The room erupted.
There were perhaps thirty of them, all roughly his height, all in various states of frantic motion. They shouted in overlapping layers of growls and snarls and sharp clicking consonants that should have been noise and weren't, because somewhere underneath the sound, like a translation happening in a room adjacent to his own mind, he understood every word.
Somewhere in the crowd, a goblin with a patchy mohawk of dark hair was already shouting.
"The savior comes."
"He wakes, he wakes."
A smaller one near the back, missing half its left ear, cupped its hands around its mouth.
"I told you. I told everyone. I said the clay was ready and nobody believed me."
The mohawk goblin spun toward it.
"My spit. I put my spit on the clay three days ago. That is why he is here. My spit did this."
"It was not your spit," said the one missing the ear.
"It was my spit."
A third goblin, round and squat with a single large tooth jutting from its lower jaw, waved a dismissive hand.
"Nobody cares about your spit."
"The savior does not come from spit."
The mohawk goblin drew itself up to its full height, which was not very much taller.
"My spit is very powerful."
They understood this concept the way they understood the sky above them and the ground beneath their feet. The savior comes. Obviously. The clay always breaks eventually. They had not doubted this for a moment.
Several of them immediately began fighting each other over who got to stand closest to him.
One shoved another into a second, who toppled into a third, who sat down hard in the dirt and started shouting at a volume that suggested genuine betrayal. A fourth scrambled directly over the shouting one and planted herself six inches from Matthew's face, beaming with an enthusiasm that showed all of her teeth, which were numerous and pointed.
"Savior," she announced. "You are here."
Matthew looked at her. Then at his hands. Then at the thirty goblins currently pressing in from every direction.
He nodded.
This was apparently the correct response. The room got louder.
Someone poked him in the back of the head.
He turned around. There was no one behind him. When he turned back, two goblins were already placing things at his feet with the focused solemnity of very small diplomats: a piece of dried fruit that had seen better days, a stone with a hole through the middle, and what appeared to be a fistful of somebody else's hair.
And something wrapped in a large leaf.
He unwrapped it.
It was poop.
He looked up. The goblin who had placed it stood with its chest out and its chin up, snickering through its nose, the expression of someone who had just given a very good gift and knew it.
Offerings. They were giving him offerings.
"Thank you," Matthew said carefully.
This was interpreted as encouragement. Three more goblins immediately ran off to find additional things to contribute.
He was poked again, this time in the ribs. When he turned there was a goblin slightly shorter than him standing very close, pressing two fingers into his forearm with the focused seriousness of someone conducting an important test. It poked. Then poked again. Then looked up at him, apparently satisfied, and retreated with elaborate innocence, eyes pointed at the ceiling, whistling something that did not resemble a tune.
Something pulsed in his mind.
He almost missed it under everything else. It was deep, in a place that hadn't existed an hour ago, sitting the way a word sits on the tip of your tongue. He turned his attention inward, not sure what he was looking for, just following the feeling the way you follow a sound in a dark room.
It was flat and rectangular and translucent, the way ice is translucent when it is very thin. The edges were slightly unformed, like something still deciding what shape it wanted to be. A tablet, or something shaped like one, which was the closest his brain could get to naming it, and even that felt wrong. Tablets didn't pulse. Tablets didn't sit in the middle of your mind and wait.
This one did both.
It pulsed again, slow and rhythmic, and he noticed the energy moving into it. Not fast, not dramatically, just steadily. Thin threads of energy ran from the goblins around him directly into the tablet, each one fraying at the edges, leaking more than it carried, the connections loose and unrefined. But there were many of them, and together they added up to something.
He watched the outline fill, just barely, just at the corners. Like a loading bar. Like a progress indicator on something he never asked for.
Illusory still. But more solid than it had been seconds ago.
Compensation, some part of him thought. For the car accident. For the crib he'd never finished assembling. For all of it. He wasn't sure whether to feel grateful.
This better be worth it.
He had no idea what would happen when it was full. He filed that under problems for future Matthew and returned his attention to the immediate situation.
