In the face of true exhaustion, even a band of midget murderers wasn't enough to stir Leo to action.

The wood goblins outside couldn't find a way into the building. Leo was slumped down on the floor, the wave of adrenaline receding. His legs had become soggy noodles, his lungs lumps of aching pudding. He was too out of shape to engage in long chases.

But his mind kept working. What was he going to do?

In time, the wood goblins would find a way into the windows, which were perhaps fifteen feet off the ground. Too high for them to reach, even standing on each other's shoulders. But they clearly weren't idiots. They probably had ropes. Or they could build a makeshift ladder, or leap off the branches of nearby trees.

He had a knife -- now sheathed on his belt -- but that wasn't much use against their numbers, assuming he could even bring himself to stab a creature that looked roughly like an ugly human child. He could hear answering yips in the distance now, a fresh band wood goblins coming to meet his three initial pursuers. There was no sign of the expedition members he'd been with. Harald, Lydia and Janso. He wondered for a moment whether they'd survived. But even if they were fine, Leo couldn't rely on them swooping in to rescue him.

He looked around the building. From where he sat, he could see most of the interior of his level. It had been built in an open layout, with a large staircase on one side leading up to the next floor.

So that was one option: he could go up, and try to find a position to defend from. But that left him trapped on the next level. Even if the goblins were afraid of his knife, they could just wait for him to fall asleep or run out of water.

Could he disguise himself using his illusion magic? For a moment, hope flared. But he didn't know how to do that. He still only had a shaky idea of how his magic worked, and how much his spells could be modified.

Even assuming he could figure it out, the wood goblins had already seen one of his illusions. So they were probably wise to his tricks. It was unlikely they'd leave the building without searching every corner.

All in all, he was out of ideas. And those previously distant yipping sounds were getting close. What if they quickly found a way in? What if those yips were actually a language and they'd already come up with a plan?

A mental image of wood goblins swaming over him brought a fresh jolt of adrenaline. With a groan, he clambered to his feet and began exploring the building.

First he peeked through a door in the back of the large room he was in. There was another room back there. It was mostly heaped with decomposing wreckage, the same as the main room, but some of its furnishings were made of stone. He recognized cabinets and what looked to be an enormous wood-fired oven. A dark doorway gaped at the far corner of the room.

A quick investigation showed that the door led to steps down. Down to a very, very dark basement. Looking into that void, Leo felt a stirring of fear.

He ducked back out of the room, weakly trotting over to the staircase up. He could hear the wood goblins having a conversation, of sorts, outside of the windows as he moved up, helping himself along with a hand on the wall.

His heart was hammering in his chest again. If they found a way in while he was upstairs, the only choice he'd have would be to hole up and defend a room. But at the moment, finding something upstairs was his best option -- besides going into the dark of the basement.

He skidded to a halt in the first room, quickly looking around. Perhaps it had been a bedroom at some point. Now there was only a clutter centered against one wall, and some assorted piles at other points. A narrow doorway led into an equally narrow room. A closet?

He went back out, and on to other rooms along the upstairs hallway. Two more rooms looked roughly like bedrooms, one with an additional room that held a ceramic tub. Another room had been a bathroom, with an strangely shaped toilet that was still in decent condition.

At the end of the hallway, the last room proved to be something different. A study?

Oddly enough, parts of it had survived the years and weather. A large glass window was cruddy with age and grime, but without a single broken pane. A ramshackle, sagging desk had once been grand, perhaps eight feet wide and facing the door. And there were wooden bookcases, filled with an assortment of junk and ancient books.

He scanned over the shelves first, looking for anything usable. They appeared to have been used mostly for display. Several strange objects looked like seashells, albeit nothing he recognized. He skipped over several small statues, a pair of ornate urns, and a large, weirdly shaped skull with inset eyes of black stone. A section of books hadn't completely disintegrated, but they were slowly decomposing under the efforts of a black fungus and probably unreadable.

After a few moments of hesitation, he grabbed the one object that caught his eye. It was a ring, although far too large for human fingers, made of some dark, glossy stone. He rubbed the dust off before stuffing it in his bag.

He moved on to the desk, circling around the enormous thing and kicking aside the remnants of a chair. As he'd thought, the desk had drawers.

The handle pulled off the first he tried to open, leaving him with a handful of soft, splintering wood. The drawer was either locked somehow, or held in place by the warped wood around it.

Hearing a clattering and yips from outside, Leo quickly pulled out his dagger and used the tip to pry open the drawer, breaking off more rotting wood as he went. As he opened it, he saw a pile of what might have once been paper in the bottom, and the remnants of a lock that had fallen off from his efforts.

The drawer above it and a tray in the center of the desk yielded similar results, with only an indistinguishable mess in the bottom. But a drawer on the right side of the desk held something more interesting.

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They looked like books, more or less. Or more like -- small scrapbooks? The cover was a dark, matte red that might have been leather. He picked up the top one. Its slightly cold cover crackled with age as he opened it, and a bit of fine dust trickled down from the spine.

The inside page, for there was only one, was blank. The roughly textured, parchment-like paper had become damaged, mottled with age and a stain that spread inward toward the center. But unlike the books on the shelves, it only looked a few decades old, not two hundred years.

Confused, he closed the book to look it over again. After a moment, he realized that it was like something he'd seen before. The memdex that Harald had shown him. Not identical, but similar enough that it was probably the same thing.

Another noise came from outside. Wasting no more time, Leo dug down through the stack of memdexes, opening each to briefly look inside. There were eight in all, and only the second from the bottom had a relatively undamaged interior page.

