On Wild Goblins

Worldbuilding | Ittoril

An excerpt from 'On the Beasts of the Near Wilds' by Jan Silverstein, half-elf ecologist of the Empyrean Academy, published 229 LE.

"It would not be judicious of me to speak ill of goblin-kind, for I am aware that they comprise a class that, in the Imperial States, is often seen as unintelligent and of little societal value, and I know that, contrary to this perception, goblins are capable of being well competent, for I have many a fine goblin colleague myself. Regardless, there is a more uncivilised species of goblin found beyond the borders of the States, and to leave out the savagery I have witnessed of them would render my account of the Near Wilds incomplete. So as to not find myself critiqued on the basis of equating the two, I will henceforth be referring to the goblins of the Imperial States as 'civil goblins' and to the goblins I am to write of here as 'wild goblins'.

It is understood throughout the States that the folk of the Near Wilds, whom we call 'Barbarians', are, as a rule, of an unmannered and uncivilised breed; their societies lack history or fine culture, and they have no respect for the dominance of the folk of the States. From my encounters with the wild goblins, I've concluded that they are no exception to this rule. That fact is one that I knew upon first laying my eyes on them: I was east of the Alerine Mountains, travelling north through the desert. Throughout the afternoon, the wind had been growing in strength, both blowing grains of sand in my face, but more pertinently, impeding my progress northward. I had already decided it not be worth attempted to press on any further, so I was instead seeking a place to set camp for the evening, but I was finding that there weren't many good prospects before me. It was then that I heard footsteps from behind. Turning around, I saw it was a strange creature; humanoid, a little less than a metre tall, and with a rather round head. Its skin appeared to be a dirty yellow, but across most of it wrapped strips of white cloth. It had no hair, but did have long side-ward ears which curved around over themselves like those of cattle. As it approached and stood before me I saw across its right cheek a patch of reddish skin like a burn mark. Its right eye was covered in a strip of cloth, but the other looked up at me widely. I saw also half a dozen other figures, as poor in appearance as this one but of varying sizes and amounts of hair, peeking over a nearby sand dune, watching me intently. The one that approached me spoke in an imitation of the common tongue so crude that it made me wince, asking if I needed somewhere to stay the night. It asked so with a quickness and excitement that I was considerably unfond of, but, without many other options at hand, I was forced to oblige the creature. As I communicated this, its eye lit up, and its mouth drew back at the corners in an unseemly grin. I stepped back in horror as the creature, in some outlandish display of brutish emotion, began jumping up and down on the spot like an ape. It companions reacted with similar displays, and some began clapping their hands with each other in the air. The creature near me grabbed my hand tightly, and I recoiled at the gross coarseness of its skin as it led me and the others over to its den.

I would very generously call its den a tent, but in truth, it was little more than a canvas tarpaulin hammered down into a rocky section of the desert, covering a shallow pit about three metres in diameter, but only a metre deep, and without any furnishings to speak of. The goblins lifted a corner of the tarpaulin and followed me as I climbed in. I will say that while it was not particularly comfortable in there — for it was still dry and sandy, and was much too short for my height — I will admit it was much cooler, and I was glad to have the tarpaulin shading me from the dry air of the desert. I sat up against the wall, and held my bag tight to my chest, for I feared that if I didn't, one of the curious things might begin prying through it. I looked around at the goblins, who were now sitting down around me, and I asked why it was they were so enthusiastic to bring me to their den, and what it was that they wanted from me. They looked around at each other and paused, before letting out laughs — laughs! — you see how these Barbarians have no sense of manner nor respect! One of the goblins spoke to me in the same poor approximation of language, and said that its "family" are only curious about me, and that none of them had seen foreigners for a long time. Then, another one of them, I believe it to be female judging by the pitch of its voice, asked me my name. I began to tell it that I was known as Doctor Silverstein, but before I had even finished answering, another younger one asked me my "job". I told it that my profession was as an ecologist of the Empyrean Academy. Immediately, another jutted in and asked what the Empyrean Academy was, and, what an ecologist was, and so it went on long into the night. They continued to display neither a sense of etiquette nor a capacity for intellectual conversation, speaking quickly and with gross excitement. You will understand my desire to be free of them as soon possible; it is already normal to feel unsafe around Barbarians, and even more so around such a discourteous kind of them. So, once they had all fell asleep, I surreptitiously climbed out for their den as they slept, and made my way away as fast as I could.

The various other groups of goblins I encountered in my journey were each different physically, though they were all just as uncouth. In the plateaus of the north Alerine Mountains, I discovered rock goblins with snouts like pigs and large round ears, and they had grown metal-like protrusions from their bare shoulders and backs. They hardly spoke even the common tongue. In the river deltas in the northern ocean I found aquatic goblins who had skin shaded blue and with yellow fins running along it. They had slits for noses and ears, and in the specimens I examined more closely, I even found gills. I attempted not to stay with those aquatic goblins for long, as they were unpleasant and had a natural stench of dead fish to them. And of course, these all differ wildly from the peach-skinned civil goblins of Leona. From all this, I concluded that goblins, much more like animals than people, are subject to evolution, and so each will adapt to the environ they find themselves in, but clearly they are able to do so at a greater rate even than that of other animals, and I suspect that juvenile goblins may be able to physically change even during life. I believe I have made clear the lack of civility and natural barbarity demonstrated by wild goblins enough to justify their inclusion in my documentation of the animals of the Near Wilds, so I will now begin to describe them and their varieties in more detail..."