Finua

Chapter 1: Sh'raitha

Here's what it's like being a fucking goblin:

You work in a mine. It's a goblin mine, separated from your measly goblin village by a formidable goblin mountain range. The trip one way would be about half a week's trek but for the community goblin warp portal station, which is simple in operation but can cut you in half if it flickers at exactly the wrong goblin moment. Everything is goblin themed, which means it's old and swollen from moisture and covered in shit. But also, like, somehow everything still kind of works. Except for when the warp portal station flickers and cuts you in half, which it almost did to me today.

The portal is magical, and as a goblin, you also have the capacity to do magic, but to cast a spell you need a talisman, and talismans are expensive, and you also have to know how to charm it, which you don't, because magic is also really fucking difficult, and if you knew how to do magic you wouldn't be working in an evil fucking mining town where your main job responsibility is digging holes to make room for more equipment for digging more holes, which is my job (plus mugging waylaid dwarves), and which has been my job ever since I was a fucking goblin child.

Okay explaining all of this is making me much more pissed off than I thought it would. And I'm pissed off at you, by the way, dear reader. Because you're human.

Whoops, looks like I fuckin assumed your species. And this is why I'm pissed off at you and will destroy you all. Like, actual genocide.

Anyway, all of these problems are caused by the human High Queen, in combat against whom my father died when I was very young, in a great siege against her kingdom in the north. My mother, who also fought (everyone fought), went missing in action: for all I knew, she could have returned to Sh'raitha years later and we may very well be mutually oblivious neighbors. The First Siege was an utterly disgraceful failure. Hopefully the Second Siege will turn out better.

The High Queen doesn't care about Sh'raitha Mines, unless some noble goes missing in them, which I admit is more often than it would be if we didn't actively grab and pull them down. The High Queen is a beautiful, compassionate, and morally steadfast piece of shit and she rules the world with an open fist, sometimes referred to as a "hand." If the Second Siege doesn't turn out better than the First Siege, then just like the First killed my parents, the Second will kill me, because what else am I going to do, hack and slash my way through Castle Berahd and formally debate the Queen on whatever the technical term is for the opposite of ethics and all of the exciting opportunities that accompany an age of darkness while my teammates, many of whom are completely illiterate, sit by and take notes? Maybe if I could do magic, I'd have a chance. But I don't. I already said that.

Instead I'm a miner, trapped in Sh'raitha forever, and the High Queen couldn't care less. I would spend my entire life digging into the mountainside with a pickaxe I stole (because someone stole mine), saving up for decades to buy a magical talisman, and a week before I am able to purchase one the mines would get raided by some righteous fucking heroes and I would get my head chopped off during a comic relief sidekick's moment of glory. Then the High Queen would say "good on you, heroes, for braving the necessary consequences of setting foot in the blue-collar part of town." That is, she would if she had a domain small enough to actually notice the activities of her citizens. But no, she has to try and rule the whole goddamn world. She doesn't catch whiff of a quest until the night before the final showdown when the giant evil army is visible through her bedroom windows. Good news for us at least: it's like playing chess with someone who has been fooled into believing the game is cooperative.

Humans are always insisting on questing. Little bands of them emerged from farming towns every so often, trekking across the countryside out of the territory of the High Queen's influence and into ours, looking for something to steal or some governing body to topple. Because they're so naïve, they usually insist on having an elf or two on their team, elves being about as street-smart as you can get while still insisting on a ten-step skincare routine even when you're camping in the mountains, and apparently having no fingerprints (not really relevant, just a fun rumor); if not elves, there's never any shortage of somber human wannabes who listened to a bunch of elven music growing up and who provide that same mystical assurance to their team of suburbanites poking their heads through the gates of Sh'raitha only to be so fucking surprised that they run into goblins in the middle of the place where all the goblins live... kind of like how they embark on an epic adventure in the first place and still manage to feel dismayed whenever something unexpected happens, because if they were honest with themselves they'd realize that what they were truly looking for was a good gym.