The Goblin's Heir

Chapter One: Anniversary

The Hollow's forest was quiet and still. The only sound to be heard was my own voice as I spoke to my dead child. I sat in a small clearing in the ash-rich soil where we'd spread Magni's ashes almost twenty years prior. As I did at every visit, I told him about all my worries and doubts, and every instance of joy as well. I told him about the things his brothers were up to, about goblins his father had made, and jokes he had told me. I laughed at them and listened to my lonesome chuckle drift away into a distant echo among the markers of the dead kings' graves. Those young saplings that made up the forest around me would one day hold worlds amid their branches, growing from roots fed by the ashes and blood of their sons. Of my sons.

"Frit didn't walk right for a month after that." I chuckled, finishing off a particularly funny tale involving Frit and an attempt to climb up to the top of my statue that still stood at the entrance to the goblin city. An attempt that ended with him spending several days under the care of Seelie healers nursing a broken tailbone and equally shattered ego. I tried to imagine what Magni's laugh would've sounded like, but I drew a blank. I'd only ever heard him gasp for breath. 

"Matilda?" A warm hand touched my shoulder and I turned my head towards where Cerise stood above me. She wore a simple mustard yellow dress with a crisp white apron. She turned her head, her brown hair falling over her shoulder and smiled with a gentle pity in her eyes. They were always looking at me like that...she and my children, even Knut. I hated it. I hated it more than I ever let them know. "It's getting late. We should return to the palace. Dinner will be ready soon."

"Has the day really come and gone that soon?" I laughed bitterly, petting the ground beside me like I was wiping dirt from my child's face. I tried, but I couldn't hide my clear disappointment. "Where is Knut? He was supposed to meet me here today."

Her eyes shifted away from me because she couldn't stand to look me in the eye when she told me something unpleasant. "He's still in the throne room making goblins."

"Of course he is." I shoved myself to my feet and brushed myself off, feeling my blood turn to liquid fire. "That's what he's always bloody doing. And the children?"

She wrung her fingers at her waist. "Cat was reading in the study. I passed Floki at the forge. Odd is returning from his hunting trip and Frit...well...I'm not sure where he is currently."  She looked up at me and I'm not sure what she saw in my face, but it made her feel the need to protect them. "I'm sure they just forgot it was today."

"Like they did last year and the year before that and the year before that?" I stalked away from Magni's grave, my feet sinking into the loose ashes. "Do not make excuses for them, Cerise. It's not exactly a date that's easy to forget." Years ago, we would've been celebrating The Upheaval, feasting, and dancing, listening to The Storyteller tell the epic story of how I'd overthrown Queen Mab and taken the Unseelie court for my own. Now, it marked a very different moment in my life. The day I was betrayed, kidnapped, enslaved. The day my youngest son was born and died. "They haven't forgotten. They simply don't care." I croaked, feeling an ache bloom down my throat. 

"That isn't true and you know it." She defended lamely. 

We made our way up out of the tunnels and out onto the golden streets of the Goblin City. It was crowded with people, faeries of both old courts, goblins, and humans. There were many more souls within our once small kingdom. With each passing day, we expanded the city further into the tunnels, building a new city atop the old, The people that had fled here decades ago had made new lives for themselves. Married. Had children. The streets that had once been filled with garbled goblin chatter, were alive with voices from every corner of the empire and every walk of life. I was proud of it, of what Knut and I had forged together, even if I could no longer stomach being among a crowd. Another reason why I rarely left the palace these days.