Will (AKA William, AKA Bill) Kenyon is freelance writer currently based in Atlanta. He has published a growing number of poems and short stories, and regularly works for clientele such as Martha Stewart Omnimedia, ING, Cisco, and Smithsonian Magazine. He’s not dead yet, despite the threat of car bombs, second-hand smoke, nuclear proliferation, and asteroid impacts - but we’ll have to see what 2012 brings, right?

Check out his thought processes at his blog: www.willkenyon.com. And follow him on Twitter: @williamkenyon

The Littlest Goblin
In the grandest Goblin style, the Goblins of Old Norcrost held their convocation. Whereas Men and Elves built majestic stadiums from gleaming rocks, open to the sun, with intricate, larger-than-life renditions of their heroes carved from marble or sculpted in copper, silver, and gold, the Goblins dug their stadiums out under the mountains, deep and dark, with rough- hewn, moss-covered rocks for seats and stands, and life-sized but exaggerated likenesses of their heroes carved from sandstone and granite. Whereas Men and Elves came to their meetings – spiritual, political, communal – with an air of soberness and grace, the Goblins assembled with crashes, bangs, shouts, and harsh language. They laughed, trampled, got drunk, and occasionally killed each other.

It didn’t matter who killed whom. All was forgotten and forgiven (by those still alive to forget and forgive) right after.

This convocation was no different. After an hour or so that bordered on riot, the acting leader of the Goblins, Jark – Seneschal of his most Flatulent, the King of the Goblins, Gorg – took his place at the top of the dais hewn at the north end of the Pit. He raised his spindly, wart- covered arms.

“Silence, you mongrels!” he howled.

His face glowed orange in the torchlight and in the bonfires that raged in spots around the vast space. The light flickered and illuminated his face — with its narrow, slitted eyes, its wart- covered forehead, and its wide, toothy mouth — the same as it reflected a sinister gleam in each eye of every onlooker in the stadium.

“Quiet, you pigs’ asses!” he screamed again.

There was silence for a moment, then another burst of catcalls, screeches, and laughter. “This is important, you little shits! This is about the king! The king is dying and you’re all laughing like it doesn’t matter. He might be dead already – I haven’t checked. Is he dead already? No? Good. Then listen up, you wee bitty fucks. The king is gonna die and we know how to save him. It’s important to save the king. You remember him? Gorg? The one who’s pulled at least 500 of you out of a gods-damned squish-you situation? You remember?”

Indeed, the king of the Goblins lay dying. He lay in his chamber below, which was carved out in the driest portion of the Goblins’ complex (some Goblins slept with murky water
perpetually dripping into their faces). He lay on his brass bed, stolen during a raid on human lands above, the only actual bed in all the Goblin kingdom (Seneschal Jark once had a wooden one, but it was splintered into firewood one colder-than-comfortable winter). And he was surrounded, attended, by twenty-four of his best concubines: the ones who had given birth to offspring that actually survived to fight in at least one of the king’s wars.

Strange thing was, King Gorg had not fallen to the swords or spears of his human enemies: most Men he’d encountered had long since been dwelling in the presence of their god. Gorg had not fallen to the arrows or magic of the Elves: he eluded the best of their hunters and even had the skull of one of their best wizards hung around his neck as a charm. He had not fallen to a rival: most Goblins recognized Gorg for what he was – the greatest, most successful, most virile king the Goblins had ever had. The few who thought they could supplant him now hung as skull-charms around the necks of Gorg’s fiercest supporters.

No. What did in old, great Gorg at the venerable age of thirty-four was not spear or sword, arrow or magic, or treachery. What was killing him, slowly and painfully, was the flu.

“In the highest tower of the grandest castle of the Elves, hangs a crystal,” Jark screeched. “It is legendary – the Essence of Healing, which those pointy-eared bastards use to stop the bleeding of their wounded, keep their sick infection-free, and keep themselves alive SO FREAKING LONG!”

A hiss erupted among the Goblin host. Their eyes lit up – crimson fireflies of spite glowing in an underground nighttime of malice.

“To save our king, the greatest king of the Goblins who has ever lived!” Jark raised his gnarled fist, and if anyone noticed that he held King Gorg’s scepter in it, they didn’t show any concern. “The greatest king thus far!” Jark bellowed.

