Storytime: What Not to Say to Goblins (Part 4)

​This is the final post in the What Not to Say to Goblins 4-part series.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, ​Part 4

What Not to Say to Goblins
Chapter 3: ​"Why Silus Can't Make Fire"

Getting to the City was a lot harder than Kali had thought. When she wasn't lugging her pack, she was either threatening it to get lighter or picking at the dirt. Most of the time she did both.

So far her great quest and adventure had lasted a grand total of forty-five minutes. She was tired and cold and really wanted to go back inside and have some hot chocolate while watching daytime talk shows. Unfortunately, she couldn't do that. The house was in shambles--it continued to slowly fall in on itself the further she was from it--and whoever had taken her grandfather might come back for her. It's not like I can offer them tea and cakes, she thought. And she was correct. Goblins hated teas and cakes of any shape and size with a passion; however they did appreciate the occasional tunafish sandwich and rather like salt and vinegar chips. (It was all a matter of making sure the tuna was rotten and the chips were mouldy, really.)

Down the road she huffed and puffed the chunks of asphalt rolling and tumbling under the satchel. Sometimes giant pieces of the road crumbled under her feet, and she would have to pull until the rubble gave way. After the fourth occurrance, she began to wonder if the road itself was conspiring against her as if it didn't want her to leave.

Kali was at the bottom of the hill now. Pausing, the girl turned and looked back, her face was red from exertion and a small frustrated frown squiggled across her brow. The house could, finally, no longer be seen. She looked around. Although the landscape hadn't changed much (everything was still very dead and very brown) the road had evened out a little and, if she needed to, the earth was dry enough to drag her pack across. Off into the distance the ground rolled and pitched like a brown, dry sea. The Camden house sat on the highest hill from the city, so as Kali looked about, she could see the gradual downward slope of the earth that ended in a plain of green. And at the end of that plain, in a wavy haze, was the City. Kali could cut across the country, she knew, but she would probably get lost. The entire area around the City up to the House was an unstable place. Reality started to get thin, the closer to the City one got. "There are numerous places where time can shift under your feet at the drop of a hat," her grandfather had once told her. They had been eating ice cream under the only living tree in the front yard and looking out across the hills.

"Stay on the road, right," she said to herself. "If only this stupid thing wasn't so heavy!" She aimed a well-placed kicked at her satchel. It went oomph. Curious, and feeling a little mischievous, she kicked it again. An ouch escaped this time And then an ugly, flappy-eared head poked out from under the flap.

"You could have just asked me to get out!" the head said. Kali shrieked, fell backwards, and scraped her hands on the asphalt. Wincing, she looked at them as they started to bleed a little. "Now look what you've gone and done. First day and you barely get down the hill. You don't even notice that your things are giggling everytime you curse at them. You kick me! Of all people! And now you go ahead and injure yourself." The head's eyes glittered in amusement though its face remained disappointed. "Well let's have a look then," it said as the rest of its body emerged from the bag. It intended to have a look at the girl's hand and possible bandage it, not likely given how hard she'd kicked it, but before it could even move, it was being strangled.

"Silus! You mean you sat in my bag all this time and never thought to make it lighter?" Kali glowered furiously at the thing.

"Well, you see, I thought...all that weight would, uh, help you get stronger?" He grinned sheepishly, yet mischeviously at her. They both knew he had done it because it had been hilarious for him at the time. Silus's little topaz eyes bulged creakily in their sockets as she squeezed harder. "Look I won't do it again. I promise!"

"You promise?" She put him down.

"Yes. I promise. And an Erodite's promise is written in stone." Silus hoped dearly she couldn't hear the slight ringing coming from her bag. He was lucky that she couldn't.

"Okay. But you can't go back in there. I-I...I forbid you." The statue made no response other than a chilly glare that, quite literally, sent ice down her spine. It took a moment for her to brush the frost off her coat.

Together they set off down the road, Kali finally carrying her satchel across her shoulders and Silus occassionally picking up bits of road and turning them into odd objects. Anyone travelling behind them might have been disturbed by the twisted animals of tar that littered their path. Eventually, they went around a bend.

