Chapter 61 : Goblins
The thought that had straightened him up in the dark was this: magical elements might not be fundamental.
The theoretical literature of this world treated the nine elemental systems as the basic constituents of magic — light, wind, fire, water, earth, lightning, dark, space, time. But the arrays in the Shadow Moth and the dire wolf didn't map cleanly onto that taxonomy. The Shadow Moth's yin-fire conversion ran through something that felt more like a processing layer than an elemental type. The dire wolf's fire-element output came from a structure that didn't resemble the fire-element arrays in human magical practice.
The thought from Earth that kept returning: elements, in Earth's chemistry, had turned out not to be fundamental either. They were structures built from something simpler. What if magical elements were the same — not the base layer but an intermediate one, expressions of something more fundamental that this world's theory hadn't gotten around to naming yet?
He couldn't verify this. He could barely articulate it. But the feeling of it was strong enough that he filed it carefully for later.
He tested it anyway, after a fashion. He visualized the array he had reconstructed from the Shadow Moth's throat — the sound-wave conversion structure — and pushed spiritual force through it. The stone across the cave disintegrated with a crack. Clean, powerful, and carrying a faint dark resonance alongside the sonic force, though the sonic element seemed to have no intrinsic attribute of its own.
He tried a fire-element array next — the basic fireball visualization. The dark element that was his nature rose and lit half the structure before the visualization collapsed. No fireball. A brief painful oscillation through his spiritual sense before he caught it.
He filed that too. Not yet. Perhaps not this way.
He turned to what was possible. The Shadow Moth's wing array had given him material — a double-attack structure combining dark element with spiritual force, flesh and mind struck simultaneously. He ran it through several iterations, adjusting the array each time, finding something wrong in each version: the flow was blocked somewhere, the elements weren't coordinating. He tried articulating certain syllables as he cast, found that the resonance helped, and on the attempt where he combined the adjusted array with a specific phonetic sequence, the output finally ran clean: a column of cold dark energy with a screaming edge, spinning as it moved, traveling the length of the cave and out into the night.
He sat back. "Yin-Chill Strike," he said to himself. "That one's mine."
Small Ling, which had been lurking somewhere outside and had nearly been hit, flattened itself against a tree and waited until it was sure the cave was not being attacked. Then it said things under its breath and made a decision: it would follow at a distance, invisibly, and repay the debt when the opportunity arose. It let its form become less present in the visible spectrum and drifted back into the forest.
Evan didn't know about this. He sat in the dark and let his magical energy recover.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
……
He came out at dawn, dismantled the illusion array, stretched, and trained. Half an hour of sword forms in the early sun, each stroke driven from the ground up through the whole body the way the bones were supposed to move — the sword as extension of the arm, the arm as extension of the shoulder, the shoulder following the torso, the torso following the legs, the legs following the earth. Then an hour of the static posture with the snake-spine variation he had developed from watching the two snakes fight — not the centaur visualization from The Knight's Lightalone, but modified, the spine moving in small waves while the legs stayed rooted, two images overlaid.
At some point during the static work he felt a specific quality of attention nearby. Not hostile. Familiar in a particular way — the elemental signature that belonged to Small Ling. It was still there.
He looked toward nothing in particular. The trees stood quietly. He picked up his pack and walked west.
Something invisible followed at a distance.
……
In a city to the west, a figure wrapped entirely in dark clothing walked into the Harpist Guild's local office and said, quietly: "I need someone's whereabouts. Evan Wang."
The young man behind the desk smiled and gestured upstairs.
……
In a Gonno Society meeting house, five elders were reviewing intelligence. The Dominion Society's holy skull had been traced through several hands and was now believed to be with a woman connected to the Cross Blade School. Evan Wang had apparently entered the Black Forest.
"The Black Forest." One elder shook his head. "That's inconvenient. Unicorns, phoenixes, dragons, things without names. If he dies in there, the skull goes with him."
"We wait at the exit. His heading suggests he intends to cross it. We meet him on the other side."
……
Raphael, in the Iron Cross Order's headquarters, had been given the same intelligence. Two engagements, two escapes — the lich had even used an avalanche against him, which was not the kind of thing that improved his mood. If the man wanted to cross the Black Forest, then the Black Forest was where the third meeting would happen.
……
None of this reached Evan, who was navigating a mountain valley and had just encountered something he hadn't expected.
The goblin civilization had once been significant. The historical record — what existed of it in scattered references and ruin sites — suggested steam technology, mobile steel fortresses, mechanical warriors standing two men tall. That was a very long time ago. The goblins who remained lived in the margins of the world, their ancestors' engineering reduced to salvage and legend, surviving in places like the Black Forest because the steel fortresses their great-grandparents had built were still standing and still structurally sound, whatever else had been lost.
Nobi was hunting with two companions when the Wind Eagle took them.
He hadn't seen it coming. One moment he was moving through the undergrowth, the next his two companions were gone — snatched from the air so fast that the sound of their screaming was already receding by the time he understood what was happening. He ran. The Eagle didn't follow. After some distance he stopped and determined that he was alive, and spent a moment with his hand over his chest feeling his heartbeat do what heartbeats do after something like that.
He looked at the pneumatic rifle in his hand. He had fired it at the Eagle when he finally understood what was happening, and the lead ball had done nothing. The rifle was a compressed-air weapon, compact and precise, assembled from salvaged components and a great deal of ingenuity, and it was useless against a magical beast with a hide like that.
He picked up the weapon, which he had thrown down in frustration, because it was irreplaceable.
Loaded it carefully. Pressed the compression rod until it was ready. Eased into the undergrowth.
A flower fairy, hand-sized, resting on a blossom — a tiny figure with dragonfly wings, singing to herself in a voice like a thread of silver. She was entirely unaware of what was twenty yards away and rising toward her in a careful sight picture.