Roars. Hoots. A beating of spear butts on the cavern floor. “To save the greatest king of the Goblins who, so far, has ever lived, we must put together a great force!” Jark raged. “We must put forth a mighty throng of strength and will, and march across the desert to the Forest of the Elves! There, we must burn every elven village that lies between us and the Castle! We must raze the Forest and the Castle and capture this awesome crystal! With it, we will save our king!”

Cries filled the chamber, bouncing off the walls and filling the hot, smoky air like bats.

“With it, we will make our own people, the Goblin folk, the mightiest in the land!” Jark snarled.

Some of the cries continued to praise and support Jark’s tirade. Others, though, declared that the Goblins already were the mightiest in the land. None, though, questioned the wisdom of what great Jark proposed.

“We will crush the Elves!” Jark stomped.

More cries from both camps. Those who cried, “Crush! Crush! Crush!” vied to drown out those who cried, “We are the mightiest!”

“We will rape and pillage the world of Men!” Jark waved his arms in a fury. Groups of Goblins clustered together. Some lowered their spears into a fighting stance.
“We will subjugate them all!” Jark screamed to the high ceiling.

And with that, he stopped, crossed his arms over his puffed-up chest, and smirked a smug smirk, pleased with his stunning vocabulary.

He didn’t have long to feel full of himself, though. An arrow whizzed past his ear, and then the Pit erupted into a real riot of Goblins fighting each other.

“Crush them and we will be the mightiest!” some roared.

“We already are the mightiest” others roared back.

A while later, in a little side-chamber a few levels down from the Pit, a little Goblin named Emys sat on her bed pallet made of straw and bones, and thought. She thought about
everything she’d just seen up in the underground stadium: Jark’s speech, the call to arms, the riot.

Emys’s father was Kord. Kord was a huge Goblin, covered in battle scars that made his skin like leather armor, hard as plate steel in spots. He was capable of wielding a man-spear and a shield at the same time, and though he had not yet been given the honor of fighting in one of Gorg’s elite companies, he headed his own, and talk and rumors had come every few days that Gorg’s eye was on Kord – until the flu had laid Gorg low. As such, it was in Kord’s best interest that Gorg recover, and soon. So it was that Kord was preparing for the fight of his life, the campaign of his career. Kord wanted nothing more than to wrap his powerful fingers around the elven crystal, to return it to his king and claim the glory it would bring.

Emys understood her father’s desire, and even saw the necessity of using the elven artifact to cure the great king, who was indeed the greatest leader the Goblins had known. Certainly greater than that jerk Jark ever would be if he became king.

But there was something she did not understand, and since Emys was as inquisitive as she was small, she felt overwhelmed with a need to understand.

Her father came home to their cavern apartment, soon after his meeting with his company, where they no doubt had laid plans of how they were going to cross the desert, enter the forest, best the Elves, and take the crystal. He burst through the tattered green cloth, a modest sheen of privacy that hung between the cavern entrance and the passageway outside. He smelled of smoke and liquor and blood, and his eyes glowed with excitement and ire. His wives and concubines, and all the young Goblins he’d sired over the past years , backed away from his truculent entry, shrinking into the shadows to wait for him to calm, to become the lucid and calculating master and father who protected them rather than threatened them.

He came in, threw the spiked club he’d been carrying into a corner, nearly braining the Goblin boy who was cowering there. He roared epithets at the stalactites above him, and shook his head so that globs of spittle tossed off of him and splattered the stone floor.

Emys was not afraid of him, though —for good reason—and when she heard him come home, she left her room and walked down her hallway and right up to him. She planted her bare, green-brown feet shoulder-width apart and beamed up at him. Even with the wideness of her mouth, the sharpness of her teeth, and the tiny future-warts sprinkling her nose and chin, a human might have found her cute. Kord certainly did. Immediately, he stopped swearing. He stopped shaking. He stopped completely, standing, stoop-shouldered and trembling, a light sweat on his prominent brow and voluptuous lips, his enormous arms, goose-bumped pylons, bracketing his powerful chest. The glow in his eyes dimmed.

And he smiled.

“My darling Emys,” he said. His voice, though amiable and hushed, still boomed throughout the cavern. “You want something?”

Emys cocked her head to one side.

“If you want to use the Elves’ crystal to heal King Gorg, why don’t you just ask them if you can borrow it?”