By the time they reached the boardwalk, it was raining and it was dark and both of them were miserably cold. The clouds started closing in as soon as the hills ended. At that point, it had been bad enough that the air was colder. On the last hill, Kali are half of her snacks and Silus went looking for his own food. Much to her disdain he returned with a large stick insect sticking out of his mouth. He chewed it slowly and seemed to enjoy the combined crunch and squelch. "Do you have to do that?" she had asked.

"Do what?" Silus's grin had been all-knowing.

They had stared down at the boggy mess before them, the light already fading. It had been the only way to go, they both had known.

Presently, Kali was clutching her flashlight with a numb hand and peering ahead into the sheeting rain. She wondered if this was what it was like for most adventurers. Kali decided they probably would have run into a nice, warm farmhouse where the family inside would have happily made them a meal. Of course there wasn't a farmhouse, or a farm, for hundreds of miles, especially not in this bog. They pressed forward onto the boardwalk. Water and mud splashed and squelched under their feet, and they were actually making decent progress. Kali's breath puffed out in little clouds as she felt her way along the rail. An then she felt something that wasn't sodden wood. It was hard, smooth, domed, and scuttling.

"Ouch!" she exclaimed. The flashlight beam swung around to glare at it. A crab, grey as the mud, waved its claws disconsolately. There was something decidedly uncrablike about the way the crab looked at her. Actually, if she had not known better, she would have thought it was the most disgruntled looking crab she'd ever seen. But she did know better, so what the creature did next made her jump out of her skin. It sang. Not a sweet and haunting melody, but a grating chittery sound that wavered across octaves. It sounded too much like a songbird's last cries. Kali covered her ears, dropping her flashlight, which hit the boardwalk with a thud and rolled off into the mud. The song was so loud, she couldn't hear anything else. It rebounded off the insides of her skull. Probably why she didn't notice the carb's crabby bretheren scuttling up onto the boardwalk. She didn't notice when they began to clamp onto her clothes. And still she didn't notice when they climbed, claw over claw, up her legs. However, she did notice when the singing stopped and one of them, an unfortunately clumsy crab by the name of Gargle, pinched her calf. Kali would have jumped, if not for the thirty-odd crustaceans weighing her down. So, she screamed.

"Get off me!" she screamed some more, kicking her legs. There was a quiet Wheeeeeee! from them. Reaching down, she groped for the flashlight, found it, and nearly dropped it again when a large slug​ peered at her. Swinging the flashlight wildly, she squashed the slug on the railing and managed to dislodge a couple of crabs. "Silus! Help me!" They were climbing up her shirt now and more were pinching, though far less accidentally.

I suppose it should be noted at this point that these crabs had a special vendetta against human beings. You see, generations ago, i.e. 5 years go, humans came into their bog and set up shop. Now, not only did these big stinking oafs ruin their countless perfectly decent crab holes, but they started eating the inhabitants. "The nerve!" many of the elderly crabs had said, shaking their eyestalks. These crabs were unlawfully persecuted until the entire bog was bare of crabs, but for one. Later, after the humans left, females came, and then families came, and then the population was thriving. The single remaining crab from that horrible time was honoured and named Craw by his followers. He churned up the colony until it was roiling with vengence! It was easy, Craw knew, to get them stirred. So they waited. Unfortunately, they were a bit unprepared as Kali's footfalls had interrupted a reproduction of the his play "Claw Cracker." Still, they were mostly willing and able. Craw now stood, still in dramatic regalia (which consisted of an empty snail shell, two bits of rotting leaves, and a very muddy twig) watching his troops ascend the Human. With a chittery voice, it sang the colony's battle song and all at once, they pinched.

Screaming, the girl began to hammer at the crabs with the flashlight furiously. A few fell off her, their shells cracked beyond repair. Segmented legs scrabbled at the air. "Silus! Where are you! Help me!" she shouted. The pinches hurt. A lot. Some of the crabs had gotten a hold of nerve bundles and in those places her legs tingled with pins and needles. Rain continued to fall in heavy sheets. Kali smashed away the ones on her stomach; they fell with wet thuds. Somewhere in the rain she heard a loud creak and then the moan of rusty nails being pulled and then a heavy clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk from there she had come. "I'm going to be eaten." Colour drained from her face in the bright flashlight beam, and flicking away the hair plastered to her forehead, she smashed Craw with the end of the flashlight. The filament in the bulb shattered.

