Day after day after day, Wilmette and I followed a similar pattern. On some days I would fight goblins one on one and only the number of kills seemed to matter to my instructor.

Other days I would fight groups of the little humanoids.

More often than not, I woke up in the morning and Wilmette was gone, and I wouldn’t see him for days. On those days, on the days that I spent wandering around our campsite alone, were the days that I studied the goblin that I had taken as my own that first day.

It was a wily and frankly filthy little bastard. I fed it the occasional rat or squirrel I hunted and bits of deer meat. It preferred its food uncooked and a little bit spoilt, and when I wasn’t watching the thing tried to gnaw its way through the wooden cage I’d built to keep it in.

But whenever I got the chance I would cast my calming spell, would clean up the filth it liked to nest in, and then when it was subdued, and then spent hours studying the intricate pattern of life energy that coursed through its body.

There was a part of myself, call it a lingering reminder of my conscious that kept telling myself that it was a living and intelligent animal. That while I wasn’t necessarily hurting the thing, that considering it ‘a thing’ was a big problem. But a bigger part of me really didn’t care, and that I could rationalize this by not causing it hurt, but rather that I was just studying it to increase my knowledge.

In order to appease my better nature I gave the thing a name, so one day the nameless goblin became Mr. Bigglesworth simply because it reminded me of the cat in Austin Powers. That and Beggle (the name I called my pet goblin aloud) was the name of one of the soldiers in my father’s guard who was obsessively fastidious about his own personal cleanliness.

Over the next few weeks, I charted the ebb and flow of the goblin’s life force. I added the occasional stimulus, like giving Mr. Bigglesworth an excessive amount of its favorite food, pelting it with my own feces (okay, that might have been revenge and a bit petty), I made it angry, I put a female goblin temporarily in its cage with it, I put another male goblin in the cage with it, I deliberately caused it pain (once), I made it sleep and studied it’s life energy while it dreamed and when it woke, I fed it hallucinatory mushrooms with its food.

And over the days and weeks that followed, I learned one thing conclusively. That life energy is incredibly complex. That whatever small knowledge I gleaned, I was just scratching the surface.

So instead I turned to try to hide the goblin’s life energy. When I withdrew a small amount of life energy, it sickened. When I added life energy I either had to specify the exact nature of the healing or I risked causing strange growths or simply exploding Mr. Bigglesworth aka Beggle.

My technique to hide in the shadows involved me coating myself in darkness, so I created a kind of blanket of life energy and tried to wrap Beggle in that. Rather than hide the goblin, wrapping it in life, lit it up under my mag sight like the sun lit up the sky.

Then I tried the opposite and wrapped the goblin in a blanket of Death energy thinking that I could neutralize the visible life energy by broadcasting its opposite. Not only did that not work – intense amounts of death energy drew the eye every bit as much as intense amounts of life energy – but Mr. Bigglesworth began to grow pale, he began to shy away from the sunlight, and his eyes began ever so slightly to glow red in the evening darkness.

I was almost at the point of giving up. Three months spent trying and failing to hide this useless stupid goblin. It was obvious that I was obviously missing something. When success happened completely by accident.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I was hunting for gubs to feed the goblin and my search for the useless creature's favorite food had taken me to dig under rotting and fallen trees. I’d found a massive oak tree that must have been hit by lightning a few years back because a good half of the tree was a burnt husk still embedded into the dirt but most of the remaining tree was simply decomposing wood.

Kicking over part of the trunk for the fresh dirt and bugs I imagined would be underneath it, I quickly moved the log back, looked away, and began to hunting for another stump to look under. I found another stump and since there were plenty of insects there, I began to collect them.

With a full bag of presumably goblin treats, I began to make my way home. Except for a part of my brain which I had been ignoring suddenly registered.

Why had I moved the other log back?

Why? It was a perfectly good place for insects to be. I remember seeing them. And yet I had moved the log I’d kicked over back into place and moved on. I needed to look into this.

Turning around I began to walk back to the curious log. Lifting it up, I suddenly remembered that when I’d put the bag carrying the bugs for Mr. Bigglesworth in a place where just any bird could steal them from me. So I again carefully put the log back into place and walked back to check on my bugs.

They were fine so I started walking back to our campsite when I clued in that I’d been tricked again.

This time I turned back to the log, completely on my guard. My entire will was focused on the log. My mage sight was dialed way up looking for anything out of the ordinary. I made it to the log, moved it out of the way.

I suddenly realized that I was really hungry, and I should probably head home to get something to eat. But I forced myself not to leave. I found myself wondering if Wilmette was back from wherever he went and almost left to see if he needed my help doing something. I avoided leaving when I thought I heard rustling in the trees and my nerves were telling me it must be a bear or some other horrific monster and it as probably in my best interest to move the log back and run away.

Then I saw it, or rather I saw nothing – but in a good way. There was a certain spot that was trying very hard to make me not look at it. And with my entire mage sight and my entire strength of will, I still saw nothing.

So with my eyes constantly trying to look away from the spot under the log, I put my bag down and began shoveling everything from that spot under the log into my grub bag. And for a moment, just a moment I saw something. For just a flash, there was a spot in my grub bag that under my mage eye had the exact appearance of the swirling energy of the pattern of life and death and nature and stone and moisture and heat and air of under the log. At that moment I saw a natural rune for an extremely potent “don’t look here” and the shape of a very tiny newt.

Then that spot was gone so fast I was left looking at nothing except the swirling ambient energies of a leather bag and the cold and damp and nature and death and life energies I would normally expect to see there.

So I put the bag down open and the log on top of it and distractedly thinking about the significance of what I saw wandered off.

It was obvious now that I couldn’t hide my life energy simply by adding to it or removing it. Instead, I needed to camouflage myself. A suggestion to not look at me when someone was actually looking at me couldn’t hurt either.

I got back to camp and discovered Mr. Bigglesworth glaring at me. He took the wooden bowl I’d once whittled for him and brush it through the bars of his cage, like a playing card flapping through the spokes of a bike. Realizing my mistake, I grabbed a new sack and went out looking for more grubs, paying special attention not to go back to the downed tree I’d just left.

A couple days later when Wilmette had gotten back and I’d finished fighting off six new goblin prisoners and I’d healed myself, I chose to approach him. Fighting larger groups of goblins on my own was easier now.

“Why no anima with maguk. Why norma beasties?” I said. Why don’t we see animals with magic? Why do we only see normal animals?

“Kunds of beasties magic. But teach maguk rar. Maguk change beasties. Near dungun. Maguk beasties more. Nearer dungun, more and more.” He said. All kinds of animals can have magic, but nobody teaches them. Magic causes changes in animals. The nearer to dungeons, the more animals have magic.”

“We near dungun.” I said.

Wilmette spit. “Teeny, tiny dungun.. Gobles” he spit again. “Nee heart. Nee Core.” It was a very small dungeon and he was near the heart, near to the core.

“Yu’s epore dungun?” I said. Are you exploring the dungeon?

“No yu busness.” he said slapping me down. Compared to my father it was rare when Wilmette got physical. “Heart my moola. Yu’s concetate on kill gobbles. Ten goes yu’s Smoochies n bugga yu’s pet ut night.”