Chapter Eighteen of Under the Goblin Trees
Campaign adaptation by Thomas Kelly
By scrapes and scrambles, shimmying down from branch to bark, I made my descent into the darkness below. One after another, my brave friends slid and dropped around me until we all stood once more on the forest floor, groping about and dusting ourselves off.
We suffered a few moments of blindness before our eyes adjusted back to the dim. It took some doing to find one another and all the things we had dropped in the descent. For minute, we thought we had lost William. “Now that we come to very porch of the Goblin Trees, he’s run off to betray us!” Myron bemoaned the trickster. He stomped his foot in childish frustration. Remember that, aside from Bruin, we had all become as children both in body and in mind.
In truth, we had not lost William at all. Rather, his leash had become entangled during the descent. He had nearly hung himself. Ivan had to climb back up to free the poor lad. As we collected ourselves, the nearby baying of wolves warned us not to tarry longer. Then the winding of a war horn sounded off close at hand. Too close. Up from the ground, a deep thrum thrum thrum of cauldron drums could be felt more than heard. The pounding reverberated up through the roots of the trees and tremored in the trunks.
All that while, the fight went on above us. The leaf-laden canopy between us and the battlefield muffled both the voice of the olven folk and the uncouth clamor of goblinkind with whom the elves contended for control of the high-limb road. The shouts of combat sounded faint, faraway, and unreal. At one point that same day, a victim dropped to ground with a heavy thud, nearly at our fee! The fletching of an olven arrow protruded from the unlucky goblin’s backside.
“Now which way do we go? I can see no road,” I observed. “How about some light?”
“Fonkin! You want to make yourself a target for the darts?” Myron scolded me.
Bruin stepped between us. “Don’t need light to find the den. I see what needs to be seen. What I can’t see I can smell,” Bruin’s words growled in his throat.
Big Clubber and the War Band
A commotion in the darkness warned of something large approaching. “Hush! Listen. Big Clubber!” Ivan gestured for everyone to crouch down or take cover. Instead of concealing myself, I scooted up on top of fallen log for a better view. I wanted to see if it was the walking tree or not. Sure enough, the unmistakable creaking and crushing sound of its rootsteps drew nigh.
I warned the party. Indeed, by the sound it made I imagined the treant coming directly toward us. “We should flee!” I suggested.
“Stay down, and it will pass us by,” young Ivan disagreed.
William clambered up the great log to join me. “Do you see it yet?” I asked him. The eyes of my folk need less light than bigger folk, but the eyes of goblinkind see in the dark almost as daylight.
“It’s coming. And goblins with it too. See their red lights?” the goblin hissed in my ear.
Yes, I could see dim red lights winking like willow wisps. Nay, torches drawing closer. Presently, I caught glimpse of movement passing between the trees. Lyrannikin came around the foot of the low hill on which we stood. My eyesight is keen enough, even in the darkness, but if not for the old treant’s glittering eyes and haughty gait, I should have mistaken it for any other tree in the wood. A few paces behind Old Clubber came a dozen or so goblin folk bearing smokey red-flamed torches.
A wolf captain in the half-man-form walked in their midst, snapping his chops and growling out orders. He carried a naked blade in hand. Abruptly he stopped and looked in our direction, or so I thought at first. He sniffed at the air, then gestured toward the treetops behind us where Sheriff and the men of Good Fellowship held the high-limb road alongside the wood elves up in the forest ceiling. The wolfman tipped back his head and loosed an eager howl to signal his packmates. From deeper in the woods, a howl replied, and then another, and then another. His warband, hurried on to join the fight with lyrannikin still at their head.
“Was that the Lord Wullurich, you think?” I asked William when the group had passed.
“Not him. A wolfing of his house,” the goblin replied.
