The Goblin & the Crow Chapter 1

It’s storytelling time and at Our Collective Oracle and we thought we bring you a tale, detailing adventures into other aspects of the cards’ endless layers. A rune card is shuffled from the deck to inform the chapter’s story direction. It’s such fun allowing Liffruma to direct the story. It opens without any rune to introduce the background to the tale. So here’s chapter one of ‘The Goblin & The Crow’.

Chapter 1 - Lost, Found & Bound

I’d like you all to get really comfortable as I’m about to tell you a story. This tale is set in a land of goblins far far away. It was very early in the morning and the sun was playing shy, waving white wisps of silk-ribboned clouds, teasing the drudging tread of the despairing goblin, to look up this just this once and ponder beauty all around her. A long long time ago the goblin remembered some other space somewhere else. She remembered being something else.

Goblin’s new nomadic companion had joined her on the road to the village of Ćirićragu which meant ‘Moss of Mystics’ or ‘Mystical Mosses’ but those meanings have long been lost to living memory of most goblins. Now they just call it Moes and Moes is a wealthy seam of long tapped greed. Moes’ homesteaders have a deep rooted, total fear of strangers stepping in to their prized fetid fields.

Goblin was glad she left that shady place where everyone prospers through villainy. All are quite safe, until they leave the city boundaries. Goblin is doubly glad to have left with a walking companion. Their anxious pace had quickly carried them far far away from Moes.

Moes had become a distant shudder yet a nasty thought slid up inside the ever over-worrying mind of the goblin. What if this companion just pretended to meet her in on the road to Moes? She might have been hiding in a crevice, waiting for me to pass by and then catching me up from behind. Things whirled, fears grew in the goblin’s mind. The Swelgnes was long established, its tread entrenched. Goblin was drenched.

What if this gentlewoman were in fact a shifty pixie after me, after all it’s well known that pixies rob goblins on highways for their hoards of gold? Well she picked the wrong goblin, rose a defiant thought lifeline. I’ve no gold whatsoever so… I’ll be dead for nothing! The Swelgnes sighed as it stole further in with its hooked dread-threads. What if her gentle semblance were a glamour, a charm, hiding her true tempers? Pixies were able to tear through time. What if the pixie pushed her out of time? Or killed her and hid her body out of time? Goblin paused and finally looked skywards towards Sister Sonne as a vast inky cloud billowed forwards unnaturally.

The companion, eyes fixed on the track yet to be trodden, gasped as the immense cloud shadow tore towards her across the ground. Unwitnessed by goblin and her companion, a steely black crow cawed so violently that its shriek sheered clear through the bodies of both travellers. The companion froze mesmerised. Goblin felt the caw grab everything fearful in her mind and scatter it far across the thirsty parched ground on which she stood. The track gobbled it all up. Goblin rubbed her eyes in disbelief as the pathway tipped her an incandescent wink. She spun ‘round and the crow was staring directly at her. A deep stilled stare of intimidation. A teasing twist of the head and the crow cackled. Then it happened.

“That scared the living Be-estla out of me, that did.” The companion ejected a discomforting burst of laughter wrapped up in a ribbon of fear. “When that shadow come racing up the track I though I was about to die and then that gods-curdling cry. Bestla protect me!” She mumbled, fumbling to find her herb pouch in her coat pocket. Pressing the hessian bag to her face she rubbed and crushed the contents to activate the calming aromas, inhaling deeply before exhaling, as if the world itself sighed with her.

Goblin stood watching once again, that soft kind countenance of her companion and wondered to herself why she had been gripped by such mistrustful fears just minutes earlier? Had the path really absorbed all that old worry of hers? Goblin inhaled sharply and uncomfortably. Something was definitely different. Even the unnatural gloaming light was somehow strangely calm. Everything now seemed in peaceful harmony with her companion’s scented sack breaths. No other sound stirred, bar the ebbing softness of her companion’s breath.

“Ssh…!” hissed the companion through the perfect silence. “I can smell an elf!¨

Her eyes darted all around settling on nothing. She flared her suddenly vast nostrils and began seeking to aroma-locate the stench. Goblin was alarmed that her companion had dared to even mention that kind. Nobody likes to talk about them. She gave a little cautious sniff wondering if she could even imagine what an elf smelt like.

