Shoma thought his end was near.

  After the battle, they tied him up and drove him behind one of the wagons, forcing him to return to the village of the Green Claws tribe — the very same one from which he had set out for a war that had been lost before it had truly begun. The troll crawled behind him with his head bowed in shame, panting heavily and leaving wide tracks of its paws in the mud.

  Valeria, victorious and in excellent spirits, simply sat on Shoma’s shoulders and ordered him to carry her like a lady riding piggyback, all the way to his former chieftain’s seat — now belonging to the vampire and her retinue. Her laughter was light, almost girlish, but there was not a shred of mercy in it.

  “You rascal. Now you’ll sit in a dungeon and think about your behavior. You know… you almost broke my heart when, for a moment you thought I might lose to your pretty little troll.”

  He had never seen anyone so shamelessly confident. Perhaps only the arrogant human lords of the east could look at the world with similar contempt. Her entourage burst into laughter. Someone shoved him. He heard the troll groan and felt the cold of the packed earth when they finally forced him to his knees.

  Escorted by goblin guards, prodded and mocked, he saw the uncertain faces of his own people. They were afraid. Too afraid to help him. Too afraid even to spit in the occupiers’ direction. The sky opened with rain, as if it wanted to mourn his defeat itself. He had been so close. One moment of arrogance — and he lost everything he had built over seven winters. A fat hobgoblin sobbed openly, not even trying to hide it.

  “You’ll sit here for a while, you arrogant heretic. Glory to Zod!” shouted a stocky goblin with three blades of yellow grass painted on his face. He slammed the wooden bars shut and walked away.

  He was left alone in a dugout cell that had once served as the place of a last night for goblins sacrificed to the God of Sword — in times so old that no one remembered them anymore.

  Once, he had been impressed by the ruins on which this settlement was built. Vort’Ayem had once rivaled the greatest cities in the world. Tens of thousands of goblins, orcs, and beastfolk had lived here before everything ended. When Varmtheim fell thousands of years ago and the human empires grew in the west, a single wild S-rank dungeon was enough to wipe the entire city out. By the time the armies and the most renowned warriors of Silver Zod returned from war, it was already over. Only ruins remained. And memory. And overgrown remnants of buildings that once reached the sky.

  “The times of Domadok Greyhide…” he muttered to himself. “How I wish I had been born then. To see the might of the green folk. I will not be granted that.”

  He lay down on the straw and stared at the ceiling. Stone slabs were covered with inscriptions in a language long lost. Rain drummed against the walls. Wind howled in the corridor. Outside, he heard the troll’s wailing. That fool must have been waiting there all this time. They probably hadn’t even tied him to a tree — and yet he stood there like a faithful dog, not knowing what to do.

  “Stupid Nut… go eat your supper and let me get murdered in peace. Maybe they’ll let you live. You’ll play the fool or carry firewood. Cursed times. Yesterday you feast and cuddle the prettiest goblin girls, today you’re shivering with cold in a stinking cell.”

  His voice echoed off the walls. Only broken monuments and shattered statues listened. Then evening came. Crickets and grasshoppers sang him a lullaby.

  He dreamed of old times.

  The slave barracks in the great city-state of Brac in the east. Damp. Cold. The coughing of sick goblins. Hunger that never went away.

  “Get up. We don’t have time. Move, you wretch.”

  His father’s voice. Surai. His scarred face flickered like through fog. They ran through muddy streets, passed bribed guards. His father, a slave-warrior, had the right to leave the quarters in exceptional circumstances — so he had arranged exactly that.

  “Faster. Watch your step, Shoma.”

  The neighing of horses. The clatter of armor. Hissing steel. They ran between tents and fences of a mercenary camp. Wolves growled. Tigers bared their fangs. A mammoth slammed its tusks against a haystack until the ground trembled.

  Surai dropped to his knees before a tall, slender man with golden hair. His face was beautiful, youthful, fearless, and serene; his eyes were bright and lively, and when he spoke, his voice sounded like music. From his brow radiated a strange, almost inhuman wisdom, and in his hands there was a strength one could feel even from afar.

