The first order of business, Matthew decided, was names.
Not because names were the most pressing concern. The most pressing concern was that he had woken up in an unknown world inside a body that was not his, surrounded by a thirty or so goblins who believed he was their savior, and he had approximately no information about any of it. Names were not the most pressing concern.
But they were somewhere to start.
"I am Matthew," he said, in the growling clicking language that lived in his throat now like it had always been there. He pointed at himself. "Matthew."
The goblins stared at him.
"Matthew," he said again.
"Matu," said the goblin with the patchy mohawk, nodding with great authority.
"Matthew."
"Matu," the mohawk goblin confirmed, apparently considering the matter settled.
Matthew opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked at the other goblins, hoping for a dissenting opinion. None came. The goblin missing half its left ear was already repeating Matu under its breath like it was committing scripture to memory.
"Fine," said Matthew. "Matu."
This was received with enthusiasm disproportionate to what had just happened.
He pressed on. He pointed at the mohawk goblin, which had been one of the most animated among them minutes ago. It stood straighter now, chest out, the energy gone, back to something more guarded and serious.
"What is your name?"
"Grak," it said.
Short. Confident. The name of someone who had never once doubted themselves.
Matthew pointed at the one missing the ear.
It blinked at him with large, slightly unfocused eyes and said, after a pause that suggested genuine deliberation, "Pip."
Matthew looked at the thirty or so goblins assembled in various states of attention around him and made a pragmatic decision. He asked their names anyway, going around the group one by one, already certain he was going to forget half of them before he finished. They gave their names the way they gave everything, with complete conviction, some of them twice, a few of them loudly enough that the ones next to them flinched. Grak. Pip. Wren. Names that landed and stuck. Others that were gone the moment the next one arrived. He caught Foss, something that sounded like Kern, possibly Mog. He had a feeling Pip and Grak were going to be more than enough for the immediate future.
Matthew took in his surroundings properly for the first time.
In every direction there was trees, dense and green, stretching away into a forest that had depth and shadow and the particular stillness of somewhere very large. Morning light came from above the way morning light does, diffuse and directionless, filtering through what looked like open sky. The ground under his feet was packed earth. The sleeping areas along one side were low structures of piled cloth and material that had once been other things. The central open space where the goblins congregated felt like a clearing.
He started walking toward a tree further out, something about it pulling his attention in a way he could not immediately name. The goblins followed immediately, all of them, in a loose and enthusiastic procession that suggested the savior walking somewhere was an event worth attending. He kept walking. The packed earth continued under his feet, the forest continued in front of him, and then his hand came up against something that was not there.
He stopped. Pressed both palms flat against the invisible surface. Solid. Smooth in a way that the bark of those trees would not have been.
He turned and walked in the opposite direction. The goblins reversed course without complaint. He walked until he hit the same nothing on the other side, then turned again, mapping the shape of it, a large enclosed space dressed up as open wilderness in every direction he looked, sky above and forest ahead and packed earth below and nothing actually going anywhere at all.
Matthew looked at Grak.
"What is that?"
Grak crossed its arms. "The endless wild," it said, with the gravity of something that had been called the endless wild for as long as anyone could remember and was not interested in alternate interpretations.
"Can you go through it?"
Grak gave him the look of someone being asked whether water was wet. "No."
"Has anyone tried?"
Every goblin in the vicinity went slightly quiet. Then Pip said, carefully, "Fron tried."
"What happened to Fron?"
Pip looked at the ground. Several other goblins looked at the ground. Grak looked up at the sky, which was a different direction but conveyed the same thing.
"Fron hit the wall," Pip said. "And kept hitting it. For a long time." A pause. "Then the demons came and Fron was one of the ones they took."
"Fron was not the only one who tried," said a goblin near the back, quietly. "Brek tried. Silla tried. Mott tried twice." Another pause, shorter. "They were all taken. Not all at once. But after."
Nobody said whether the trying and the taking were connected. Nobody said they weren't.