“With Old Clubber lurking about, Sheriff and the Good Fellowship will be in need of some help,” I exclaimed. Ever since our last encounter, Nyssa’s gift had been on my mind. I triumphantly pulled the acorn from my pocket and planted it beneath the moldering leaves and cold winter soil. Then I breathed over my little gardening project, “If you can help us, Servant of Nyssa, help us now.” I waited for something to happen. When nothing did, I added a few invocations: “By the good will of my Lady of Ever-Changing Seasons, and the favor of the Lady of this Wood!” I expected a spout to shoot forth at that moment, or a treant to burst up out of ground, or something remarkable and worthy of a dryad queen’s faerie magic. Alas, absolutely nothing happened. Feeling foolish, I went to retrieve the acorn from the soil, but I could not locate it. After scooping and shoveling at the ground for quite long enough, I despaired. “Well, so much for that,” I grumbled, rubbing the grime from my cold, benumbed hands. “That’s what I get for placing hope in heathen things.” My companions showed no interest in my efforts.
A Night in the Goblin Trees
“Now look here,” Myron called a meeting. “By power of my illusions I alter my visage. I will appear in the eyes of the beholder like that that of our friend, William, here. Should any encounter us, let them think we are henchgoblins of Bruin the flesh trader. The rest of you children will be the flesh we trade.” A glimmer of magic briefly illumined Myron’s face as it took the illusory shape and form of a goblinish phizog.
William grinned stupidly at the ensorcelled sight of Myron’s face. Bruin laughed at the trick, “Nice! It’s an improvement, my brother! Just like the trick in the Rushmoors. Only this time I’m the not the one that gets tied up.”
“Best watch yourself, Myron, or I might run you through on accident,” Sir Belvenore warned him.
“I don’t care for this ruse,” Cirilli protested. “I won’t be bound or caged, even for a disguise.”
Myron the goblin spat through his fangs at her. A squabble was about erupt, but Ivan came to Cirilli’s rescue, “Here, Cirilli. You keep the leash on William. Just make it appear he has the leash on you.”
The trick worked. The first time a warband came upon us we panicked and reached for weapons, but Myron and William exchanged a few words with them in their uncouth tongue. They paid us barely a nod as they passed by in the early evening dark. A few more encounters like that persuaded me of the efficacy of our disguise. Was it all by Nyssa’s design. Surely, the Queen of the Trees orchestrated affairs so that we should be as children for this very hour.
Now we walked beneath the Goblin Trees more confidently. Dark night fell over the Dim Forest. Bruin carried a torch. The rest of us stumbled and tripped along after him, trying our best to keep pace and appear the part. The colossal trunks of the Goblin Trees towered impossibly high until their tops disappeared into the darkness. Red lights of fire and lamp flickered from within windows and portals cut high into their bark. From within the hollowed places inside those wooden towers we heard goblin voices chattering, laughing, cursing, and occasionally shrieking. Each ancient tree husk and shell made a high-rising village to itself; each hosted its own clan of the Dim Forest tribe. They infest the eldritch wood like carpenter ants in a fallen log. William could tell us the orcish names of their families as we passed them by: Puggles, Muck Rakers, Ogre Tooth, Blood Lappers, Broken Bone, and so forth.
Goblins are nocturnal by nature. As the night quickly deepened around us, the denizens of the trees stirred the more. Pups scampered up and down like squirrels. Ropeways above our heads connected trunk to trunk. Warbands issued up out of the earth and down from the boughs. Clutches of half a dozen, a dozen, sometimes more, scurried off through the dark wood squealing and snorting like swine.
“This becomes all the more treacherous! How much further?” Myron inquired.
“Close now,” William said softly.
Another warband drew up nearby: eight goblins, an ogre, and a wolfing captain. I hoped they would pass us by as the others had done, but after exchanging a few words with Myron and William, the captain turned aside to confront them. “Where do you two think you are going? Leave those brats, and fall in behind me,” the wolfing ordered William and Myron. He spoke in the Oeridian tongue.
“These are my jebli! And these are a delivery for the Baron,” Bruin gestured first toward his goblins and then toward us with the flaming end of his torch.
The lycanthrope man gave him a few suspicious sniffs, but apparently the scent of Bruin’s wolfing blood satisfied him. A malicious toothy grin peeled back the captain’s lips to reveal salivating chops. Drawing nearer to Bruin in a confidential manner, he whined softly, “Brother, why don’t we eat them ourselves?”
Bruin drew himself up to full stature, thrust the flaming torch toward the wolfing, and growled, “Go on, git! Or, I tell it to the Lord Wullurich. He’ll be pleased to know you swallowed his lunch!”
