Down and through and over and across and about came the night parade, playing all the while, and filling the streets until it seemed half the city was enwrapped and enraptured in the festivities. Doors that would normally remain closed opened, and the businesses emptied as the people took to the streets, the air filled with the sound of music and the smells of frying food.
Not all were happy, of course. There was Aayla, but plenty of other figures in Families and the Sects shared her distaste, and in between the fun and festivities there were intermittent fights between cultivators and the revellers.
“You’re courting death!” Cried Juan, Second Circuit orthodox cultivator of the Lemme Llama Lemma Sect.
“No, I’m courting her!” The goblin king cried, pointing at Anna, who was eating a meat skewer (which tasted even better than ice cream, because there were three dozen other people eating them with her). She gave the duelling pair a wave.
“You dare!” Juan returned.
“No; I pick truth.” The goblin king declared, shaking his fist.
Juan hurled a bolt of lightning from his fist, but it branched off, took root, and turned into a rosebush.
A classical musician trilled on his flute as Juan stood there, lost.
***
The businesses emptied; but some businesses found themselves full.
“What is the source of your protest?” The reporter asked.
Mossfoot the goblin stared blankly at her in confusion. “Protest?”
He couldn’t recall protesting anything, except maybe the lack of rubber duckies in the goblin bathhouse. (Truly, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.)
“Yes. We’re all very inspired by your taking a stand.” Mossfoot nodded at this. Given how much of the day the average human spent sitting, they should be.
“It’s a brave and inspiring moment of the people coming together for justice and what is right. It’s not about politics; it’s about basic human decency. They’ve already started making banners at the university. But what everyone wants to know is, what are you protesting?”
Mossfoot scratched his gobliny snoot, and looked at the goblin beside him. Snufflefungus shrugged.
The goblin looked back at the reporter, and blinked, his blank eyes slowly coming into focus.
“We’re here to protest the horrible mockery that’s been made of Saint Patrick’s Day.”
This… was not what the journalist had been expecting.
“What,” she said, and then, remembering that she was right outside her office, and that the other reporters could see and hear her, immediately clarified her question. “I mean, would you care to tell us why you’re protesting for Saint Patrick’s Day in December?”
“Why…” the goblin said, and then a grin like a waxing crescent spread across his face. His fellow goblins pulled out a collection of deadly weapons, like horse whisks and a cheese grater, advancing towards the office. “Why’re we protesting for old Saint Paddy in December? Because it’s time to drive the snakes out o’ Ireland.”
***
“And I'm telling you, my hands are tied,” Mayor Rella explained, patiently, affably, as if he was talking about an inability to help with a school project. His interlocutor, an elder of the Ell Company, swore.
“Don't you play dirty tricks with me, Charles. That the law bans belief in goblins in no ways implies that you can’t take action on the matter - the law has never required the law to be in accordance with its own actions. It is entirely within the realm of precedent to pass laws to justify our own actions after the fact, or to simply reformat the entirety of the law at our own private whims.”
Mayor Rella stroked his goatee as the two walked down the street, weaving through cartwheeling toasters and goblin jesters and musicians banging out a saxophony cacophony. The stones sang a beat in their wake.
“Of course we can, but that would be highly corrupt - and do we have a licence to be highly corrupt?”
The elder gnashed his teeth in frustration, the sound drowned out by a pinkish creature made of horns, which was blatting out what was probably God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, but could also have been Carol of the Bells (or maybe it was Drunken Sailor). “No. I tried to get one, but was told by the Ministry of Organised Crime that corrupt actions of that magnitude would require personal approval from the Ministry's head, and that mysterious person is apparently unreachable right now.”
Mayor Rella stepped around a colossal mouse carrying a hickory grandfather clock, which rang one in spite of the fact that it had stopped short, never to move again, and blinked in an obviously feigned surprise.
“My, really? I wonder where they could have gone.”