“How do you know what an elf smells like?” queried the goblin as the companion gestured for silence snorting air in and out of her nose. She twisted and twitched her head from left to right increasing the pace of her inhalations as she used her nostrils like divining rods. This strange routine was slow and thorough like a falsehood fishing for a truth. As the companion moved and wove around truffling the air, a group of field goblins came hurrying down the hill towards them.

“Stay where you are!” Screeched the companion as the goblins grew nearer “I smell Elf! Could be anywhere. Stay back.” Goblin looked from her companion to the other goblins in utter confusion. Elves didn’t exist. Everyone knows that. Yet her companion’s insane command was accepted by everyone else as fact but unfolded as pure lunacy.

The clearly crazy goblins all nodded and stopped still, thanking the companion for the warning. Right where they now stood still, the goblins suddenly started performing various strange gestures and manoeuvres. They encouraged each other to avoid any lickings from any errant Elf.

“My aunty’s sister’s father-in-law was licked once. Nigh on killed the poor bugger.”, piped up a burly hoe’d goblin. Goblin thought how so very stupid they all looked. No one has ever seen an elf. There’s not even any proof there ever were Elves. Again a tendril of Swelgnes latched itself inside her rationality and gently tugged at goblin’s worries. As she tied herself back up with her everyday fears she failed to notice all the others edging closer and closer to her as they snorted and sniffed amassing like flies round filth. A collective gasp pulled goblin’s attention back to the snuffling hogs now huddled around her.

“It’s you!” her companion dry heaved, pointing at her. All the other goblins stopped and looked on in horror.

“Elves don’t exist. How can I smell like one? How would you even know what they smell like when they’re not real?” goblin interjected hesitantly at the huddle, easily outnumbering her. The huddle stared in disgust. “Me! Smell of Elf?!” goblin continued in her faltering defence against this mythological nonsense. And then as mentioned earlier, it happened. Goblin passed out. She folded up and tumbled down, crumpling to the ground.

When goblin eventually woke she couldn’t remember any of what I just told you but she did have a remembrance of another place. It was both real and other and yet she knew somehow, or felt through misty remembrances that she was once of that space. It was very soft and extremely comforting like being held in something she had no words to describe. It was just something that was apart from here and her and yet it was a familiar ribbon of remembrance. It felt nice she thought but it was already fading like memories from infancy.

Goblin shuddered to pull herself back into the dark comforts of the chaos and troubles she loved so much. She is always happy wrapped in life’s grumbles and disputes. Then she thought she caught the stench of something she half remembered as scented pleasure and she wretched. Having no memory of the recent incident of the elven scent the goblin could only rationalise what this perfume might be. She often heard talk of a blossoming breeze that occasionally gathers goblins before death? Well there were stories from those holding vigils for the dying who claimed they had smelt it. Perhaps it always came but wasn’t always noticed. Nobody was quite able to describe the odour accurately as they said it was preternatural. Since she hadn’t died before she wasn’t sure what that might smell like or what preternatural even meant. There were so many things she had never sniffed. Was death to be her first honestly acknowledged aroma?

There was a sudden solemn sound as the door was turned into the room and a group of goblins entered the chamber. Dressed in floor length capes, their heads entirely masked by large woven red hoods stuffed with protective scented herbs. They rung hand bells and struck gnarled percussive logs as they paraded purposely to surround goblin where she lay. Totally unaware of the unfolding ceremony to cast out the Elven stench, she could only imagine she was having a nightmare and screamed to wake herself up. The opposite in fact happened and she lost consciousness once more.

Awaking again later she remembered the nightmare of masks and was grateful to have woken safely in a bed rather than dead on a highway from a marauding pixie. Goblin was struck by a sudden remembrance of a companion somewhere. Maybe that was a dream too? Goblin decided to rise and go find out who had rescued her only to discover that she was bound to a bed frame unable to move. Fearful of screaming she squeezed shut her eyes and they welled with frightened tears.