Since their capture five years ago, the goblins had not stopped counting.
Two years in stasis, time stolen from them cleanly, no dreams, no passage, just absence. When they finally woke, it was to rows of pods, most of them already empty. How many had there been at the start, they could not agree on. But the empty ones outnumbered the full ones, and that was answer enough.
Then the experiments began. One by one, pulled from the group and returned wrong, or not returned at all. Their numbers dwindled in ways they could not explain to each other because there was no explanation, only the empty space where someone had been. They did not know if the others were dead. They did not know if there were others at all, somewhere else in this place, holding on the same way or not holding on at all.
What they had was each other. Thirty-five of them, when they were first thrown into this place, a forest, a space large enough to move in and small enough to understand completely. Trees around them, a sky above them, ground beneath them. Everything a world needed to look like a world. They did not know where here was. They only knew they could not leave. Four of them had tried, pressing against the invisible wall at the edge of the trees, looking for a way through, a weak point, anything. They were taken and none of them came back.
Thirty-one remained. So for the last one and a half years, they had been praying.
What was real to them was the statue.
Clay, roughly their height, shaped by many hands over many months, the features of it imprecise in the way of something made by creatures who had never done it before and were working from a feeling rather than a reference. It stood in the center of the clearing and they stood around it the way they had learned to stand. Close but not too close. The space between them and it held deliberately, the way you hold space for something that matters.
A goblin with a mohawk stood at the front. Always at the front.
The sounds carried no structured language. Growls, clicks, a low rhythmic exhale that rose and fell in the same pattern it always did. The meaning arrived anyway. "Save us. Promised one. Save us."
The others took it up. Some of them loud, some barely a sound at all, some just the shape of the motion without anything coming out. One of the goblins at the back, eyes closed, both hands pressed flat together, clicked and exhaled with the particular intensity of someone who had decided volume was not the point. A goblin crouched near the base of the statue with a handful of grass she'd been eating growled it between bites, which should have seemed irreverent and somehow wasn't.
The clay had been different lately.
Not visibly. Nobody could have pointed to something specific and said anything at all. But the quality of the air near it was different. The way the light seemed to sit differently around it. The feeling that something was happening in there even when nothing appeared to be happening. One of the goblins had mentioned it three days ago and hadn't mentioned it again.
"Save us," the goblins said again. Louder.
The group responded. Louder.
The clay changed.
Not slowly. Not dramatically. At the hands first, a shift in texture that moved upward, the surface of it becoming something denser, something that caught the light differently, and then the features sharpening, the imprecise lines of a face made by many hands becoming something more specific, something that looked less like an idea of a goblin and more like a goblin. The goblins nearest to it went very still, one by one, in the way of creatures registering something they had expected and somehow weren't prepared for.
"Keep going," a few goblin said, from the back. Very quiet. Eyes still closed.
They kept going.
"Save us. Promised one. Save us. Please"
...
Matthew had been thinking about cribs for three days.
Not obsessively. Just in the background, the way a program runs while you're doing something else, taking up memory without announcing itself. By day three he had tabs open for every crib on the shortlist, a YouTube dad who had reviewed all of them with unreasonable thoroughness, two Reddit threads, and a parenting forum he hadn't known existed until the algorithm decided he needed it. He'd gone through all of it at lunch yesterday. Closed everything. Opened it again this morning over coffee before his wife sat down across from him and gave him the look.
"You're doing it again," she said.
"I'm looking for the best one"
"Matt." She sat down across from him and folded her hands on the table in the way she did when she had already decided something and was giving him the courtesy of feeling like he was part of the conversation. "We're buying it tomorrow. I already cleared my afternoon. You have until then to pick one, and if you don't I'm picking it for you."
"I just want to make sure we're getting the right one."
"I know you do." She reached over and closed his laptop. "That's why I'm giving you until tomorrow and not right now."
He put the phone down. She was right. She was almost always right, and he'd stopped arguing with that a long time ago.
The problem wasn't the cribs. The problem was that every time he looked at them he started thinking about the room, and every time he thought about the room he started thinking about the fact that in roughly nine weeks there was going to be a baby in it, a whole actual person, and that person was going to need things, and he was currently failing to provide even one of those things because he couldn't get past the third tab without opening a fourth.
"I'll decide today," he said.
"You said that yesterday."
"I mean it today."
She'd kissed him on the cheek on her way to get her coat. "The maple one," she said, over her shoulder. "It's the maple one. You've been looking at it longer than the others. You already know."
He'd thought about that on the train. The maple one. She was right, obviously. He'd known for two days and had been doing the thing he always did, which was treating a decision he'd already made like a problem he still needed to solve.
Systems thinker, his manager called him. Which was a polite way of saying he trusted the process more than the output, even when the output was already there, already correct, already waiting for him to stop second-guessing it and just call it done
He was going to order the maple crib tonight.
