Eric was surprised by how sweet the night air smelled. The tight goblin perimeter had contained much of the soot and violence, so much so that, once on the other side of the buildings, the world seemed almost peaceful. There were still a few more traps and hurdles to get around, but as Eric looked out into the dark depths of the forest, reality set in.
He’d made it. He was free.
In different circumstances, Gabrielle might have made it. Her idea had been a sound one: sneak behind the bulk of the warriors to a secret get-away path she knew about. It was near the main entrance, obscured enough that one wouldn’t find it unless they knew it was there. Her movements were controlled, careful, and precise. She knew this camp well, and if any of the goblin warriors noticed her making for the exit, they did nothing to impede her. For one thing, she’d been around so much they considered her a friend. For another, they had far bigger problems on their hands.
The demon in the center of the warriors was beginning to show signs of wear. Tough though its hide was, the sheer number of arrows and polearms were beginning to tear away bits of its flesh. The one near the building seemed to be faring better — not enough of the goblins were focused on it — and the monster was dropping their numbers with nearly every swipe of its claws. Gabrielle couldn’t make out the one that had jumped across the camp, but she assumed it was probably doing well, too. For a time, she didn’t know where the fourth demon had landed. Then she arrived at her exit point.
At first, her heart felt lighter as she saw the swarm of goblins around the demon. This many would end it swiftly and then they could focus on the other two. The tribe might just have a shot at this. Then she noticed how quickly they were falling and realized few of them had armor or weapons. A quick glance toward the area where the secret get-away was located showed that the entrance was blocked.
Blocked with goblin corpses.
The reason there were so many goblins around it was because the demon had caught onto their escape attempt and sealed it. Now it stood between them and escape on the main road. It wasn’t being swarmed with warriors, it was cutting a swath of death through the children and peaceful-goblins that had been trying to evacuate.
Thistle moved with all the speed his crooked, gnomish body could muster, which was, unsurprisingly, not a lot. Thankfully, the focus on the incursion of demons made sure he was the last concern on the minds of the goblins he gently moved past. Along the way, he followed his own advice and snagged a pair of mismatched daggers from the corpses of fallen archers. They weren’t as well-made as the ones he’d taken from the dead rogue, but they had pointy ends he could stab into people and that was really all that mattered in a dagger.
Of the four, he was the last to reach his destination, both because of the difficulty of what he was moving through and his hobbled size. He did make it without incident, which was more than he imagined the other two would have pulled off. Thistle hoped those two would be safe. Maybe if they survived, they could recruit new people to fill the party’s holes and draw the king’s ire from their town. It was what Thistle would have done; however, he was less confident in his own survival than theirs. They still had the strength and determination of youth. It was then that Thistle broke through the mass of goblins into the area where Grumph was, and all thought of the humans’ safety flitted from his mind.
Seven fresh goblin corpses littered the ground around the demon, their light purple blood already soaking into the dirt. A few feet away, Grumph lay on his side, struggling to get up with the one arm that wasn’t covered in blood. A shattered goblin polearm stuck out from the demon’s hide, wedged into the shoulder above its right claw.
In an instant, Thistle knew what had happened; he saw the goblin regiment’s death, followed by Grumph rushing in and smashing the demon with a weapon not designed to bear his strength, snapping it off in red flesh only to have his own half-orc body savaged by the monster’s counterattack. Thistle put it all together, and in the span of a heartbeat, he extended the scene moments into the future, seeing what would play out as plain as a sunlight spelclass="underline"
Grumph was about to die.
7.
There were surely better ways to die than this. Going down in battle was a point of pride, certainly, but it was supposed to be while making a grand last stand for some important cause. All Grumph had done was whack a polearm against a demon while it was killing several goblins. From the pain in his shoulder and the sizable chunk of missing flesh, he didn’t imagine this was going to be a peaceful death. The demon was approaching steadily, but cautiously. Grumph let out a weary sigh that sounded like the wheeze of a broken organ. He’d wanted to be one of the few half-orcs to die out of battle. Oh well.
The knife moved so fast Grumph didn’t actually see it fly. One moment, he was staring up at impending death in the form of a rat-faced monster, the next, he was looking at a rat-faced monster with a knife sticking out of one eye. The beast let out a howl that made all who heard it remember times when they sat in the dark, certain something was moving there, coming after them. The demon twisted to the side, searching with one eye for the source of its agony. It did not prove difficult to find.
“Hey, One-eye, that’s a good look for you!” called Thistle, twirling the other blade casually in his hand. “Bit uneven, though. Want me to get the other one too? Then you won’t have to see how ugly you really are.”
The demon snarled, and its clacking grew faster. Whether it understood the words or merely that this small figure had stabbed it in the eye was debatable: what was clear, however, was the effectiveness of Thistle’s strategy. Immediately, the demon changed targets, Grumph all but forgotten as it moved toward the gnome.
Grumph felt the bottom of his half-orc stomach drop away as realization hit him. Yes, there were better ways to die, but there were also worse ones. Like watching your only friend be sliced to shreds first.
Later, when the blood had dried and the dawn had broken, Gabrielle would reflect on how it all happened. She’d face the fact that perhaps this sort of thing had been building in her for years — an inevitable reaction to concealing the life she loved for a duty to the family she had. That would be when she finally faced how much this tribe had meant to her; how she’d loved the way they taught her, hunted with her, and treated her like a capable, functioning person, instead of a delicate doll to be loved and protected. All that would come later, though.
In that moment, when she realized she was watching the indiscriminate slaughter of the weaker goblins, all that existed in her soul was an explosion of incomprehensible fury. There were no thoughts, no fears, no debates: only action. With a primordial scream that none would have believed came from her, Gabrielle gripped the axe at her side and charged forward. It should have been too heavy, her inexperience too much to overcome, yet none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the sight of those demon claws tearing through unprotected goblin flesh.
To its credit, the demon did look up when it heard her undisguised charge. Had it been a mindless killer it would have shifted its attention to the new target. These, however, were thinking demons, so it paid almost no heed to the thin woman with the oversized axe. It raised one claw in a purely obligatory blocking maneuver and went back to skewering goblins.
The error of that strategy sank in right around the time it heard a heavy object hit the dirt, looked down, and realized it was its own claw, along with a sizable portion of its arm. The axe had cleaved straight through its tough flesh and bones, so quickly that the pain hadn’t even registered yet. It did an instant later, however, and the demon screeched shrilly at the loss of its limb.