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.

Continue reading “Beneath the Boughs and Roots” →