He was still thinking about it when he stepped off the train and started walking the last four blocks to the office, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, half-composing a message to his wife that said simply maple so she'd know he'd figured it out.
He didn't finish the message.
The car came from the left, through a red light, and the last coherent thought Matthew Garcia had before impact was that he hadn't hit send yet.
He didn't feel the collision.
He heard it, distantly, a sound too large and too close to fully process, and then he was gone, flung far.
He wasn't in pain. That was the strange part. He'd expected pain. Instead there was just this, a floating and directionless sensation,
Matt.
His wife's voice. Or the memory of it. He couldn't tell the difference.
He tried to hold onto it and found he couldn't hold onto anything. His hands weren't there to hold with. He wasn't sure where his hands were. He wasn't sure where he was. He'd been on a street and then he hadn't been, and now there was just the dark and the floating and the very specific feeling of something letting go of him slowly, the way a hand releases something it has been holding for a long time.
The maple one, he thought, for no reason.
Then something else found him.
Not a sound. Not exactly. More like the shape of a sound, pressing against whatever he currently was from a direction that didn't have a name.
Save us.
He didn't understand it at first.
Save us. Promised one. Save us.
He tried to ignore it. He was busy not existing, which felt like it required concentration, and the voices were interrupting whatever that process was supposed to be. He turned his attention away from them.
They got closer.
Not louder. Closer. More present, the way a voice changes when someone moves across a room toward you, the volume the same but the distance collapsing. He felt them before he heard them, a pulling sensation that started somewhere in the center of whatever he was now and moved outward, like a current finding the path of least resistance.
Save us.
"Save you from what?" he said, or tried to say, into a dark that had no interest in words.
The pulling didn't answer. It just pulled.
He tried to resist it. That was instinct, probably, the basic animal response to being moved somewhere without permission. He pushed back and found there was nothing to push against. The current wasn't a force. It was more like a direction, like gravity, like the specific logic of something already in motion, and he was in motion whether he'd agreed to it or not.
He stopped resisting.
The speed changed immediately. Not faster exactly. More like the resistance had been the only thing keeping it slow. He moved through the dark and the voices moved with him, not louder but closer. One voice made of many, speaking in a language that arrived already translated.
Promised one. We have waited. Save us. Please.
The please was what got him.
It landed differently than the rest. Not a demand. Not a summons. Just the please of something that had been holding on for a very long time and was starting to feel the weight of how long that was.
He followed it.
The speed changed. The dark changed. The voices stopped being distant and became immediate, all around him, the growls and clicks of creatures pouring everything they had into a single direction. He shouldn't have understood any of it. He understood all of it. Every growl a word, every click a punctuation, every exhale a feeling that arrived already translated, and he was moving toward them faster than he could process, the pull becoming something total, and then he hit something solid and the dark ended all at once.
...
In the clearing the goblins went silent.
The statue was breathing.
A crack spread across its clay surface. Then another. Between the cracks, a glow of green energy bled through, faint and visible only to the goblins. Chunks of dried clay peeled away from the face and shoulders, falling to the ground in brittle pieces. Beneath them was green skin.
A goblin.
It drew a sharp breath, swayed once, and immediately pitched forward, landing face-first in the dirt.
The floor was dirt and grass, gritty against the side of his face, and the smell of earth and something damp beneath it.
Matthew lay still.
He was breathing. He could feel himself breathing, which meant he had a body, which meant things had gone somewhere very different from where he'd expected them to go. He ran a quick inventory the way you run a diagnostic on a system that's just come back online unexpectedly. Breathing. Heartbeat. Weight. Ground beneath him. Air above him.
He pushed himself upright.
His arms were wrong.
Not broken. Wrong. Too short. Too thick. The hands at the end of them were wide and stubby and ended in fingers he didn't recognize, and when he got one knee under himself and tried to stand he nearly fell because his center of gravity was somewhere completely different from where he'd spent thirty-two years expecting it to be.
He looked down at his hands.
Pale green. Dark markings across the backs of them, clustered and sourceless, running up toward the elbows in no particular pattern. He turned them over. Both sides. He looked at his arms. Same green. Same markings. He looked at the rest of himself, as much as he could see from this angle.
All of it wrong.
All of it green.
He looked up.
Thirty-odd creatures looked back at him. Small. Compact. The same pale green he was apparently also now, with wide eyes and pointed features and the expressions of something that had been waiting for a very long time and was now trying to understand what it felt like for the waiting to be over. Every single one of them absolutely silent.
He looked at them.
They looked at him.
One near the front had a patchy mohawk of dark hair and the posture of someone who had been standing at the front of things for so long they'd stopped noticing they were doing it. It looked at him with the specific expression of a person whose entire understanding of the world had just been confirmed.
It opened its mouth.
He had approximately half a second to wonder what it was going to say.
Then the room erupted.
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