Chapter 09 The Sound we had Prayed to Never Hear Again

A hand. A clumsy, insistent tug on my arm.

It pulled me from my sleep. The return was a slow, painful swell of sensation: the cold, hard stone beneath me, the ache in every joint, the hollow, grinding void in my stomach.

I forced my eyes open. The world was a blur of grey and brown. Above me, a shape focused into a face. Grub.

“Hermit? Gobby friend… you still with us? You still… alive?”

It took all my strength to move my tongue, to push air past my cracked lips. 

“Still… here. Still alive.”

 “Good. Good, gobby friend.”

He shifted, and a sliver of something new entered the cave—golden beam of light.

“Rain stopped,” Grub said, his eyes following the light, “Sun is up. You saved us from drowning. You gave us a chance. The big water… it cleaned the cave. Washed dirt away. Showed us new things.”

He gestured weakly with a mud-caked hand around our prison. 

“Many loose rocks now. New cracks. Small ones. We been… scraping. Poking. We might wiggle. Make a hole. Not big. But maybe… maybe big enough. We have luck on our side now, Hermit. Maybe… maybe we manage to escape after all. Hope is not lost.”

 “Hope?” I whispered, “There still… hope?”

 “Yes, gobby friend. Yes. We look more. For more cracks. Maybe we can scrape at the ceiling, where the water softened it. Make it cave in a little. Or bang on the walls, on the new cracks. We can try.”

The hope Grub spoke of was a thin, dry twig. We spent the rest of that sunlit day trying to bend it into a lever, and it snapped in our hands.

We crawled to the loose rocks I’d torn up, the ones that had revealed the lifesaving crack. We tugged. We banged them together, chipping useless flakes. Nothing gave. The crack in the floor was a drain, not a doorway.

We turned to the walls, to the new, damp cracks the floodwaters had revealed. We hammered at them with our fists, with other rocks. A few pieces, no bigger than a tooth, broke off and fell into the mud. It was meaningless. The walls were still walls.

Finally, we looked up. The ceiling, stained with water and softened in places, seemed like our last chance. We tried to scrape at it, to chip away at the dampest spots. Our efforts yielded only showers of gritty dirt that filled our eyes and mouths. Nothing caved. Nothing even shifted.

The thin, golden beam of sunlight slowly crawled across the floor, then thinned, and died as evening came. With it died that spark of stubborn luck. The darkness that returned wasn't just the absence of light; it was the return of the familiar, heavy truth. We had tried. We had failed. Our spark of hope was swallowed back by the dark.

We didn't even have the energy to slump in despair. We just fell where we stood, collapsing into the cold mud like sacks of bones. No one spoke. Speech required breath, and breath required energy, and we had none left to spare.

The fifth day arrived not with a change, but with a sound.

Click.

A small, dry sound. A pebble hitting the ground.

I opened my eyes. One of the hatchlings was sitting in a patch of weak morning light. It was a horrifying sight. It was no longer blue from cold, but a sickly, translucent grey. Its skin was wrinkled, hanging loose over a tiny frame that was pure skeleton. It looked a thousand years old.

It picked up a crumb of rock from the floor, the kind we had chipped off in our useless efforts. With a slow motion born of pure, delirious instinct, it put the pebble in its mouth.

Its whole face spasmed. A shudder of disgust wracked its frail body. It spat the rock out with a weak, dry heave.

Then, with a heartbreaking lack of memory, it stared at the rock for a moment, picked it up again, and put it back in its mouth. The same spasm. The same spit. Again. And again. As if on the tenth taste, the stone might magically transform into bread. 

My heart ache. It clenched, a physical fist of sorrow squeezing what little warmth I had left.

I didn't have the strength to stand, but I crawled. I gathered the hatchlings, all six of them, into the circle of my arms. They were so light, like bundles of dry twigs. I pulled them against my chest, wrapping my arms around their shivering, skeletal bodies, trying to cover them with what remained of my own warmth. They didn't resist. They just nestled in.

The others began to stir, roused by my movement or the new, subtle warmth in the cave as the sealed stone absorbed the sun's heat outside. They moved slowly, but there was a tiny energy in it.

Our cave was warming up. We were slowly drying out.

The fragile, terrible calm of our warming tomb was shattered by the sound we had prayed to never hear again.

Voices. Human kid voices, loud and carried on the clear, post-storm air right through the cracks in our stone.

"Erwin, it's been 5 days. That stupid storm ruined it for us. Do you really think these goblins still be there? I mean, they're goblins. I bet they dug their way out by now. Or had another tunnel."

