The creature laid dead, but the song refused to acknowledge it.
Stillness did not suit it.
Its body was built for motion. Even sprawled on the ground, one knee drawn under its center of mass, fingers splayed as if ready to spring, it seemed caught between moments. Sawyer had seen animals freeze like this—creatures whose muscles never fully relaxed, whose instincts clung to tension even after the mind had gone quiet.
He crouched and studied it carefully.
The creature was compact, but not small in the way children's stories implied. Its limbs were long relative to its torso, giving it a low, forward-slanted profile. The arms reached farther than a human's would, shoulders rolling forward in a way that favored crawling, lunging, climbing. The spine curved naturally into a crouch, not a deformity but an adaptation—its center of gravity kept low, balanced, ready.
The skin was a muted green, but uneven—darker along the forearms and calves, lighter at the joints, with a faint leathery sheen that suggested resilience rather than rot. Sawyer pressed a thumb gently into the flesh of the shoulder. It barely yielded.
Dense muscle. Packed tight beneath a hide that had learned to resist abrasion, thorns, stone.
The hands drew his eye next.
Long fingers. Too long. Each joint pronounced, reinforced, the nails thickened and blunt rather than clawed. These were not decorative talons. They were tools—meant to grip soil, bark, weapons. The palms were roughened with callus, especially along the heel of the hand and beneath the fingers.
He moved to the feet.
Wide. Splayed. Toes spread for balance, the skin along the soles thickened almost to horn. No boots would have fit these feet comfortably—nor were they meant to. This creature had been shaped for uneven ground, for roots and rock and broken terrain.
Sawyer exhaled slowly.
Then he looked at the face.
This was where the lie always lived.
The goblin's head was large relative to its body, but not grotesque. The skull sloped back sharply, forehead ridged, brow heavy over deep-set eyes that even now seemed sharp with intent. The eyes faced forward—fully forward—granting depth perception rivaling any predator's. The sclera were tinted faintly red, the iris darker still, catching light in a way that felt uncomfortably aware.
The ears were long and flared, tapering to narrow points. Not ornamental. Their angle funneled sound from behind and above, granting awareness without the need to turn the head. Sawyer traced the edge of one ear and felt a small puncture near the base—pierced. Not tribal decoration.
The nose was flat and broad, nostrils too wide for its head. The mouth—when closed—was smaller than expected, lips tight over a powerful jaw. Sawyer parted them carefully.
The teeth were not fangs.
Incisors thick and reinforced. Molars broad and ridged. A mouth designed to eat almost anything that could be broken down, cooked or raw. Survival teeth. Wild.
He paused at the expression frozen on the goblin's face.
Even in death, the lips were drawn back—not in a snarl, but something closer to anticipation. A grin, sharp and knowing, as if the creature had died expecting the world to be cruel and had chosen to meet it on its own terms.
Whatever this Goblin is, it was a creature made as an affront to humanity. A great mockery made by the Song.
Sawyer straightened slightly.
A light tap struck the middle of his back—familiar, careless.
"Oi."
Agnes's voice followed it, bright and unbothered, as if she'd just caught him staring too long at a cracked wagon wheel. "You planning to study that thing all day?"
Sawyer didn't answer immediately. He remained standing, eyes still on the corpse, as if committing the shape of it to memory before it was taken away by distance and denial.
Agnes leaned over his shoulder, peering down at the goblin with open distaste.
"Disgusting, aren't they."
She didn't phrase it as a question.
Her boot nudged the body once—hard enough to roll the head a fraction, to bare more of the grin frozen across its face. Agnes clicked her tongue, repulsed.
"Serves them right."
She spat.
The sound was small, wet, final. Saliva struck green skin and slid uselessly down the goblin's cheek, catching briefly in the crease beside its mouth.
"Filthy rapists," she said, the words sharp and unfiltered.
There was no tremor in her voice. No uncertainty. Only something old and settled—an anger that had long since burned past heat and into something colder. More durable.
Silence followed.
Not the comfortable kind.
The Song did not react. It did not recoil at the words, nor did it affirm them. It simply… held. Flat. Unmoving. As if listening and refusing to take a side.
Sawyer finally turned his head.
Agnes was still looking down at the body, arms loosely crossed, expression unreadable in the way only someone certain of their hatred could manage. She didn't look at him. She did not notice.
Sawyer's mouth opened.
Closed again.
He found, to his quiet surprise, that there was nothing ready to come out.
No rebuttal formed. No agreement either. Just the lingering image of callused hands. Pierced ears. Teeth made to endure famine. In a body of that of a child.
A creature shaped by pressure.
A judgment shaped by pain.
An existence created by Song.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Agnes straightened abruptly, the tension vanishing as if it had never existed. She clapped her hands together once, sharp and decisive, and flashed him a grin that belonged to an entirely different conversation.
"Anyway," she said lightly, tapping his back again—harder this time. "Don't fall behind."
She jerked her chin toward the road, where wagons were already creaking back into motion, people climbing into familiar positions, the caravan reforming its practiced shape as if death were nothing more than a brief obstruction.
"We're moving again," Agnes added, already turning away. "Wouldn't want you to get left behind."