And then it was dark.

Clunk clunk. The sound was getting closer. Clunk clunk, clunk clunk. More wet thuds as Kali frantically smashed away the crabs. Only a few clung to her legs desperately. Clunk clunk. She tried to run, but fell. Clunk clunk. She couldn't feel her legs properly. Clunk clunk. So she raised the flashlight. Clunk. The sound was louder. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. She was ready. Clunk. Clunk. Thwack!

"Bloody hell!" A pair of small topaz eyes glared at her with a light of their own. "Why'd you go and do that?"

"I thought I was going to be eaten!"

"As if that pathetic thing could serve as a weapon," Silus grumbled.

"Where were you?" she demanded. The faint glow of his eyes made her a little queasy.

"I...well...I ran into a bit of trouble," he admitted, sounding rather embarrassed. "Ugh, put that away." Kali was holding the glass globe over her head, and the blue light that oozed from it was soothing.

It's like being underwater, she thought.

The reason Silus was embarrassed might have been because he hated crabs. Or it might have been because he had paused to crunch down a handful of snails when Kali wandered off. But what it probably, most likely, actually had everything to do with the shoots that sprouted from his feet and wrapped around two planks of the boardwalk.

He shuffled awkwardly toward her and began to pull off the remaining crabs. The look of disgust on his face and the ferocity with which his knobby hands crushed their shells barely scratched the surface of his loathing for the creatures. Feeling rushed back into Kali's legs with waves of heat cold, heat again, and finally pins and needles. That done, Silus chewed on the shoots in his feet. With a grimace, he began to forcibly pull them out one by one. Then, with an even more disgruntled, contemptful, disdainful look he muttered, "You're going to have to carry me." His eyes refused to meet her gaze, and Kali was two parts relieved, one part worried, three tenths of a part suspicious. When she didn't respond, he continued, climbing up the rain-soaked rail and into her pack, "Look. I can't walk in this. It...it...well it makes me start growing." Silus spat the last word out as if it tasted terrible. It did--just like time and dust and sunshine.

"Are you a tree?" she asked.

"No."

"Are you a plant then?"

"No!" And in Silus's desire to quiet her questions, Kali found herself unable to say anything except:

"Quack." Her eyebrows raised. "Quack quack quack quack?"

Behind her, Silus cackled, feeling more like his old self.

"Quack!!"

"When it stops raining." He disappeared. The rain poured on and on. Kali sloshed down the boardwalk, exhausted and quacking, as the night and wet rolled around her. In her hand the globe shone a soothing, watery blue light in front of her.

After an hour of more wooden sloshing and quacking, they reached the end of the boardwalk and the stars were shining quietly overhead. Here the road was made of packed dirt made slippery by the rain.

"Quack," said Kali.

Silus climbed out of the bag and squished towards a large stone on the side of the road. "Here," he said without enthusiasm, "is where you can sleep."

"Is it dry?" Kali asked, stretching her unquacked jaw.

"Mostly." His glow-in-the-dark eyes stared at her.

Too tired to complain, too tired to feel hungry, too tired to be bothered by anything, she curled up on the stone and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Silus sat nearby, watching her, but watching the surroundings more. For as she slept, time began to drift. At first, Silus merely noticed the change in the lengths of her hair. It grew long then short then longer and shorter. Then he saw it in her face. He saw how she looked at ten and found and would look at fourteen and thirty-nine and eighty. Just as he saw a glimpse of time, it disappeared into the next glimpse and back into the present. Kali slept on without knowing or feeling any of this. Time continued to shift and spin right into the surrounding rocks and weeds. Things grew old, died, budded, and stayed as they were all at the same time. It was a hypnotic dance of growth. And Silus, in his refusal to ever sleep again, found his eyelids heavy. Even as he mumbled, "You can't make me sleep," he found himself drifting away. Finally, when the weeds and rocks and Kali shifted back into the present, he slumbered.

