Chapter 12 Pile of Broken Bodies Moving Forward

The sun climbed, a blazing, merciless coin in a clear blue sky. To humans, it would have been punishing. To us, cold-blooded and broken, its heat was a faint, creeping blessing. It seeped into our bruised flesh, slowly warming the deep, shock-induced cold that had settled in our bones.

For hours, we just lay there. Flies found us, buzzing around the dried blood and worse. We didn't have the strength to swat them away.

The first movement was mine. The rope around my neck had loosened slightly, soaked with blood and sweat. With agonizing slowness, I managed to twist my head, to work a claw under the coarse fiber. Every movement sent fire through my groin and up my spine. Finally, with a gasp, I slipped the noose over my head and let the hateful thing fall into the grass.

The relief of being unchoked was a small miracle. I could breathe a little deeper, even if each breath was a knife in my side.

 I reached Grill first, his face was brutally swollen. My trembling, broken-nailed fingers fumbled with his knot. He helped as much as he could, a faint wheezing guiding my efforts. When his rope came free, he let out a long, shuddering sigh.

One by one, I moved among the wreckage of my family. Snag. Fort. Grub. Trog. Finally, Muddy, who had been flung like a sack. He was alive, but his breathing was a wet, troubling rasp. Each rope removed felt like unshackling a part of my own soul.

When the last noose was tossed aside, we didn't celebrate. We didn't speak. We simply, weakly, crawled toward each other. We formed a pile there in the bloody grass, under the hot sun. A heap of broken green limbs and weeping wounds. We pressed together, forehead to forehead, arm over shattered side, seeking the only comfort left: the physical proof that we were not alone.

Then the sounds came. Not cries of pain, but the deep, guttural sounds of pure sorrow. A low, collective weeping. It wasn't loud. We had no strength for wails. It was a hushed, rhythmic thing, punctuated by hitched breaths and shuddering tremors. We wept for the hatchlings, whose tiny, crushed remains were scattered like tragic garbage. We wept for the violation, the humiliation, the loss of everything soft and hopeful.

Trog, his head lolling from what was surely a concussion, was the first. He was crying for the broken thing in front of him. 

"The... the little one," he slurred, staring at a spot of bloody grass.

 "The one who... who laughed at the tumble. It... it went splat. Like a berry. A sad berry."

Muddy, his breathing a wet rasp, let out a choked sob. 

"They were so small. Just wanted... wanted a song. They… they used them as… as sticks… to hit each other with… they was laughing… my hatchlings at the farm… they cried like that too… when the monsters came… Why… why was we so happy in the dark? With the eggs? Why did we get happy? It just… it just made the hurting bigger…"

Snag broke down over the details of the beating. 

"The bruises. They come up so fast. Like... like dark fruit under the skin. My skin grew bad fruit. My hands… my good hands for turning eggs… they broke them… the big one with the stone… crack… on the fingers… I felt it go… I can’t… I can’t make a nest no more…"

 "The ropes," Fort mumbled, "They itched. While they beat us. The rope itched and the hitting hurt and I couldn't decide which was worse. And then… the kicking… there was a sound… like… like snapping a wet stem… They looked at me… when you held them out… they just… looked… My ears still hear the hitting… thump-thump-thump… on the… on the little ones on the rock… the splash sound."

Grill cried silently, but his body shook with the force of it. He was remembering the hatchlings held aloft, pressed to the ceiling. 

"We held them up. We held them up so high... so they wouldn't drown. And then... and then they..." He couldn't finish.

My own weeping was a soundless, shuddering thing. I saw it all in flashes: the kick scattering them like rubbish, the awful crunch, the playful, brutal way they were destroyed. My mind, addled by pain and loss, couldn't handle the sorrow. 

"Baby-gobbies... all gone in blood puddle... rock went sploosh... all gone... Boot. Boot come down. On... on our egg sacks... everything burst. Inside-pain. Can't... can't ever be gobby-dada now. They took it. They took the future-making. World too hard... too much boot and spear and hate... why we so soft inside? Why we not hard like them? Just wanted a warm rock... and some wrigglies... and quiet. Just quiet. Now only quiet is... is hatchlings. Don't like this quiet. All broken. Inside and outside. All just... broken."

We wept until we were empty of tears, leaving only the dry, hollow ache.

As the weeping subsided into exhausted silence, a single, unavoidable thought pressed in on us.