"Only the demons pass through the wild," Grak said, after a moment. Matter of fact. The way you state something that has been true for so long it stopped being frightening and became just another condition of the world. "They come from it. They take. They go back."
Matthew looked at the trees.
"What do the demons look like?"
Grak described them. Tall. Soft-skinned. Wrong-colored, pale or brown or somewhere in between, none of the right greens. No markings. Eyes that looked at you like you were not quite there.
Matthew said nothing for a moment.
"And they come through the wild," he said.
"Yes," said Grak.
"And go back through it."
"Yes."
Matthew looked back at the invisible wall his hands had found and did not share what he was thinking. He turned back to the goblins and filed it for later.
The day developed its own rhythm quickly, which was to say it had no rhythm at all and somehow repeated itself anyway.
He was poked at intervals he could not predict. He had begun to suspect that Grak was coordinating this, not because he had caught Grak doing it, but because Grak always appeared to be looking somewhere else at the exact moment it happened, which was a level of strategic misdirection he would not have predicted and was developing a reluctant respect for.
He was offered food. Most of it was edible in the technical sense that it would sustain life, which was the most charitable thing he could say about it. Something fibrous and grey that tasted of earth. A small purple fruit that was actually fine and which six goblins tried to take back from him immediately after giving it, apparently not having fully committed to the gesture before making it.
He ate carefully and thanked each goblin individually, which they found enormously meaningful and which cost him nothing except time.
Between the offerings and the poking and Pip appearing at random intervals to press two fingers into his arm and then retreat, apparently still confirming he was real, Matthew was trying to map what the goblins knew.
He did it carefully, the way you ask someone a question without letting them know you are asking. He would say something and watch what it produced.
He asked about food. Grak told him it appeared at the same time each day, materializing at a specific spot where the trees thinned slightly, as if the wilderness itself left it there. No one brought it. It was simply there in the morning. Matthew noted the location and said nothing about what he thought that meant.
He asked what happened when the food was not enough. Grak shrugged in the way of someone who had solved this problem long ago and moved on. Before he could press further a small goblin near the back of the group, round-faced and large-eyed with an expression of permanent mild contentment, crouched down and pulled up a fistful of grass from the ground. She ate it thoughtfully.
"Is that good?" Matthew asked.
She looked up at him. "Think it is delicious," she said, with complete sincerity. "Then it is."
He stared at her.
"What is your name again?"
"Niblet," she said, and offered him some grass.
He declined, carefully, and made a note to think about Niblet later because there was something in what she had just said that felt like it mattered and he did not have time to work out why yet.
He asked about the sleeping arrangements and learned the piles were organized in a way that had its own internal logic, one he had not understood from the outside. He asked, very casually, about the goblins he had not seen.
The ones who were taken.
It went quiet in a different way than it had gone quiet about Fron. Not the silence of something too painful to name. The silence of something known and agreed not to be discussed because discussing it changed nothing.
"They're taken," said Grak, after a moment. "Then they do not come back."
"Where do they go?"
"The wild," Grak said. "The demons take them into the wild and they do not come back."
"Has anyone followed? Tried to see where..."
"The invisible wall does not let us through," Grak said. Simply. Finally. The way you close a door that has been closed many times before. "Only the demons can pass through it. We do not."
A goblin near the wall added, quietly, "We stopped trying to follow."
Matthew looked at the dense trees. Solid. Indifferent. Giving nothing away.
He was beginning to have a theory about all of it. The invisible walls his hands had found. The food that appeared from nowhere. The light that came from above but landed wrong. The demons that passed through the wild and went back again.
He did not share the theory. Not yet. He stored it alongside everything else and did not pursue it further. Maybe the other goblins have this same kind of theory as well.