Days passed and weeks passed and years passed seemingly effortlessly around them. On the road, a rabbit watched the two figures dream, holding on to each other desperately. Eventually, the sun began to rise. Still the rabbit watched. She crept closer to the sleeping girl, and just when she was within a whisker's breadth of the girl's nose, a pair of eyes popped open and the girl screamed and scrambled to her feet. The rabbit, named Molly, hurried away to secure breakfast and avoid being eaten by the uglier of the two. Molly would have to try speaking to the girl another day. After all, it wasn't everyday a human and a...thing...turned up on your doorstep. Especially a human with a Glass.

Unfortunately, Kali, in all her hurry to get away from the Hairy-Thing-With-Eyes, had trod on what now remained of Silus's right arm. Her misfortune continued when the pained statue had caused her right arm to be covered in thousands of small insects that screamed unendingly until Silus stopped hurting. And such misfortune escalated when she discovered she had no means of warming herself or her breakfast (a slightly dented can of chicken soup). Kali had gone so far as to arrange an armful of logs in what passed for a campfire. The problem was the lack of the essential ingredient of all campfires: fire.

So standing there, perplexed, and holder her can of soup, she turned to her oh-so-cheerful companion, Silus.

"Can you make fire?"

"Eh..." Silus wrung the centipede in his hands and did meet her gaze.

"Can you?"

"The short answer is 'no'."

"Why on earth not? You can do all this other stuff!"

"Well, you see, I could. Once. But I may have made a tiny mistake," he replied, showing "tiny" to mean something the size of an ant.

Kali crossed her arms.

"What did you do?"

"I may have set fire to the City. But that was a long time ago! And no one died. I don't think."

He paced about the rock like a wild animal in a cage.

"When your grandfather's grandfather's aunt found out, she removed my eyes. Put me to sleep. Cursed me." He looked up at her with a pleading expression. However, the glint in his eyes gave him away. As did the monocle Kali was now holding.

Silus wailed when her foot collided with his ribs.

"You liar! Light the stupid fire before we freeze to death!"

"I can't!"

"Why not now?" She was beyond cross at this point.

With a scathing glare, the status did not reply. Instead, he snatched the monocle from her and turned it toward the sun. It wasn't long before the leaves smoked and a tiny flame flickered to life. At the sight of the flame, Silus shied away to the other side of the road. There, he glared at the flames, tugging at his big ears with his big hands as if they might disappear.

Kali, on the other hand, sat on the rock in front of the fire warming herself and waiting for her food to warm up. When it was, she practically inhaled the canned misshapen noodles and drank half the water kept in an empty choco-bites tin.

Behind her, Molly peered from the safety of a bush. For the most part, she went unnoticed. Her focus was centered on the blue globe lying temporarily forgotten in the grass. Molly crept forward, carefully eyeing the creature across the road, and in response to her presence, the globe glowed with a pale light. It whispered of dreams and nightmares. Enraptured, she moved closer, her long ears looming over the soft blue and her reflection stared back, enlarged and bent. And then, seeing something, perhaps her wildest dream, Molly snatched the globe and scampered away.

Only Silus noticed, though he didn't move. He only smiled.

"What?" Kali asked, watching the flames flicker across his image. Like clouds scudding across the moon.

"Nothing. Merely good luck," he said, still smiling. In his hands a rabbit's foot materialised, and he rubbed out the luck, smearing blood and grisel into the fur until it was matted and red. With his sharp ears he heard Molly's scream.​

---

And that is the end of the story.

The idea was of course for Kali to rescue her grandfather, but in the process learn of her family's history and secrets. Silus was to be the key to all of this. And I think somewhere in there, the City itself would be rid of goblins. I mean, how can you not when you set the story up like this? The evil has to be removed from the plagued town. That's how the story always goes.

I hope you enjoyed it. I did. My 18-year-old self was a hoot! She's still in here somewhere. Folded into the layers that are this self.

I thank you for your time. Adiamas.

--Kyriel