He tried to address the group at large. They were still reeling, some of them spinning in small circles repeating the savior is here the savior is here to no one in particular, two of them having an argument about whose spot he was standing on, and one of them getting slapped hard on the back of the head mid-sentence and spinning around to find absolutely nobody behind them, which produced a fresh round of accusations. Matthew raised his voice.
"Friends," he said.
It came out as a growl. A short, clicking, guttural thing that should not have meant anything and apparently meant friends. He touched his own throat, momentarily distracted. Whatever mouth he was using now, it was not built for the words he was trying to say. It was built for this, for snarls and clicks and sounds that lived lower than language, and somewhere in that gap his meaning was crossing over anyway.
He pressed on.
"I need to understand where I am."
Fifteen goblins answered simultaneously. The information they provided included three competing theories about the nature of his arrival, a description of what one of them had eaten for breakfast, a very strong opinion about the poop offering, and directions that amounted to here, but louder.
He tried simpler.
"Where are we?"
"Here," said the goblin on his back helpfully.
Matthew looked at the ceiling. Somewhere behind his eyes, a headache was forming.
...
In the monitoring room, an apprentice wizard was explaining what she had seen to the others who were having difficulty believing it.
"There was a commotion in the theology chamber, Sir Charon," she said, for the third time. "We saw it in the observation array. The clay statue, it isn't there anymore. There's a goblin where it was standing."
Charon stared at her. "What do you mean it isn't there."
"I mean it isn't there. The statue is gone and there's a goblin in its place." A pause. "We didn't see it happen. Just before and after."
Charon stood at the observation array with the expression of a man trying to determine whether this was the kind of crisis that required escalation or the kind that would resolve itself if he waited long enough. The instruments had not calmed down. Three different readings were still spiking, including one that measured ambient mana deviation and had, four minutes earlier, climbed beyond the range the panel was designed to display.
The indicator had simply become a dash.
A dash, where a number was supposed to be.
Nobody spoke. The researchers stared at the array, waiting for the values to return, for the system to correct itself and reveal whatever error had caused it.
It did not.
"Activate retrospective vision," Charon said.
The apprentice wizard placed both hands on the array immediately. The crystals along its frame ignited one after another, and the scene began to reverse, goblins stepping away, the empty space returning, the statue reforming piece by piece until the clay figure stood exactly as it had before.
The rewind slowed at the point where the anomalous readings had begun. Then it resumed at normal speed.
The clay statue began to change.
It did not break or crack. The outer layer separated from itself, sliding away like something underneath was shedding a shell. A shape emerged from inside, not carved, not constructed, but already there. The clay fell away in chunks.
And a goblin fell to the ground.
Charon looked at the schedule crystal mounted beside the main console. Senior Wizard Nestor was scheduled to depart for Frontier-88 in less than an hour. If he waited for him to arrive naturally, they would lose time they didn't have.
He looked back at the observation array. Thirty-two goblins now, where thirty-one had been.
"Activate the interplanar communications array," he said.
Several heads turned toward him.
"Yes, sir."
Moments later, rings of silver-inlaid magic array ignited across the communications chamber floor, forming a nested array that could carry a message between planes. The spell was expensive, temperamental, and normally reserved for matters important enough to justify explaining the expense afterward.
Charon felt this qualified.
The final circle flared. A translucent projection formed above the array, blurry at the edges. After several seconds of distortion, a familiar figure appeared, visibly irritated at being contacted.
"Charon," Nestor said. "This had better be important."
Charon looked at the observation array one more time. "The theology chamber." He paused. "It produced a goblin."
The silence on the other end lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
"I'll see it myself when I arrive, leave it where it is," Nestor said. "Record everything. Anything related to that goblin, I want it all. And Charon, I want a comprehensive report on my desk before I arrive. Everything leading to this. Every anomaly, every reading, every behavioral change in that chamber going back to the beginning. Nothing summarized."
"Understood, Director."
The call ended.
