Chapter 07 Water Seeping Through the Walls

The dawn did not arrive with light, but with sound.

A slow, steady patter-patter-thrum on the stone sealing us in. Rain. A heavy, soaking rain that drummed a hollow, mournful lullaby on our tomb’s lid.

We woke to it, cold and stiff. It was Muddy who noticed first. His sleepy eyes swept the pile of sleeping goblins, then scrambled up, patting the empty moss where the hatchlings had been.

“Gobby friends! Wake! Wake! The little ones! They gone! They gone! We need to look!”

 We scuffled to our feet, hearts hammering. The burrow was small. Our search lasted three seconds.

Our eyes found them.

They were a piled, pudgy lump inside the hollow log that had been our worm farm. Six round little bodies, pressed together for warmth, their bellies swollen into perfect, taut domes. The log around them was empty. It was clean. Licked clean. Every grub, every worm, every wriggling bit of future protein was gone. 

We stared. No one made a sound. The only noise was the relentless rain and the soft, whistling snores from the log.

Our hands began to tremble. Not with anger. But with a hollow understanding. That was it. The last of our food was gone. The strength we were going to need to run. The tiny buffer between us and the end. Gone. Not lost to monsters or humans, but vanished into the blind, hungry bellies of the very future we were trying to save.

Gently, we extracted the sleeping hatchlings from their grimy cradle. They were heavy, limp, and smelled. We laid them in a small pile on the last of the soft moss, their full bellies rising and falling in peaceful snores.

“That,” Grub said, his eyes on the hollow, worthless log, “was our last morsel. Our final crumb. The little ones… ate it all at once. We have nothing to eat. Nothing to feed them when they wake, screaming with hunger again. Nothing for us.”

He gestured a heavy hand toward the ceiling, toward the sound of the rain. 

“Water from the sky falls strong. No human young will come today. Not with water falling this hard. Storms like these, in these lands… they last weeks. Maybe more.”

Trog scrambled to the hollow log, shoved his arm inside up to the shoulder, and frantically scraped his claws along the bottom. He brought his fingers to his mouth, licking them desperately.

 "Maybe… maybe little bits left? In the cracks? Juice? We can lick the juice!"

He began to lick the interior of the log, his tongue rasping against the sour, empty wood.

Muddy, watching him, burst into tears. But his tears sparked an idea. He pointed a trembling finger at the cracks where the rain seeped in, creating tiny, muddy drips down the wall. 

"Water! We have water! We can… we can drink the wall! If we drink enough, our bellies will feel full! It’s a trick! A good trick!" 

He lunged for the wall, pressing his open mouth against the slow seep, sucking at the cold, gritty trickle.

Snag started patting down his own body.

 "We have… we have scraps. Leather ties. Moss from the nest. Our loincloth. We can chew it. Long chewing makes it like food. It’s something to put in the mouth." 

He began pulling at the filthy edge of his own loincloth, ready to start shredding it.

Grill didn't speak. He looked at the sleeping, bloated hatchlings, then at our desperate faces. He walked over to the entrance wall, put his back against it, and slowly slid down to sit. He just stared at the opposite wall, as if he could disappear into it through sheer will.

Grub watched our pathetic, scrabbling panic with eyes that had seen too much. 

"The water. Yes! Water! We drink!" Muddy said, pointing.

Grub didn't look at him. He looked at the tiny, growing puddle at the base of the wall where the mud-drip landed. He looked at the other seeping cracks, a dozen little runnels in the dirt.

"Water trickling inside is good. For drinking. Yes." Grub paused, "But we are in a hole in the ground. A bowl. The sky is emptying its belly onto our bowl."

He knelt and pressed his palm flat against the floor near the entrance. It came away damp, not from the direct drip, but from the moisture seeping up through the packed earth.

 "Ground is drinking. But ground will get full. Water has nowhere to go but here. With us. If the water from the sky does not stop for a few days… this burrow will fill. Like a cup under a drip-drip-drip."

The image was simple. Horrifyingly simple. We weren't warriors. We weren't strategists. But we all knew what happened to a bug in a cup when you filled it with water.

"We will not starve waiting for humans," Grub said, "We will get drowned. In our own home."

I stumbled to my feet, pointing a trembling claw at the pile of sleeping hatchlings.

"No! We can't give up! Not now! Not when they hatched! We need to save them! At least them!"