Days later, Kord sat down on a rock, a piece of granite that stubbornly refused to erode or even be covered by the miles and miles of yellow-white sand that surrounded it. He was
sweating more than he ever had in his life. He’d made forays into the desert before, to raid human caravans for fruit and steel and oil, but he’d never tried to cross the damnable expanse before.

Fortunately, his constitution was up to it. Unfortunately, there were others among the Goblin troops who were not so physically prepared: a veritable line of Goblin corpses tracked the sand behind him and the rest of the surviving troops, their bodies already desiccating in the dry heat, the sand already covering their limbs, erasing them from sight and memory.

For a moment, he wondered if they would have enough goblinpower left to engage the Elves or take the elven fortress. But then he looked out across the desert, first to either side of the trail of dried corpses behind him, then toward the plain immediately in front of his rocky vantage. There, tens of thousands of surviving Goblins milled and crowded, the noise of their encampments causing the very sand to shudder, the glint of their steel armor a second sun on the face of the desert.

Kord smiled a wry smile.

When Emys had asked him about borrowing the crystal, Kord had at first been speechless.

The same flicker of intelligence that made him reconsider his crossing the desert had also made him consider Emys’ suggestion. That passed, though, and then Kord had been amused.

“Emys, Emys, Emys,” he said, sweeping the littlest Goblin in his enclave up into his massive arms. He sat down on a stony pedestal much like the one in the desert (except this one had been worn smooth by seated Goblins while the one in the desert was jagged and rough). He stroked her under her pale green chin and smiled down at her with a tenderness and good humor he showed no one else. “We are Goblins,” he said and licked his lips in a fatherly fashion. “As Goblins, we have three things that can never be denied. First, we have the strength to do anything we want – strength of arms, strength in numbers, strength in spirit.” He cradled Emys and beamed at her, his voice growing softer and softer until he was whispering. “Next, we have a destiny. All the ancient writings and all the teachings of our ancestors say that we, the Goblins, are destined to rule the whole continent, even the whole world.” As Kord spoke, the other Goblins in the enclave slowly came out from hiding, sure that once again Emys had managed to temper their master, soothe their father’s ire. Goblin eyes glowed in the dim torchlight around Kord and Emys. Pointed Goblin ears pricked up and twitched as the powerful Goblin spoke. “Finally,” Kord said, “because of our strength and the inevit– , the uh, inev–, the er, uh, the… the… because of our destiny, we Goblins have a pride we can’t deny, a pride which will not let us simply ask, like beggars on some human city’s streets, for the use of the Elves’ crystal. It is our destiny, our right, simply to take it.”

Emys furrowed her eyebrows at him. Whenever she did this, Kord grasped somewhere in his dim cunning that she was thinking deeper than he ever could. In much the same uncanny way he could sense when someone was sneaking up behind him on a battlefield, he could sense that he needed to stop Emys from pressing him further.

“In truth, little one,” he said, unwavering, “that crystal is ours by right, and it would actually do a disservice to the gods and to destiny, not to just reach out and seize what is
rightfully ours.”

Emys had looked at him and blinked; and then he’d stood up, plopped her back down on the hard stone floor of the cavern, winked at her, turned, and bellowed to the other female Goblins still hiding in the recesses and the dark, “Gods be damned, where is the dinner I require? What have you ALL been doing while I’ve been gone?”

Even as her father (although sometimes she failed to see a likeness) was sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert, thinking about her, Emys sat down on a half-rotted log that jutted from the loamy dirt at the edge of the Forest of the Elves. Somewhere to the northwest of where she sat, she could see trails of smoke from the Goblin army’s various camps. Between her and them lay a couple hundred miles of desert. She knew that the terrain they were advancing across would sometime soon begin to get rocky and hilly, then become grassy and moist, almost swampy in the low places (but still hot), and finally would begin to slope upward, away from the desert, up, up, up to the edge of the Forest where she now sat.

She felt a little sad for the foliage, however sparse, that her father and his cronies would soon be ravaging and despoiling.

