“No problem!”
I catch the thunderclouds I’d summoned, pull in some more clouds from the sky, and bundle them all together until they’re heavy enough for rain to fall. I stand there, beaming proudly, as it pours buckets all around us. Aurelio deadpans at me as the water drips from his hair.
“Alessia? Was this necessary?”
“Well, yeah. The fires are going out, see? And we won’t have to bathe in the river later.”
Aurelio drags his hands down his face. “This is turning out to be so much more work than I signed up for.”
“Actually, you didn’t sign up for anything,” I point out.
“That makes it worse!”
“Oh, quit whining, you big baby,” I say, grabbing the deer carcass. “Let’s get this back to camp.”
I drag the deer behind me as we return to camp, following the path markers we made along the way, which are simple etches in the larger tree trunks we’ve passed. The rain stops within a few minutes, and by the time we get halfway there, the sun comes out again. Our camp, we find, is completely dry, having been outside of the range of the storm, which is lucky, since I really didn’t feel like drying out all our wood.
We’ve only been traveling for a few days, but already, our tent is gathering weather stains. The canvas that was once bright white is now gray, even dark brown in places where dirt has stained it. We’ve gathered a couple rocks and placed them around a makeshift fire pit, which is simply a shallow hole in the ground where we’ve gathered dry wood, but that’s about the extent of our camp. We kill and eat our food in one go rather than storing it and carrying the extra weight around.
This deer, however, may have to be eaten over the next few days. It’s a bit large for one meal, even for me. I’m still not sure how I’m going to store the rest of the meat, but I’ll figure it out.
I set down the deer by the firepit and wait for Aurelio to grab his knife from the tent. I sit there for a little longer than expected, and I’m starting to get concerned by the time he reemerges. Apparently, I was right to be concerned, because the panicked look on his face can be spotted from a mile away.
“My knife is gone,” he says. “Both our swords are gone, too.”
I jump to my feet. “Do you think someone stole it?”
“There’s only one way to find out. Check for footprints.”
I use magic to enhance my vision and check for footprints around the campsite. Sure enough, I find not only one, but four pairs of footprints trailing from our tent, through our campsite, and away into the forest. I crouch down by a footprint, studying it carefully.
“There’s four of them, and none of them are wearing shoes,” I determine. “Also, they don’t seem to be human.”
Aurelio frowns. “Not human?”
“Take a look. What human do you know that has four toes and daggers for toenails?”
Aurelio crouches beside me, then says, “None. These are monsters.”
“Goblins, I’d presume,” I sigh. “That was one of our quests, wasn’t it?”
Aurelio pulls out our quest papers from his back pocket, unfolding them to read their contents. “Yes, we accepted a quest for goblin extermination in this area, alright. I can’t believe they’re this close to the village, though.”
I shudder. “To think, they’re this close to where children sleep peacefully…let’s kill them, Aurelio.”
“Gladly.”
We follow the trail of footprints, taking care to be as silent as possible. It’s impossible to be completely silent, as the forest is full of fallen leaves and twigs that insist on crunching in the loudest manner possible. I glance overhead, noting the position of the sun, then continue onward, recognizing the terrain as transitioning to the rolling hills of the Queen’s Meadow, a vast, grassy area just on the other side of the eastern stretch of the Wendigo Forest. This area is notorious for being the most fertile ground in the entire country, so there are many farming villages out here.
This area is also notorious for goblin attacks.
Goblins adore large hills, as they dig their disgusting nests right into the hillside. They can hole up in there for months, slowly attacking villagers in the night, until they’ve had their fill of human flesh. There can be as many as fifty goblins in one nest, and every one of them is as vicious as a wendigo, just with a much smaller, less capable body.
I smell the nest before we see it: the stench of blood and decomposition hangs heavy in the air around their home. I hold my hand over my nose as Aurelio and I peek over a hill on the very edge of the forest, and before me is the dark, cavernous entrance to the goblin’s nest. They’ve reinforced it with sticks and stones, but it doesn’t make it any less crude of a construction. Goblins are crafty enough to learn, but not smart enough to be capable of independent thinking. They’re comparable to extremely dumb dogs.
One of the horrible creatures emerges from the goblin nest as I look on. My stomach curdles in disgust at the sight of him. He wears nothing but a torn piece of loincloth around his middle, exposing the rest of his three-foot hairy, dirty frame. He is spindly and hardly muscular, and his skin is the color of molding bread. His nose is pointed, his teeth sharp and crooked, and his eyes a jet black. He scratches his back, stretches in the sunlight, then walks back into his cave, mumbling a gibberish that must be the goblins’ rudimentary language.
“The footprints lead all the way into the nest,” Aurelio whispers. “Good. We can kill two birds with one stone.”