***
Cindy demurely roared a challenge as the cultivator came at her, responding to his exchange of thrusts by beating his sword out of his hands. She swung her sword in a side blow towards his neck, flipping the blade halfway through to smack him with its flat edge.
He backed up, holding onto his throat and gagging. Two other cultivators stepped in to take his place, and the woman calmly assumed the Guard of the Iron Gate before going on the attack, her blade flickering in a wave of feints and jabs at the men.
The cultivator gulped, his heart thundering in his chest. He had no clue what was happening. Earlier, he had heard about goblins swarming the downtown, and getting the peasantry to join them in a grand revel, but at the time he’d thought that couldn’t be true - as everyone knew, goblins were mere superstitions, the product of unenlightened minds seeking to comprehend the sights and ways of cultivators.
Probably the peasants had just gone mad - it’s not like they ever thought much in the first place - and anyways, he’d heard there were classical musicians with them. Music was a vile thing, which produced strange enthusiasms in those unwise enough to listen to its siren song, and it was no wonder that those who listened to classical music were delusional.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
That had been the morning. The rumours and reports had grown over lunch, and come early afternoon they had come knocking on the sect door, in the form of the goblins themselves.
They had been polite about it. One goblin had stood atop another and, finding no knocker affixed to the door (for none were welcome to the sect, save who the sect deigned to permit), had magiced one up for themselves.
Sure, it may have knocked the door down - and turned the wood it was composed of into a fungal carpet - but that was no reason to get upset. It certainly wasn’t reason to cry “you’re courting death” - as if the poor goblins at the door didn’t already have wives who they loved very much, and who loved them in return - and started hurling every variety of malefic energy and weapon thrust at them.
The goblins quailed as the cultivators went for them… only to find their attacks blocked.
A strange woman stood in front of the goblins, protecting them from the cruel cultivators. She wore a bird’s mask over her face, and down feathers were visible on her arms and over her pure white armour. (“But it was nonetheless clear that she was the most perfect woman to exist,” Caedes prodded the Author. The Author huffed. “I’m not writing that - these are editorial remarks.”)
The woman brought her blade into frontale, settling into a fighting stance.
“You dare!” Cried one of the cultivators.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,” the woman replied.
“Hah! Well- wait, what?”
“Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again… but would Humpty want them to?”
The cultivators said nothing, staring at that blade. They knew that a sword was never as dangerous as when its owner was mad.
“Humpty Dumpty was upon a wall, and then he had a great wall; and all the horses and men of the king couldn’t raise him to those heights again. Humpty was a broken man, but perhaps that was for the best - better a broken man, than one who arrogantly watches over all. I’m sure the old egg would agree, since he did nothing to help them repair him.”
The sect master’s first disciple, a man of high standing and elegant appearance who the cultivator looked up to - gulped. “What do you want?”
“Me? To live in a land where nursery rhymes are real, and the puzzles are left to the king’s scholars and his handymen - not his horses.”
The woman motioned to the goblins with one hand, and it was then that the cultivator saw that the goblins were no longer afraid, but determined. Dozens of them had formed two lines on either side of the woman, their standard-bearer - a squat goblin carrying a banner emblazoned with Mother Goose - standing firm behind her.
“Now,” she said, “I leave the egg in your court - will you let the egg break, or are you horses?”
“And what if the egg wants to rise?” The sect master’s first asked.
“Then it should go seek out the Easter Bunny, stirring his elixir of immortality on the moon; and leave walls well enough alone.” The woman replied.
The sect master’s first disciple nodded, acknowledging her response, and charged.
He shouldn’t have. Before he’d charged, he’d lived in a world where there were no such things as goblins. Now, they all knew the goblins existed.
The cultivator had to admit it to himself, as one of his colleagues went down screaming, his leg bleeding and his body covered in glowing furry balls. Those had come with the goblins, as had all manner of other, stranger things - creatures with the upper torsos of men and the lower of horses, but no skin; pigs in red riding hoods, riding wolves; and one very large, very angry egg, beating cultivators with a ladder.
