitive side that he hides behind witty banter…”

The puppet man fell silent, when Becky put up the hood of her formal robes, engulfing her pretty, cherubic face in crawling chaos and ominous, dark shadows.

“Ace, focus up.” She walked into the room, a dark robed harbinger of early winter frost and the end of things, cold and implacable. “We can’t wait any longer.”

#

“King Ghnash, lord of the goblin dungeon, where is my brother?” The robed and hooded figure demanded, when the goblin looked up to see who’d entered. He squinted in the bright lights, but it barely helped.

“Br.. Brother? Nub Gruk!” He gabbled hastily, flinging drool from slack lips, as he pleaded and shouted his inability to understand.

“Can it gobbo, I speak gob too.” The hooded girl snapped, in perfect mountain tribe pidgin. She even got the accent right, rolling the L’s just a little and with plenty of slobber in her cheeks.

“My brother, Gary Ward, you know where he is. Tell me now.”

“Bahh, too many Garies here! I smell several… gotta be specific. I only took the broken Gary… The one you had soaking in a pond…” He chittered his teeth at her and leered inside her hood.

“Oh, I see, priestess! High priestess of god SmartyPants! Ghnash too! Ghnash is a priest of the god of smartness and cleverly doing many smart things!” He cheered, seeing hope on the horizon, for some reason.

“Unbind me, cult sister. I buried that wrecked Gary, buried him good and deep.” He nodded firmly, his head bobbling on the bed. “Needed doing, should have been done long, long ago!” He chittered again, when Becky made no move to release him.

“You… buried him?” She asked, very carefully, peering at him from her hood of darkness.

“Yes yes, nice and deep! Gave nice shroud too, very precious, sanctified to lady SpiderBoobs!” He nodded some more, excited by his workings.

“Good good grave clothes! I made grave marker too, very proper burial! Strong funeral. You’re welcome!”

“Where?” She barked. “Where did you bury my brother?!”

In an instant she was up in the little man’s face. Her hood crawling with tentacles of utter darkness, inches from the tip of his long nose.

“In garden. Is good soil, burial good for the soil too.” He nodded again, smiling cheerfully. When he spoke again, he seemed less… gobliny and more human.

“Show me your face… please, girly… I feel like I should know you… Ace, tell her Ghnash is ok. Ghnash good good goblin, hardly ever kills humans and never eats, even though they are tasty tasty smelling!”

His diction and grammar kept shifting between clear and lilting, Gary’s own accent; and a wild, random pidgin speech cobbled together from grunts and disordered words of the common tongue.

Ghnash’s pleading look shifted to a hostile glare and then back to plaintive puppy gob eyes, as he looked back and forth between his two interrogators.

“I’m on thin ice too, bro… What the fuck did you do?” Ace demanded. “Just tell her where the poor bastard is, he’s a wreck anyway.”

“Nice job helping, Ace!” Both the hooded girl and the goblin complained sarcastically, in unison.

“Look here…” The goblin complained bitterly, glaring at them fiercely. “Is a therapeutic funeral… gotta bury dead things right… dumb humans…”

#

While Ghnash grumbled and complained, Becky tapped her ear cuff and whispered softly. “Is he still Ok? You can still see his status?” Becky asked softly and gasped with relief a moment later.

“Search around where you caught this little creep, look for something like a grave marker or something…” She paused for a moment and whispered again.

“Be careful if you use that crazy shovel… He says he buried him… I love you.”

She left the room without another word, since the goblin was still nattering on. She left Ace with the weird little guy, under strict instructions to not let him loose.

#

Gary felt… good. He felt stronger than he had in a long time and wanted to get up. He needed to get moving and see what happened after he blacked out… When he opened his eyes, only darkness met his gaze. When he tried to move, something immense pressed him in, all around.

Panic set in immediately, as he realized the awful truth… He’d been buried alive. He felt a shroud of smooth soft silk around his naked body and the cool, damp earth, hugging him close… And his panic drained away, just as quickly as it had come.

He couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t feel the lack. He couldn’t move or see, but he felt a distant vague memory of something similar happening, way back when… It was a jolt to suddenly find himself reminiscing on his time in the womb, and even more jarring to realize he kinda remembered that time... now.

