The Gremlin Plan
Chapter 4 · 1,636 words
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Two days after you yanked a goblin spear from her shoulder and held her wound together with crushed herbs and stubbornness, she's standing. Unsteadily, favoring the injured side, her wing still tucked tight against the healing muscle — but standing. The poultice has dried to a hard, brownish crust over the wound, and underneath it, the flesh is knitting together with a vitality that makes you suspect owlbears are built from significantly sterner material than people.
You spend those two days in the cave. Not by choice — your magic burned out so thoroughly during the fight that even the Gravity Tic has gone silent. No floating pinecones. No involuntary shoves. Just ordinary, non-weaponized fingers and a migraine that takes thirty-six hours to fully dissolve from the space behind your eyes.
So you do what you always do when circumstances conspire to keep you still: you work the problem.
The dead cultists' packs yield treasures. A waterskin. Dried rations — hard tack and cured meat that tastes like salted cardboard, but calories are calories. A tinderbox. A coil of rope. And, most importantly: a crudely drawn map.
The map is rough — charcoal on parchment, no scale, no compass rose. But the landmarks are clear enough. A cluster of buildings labeled Shattered Sanctum in the center, connected by red arrows to a spot labeled Emerald Grove to the northeast. Between them, scattered symbols that look like waypoints. Patrol routes.
Tucked into the same pack: a folded note, the handwriting cramped and angular.
True Soul Minthara commands all scouts to prepare routes for the assault on the Druid Grove. No survivors. The Absolute wills it. Ensure the captives are brought to the sanctum alive — Priestess Gut requires specimens for the communion.
You read it twice. Look at the brand on the dead cultist's wrist — the same eye-and-lines symbol as the traveler by the river. Look at the map. Look at Mama, who is methodically licking the poultice on her shoulder with the focus of someone who considers healing to be a project management task.
"So," you say to Mama. "There's a whole camp of these brainless pests, all in one place, planning to burn down the forest." You fold the map carefully and tuck it into your belt. "If they burn the forest down, it ruins my camping trip."
Mama clicks her beak. It's a noncommittal sound — the owlbear equivalent of and this is my problem because?
"Also, they tried to kill you and kidnap you for entertainment. So there's that."
A more emphatic beak-click. That argument landed.
"Stay close to the perimeter," you tell her, scratching the spot behind her ear that you've discovered makes her left foot tap involuntarily. "If I'm not back by dinner, assume I did something stupid."
The Goblin Camp is built into and around the ruins of a Selunite temple — a once-grand structure of pale stone and arched windows, now scabbed over with crude wooden fortifications, goblin-built watchtowers, and the general aesthetic sensibility of a species that considers rubble a design choice.
You approach from the southwest, keeping to the tree line, moving low. Your magic has been trickling back for the past few hours — a faint tingling at the base of your skull, the occasional flicker of purple at your fingertips. Not enough to fight with. Enough to bluff with, maybe.
The outer gate is guarded. Two goblins on the wall, one on the ground, all armed with crude bows and the specific brand of bored alertness that comes from pulling guard duty at a post where nothing ever happens.
Your plan — such as it is — calls for stealth. There's a cracked section of wall on the upper east side where you might be able to climb up and slip in unnoticed. You circle wide, find the wall, start your ascent up a rocky ledge toward the breach.
Your boot catches on loose shale.
CLACK.
The sound echoes across the stone like a gunshot. Below you, the ground-level guard's head snaps toward the noise. Sharp-eyed. Alert. The bored alertness evaporates instantly.
"OI! WHO'S THERE?"
Stealth attempt: dead.
For one second, you cling to the ledge, frozen, brain racing through options. Run? They've seen you. Fight? You have a dagger and a headache. Hide? You're outlined against pale stone in full daylight like a portrait of terrible decision-making.
Option D, then: be insane.
You stand up. Brush the dust from your knees. Cross your arms with an authority you absolutely do not possess.
"Do you idiots always scream at your own superior officers?" you snap, and the contempt in your voice is so convincing that you almost believe it yourself.
The guard blinks. The two on the wall exchange glances.
"Wha — who are you?"
"Who am I? I'm the one True Soul Minthara sent to track the crash survivors, and I've been crawling through this forest for five days because someone —" you point vaguely at the guard with the righteous fury of middle management "— didn't secure the northern perimeter after the sky-ship went down."