  “Noble Gabriel, Firebearer!” Surai cried, pressing his forehead to the ground. “My son is the worst rascal, a fool and a failure. If you took a sewer and turned it into a goblin, you’d get the same thing. I don’t know how I fathered him… but he’s my son. I love him more than life. Let Horada the Golden-Handed tear me apart if need be. Yes, I stole him from the barracks. I don’t care. They’ll come after me if I were to escape this cursed city. He still has a chance. Please. Take him with you. He’ll work. He’ll cook. He’ll wash. He’ll clean.”

  Gabriel looked at them in silence for a moment, as if weighing their fate in his thoughts.

  “Lord Horada once gave me twenty imperial crowns and a breastplate for winning a tournament,” he said calmly at last. “But I am a man of the Church of Light. The God of Light, Aslan, forbids us to murder. This child will not survive the journey back. And besides… Horada is a miser. He’d rather lose a war than lose his gold. Even when he handed me the prize, he looked like he’d stepped in shit.”

  In the dream, everything was as if seen through water. But Shoma remembered one thing: it was better with them. Even as the lowest servant. Even sleeping by the horses. Better than in the barracks. Better than in this cell.

  Then there was a long journey, shortened by sleep to just a few heartbeats. There was a battle. Shouts. Blood. When the orc tribes broke the Fiery Company, he fled south. Small and clever. And that was how he ended up in a village on the ruins of an ancient city.

  Thunder shook the world.

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  He woke in damp and stench. His stomach growled. His joints ached. The troll was still wailing outside. The bars were still closed. Only one candle burned beyond them, casting a trembling light on stones that remembered better times.

  What tormented him most was uncertainty and boredom. Would they cut off his head? Kill Nut? Enslave his people? These questions gnawed at him mercilessly. For now, beaten down and chilled, he returned in his thoughts to the dream and to the past.

  The troll’s wailing reminded him of the day he had found him in the middle of the forest — abandoned, most likely condemned by his own parents to certain death. Crooked legs and a frail body of a barely breathing newborn said everything. They had decided nothing would come of him. That he was a lost cause. That only death awaited him.

  Shoma had once thought exactly the same about himself.

  That was why he took him in. He fed him, watched over him, carried him, until the creature finally accepted him as his parent. And though Nut was dumb as a boot and never learned to speak, his mere presence and unconditional obedience made Shoma feel… like someone more. Like someone who mattered.

  In time, they built a people half a thousand strong living on the ruins of the old city. They subjugated nearby villages and tribes, drove off bands of orcs, built granaries. Though Shoma, remembering the hunger in Brac, often overate himself, he never begrudged food to those who obeyed him. He knew hunger too well to wish it on others.

  And yet all those efforts were turned to nothing by a single vampire.

  An exiled patricide from an arrogant race that considered itself better than all others.

  “Chosen of the behemoths… Herald of Zod… Hah! What nonsense!” he snarled, smashing a sharp stone against the wall. “If he were alive, he’d have come back by now. And if five hundred years have passed and there’s still no sign of him, then he’s most likely dead!”

  He struck harder.

  “In the end, everyone dies. Hunger or some petty wound is enough… I’ll die sooner or later too. What are a few years of misery to me? In the end, only our deeds and achievements remain… and even those not forever.”

  He poured his frustration into the wall. The noise made his ears ache; the blows made his wrists hurt. He scraped, pressed, carved, as if he wanted to claw something more than just marks out of the stone.

  “At least this will remain of me…”

  Scratches and chips began to form into shapes, and then into faces. Two larger hobgoblins — one slender, one stocky — and two children — him and his sister, who hadn’t lived to see her ninth birthday… In the middle stood a tall troll, holding them all.

  He remembered exactly how he had lost them. First, his sister — quiet, emaciated, too weak to even rise from her cot. Hunger and illness claimed her faster than a guard’s lash. He held her hand as she stopped breathing, and for a long time he couldn’t let her go. His mother died differently. One day, they took her from the barracks, and she never returned. Only later did he hear whispers that she had been thrown to the dogs for sport, at the birthday celebration of Lord Horada’s daughter. Laughter, music, wine — and blood on the sand. From that moment on, the name Horada tasted like ashes in his mouth.

  He did not know what fate had befallen his father. All he could do was cling to hope, though he could find none of it in his heart. He raised his hand, the weight of the past pressing him into the ground. Every movement of his hand was an agony.

  With his own claw, Shoma carved the only word he could write. A strange snake, two posts joined in the middle by a smaller one, a circle, a double mountain, and another circle, this time with a staff on the right, formed the name “SHOMA”.