A nervous high pitched hyena’s laugh escaped the wolfing’s throat, “Nay, nay, brother! I jest!” He retreated and hurried along after his goblins.
“We should hide ourselves until the morning. Rest a few hours before the den,” Ivan suggested.
Belvenore agreed, “Our legs are not long like yours, Bruin, and we have been on the move all this day.”
We nestled down in a hollow under a fallen trunk and wrapped ourselves in cloaks and bedrolls. With so many dangers prowling about, we chanced no fire. Instead, we huddled together for warmth as tight as modesty and decorum allows. Even shivering William curled up close to big Bruin. As I fell asleep, I thought I still heard the thrum, thrum, thrum of war drums somewhere in the wood.
Into the Hole
Mid-morning on the eighth day of Readying we arrived. Under the retreating shadow of Dimwood’s midmorning, the Goblin Trees had fallen silent all around us. Not a single leering face peered down on our approach; not a pup could be heard to squeak. “Here it is. This is the hole. This is the way to the den of Clan Knucklbone and Lord Wullurich,” William pointed out to an open-mouthed cave-like entrance descending beneath the entangled roots of three massive towers. The ground coming and going from the open hole showed signs of heavy traffic, but none came or went as we looked on.
I searched the wide trunks towering around us for spying eyes peering through the portals and openings. “No guards? No wards? Can it be so easy? Just a hole in the ground?” I asked.
“Come on. Let’s go,” Bruin snapped at us. “Get in the hole and remember, I’m your master now!” He shoved us along.
Cirilli and I exchanged a nervous glance as we stumbled down into the hole. A sickening thought occurred. Has Bruin already succumbed to the spell? Are we to be tribute to the Lord Wullurich?
A brief descent and sharp turn took into a hollowed out torchlit chamber paneled, as it were, with living roots above and all around us. We now stood beneath one great foot of the chief tree that housed Clan Knucklbone.
From the chair on which he sat behind a crudely cut table used for writing desk, a man-sized and man-shaped rodent peered at us with unblinking bead-black eyes. A poorly fitting vest hung over his stooped shoulders, but he wore no other clothing aside from his smooth well-groomed coat of ash-brown hair. Sharp incisors protruded from under his lips, and his long, naked tail coiled around the leg of his chair. It twitched slightly as he sized us up. Account books and stacks of parchments, neatly arranged in careful piles, nearly covered the desktop. As we approached, his clawed fingers flipped open a bound ledger. He reached for his quill and inkwell and jotted something down.
Then he looked up and said something in the goblin tongue which William translated. “This is Regus,” William explained. “He says we’ve arrived just in time. He says we should put them in the cage with the others. They will be sacrificed on the full moon. But he doesn’t recognize us, so he wants the password.”
Bruin said to William, “Tell him we weren’t given a password.”
William exchanged a few words with Regus and then translated for Bruin, “He says, ‘Leave the children here with me. No one enters the trees without the password.”
All these words in the goblin tongue Myron understood well enough, and he tried to warn Bruin not to do anything rash, but Bruin always does something rash. The big man thrust his hand across the desk to seize the rodent fellow by the scruff, but Regus ducked and leapt out of reach fast as a scurrying rat, which is what he was. Bruin lost his balance and tipped into the table, scattering parchments, books, and ledgers and ink.
The rat reached up toward the ceiling and, taking hold of a single dangling root that hung near the back end of the chamber, he yanked it downward with both clawed hands like he was pulling on the rope of the great bell in a belltower. It activated some clever dweomer. Instantly the walls and ceiling sprang to life with long coiling roots and creepers which wrapped themselves about us and entangled us tightly as ropes. William started shrieking. Only Ivan managed to duck low and escape the entanglement spell, but what could little Ivan do to help the rest of us, unarmed as he was? For the sake of our disguise, we had surrendered all of our implements to Bruin or concealed them away in Myron’s magical hidden pocket. There was nothing to be done. The twining bonds yanked the rest of us up against the walls of the chamber. The more that we thrashed, the tighter the vine-like roots and creepers closed about our wrists and ankles.
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Artwork: ChatGPT5
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