(Not to mention a small and fuzzy rodent in a hot pink leotard that he was fairly sure was the Saint Valentine’s Day Romance Shrew, squeaking his snuggly fury to the sky as he fired arrows into the cultivators’ ranks.)
The strange woman leaped over his wisp-overwhelmed colleague, focusing her full attention on the other cultivator. Her legs danced back and forth across the sect floor - made rocky and root-covered by strange magics - as the down feathers on her body grew into goose wings of scintillating white light.
The cultivator went for an overhead thrust, but the woman caught his right hand, stepped around his back leg, hooked her sword arm behind his head, and then violently slammed him into the ground, stomping on his chest. The entire motion was practically simultaneous, and infinitely smooth, a testament to the fervour with which she'd practised.
The rest of her goblins had already overwhelmed most of his sect. The cultivator could hear screams of rage from the elders, and the roars of some hairy monstrosity, and across the sect floor scuttled all manner of critters with three legs or springs for feet.
The goblins themselves were singing The Wheels On The Bus. (They were running low on more traditional nursery rhymes, but that’s okay because the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, all through the town.)
The cultivator recovered his breath and raised his blade, but froze as another woman entered the sect. She was plain, with pigtails, and wearing wellingtons, yet unless his physiognomic lore greatly failed him that was clearly the Heavenly Divine Immortal Disco Soufflé Body. Even he had heard of its vaunted reputation, and despaired.
He threw his sword down. “I- I surrender!”
She adjusted her glasses, examined him, and gave him a pat on the head. “Good - it would be a shame if the tradition of cultivation were to die out in this city.”
Then she gallumphed on, stomping towards the woman with the goose down, and pulling a stack of papers out of a storage ring.
The swordswoman paused in the middle of getting one of the elders into a knee lock, and looked the girl in pigtails dead in the eye.
“No,” she said.
“Look,” the girl in pigtails harrumphed, “it’s all well and good to go gallivanting about the city, secure in the knowledge that you can do what you will in the chaos, but that doesn’t mean the paperwork goes away.”
“I’m not doing what I will, I’m doing what I must.”
“What you must do is be a good lady-” the girl with the wellingtons started, but the other cut her off.
“And a good lady always cleans up. And nobody knows how to clean messes quite like I do - I was top of my grade in home economics,” she declared with no small amount of pride, as she took out the trash.
“Well this paperwork will be a mess if it’s not filed within the next day.”
“The paperwork can be completed tonight, after the city is free.”
“Really?” The woman with the wellies said, pushing her glasses up her nose. She was smirking, nostrils flared with the scent of triumph. “I thought you said you were going to host a congratulations party for Caedes tonight?”
The two women stared at each other, the one smirking in her wellies, the other staring blankly in a suit of goose down armour.
And then the wall caved in. An ailing, elderly man in white robes rode through the rubble on an ostrich, dozens of cultivators following him as he waved a sword in the air.
“For our brethren in the Iridescent Heavens Sect! Charge!”
The young cultivator just sat back down. He appreciated his fellow cultivators coming to his aid, but even if the woman went off to do paperwork, they were doomed. The goblins couldn’t be overcome; how could you defeat what didn’t exist?
The woman in the goose mask analysed the onrushing cultivator horde, looked at the paperwork, and held out one hand. Her tone was perfunctory. “Pen.”
The woman with the wellies grinned. “So you’ll come back and-”
“I’ll multitask.” Her eyes were piercing behind the bird mask. “There’s no way I’m missing this chance, and there’s no way I’m missing dinner. So hand me the pen.”
Sighing, the other woman did. Pen in one hand, sword in the other, the woman met the cultivators’ charge, casually talking to her assistant as she repelled the dozens of cultivators.
“Now, let’s start with page one.”