Gary felt no bodily needs, no urges or imperatives, just a tranquil ease, surrounded by the close clinging shroud and the rich, loamy soil all around, above and below his body.

‘Dead?’ He wondered briefly, but a check of his status showed all his pools were good; green, red, yellow and blue, across the board.

Using his Interface gift must have jostled a message loose, since one got tossed in front of his eyes without warning. Cheerful, golden text in a window, bordered with mystic runes and sigils that all spelled out his own name in endless phonetic and idiographic variations, hovered before his eyes. His old familiar Interface gift was still working like a champ.

Congratulations, you have been successfully interred in your grave. Your mortal remains are being purified, please be patient.

Time interred: Three hours, twenty two minutes.

Optimal exhumation window time remaining: One hour, ten minutes.

Time until exhumation is required: Ten hours, eight minutes.

Ghnash Wha’rrgh Thanks you for participating in this occult, ritual burial… and enjoy your esoteric rebirth!

Gary Ward, the lost, mad and damaged remnant of a criminal experiment, perpetrated by a cabal of gods, fae and immortals was accustomed to new experiences, especially unpleasant ones… This was not so bad, especially by ‘buried alive’ standards.

He did find himself deeply shocked that being buried alive was relaxing, liberating and felt like a cleansing river of good feelings had washed away the built up silt and rubble of his life so far. If nothing else, he felt like maybe his soul had just taken a massive crap, That came along with the sense of lightness and well being that unloading a legendary deuce sometimes brings.

Wishing he could take a deep breath and stretch, he reached out with his senses, into the place where he was buried.

‘In my own back orchard?’ He thought, finding a bit of grim amusement there. With his senses roaming the house and yard, he noticed right away; the family was searching for something… or someone, pretty desperately.

‘Oh, no…’ He thought, as he remembered the look on Shai’s face when he’d told her to ‘shut up’ before demanding that Liam help him kill himself with a sweet ass guitar.

‘Ok, maybe I am dead…’ He mused hopefully.

The problems innate to those who spend time hanging out with gods, spirits and the dead are different from the usual run of troubles… Gary knew he wasn’t dead, because Ward would have shown up to shuffle him from his mortal coil already.

They had a pinky swear on that. Gary was not going to be an undead menace, slowly going mad and devouring the lives of mortals. ‘On the other hand…’ He thought. ‘A little light haunting and spooking is fine, right?’

With a bit of internal effort and a flex of a portion of his being that he couldn’t quite define or explain rationally, he ripped his shadow free and sent it drifting up through the soil in classic spectre style.

‘Ah… Better!’ He whispered in the rustle of dead leaves across the grass. He hitched up his trailing shroud of darkling vapor and began to glide toward the house, leaving a trail of black, misty tendrils in his wake.

He haunted through the gate and ghosted through the garden proper, steering wide of the baths and their cloud of entangling steam.

That way led to true death; Shai would kill him if he stumbled into his own bath and slipped into the next life on a metaphorical, banana peel pratfall.

He found her, marching along looking furious and carrying her beloved grave digging shovel,Yorick’s Spade, the terrifying thing was more of a weapon intended to destroy the undead than a gardening tool.

Fortunately Liam was there with her, but he was carrying a shovel too… his own custom made murder shovel, both deadly trenching and digging weapons were gifts from Gary’s own hands, from when he’d been able to play with his toys.

‘Oh, man…’ He mumbled in the soft clatter of branches in the wind, scraping against your windowpane. Nonplussed and a little worried, Gary hurried back to his grave and stopped, halfway done sinking into the soil to rejoin his body…

He hadn’t noticed on the way out, but there was a marker; a simple bamboo pole, topped by a boar skull, painted with the signs, runes and ideograms of goblin witchcraft. Written boldly down the length of the grave marker, in dark blue pigmented clay was a ‘blessing’.

Here Lies A Gary Ward…

Gabba Gabba, We Accept You!

We Accept You, One Of Us!