The others looked at me, their eyes dull. I grabbed a loose rock from the floor, a little bigger than my fist. I ran to the wall opposite the entrance, to a spot where the stone seemed thinnest, just a layer of crumbling shale over hard-packed dirt.

"A hole! A small hole! That's all we need! A hole big enough for a hatchling to go through!"

 I swung the rock, smashing it against the wall. A dull thunk. A few flakes of shale pattered down.

 "We bang rock on rock! Maybe it cracks! We push a small one outside! Into the grass! Maybe it survives! A better chance than in here with us!"

I swung again, grunting with the effort. Thunk. More flakes. A tiny dent. I was a mouse trying to gnaw through a mountain.

Hands closed over my wrists, stopping my next swing. It was Grub. He didn't wrench the rock away. He just held me until I went limp. He took the rock from my numb fingers and let it drop to the wet floor.

"Hermit. Save your strength."

 He pointed at the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

 "Look. This place… we chose it because it was hard. Hard for monsters to dig. Hard stone. Good for hiding. That rock? That is the soft bit. The rest? That is the real wall. You could bang for a week. You would break your arms. You would not make a hole for a bug. There is nothing our hands can do to the stone. Not to get out. Not to make air. We are in a stone fist, and the sky is crying into it."

He sank down to sit against the wall, pulling me down gently beside him. He looked at the sleeping hatchlings.

"All we can do now is pray to the forest spirits. The old ones. Creator of all things. The ones who remember when goblins were more than prey. We pray that the rain stops. That the sky gets tired of crying before this cave fills with water."

He leaned his head back, closing his eyes against the relentless drip-drip-drip that was now the loudest sound in our world.

 "We pray. And we wait. And we try to be… not afraid. For them. So their last memories are not of our screaming. But listen, Hermit. I do not say we give up. The best thing we can do now… is be still. Less we move, less energy we spend, longer we live. Energy is food we do not have. If we panic… if we run in circles, bang on walls, scream at the sky… we will only burn the last bits inside us. We will starve faster. And that,” he said, looking at the hatchlings, “will not help them. A hungry, screaming gobby is no comfort to a hatchling.”

He leaned his head back against the stone.

 “So we rest. We sit. We sleep, if sleep will come. We make our bodies quiet. We make our hearts slow. We be… like the rocks. Waiting. Maybe rain stops. Maybe the water finds a crack we cannot see and goes away. Maybe… maybe nothing. But panicking changes nothing now. Only uses up what little is left.”

There were no more plans to debate. No more stupid ideas to try. One by one, the others understood. The frantic energy seeped out of us, replaced by despair. Snag carefully put his cloth scrap down. Trog curled into a ball. Muddy slid down the wall to sit in the growing puddle, too tired to care.

The fight left my body—I gave up.

Grub was right. There was nothing I could do. I wasn't a hero in a story. I was Hermit. A pathetic, ugly, stinking goblin who couldn't save his first family, couldn't find his way home, and now couldn't even bang a hole in a wall for six sleeping babies. 

For the rest of that endless, dripping day, we just lay on the cold, slowly dampening floor. The panic had burned away, leaving a strange, hollow calm. In that calm, with the drumming rain as our only audience, I found my voice. Not to plan, but to confess.

And I told them. I told them everything I had carried like a corpse on my back.

I told them about stumbling upon the evil goblin caravan—not monsters, but goblins twisted by greed. How they saw my weakness and put me to work. How I helped them build their breeding farm, stacking stones for pens that would cage my own kind, because I was too broken to say no.

Then I told them about Lyn.

Her name felt strange and beautiful in our foul, damp cave. I described the cat-girl, not as a monster or a slave-driver, but as she was: Strong, beautiful, secretly kind. How she’d told me she loves me. How her laugh sounded like pebbles skipping on water. My first love. The impossible future we’d dreamed of in whispers. I told them about the Cat Boss, her father. And I told them about the disaster. How I’d tried to save them, how I’d failed, how I’d run with nothing but the smoke of my life choking my lungs. How I lost everything in one day. My love. My children. My place. I thought that was the end of the story. 

No one spoke. Not because they had nothing to say, but because the sorrow was too dense for words. It was a physical thing in the air, heavier than the water seeping through the walls. They didn't offer pity. They didn't say it would be alright. They just listened.