"What do we do now?"

Grill’s voice was the first, a cracked whisper against my ear.

 “The plan… is the same. The stinking swamp. Muddy said… it is possible. To survive there. We must try... or we just die for nothing here. We can still hope... We can still move... We can still heal. But if we stay here... we will die.”

We all looked at the distant, hazy line on the horizon. A healthy goblin could reach it in a day or two. But we were not healthy. We were a collection of fractures, internal bleeding, concussion, and soul-deep trauma.

“It will be hard, but we must try.” I spoke.

No one disagreed. There were no brave speeches. No promises we couldn't keep.

There was only the sun, the distant swamp, and the pile of broken bodies that had to find a way to move toward it.

Getting up was the first war.

We could barely stand, leaning into each other like a structure of rotten timber. Grunt by grunt, whimper by whimper, we wobbled forward. Snag and I supported Muddy between us, his feet dragging. Grill had an arm around Fort, whose head lolled. Trog, the least broken, staggered alongside. 

"Swamp," Grub said, "Muddy leads. Knows the way."

Muddy pointed a trembling finger toward the shimmering, stinking line on the horizon.

 "There. Where the birds circle lazy. Smell… comes from there."

We shuffled for hours. We listed. We fell. A hidden dip in the ground, a tussock of grass, anything was enough to send us crashing down in a groaning heap. Getting up again took minutes of shared, painful struggle.

But the plains were alive with tiny, ignorant life. As we lay in the grass after one fall, a fat, slow beetle crawled across Snag’s arm. His hand, trembling with the effort, closed over it. He didn't crush it. He brought it to his mouth with a reverence that was terrible to see.

He put it on his tongue. He closed his eyes. He began to chew.

He was savoring. Savoring the crunch of the carapace, the faint, nutty bitterness of the insect's innards. It was the first solid thing to pass his lips in days besides water and his own blood. He chewed until it was paste, until every possible nutrient was extracted in his mind, before he finally swallowed with a painful gulp.

It became our ritual. Every time we fell, before we summoned the strength to rise, we would scan the grass, the dirt beneath us. A crawling ant. A ground beetle. A fat, stupid caterpillar. We would snatch them, stuff them into our mouths, and chew, our eyes closed, lost in the minuscule, desperate feast.

We moved like that for hours. Fall. Search. Eat a bug. Rest. Rise. Shuffle ten paces. Fall again.

The sun began its slow descent, casting long, distorted shadows of our broken bodies across the plain. The air began to change. The clean, dry scent of grass and earth began to be undercut by a new smell. A thick, wet, organic rot. The smell of the stinking swamp. It was still far, but it was closer. 

“There,” Grub grunted as he nodded towards a tumble of mossy, ancient-looking boulders. Between two of the largest stones was a deep, narrow pocket. A slit in the earth hidden from the wind and prying eyes. It wasn't a cave, but it was a hole in the ground we could disappear into.

It took the last of our collective strength to pack ourselves into that crevice. We simply huddled, sharing the faint, animal warmth that still lingered in our cores, and listened to the strange, bubbling night sounds of the wetlands. Sleep was a shallow, uneasy thing, haunted by the echoes of laughter and the memory of tiny, crushed bones, but it was sleep.

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Morning came, grey and damp. The miracle was small but profound: we could move. We were a collection of brutal bruises and searing injuries, but the edge of mortal shock had passed. We crawled from the stone pocket, standing, wobbling, but standing, on our own feet. We had survived the night. The swamp awaited.

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By the time the sun was high, the landscape had transformed. The firm plains were a memory. Now, our feet sank into black, peaty muck with every step. Strange, twisted trees with exposed, knobby roots rose from tea-colored water. Thick curtains of moss hung everywhere, and the air was a soup of humid rot and vibrant, strange life.

 Dragonflies the size of birds hummed past. The buzzing of insects was a constant, droning choir. We had reached the fringes of the stinking swamp.

We stood at the edge of this new, wet world, a ragged group of broken goblins.

“Gobby friends, we need three things,” I said, “A nook-nest, our new home. Food, to calm rumbling belly. And goblin medicine to treat our owchies. But first, we need to fill our empty belly only then we find a place to rest and be safe. Then we can smear the goblin medicine to ease the pain.”

Grub nodded, wincing as the movement pulled at the bruises covering his neck.

 “We split the work. Cover more ground. But we run if danger.”