He quickly piled the rest back into the drawer, pushed it closed, and put the memdex into his bag. Feeling like he was running out of time, he stepped back outside, trotting down the hall and onto the stairs.

A wood goblin looked up, hanging halfway over the window sill at the bottom of the stairs. They stayed in place for a moment, mutely staring at each other, before the goblin grunted and pushed, tumbling into the building.

Fear surged through Leo. Giving an inarticulate cry, he rushed down the stairs.

The goblin scrambled to its feet, quickly seeming to realize that it had miscalculated: it had left behind its weapon to climb in, and it was far smaller than its opponent. Leo bowled the creature over and ran on a couple feet before turning back, also experiencing a realization.

Once, in high school, he'd done a tryout for the wrestling team, running drills then having a two minute long match with someone the same size. He remembered a surprisingly exhausting grapple and the seeming impossibility of making significant headway against someone of roughly equal size and strength.

But a vicious humanoid -- who was the size of a ten year old?

As the goblin toppled back out of the window with a squawk, he didn't even feel too guilty. He brushed at some scratches its sharp fingernails had left on his arm, hoping they wouldn't become infected. Then he leaned forward to peak over the windowsill.

There were about ten wood goblins in all, clustered around their fallen comrade. Two of the new arrivals looked rather more fierce than the others, wearing circlets of teeth around their biceps and crude helmets. One was looking up. As it made eye contact with Leo, it hefted its spear.

Leo ducked out of the way, just in time for the wooden shaft to fly past, arcing into the room before it clattered to the floor.

How had the goblin gotten in? He hadn't seen anything like a rope or ladder. So maybe they had built a human pyramid. Well, goblin pyramid.

He retrieved the spear, considering hurling it back out the window at the goblins. But then he got another idea.

It was surprisingly hard to create an illusion of himself. Twice, the air only shimmered before the semblance dissipated. He rubbed his arms, having become chilly in the process of trying to cast the illusion.

Then he remembered the size limitation. With a moment of concentration, he was able to create an illusion of himself -- without legs. It floated in midair, only complete from the waist up. Even then, it didn't look quite like him. The face was warped, and as he glanced down at his own clothes, he realized that the attire on the illusion didn't quite match.

But, he guessed, the goblins wouldn't have time to examine it, even if they had a clear idea of what he looked like. Taking a deep breath, he made a twisting motion with his hand to make the deception turn around toward the window, then lowered his palm, concentrating, until its waist was about even with the window sill. His illusions were able to move autonomously, but the hand gestures felt helpful for fine positioning.

Then he sent it forward, as if it were leaning to look out of the window.

After a moment, a spear flashed upward. Leo jerked the illusion back away from the window, and with his own voice, gave out a pained scream. Then he screamed a couple more times, for good measure.

After that, he listened closely. The goblins might not have bought the ruse. If they'd been watching closely enough, they might have seen the spear penetrate far too deeply into the chest to be real. He hoped they were too stupid to work it out.

There was an excited exchange of yipping and snarling from outside. He heard a flurry of motion, scrabbling around in the leaves. Hoping he could add to the realism, he gave a loud groan, ending with a sob.

Mentally, he gave his acting skills a B minus.

More noises from outside. He thought about going to peek out of the other window, but if they saw him, he'd ruin the whole thing. Instead, he just moved over to the wall by the window, staying ducked down so they wouldn't see him moving. Then he turned to listen.

The next couple minutes were torture. He could at least he could tell that they weren't moving away from this particular window, but he wasn't sure what they were doing. He just heard various scuffling noises, along with an ongoing conversation in their yipping language.

Then he heard a scrape against the wall just outside the window. He readied himself.

A set of small, sharp-clawed fingers reached onto the windowsill, straining for purchase. More yips. The greyish fingers of the hand tightened, and another hand appeared. The goblin began to pull itself up.

A bark-helmeted head appeared, coming over the windowsill. Then the rest of the creature began to follow. But only until Leo's kick caught it full in the face. The goblin flew backward without a sound, and he heard a heavy impact on the ground outside.

He couldn't help it. He laughed. Partly in relief that his trick had worked, and partly over the comedy of the situation. But he quickly sobered as he heard the outraged yells from outside. These were, after all, creatures bent on murdering him. Doubly so, now.

Just to let them know that he was in good enough health to mock their efforts, Leo forced another laugh. Then, for good measure, he leaned over to hurl down the spear he was holding. He felt sure it hadn't hit anything, but more outraged cries followed.

There was a minute of conferral outside, during which Leo leaned against the wall, resting and letting his mind go blank. Clearly, the wood goblins weren't going to be able to climb up without a better plan. He'd shown them that they couldn't even trust their own eyes, when it came to where he was or what he was doing.

As it turned out, they didn't take long to formulate a new plan. As they had before, the goblins raised their voices in ululating cries. Shouting for even more reinforcements to come and help them out.

Leo groaned, sagging down. He hadn't known exactly what to expect, but he'd felt a moment of hope that the goblins would just give up and leave. Clearly, whatever else they did or didn't have in common with humans, they could be stubborn. And, most likely, hold a grudge.

He gripped his hair in his hands, staring at the floor and trying to think of what to do next. He could try to fool them again and jump out of a window on the other side of the building, running away into the forest. But he had a feeling they were expecting that move. There was probably a lookout keeping watch, and his illusion-making abilities couldn't turn him invisible.

Likewise, he couldn't just keep defending the building against them. There were too many windows for him to cover if the wood goblins split up, and the second floor of the house didn't have anything more defensible than a narrow doorway. He imagined himself dying in a bathroom or closet to a horde of persistent goblins.

That left one place to go. The basement.

And he didn't even have a light.