My blood, what little was left, turned to ice. We all convulsed where we lay, a simultaneous flinch of pure terror. The hatchlings in my arms went stiff.

"Yeah, I have little hope we find them. But we have to check it anyway. Who knows, maybe we get lucky and those freaks are still there. Just imagine! We trapped them in there for so long. If they are still there, I bet they're regretting being stinky goblins by now."

A new voice, "Serves them right! Goblins deserve it! And then some! I hope you didn't lie to us, Erwin. I want to get revenge on these stinking goblins for what they did to my brother!"

Another voice, "Yeah, he's right! I tagged along just because you promised me goblins to kill. I hope you're telling the truth. I want to avenge my family too."

There was a shuffle of feet right above us. Then Erwin’s voice, "Hey, hey, listen! Five days ago, we did trap goblin freaks in their cave. I can't promise you they'll still be there. Look, I lost both of my brothers to goblins. I would not joke about something like this. Ask David! He lost his little sister to these freaks. He'll tell you I'm not lying. He was there; he helped me drop the rock on their nest!"

A moment of silence. Then David’s voice, closer, right by the entrance stone.

 "Look. Over there. That's the rock blocking the hole. They should still be trapped. Can't promise they still be there. But there's no mistake, we did see goblins in this hole. We are telling the truth."

The words were a death sentence, delivered in the casual, cruel logic of children.

Inside, we didn't scream. We didn't even whimper. We moved as one silent, shuddering goblin, scrambling, crawling, dragging ourselves and the hatchlings to the farthest, darkest corner of the cave. We pressed ourselves against the cold stone, a tangled heap of trembling green flesh and bone, trying to make ourselves smaller, to disappear into the very wall. 

While children’s voices argued above. In the dark corner, pressed together, a different conversation happened in whispers. Grub’s lips were right against my ear.

 “Hermit. Listen. We talked. While you were sleeping. About humans returning.”

My eyes, wide with fear, flicked to his in the gloom. 

“We all agreed on a plan. You, Hermit. You take the hatchlings. You run. For the swamps. Muddy says… the ground there is soft. A sucking soft. Big monsters hate it. They get stuck, sink in mud. Humans hate it too. Stinks. Bad water. But we goblins… we are light. We walk on soft mud. We like hot water. Good swimmers. We are fine with stink. Muddy lived there once. It is possible to survive there.”

My head shook weakly before he finished.

 “I can't leave gobby friends. I can’t leave you all. I can’t.”

“Shee, Hermit. Shee,” he hushed, “We all agreed. After all you told us… about the caravan, about Lyn, about the farm… about surviving. No other goblin I know could have done those things. You are smart. You are precious. You have to live. For all of us. For Kaka. For Lyn.”

 “Grub, please… I can’t lose you all. Not again. Not after I found you all. It's too much.”

He pulled back just enough to look into my eyes.

“You will not lose us.” He pressed his broad, calloused palm flat against my chest, right over my starving, hammering heart.

 “We will be here. With you. As long as you don’t forget about us… we will be with you. Forever.”

A soundless sob wracked my frame. Tears, hot and silent, cut tracks through the mud on my cheeks. 

Grub’s thumb brushed a tear away.

 “Plan is simple, Hermit. The rock moves… we all rush outside. We grab the humans. We cling. To distract. We are not warriors. We hate violence. But we will buy you moments. You will run. Run and do not look back. No matter what you hear. Run till you can’t.”

He looked at the skeletal hatchlings curled against me.

 “You have to survive. You have to at least try to save these hatchlings. Start a new life. Maybe the swamp… maybe it is the safe haven we all dreamed of. But don’t get me wrong, Hermit. We will not just drop and die. We will stall them. And when we see you are out of sight… we run too. Maybe we get away. Maybe… we meet you at the swamp. We just have to have faith.”

I couldn’t speak. My throat was sealed by grief and love. I just nodded, a small, desperate jerk of my head.

 “Good.” He turned his head, his whisper now meant for all of us. Grill, Snag, Fort, Trog, Muddy. I saw their shadows nod in the dark. They had already agreed. This was our last stand. A stampede of cowards.

“When the rock moves,” Grub whispered, “we rush. Cling to arms. Grab feet. Tug on clothes. Anything. Slow them down. You, Hermit… you run. Remember. Just run.”

We sat in the terrible, waiting silence, a coiled spring of desperation. Above, the children’s debate reached its conclusion. Scraping sounds began. The great stone sealing our tomb began to grate, to shift.

Light, cruel and bright, stabbed into our darkness.