She walked off without another glance at the corpse.
Sawyer remained where he was for a heartbeat longer.
Then he looked down one last time at the goblin—at the body the world had already decided what it was allowed to mean—and felt the weight of what had just been said settle somewhere behind his sternum.
The Song stirred.
Not in approval.
Not in denial.
In mourning.
Sawyer stepped away from the body and followed the caravan as it began to move once more, carrying with him a truth that had not yet found a place to land—and a choice that was already tightening, like a wire being slowly drawn taut.
Bran fell into step beside Agnes as the caravan settled back into its rhythm, wheels groaning softly, hooves finding cadence. He glanced over his shoulder once—back toward the place Sawyer had lingered—then back to her.
"What were you two doing back there?" he asked, casual on the surface, but watching her closely.
Agnes didn't slow.
"Laughing at the corpse of scum," she replied easily.
Bran blinked, unsure whether to laugh himself. He didn't.
Faust, walking just ahead of them, stiffened. His grip tightened on the strap of his pack, knuckles whitening for a brief moment before he forced them to relax.
"Fighting them still brings up those memories—" he began, voice low, careful, like someone testing thin ice.
"Do not remind me, Faust."
The interruption was sharp enough to cut the air.
Agnes stopped walking.
The caravan did not.
For a few steps, people flowed around her—then Bran and Faust halted too, creating a small pocket of stillness amid motion. Agnes stood with her back straight, shoulders drawn tight, eyes fixed somewhere far ahead and nowhere at all.
"Those poor women," she said, the playfulness gone completely now. "Forced to conceive a goblin's child."
The words came out clipped, each one pressed flat by restraint.
A shiver ran through her, sudden and violent. She crossed her arms over her chest, hands gripping her sleeves as if the air itself had turned hostile.
"They survived the raid," she continued. "That's what the report said. Survived. As if that was the end of it." Her jaw clenched. "As if walking away breathing meant the rest didn't matter."
Faust lowered his gaze. He said nothing.
Bran swallowed. He remembered the aftermath well enough—the silence in the shelter, the way some of the rescued women wouldn't meet anyone's eyes, the way others stared too hard, as if daring the world to look back. He remembered the guild clerk clearing his throat before reading the compensation figures, voice carefully neutral.
He had told himself it was better not to think about what came after.
Agnes let out a slow breath through her nose, visibly steadying herself.
"They didn't ask for that," she said. "Didn't ask to carry a reminder inside them. Didn't ask to be whispered about, pitied, avoided." Her fingers dug into her arms. "Didn't ask to have their lives decided by what those things decided to do to them."
Silence followed again—thicker this time.
Somewhere ahead, a child laughed. A wagon hit a rut and jolted, drawing a brief curse from its driver. Life, unbothered, continued.
Agnes finally unclenched her hands and forced herself to move again.
"So no," she added, tone hard but controlled as she stepped forward. "I don't need reminders. I remember just fine."
She didn't look at either of them as she walked on.
Behind them, Sawyer followed at a slight distance, having caught every single word. It was an anger he was far too familiar with. The kind to make one dedicate their entire being to swear its destruction. Sawyer understood.
He said nothing.
But the wire inside him drew a fraction tighter all the same.
Aluna's voice cut through the murmurs—too loud.
Not shouting. Never that. But pitched just high enough to carry without effort, to reach every ear nearby whether it wanted to or not.
"Pick up the pace."
The effect was immediate.
Footsteps faltered. A few heads snapped up. Even the animals seemed to register it—ears twitching, reins tightening instinctively in handlers' hands. Aluna rarely raised her voice. When she did, it meant something had already gone wrong—or was about to.
Her tone was calm.
That was what made it unsettling.
She turned her head, eyes sweeping the line behind her with clear, deliberate intent. Not accusatory. Assessing. Counting. Driven.
"Let us focus and move quickly," she said.
No embellishment. No explanation.
She faced forward again and began walking, stride lengthening, staff tapping once against the ground to set a new rhythm. The caravan adjusted around her almost without realizing it—wagons urged forward, gaps closing, guards drifting subtly into tighter formation.
"We do not have the numbers to fight off a horde," Aluna added, voice steady as stone.
That did it.
The last traces of levity vanished. Conversations died mid-sentence. Bran straightened. Faust shifted his grip on his weapon. Agnes's jaw tightened, her earlier tension snapping into something sharper and more useful.
The Song responded—not with reassurance, but with alignment. Paths narrowed. Movement streamlined. The caravan began to flow with intent rather than habit.
Aluna did not look back again.
She walked at the head of the group, eyes forward, posture composed, prayer beads hidden beneath her sleeve and unmoving.
As she passed beneath her breath, so quietly it was almost lost beneath the creak of wheels and the crunch of gravel, she whispered,
"It will not happen again."
The words were not a promise to the others.
They were a vow to herself.
Behind her, Sawyer felt the weight of it settle—another strand pulled tight, another silent decision added to the growing knot of inevitability. The road stretched on ahead, unchanged in shape, but no longer neutral.
Whatever lay waiting beyond the trees was no longer just a threat.
It was a reckoning already in motion.