  “I was here. I lived…” he muttered, then tore a piece of fabric from his own clothes.

  He twisted it into a makeshift rope, meant to hold his weight, threw it over the upper bars, tied one end and fashioned a loop in the other. He put his head into it and, gripping the bars until they creaked, a tear rolling down his cheek, he threw himself in search of death…

  The makeshift noose didn’t hold. Shoma crashed onto his backside with a thud, howled in pain, then burst into tears of helplessness. He wanted it to end. He wanted to see his family. His screams and pounding against the wall consumed him so much that he didn’t hear the growing footsteps of someone approaching his cell.

  “Did defeat hurt you that much?” he heard a dreadful half-voice, half-growl.

  He turned and saw a hydra black as pitch, with a purple hue of catastrophe along its back and the upper parts of its two terrifying heads with furious eyes.

  One of the heads looked at the torn clothing and snarled.

  “Magnificent Valeria Nocturne gave you a chance to become her personal slave, and you run from such an honor!? You truly are the worst.”

  Shoma turned his back to him. Now he truly feared nothing anymore. He had already died on that battlefield where he lost everything: his position as chieftain, the respect of his people, his fighting army, and the riches of his granaries. Let this cursed hydra devour me and be done with it, he thought, glancing at the scratched drawing.

  “Death is a luxury you have not yet earned,” said the hydra in a commanding tone, slamming its tail against the floor. “The Queen has a role for you, one you owe her to fulfill. You played and you lost. You doubted Zod…”

  At the mention of that name, anger flared in Shoma. He stood up, slammed his hands against the bars, and shouted from the depths of his lungs:

  “Zod is dead, you false prophet! My family died because goblins were left to themselves! How dare you play on our tragedy. In Brac I met many like you! Fraudsters and false preachers. It won’t work on me!”

  The hydra laughed. He felt its dark aura intensify — like the vampire’s, though more controlled, more condensed in Artax’s body.

  “He lives, and I have seen him myself. Gravely wounded after fighting for the good of goblins, he licks his wounds and prepares for a triumphant return. When he comes back, let us be ready — let him see that since the days of Domadok Grayhide, the goblins have not lost their spirit! The silver fur of the King of Monsters will soon drive away the enemies of the green nation…”

  Overwhelmed by the weight of his words, Shoma sat down and contemplated them. On one hand, they shared common goals. On the other, he did not want to believe in the vampire as the chosen of the behemoths. A race that had so many times raided the three great forests, capturing goblins and selling them to the human city-states in the southeast of Montara? The race that had enslaved his ancestors and sold them to Brac?

  “Is that your family?” Artax suddenly asked, looking at the wall.

  “What’s it to you, lizard!? They’re all dead. Old stories. Not worth talking about.”

  The hydra closed its eyes, lay down on the ground, and remained silent.

  “How long are you going to sit here and try my patience!? What are you doing!?”

  The great lizard — the emissary of Zod — said nothing. Then it opened its eyes; the second head sighed deeply, steam escaping its nostrils.

  “I’m praying for your family. Since they cannot count on you…”

  Shoma stood frozen. He was speechless, then anger rose in him and he grabbed the old bars, driving his claws into them until splinters flew.

  “For what!? After death, goblins without ritual and burning of the body dissolve into nothingness. They wander the misty valleys of the God of Sword until the end of the world!”

  “No, I don’t believe that,” Artax replied quietly. “If the God of Sword had arranged the world that way for his servants, he would be unworthy of being called a god… I believe in a good place after death. I believe death is not the end — that there is something beyond it. Believe me, that is so. It is not only more comforting for the dead, but for the living as well…”

  The goblin remained still for a while, then turned his gaze to the drawing and remembered the faces of those who, though they had nothing, gave him everything he needed — hope, support, and kind words. For a moment he felt like the worst scoundrel. His father hadn’t risked everything just so he could give up. His older sister hadn’t given him her rations for that. His mother hadn’t told him stories about goblin heroes, the God of the Sword, Zod, and Domadok so that he would sink into despair.

  Before he died, he owed them making goblin lives better. Dying without doing that would be a disappointment to them. Even if he had to cooperate with that cursed, vampiric spawn, he would fulfill his mother’s dream.

  He knelt and clasped his hands together. He prayed in the words of old goblin songs…