Charon looked at the energy crystal mounted beside the array. The reserves had dropped by a third from a single transmission. He looked back at the observation array, at thirty-two goblins where thirty-one had been.
Worth it, he decided. Probably.
...
Nestor had been thinking about the goblins for years.
Two years of it had been invisible. After the unmapped plane, after the casualties, after the failed spatial anchors and the colleagues who hadn't made it back, there had been reports to file and questions to answer and a version of events that needed to be established before anyone started asking the wrong ones. The goblins had sat in stasis the entire time, preserved, contained, untouched, while he buried the expedition under paperwork and waited for the scrutiny to pass.
It did, eventually. These things always did.
Then the real work began. Three years of experiments since he'd brought them out of stasis. Three years of pushing every angle he could find, testing every theory his researchers proposed and several they hadn't thought to. The results had been inconsistent at best, maddening at worst, effects that appeared and then refused to repeat, anomalies that dissolved the moment he tried to isolate them. Something was there. He was certain of it. He just hadn't found the way in yet.
And he needed to. Badly.
He was a second-rank wizard, which was where senior wizardry began, and advancement beyond it came down to one thing: how much mana the body could hold. Saturate past the next threshold and the promotion followed naturally. No committee decided it. No test confirmed it. The body either held enough or it didn't.
His chosen field was mind magic. Pushing its boundaries, developing new spells, refining old ones, forced him to handle larger and more complex concentrations of mana. Every new working was practice. Every refinement was accumulation.
His accumulation had plateaued.
He had reviewed his methodology seventeen times. He had consulted texts he hadn't opened since his first rank advancement. He had eliminated every variable he could identify, and the threshold was still sitting exactly where it had been, just out of reach, in the specific and infuriating way of things that should be achievable and weren't.
The goblins were supposed to change that. Something moved through them that didn't follow any rule he knew, and he intended to understand it. He just hadn't figured out how to reach it.
The theology experiment, at least, had been showing something.
It had started as a suggestion from one of the apprentice wizards, a junior researcher who had noticed the goblins' clustering behavior and proposed, somewhat hesitantly, that introducing religious structure might produce measurable cohesion responses. Nestor had approved it more out of exhaustion with the other dead ends than genuine expectation. They had cast sustained illusion spells to shape what the goblins saw, and layered hypnotic compulsion spells beneath that to guide what they felt about it, seeding the concepts carefully: a savior, a promised deliverance, the shape of belief given just enough structure to take root.
The goblins had done the rest themselves.
A year and a half in and the theology chamber was producing more unexplained phenomena than all the other research lines combined. The difficulty was that the instruments couldn't explain any of it. Every reading came back at zero. No mana output. No detectable energy signature. No measurable force of any kind and yet the phenomena kept happening. Things that shouldn't have been possible without something powering them, occurring in a chamber where every sensor insisted nothing was there.
That was what kept his attention. Not the phenomena themselves, but the zero. A zero that produced results was not a zero. It was something the instruments had no language for.
A single goblin pulled from the group for individual testing produced nothing on any scale, expected or otherwise. Put them back together and the unexplained phenomena returned immediately. Whatever was operating here, he was not certain. Most of the data pointed toward something collective, but in other experiments one goblin complicated that. One individual, isolated, producing results that had no business existing. He did not have a clean explanation that covered both.
Both approaches had produced results. Neither had produced consistent ones. Isolation occasionally showed something. Grouping occasionally showed more. But nothing held across repeated testing, and he had no framework yet that accounted for all of it.
The statue had been the latest development. The goblins had built it on their own, from materials left in the chamber, and had been maintaining it with a consistency that bordered on ritual. The readings around it showed nothing. No energy signature, no detectable output, nothing that distinguished it from any other object in the room.
Until now.
Whatever had just happened to that clay figure was not something he had predicted.
But it was exactly the kind of thing he had been waiting for.
He began composing the transit arrangements in his head before he had finished closing his notes. Whatever Charon had seen in that chamber, he was not going to understand it from a projection across planes.
He needed to see it directly.
ns216.73.216.254da2
and then Add to home screen.