‘Ok… I have to take that one on the chin.’ The crickets and night birds sighed, sounding deeply exhausted by the strangeness of life.

#

The half wild naturalistic ‘food forest’ that Gary let run wild in his back lot was not among Shai’s favored haunts, despite how much all the kids loved foraging there, ‘on easy mode’.

She liked it even less, while searching for the spot where a mad goblin man had buried her husband alive… before feebly attempting to take his place.

She slipped through the berry canes, all heavily laden with ripe fruit and smelling divine, as she ducked under a plum tree, its boughs sprinkled with several varieties of the sweet squishy darlings.

There, between the apple tree and a wide spreading pumpkin vine was a bare patch of earth with a crude totem erected at the head of the grave.

Unfamiliar goblin scribbles read clear to her through her inherited gift from her lad… But the words were utter nonsense.

“Gabba Gabba, my sweet arse.” She growled as she read the short passage. “Gods above and below! Liam, Kermal come aid me with the digging!” Shai bellowed, as she cut the soil over the new filled grave. In a few seconds the two men were there, wielding magical shovels as potent as her own, in their own ways.

Liam’s spade moved earth with inhuman speed, while Shai’s cut and hewed obstructions and stubborn roots easily. Together they dug an expanded pit around the grave site, for safety’s sake, hurling clods and turf aside with gusto.

Kermal’s gray shafted, bronze bladed shovel burrowed through the earth quickest of all, digging straight down, seeking the ‘prize’.

The young knight attacked the plot of dirt with a vengeance, careless of what he might plunge his keen bladed tool into. He was using his Contract weapon in shovel guise; the magical construct would never, could never, harm the man it had once been a part of and had bequeathed it to the knight after his death… one of them anyway. It was pretty confusing.

The magical weapon could, would and did give him an almighty clobbering in the belly, when sir Kermal struck ‘paydirt’ four feet down.

“Oof!” Gary moaned, through a thick layer of rich black soil that was crawling with all manner of worms and slippery things.

Shai was down in the hole with Liam, digging him the rest of the way out by hand and getting absolutely filthy, before the knight could stammer out an apology.

To be fair, he had whacked the man in the breadbasket with a shovel during his own emergency exhumation. That had to count for something, right?

“Are ye well? Kin ye speak, lad?” Shai demanded, very loudly, right in Gary’s sensitive, silence attuned earhole.

“Shhh! Too loud…” He whispered desperately, as he tried to hide his eyes from the warm tropical afternoon sun. “Too bright!” He wailed weakly, as his wife dragged him out of the hole and ripped open his shroud.

“I think it’s my turn to spank him on the ass…” Kermal reflected quietly, while he removed a length of some kind of sinew or gut, stuck into a plug of wax from his friend’s navel. “Hold him upside down for me.”

#

“See?” Ghnash demanded happily, when the faceless priestess glided back into the brightly lit cell to face the blinking goblin’s watering eyes. “Good funeral, strong magic, healing magic of goblin tribe… Soil here is very fine too. Strong mojo! Lucky, double lucky Ghnash strong witch doctor…” He gibbered and hooted, straining against his bonds, until she used her Will to dim the lights.

“He seems to be safe… and healthy…” The hooded girl murmured quietly. “You broke your word… you promised to wait until we were ready to introduce you to our friends.” Her scolding tone cut deep into Ghnash for some reason, spiking his soul with daggers of guilt and shame that disrupted his magic… A witch doctor’s mojo was the trust and honor his tribe held for him, balanced against his own honor and sense of duty to the tribe.

He’d never had trouble lying or cheating humans before, they were natural enemies and no human should ever take a gobbo’s word for anything; just as no gob could really trust a human. Now he felt out of balance, his mojo waned a bit under that internal stress, diminishing his powers.

“That poor Gary could have lingered on, half wrecked for years in that condition…” He complained sourly, disliking the way this nameless, faceless priestess was making him feel inside. “Needed to be done done, and double quick quick too!” He hooted, shame burning in his cheeks and bowels, like hot peppered, boar-grub larvae…

“So squishy and spicy! Now Ghnash is super duper hungry!” The goblin king moaned.

#