She was miles ahead of them for two reasons: she was alone, and alone she moved much faster than Goblin horde; she also rose earlier than they did. The morning they had all set out, in fact, she was up and out well before the sun, well before the first Goblin soldier stirred or opened his eyes. And when she got up each day, she started walking immediately. She could imagine the other Goblins getting up, making their nasty breakfasts (she ate her cereal and cold ham as she walked), donning their armor, perhaps fighting with each other a little, looting the bodies of those who’d died during the night, and then finally hearing, if not heeding the call to move out. How long it probably took for them to actually get moving made her shake her head.

Alone, she also didn’t have to wait for stragglers; and she wasn’t wearing any armor, just a canvas slip, a belt from which hung a bunch of pouches, a knapsack, and some tough-soled walking shoes. She’d thought about bringing along a short sword or a dagger, but decided against it. If something attacked her, she would be dead regardless, given how small she was, therefore it made no sense to provoke anyone by looking hostile in any way.

So here she was, sitting and eating a quick lunch, gazing into the eaves of the elven wood. She recognized it as a forest because of the descriptions of forests that she’d overheard or read (mostly overheard; there weren’t many books where she lived). She’d never seen this many trees together in one place. She was amazed at how the overhang of leaves cast shadows much like the ones that permeated the Goblin caverns. And yet, the verdure of it made it less oppressive, and the hint of sunlight that beamed occasionally through the leaves, or illuminated some of the leaves from within like flat, veiny, vibrant torches, made the forest seem to scintillate like some great hulking creature full of life and light.

Which, Emys supposed, was what the forest was.

Her eyes never left the wood as she chewed on the cold, salted, and cured ham that had sustained her for days.

Then, when she finished it, swallowing the last bite, she stood and wiped her hands on her slip. She was nervous, she had to admit, but she was determined to see this thing through.

And finally, following what appeared to be a footpath into the forest, Emys took a deep breath, squared her narrow shoulders, and plunged into the woods.

Kord roared as he swung his poleax at the tree. The ax’s blade was dull, though, so instead of severing the trunk neatly, it instead shattered the tree into thousands of splintery, somewhat wet pieces that fell, little wooden raindrops, onto Kord and the Goblins around him. Some of the sharper splinters drew blood.

Another swing and another felled tree. The sound of it was like thunder, accompanied by explosions of leafy green rather than bursts of lightning.

Another roar and swing. And another.

The Goblins who had made it to the edge of the forest, a little under 10,000 of them, had spread in a line miles long and ranks thick when they came to the wood. At an order from Jark, which echoed up and down the line, the Goblins had charged into the trees, bludgeoning, severing, and trampling them.

Now, the line surged forward – the Goblins had come a hundred yards in mere minutes, leaving a strip of stumps and splinters behind them. Here and there, small fires sputtered. The original plan – to burn the wood before them – had been all but abandoned. The flora of the woods was much wetter than they’d anticipated, a surprising number of the dead Goblins behind them in the desert were the ones who’d brought tinderboxes (and looters had mostly disregarded these in favor of more weapons and food).

Kord swung at another tree, a tall, foot-thick elm. But this time, the tree didn’t give, didn’t splinter or break. Instead, it swayed a little, a few leaves fell from it, and the iron-bound, cured oak shaft of Kord’s ax cracked, sending an awful shudder up to his elbows. His eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise. He swore aloud and held the ax shaft up to his face, squinting now at the place where the thick wood had been compromised.

Right at that moment, a strange sound filled Kord’s large, misshapen, pointed, and pierced ears. It sounded like a cross between a whistle and a hiss, a brief sound that crescendoed and then faded in the span of a second. Another sound like it followed, then another, then another. The sounds seemed to be coming from different places deeper within the forest.

Kord glanced away from his broken poleax toward the place where one of the noises ended. Just in time, he saw one of his soldiers, a hardy, broad-shouldered brute named Nik,
stop in his tracks, drop his broadsword, and reach toward his face. A silver-shafted, white- fletched arrow poked out of Nik’s eye socket. The big Goblin fell to his knees, and then knelt there, still. His arms fell motionless by his sides, so that his knuckles sank into the soft earth.

Thwip. Thwip. The strange sound now surrounded Kord, and he looked around himself desperately. Everywhere, his fellow Goblins were falling like the trees themselves, fleshy trees with limbs of muscle and sinew, blooming with flowers of silver arrow and oozing a sap of blood. They piled higher and higher around him, bristling with countless arrow shafts.