Your heart is hammering so hard you're convinced they can hear it. But the bluff holds — partly because goblin hierarchies are built on fear and nobody wants to be the one who challenged the wrong person, and partly because, as if on cue, your adrenaline spikes and purple sparks dance across your knuckles.
Uncontrolled. Unintentional. But very, very convincing.
The guard's eyes drop to the sparks. His posture shifts — from suspicious to uncertain to actively deferential.
"Right. Yeah. Sorry. Go on through, then."
You march through the gate with the measured stride of someone who belongs there. Your pulse doesn't slow down until you're well inside, up on the upper walkways, crouched behind a pillar where nobody can see your hands shaking.
"Okay," you breathe. "I'm in. Great. Now what?"
The Shattered Sanctum is larger than the map suggested.
From the upper walkways — a maze of wooden scaffolding and repurposed choir balconies — you have a bird's-eye view of the entire operation. And it is an operation. This isn't a raiding camp. This is a military staging ground.
Three factions, three zones, three leaders.
Left wing — the chapel: Priestess Gut. A goblin — but not a normal goblin. Larger, draped in ritual vestments, her one milky eye staring at nothing while her other eye stares at everything. She moves through the chapel with the proprietary air of a priest in her own cathedral, and the goblins around her give her a wide, fearful berth.
Center — the throne room: Dror Ragzlin. Hobgoblin. Massive. Seated on a throne of scavenged furniture and animal skulls, and in front of him — you squint, lean forward, grip the railing — a dead mind flayer, laid out on a stone slab. Ragzlin has his hands on the creature's temples. Seancing it. Communing with the corpse.
Your stomach does something uncomfortable.
Right wing — the war room: Minthara. Drow. Tall, angular, radiating the kind of cold authority that makes you instinctively want to be somewhere else. She's bent over a table covered in maps, and the scouts around her snap to attention when she glances their way.
Three factions. Three leaders. All of them planning an assault on the Druid Grove.
You crouch on the walkway, chewing the inside of your cheek, thinking. Your magic isn't strong enough for a direct fight — not against this many. But three factions means three egos, and three egos means pressure points.
You don't need to beat them. You just need to make them beat each other.
You're halfway through formulating a plan involving a very creative redistribution of Minthara's scouting orders when Priestess Gut ruins everything.
It happens fast.
Gut's milky eye sweeps the room — a habitual scan, the way a predator checks the waterhole. Then it stops. Fixes. On you.
You feel it before you see her move. A prickling at the base of your skull — not pain, more like static, the sensation of being looked at by something that sees in frequencies you don't have names for. She's reaching out. Mentally. Probing.
Gut climbs the stairs toward the walkway. Not running — walking with purpose, her one good eye locked on you, her ritual vestments swishing against the stone steps. The goblins part for her automatically.
She reaches the walkway. Stands before you. Up close, the milky eye isn't blind — it's wrong. It sees something, just not light. The tattooed brands on her arms glow faintly.
"You," she says. Her voice is low, gravelly, unexpectedly calm. "You're new. Hold still."
She reaches out mentally. Not a wave, not a broadcast — a connection. One-on-one. Her tadpole reaching for yours, the way True Souls greet each other, the psychic handshake that confirms you're part of the network.
Her mind hits your psychic static like a bird hitting a window.
CRACK.
The sound is audible — a sharp, crystalline snap of purple energy that jolts Gut backward. She staggers, clutching her temple, her milky eye rolling wildly. The mental probe didn't just fail. Your brain slammed the door on her fingers.
For one second, she stares at you. Then her face contorts — fear, then fury, then something fanatical.
"No worm," she hisses, backing away. "No Absolute. You are NOTHING — a blank, a heretic!" She spins toward the sanctum below. "KILL HER!"
Every eye in the room looks up.
You are crouched on a wooden walkway, thirty feet above a room full of goblins, cultists, and three of the most dangerous people you've never met, and every single one of them is now looking at you with the focused, collective hostility of a hornet's nest that just got kicked.
"Well," you say to nobody in particular. "That could've gone better."
End notes for Chapter 4: Content warnings — deception, mild peril, references to mind control. No sexual content.