Things Happen in a Place

This was going to be a standard log cabin with a porch. Then we started talking about goblins and building underground, so I tried making it underground. I thought underground folk would build with iron and stone, but then it looked like a Standard Fantasy Dungeon™, so I tried giving it eighteenth/nineteenth century pioneer-house furniture instead (plus an extra fancy chair, because girlfriend needs a good place to read).  We may not go with underground housing at all, but it's a opportunity to practice dragging images out through my nostrils so that we have something to talk about.

  "He likes digging. What if we used him to... dig?" "Pickaxe isn't good enough for you? You've gotta offload your tunnel?" "I could train him." "DO IT I LOVE HIS LITTLE ARMS THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT." "Just saying, my pickaxe doesn't need training. Won't get a mind to run off and eat the furniture." "There was that one time with Blexen's shovel..." "That was different. And we don't use that kind of magic anymore."

 "Everygoblin struggles with something," Markbla sighs, her eyes hard. "Well, yeah." I can see the unsaid portion though, in the lines on her face. That it doesn't make it ok, what he's done. But. We need eachother. We need his strength and cunning. And after all we're goblins.  What more can be expected of us, by any god? They've all forsaken us, and we have to make do.  We have to keep going, in the dark corners of the world, if just to spite them. To fart in the faces of the high and mighty ones. To keep going, too, because we're terrified of the alternative, not death I mean, but annihilation, to be erased, eradicated, and forgotten. And to keep going, finally, because of a crazy elusive hope that we dare not breathe or think too clearly, that someday it might be better for our small ones. That there could be a redemption for any of us. This all passes unsaid, of course, and someday I'll come back and write it up more artfully, maybe play...