By midday he had learned that Pip was the oldest goblin in the group. Not because anyone said so directly, but because of the way the others referenced things. Before Pip forgot. Back when Pip still had the ear. When something needed to be remembered, they looked at Pip first, and when Pip could not remember it, they accepted that it was simply gone. Pip was the oldest by the evidence of everything around them. He had learned that Grak had opinions about everything and the vocabulary to share approximately thirty percent of them, which meant a significant portion of Grak's communication was supplemented by gestures, expressions, and a specific sound somewhere between a grunt and a sigh that Matthew was beginning to identify as meaning you are being very slow about this.
He had learned that there were thirty two goblins including himself. He had learned that they celebrated things frequently and the threshold for what qualified as celebration was extremely low.
He had learned that the spot where food appeared also occasionally produced other things. Materials. Cloth. Tools of unclear purpose. The goblins had a complex system of distribution for these things that collapsed into argument approximately sixty percent of the time and worked perfectly the other forty. He had learned that Niblet, given the choice between arguing over distributed materials and eating whatever was growing near her feet, would choose the latter every time and seem genuinely satisfied with the outcome.
He had learned almost nothing about what lay beyond the invisible walls, beyond the goblins who had gone and not returned, and he had decided that pushing harder on that today would produce nothing useful. He would come back to it.
By the time the light shifted, which it did in a way that felt wrong, more like a setting being adjusted than a sun going down, the goblins were already moving toward their sleeping piles with the ease of long habit. Grak gave him a look on the way past that communicated, with considerable efficiency, that the savior was expected to sleep and not do anything unusual and Grak was watching.
Matthew lay down.
Around him, goblins settled into their piles in overlapping layers of limbs and quiet sounds, the specific unconscious closeness of creatures that had been in the same space for a very long time. Pip was already asleep within moments, one arm flung over a smaller goblin who did not appear to mind. Niblet was curled up near the a tree, apparently unbothered by proximity to the endless wild, chewing on something even in sleep.
Matthew looked up at what passed for a sky.
He turned his attention inward, to the tablet, and checked it the way you check a wound. Still flat. Still translucent at the edges, the outline of something rather than the thing itself. Energy had moved into it all day, slow and steady, from the noise and the reverence and thirty goblins who had greeted every single thing he did as confirmation of something they had always known.
Half full. Maybe slightly less.
He ran through everything he had observed. The invisible walls. The light that adjusted rather than moved. The food that appeared from nowhere at the same time each day. The ones who had gone through it and not come back. Pip's age. Niblet eating grass and finding it delicious through sheer conviction. Grak's coordination of the poking, which he was now entirely certain of.
He was in an enclosed space. He was nearly certain of it. Something large and designed, dressed up as wilderness on every side, with a controlled light source above and a controlled food supply and a door that opened from the outside.
He did not know what that meant yet. He had suspicions he was not ready to name.
The tablet pulsed once, slow and steady, and went back to filling at its usual pace.
Somewhere between the invisible walls and the demons and Niblet eating grass through the power of positive thinking, a thought surfaced that he had been too busy to have until now.
He had followed voices into somewhere he did not recognize and woken up in a body that was not his.
Did he die?
He turned the question over once. Then again. The answer, when he was honest about it, was yes. He had stepped off a curb and then he was here, and there was nothing in between that suggested otherwise.
He thought about Olivia. She was seven months along. She had closed his laptop and kissed him on the cheek and told him it was the maple one, and she had been right, and he had never sent the message.
She would be waiting for him to come home.
He pressed his face into the crook of his arm and did not make a sound. He cried for the child he would not see born, for the wife who did not know yet, for the message he had never sent. For all the ordinary things that had been one morning away and were now something else entirely.
Eventually the crying stopped, the way it always does, not because anything had changed but because the body runs out.
He lay still for a long time after.
The grief was not gone. He did not expect it to go anywhere. But underneath it, quiet and separate, was the understanding that tomorrow was coming regardless, and whatever this place was, whatever these goblins needed from him, he was the only one here to give it.
He would carry both. He did not see another option.
ns216.73.217.178da2
and then Add to home screen.