Kord glanced down the line to his left and saw mayhem, glanced down the line to his right and saw the same. Now the edge of the forest was in layers – the grasslands gave way to the razed trees, which gave way to the felled bodies, which gave way at last to the darkened eaves of the forest itself.

Here and there, Kord could see a lone Goblin, still standing knee-deep in a pile of his comrades. This lasted for less than a minute. Then, almost simultaneously, every one of them
fell as well.

And then there was silence.

Kord stood, alone, his broken ax still clutched in both hands, the shock of hitting the ungiving elm still aching in his funny bones. Slowly, he became aware of his own labored
breathing rising and falling, rising and falling in his ears. Then, above this, he heard groans, at first seemingly distant, but then nearer, nearer, until he realized that they came from all around him. His gaze shifted down, and he saw that the Goblins closest to him – those of his own troop – had not been killed by the rain of arrows (with the exception of Nik). They were pierced, torn, maimed, and crippled, but they were all, some thirty strong, very much alive.

“Kord,” one moaned at him from a few feet away. “Kord.” The wounded Goblin lay against a half-toppled tree, three arrows sticking out of each of his forearms and three out of
each of his thighs – twelve in all. The Goblin coughed blood. “Kord?” he repeated.

Another voice then said his name. And whereas the wounded Goblin’s voice was weak and gruff, full of gravel and blood, this voice sounded noble, strong, and velvety. It seemed to come from the trees themselves – each individual tree, and all of them together. It filled Kord’s malformed ears, resonated in his brain.

“Kord of the Goblins.”

He scowled and looked around. He was not afraid. Whatever had happened, whatever was happening, it did not frightened him – no death or torture or pain could do that.
Mostly, Kord was just angry.

“Kord, father of Emys,” the voice said.

And then he was confused. And with that confusion, and with the utterance of his favorite daughter’s name, Kord faltered a little, lowering his useless ax. Some of his anger left him.

“Kord, you have been spared because of your daughter,” the voice said.

“What nonsense is this?” Kord demanded. “Where is she? Where is Emys?”

“She is on her way home already, accompanied by an entourage of elven warriors, who carry with them the Crystal of Salameric, which your army sought. They will deliver it to your people, use it to heal your king and any others among you who are ill, then return with it here.”

“What?” Kord raged. And to reiterate, he said, “What? What? What?”

“You and your army came far in your effort to achieve the crystal, but we could have warned you simply to stay at home. On our lands, under our stars and the leaves of our trees, you cannot stand against us. We knew you were coming since you set out, and we were ready.”

Kord answered with a roar, and swung his ax through the air so hard that it whistled.

When he jerked it to a halt, inches above a fallen tree limb on the ground, the inertia of his action finished the job the elm had begun, and the ax snapped in half. “Never!” Kord screamed.

“We could have taken you!”

A tiny chorus of chuckles, like tinkling bells, filled his ears.

“No,” the voice replied. “You could not. Take another look around you, Kord. There is a dead Goblin for every dead tree. You were spared any harm for your daughter’s sake, and your closest friends were spared their lives for your sake, so that you might all go home and bear witness to everything you’ve seen and heard. The Goblins are a strong race, but foolish. This is a lesson long in coming.”

Kord huffed. Kord seethed. Then Kord looked around again, and this time he saw, some distance away from him, Jark. Jark’s neck was ringed with a collar of arrows, which pierced his throat at even intervals. His eyes stared, empty, back at Kord. One of his gnarled fists clutched a severed tree limb.

“Go now, Kord,” the voice said. “Take your life, take your friends, and return to your daughter and your people. And don’t come back, unless you come as your daughter did,
supplicant, genuine, and knowledgeable of her place and what it was she was asking. We can live in peace, if only you and the Goblins would try.”

Kord stood there for a long time, watching the edge of the woods for some movement, some object that he could hurl insults and hate at. Nothing moved, and the groans of his
comrades, a bloody carpet at his feet, soon grew louder. Kord opened his mouth to say one last thing to the forest and the voice, but thought better of it, perhaps finally finding some of his daughter’s wisdom. Then he stooped over, grabbed one of his fellows, and slung the poor creature over his shoulder.

“Get up, you Goblins that can walk!” he yelled. “Our mission is a success. We’re going home.”

And without a glance behind him to see if anyone was following his lead, he walked away into the desert.