Chapter 35: A Dream of Sprite and Goblin

Reads: 269

Everyone in the common rooms stops when we hear the raised voices from the parlor. Lianth is yelling, practically screaming.

Trinket tells him to quiet down.

“Mind your work,” Mrs. Trinket says. I’m to watch the melting of snow in the three pans by the fire, and pour out the water when it’s wet. The barrel is half-full. We’ve another that must be filled before the dark settles back in earnest.

By and by, Mr. Trinket and Lianth come into the common room.

“Everyone listen,” Trinket says. “This has been a hard cold dark. We’re down to just a few bricks to burn. The water in the cellar has froze, so everything in there will freeze soon. We’ll be eating roots for now, until the end. Until the light comes back,” he adds. “We don’t have enough to burn, not in the brazier, so everyone will stay in the big room. More bodies to keep us warm, anyway.”

I want to ask the blasphemous question, but I hold it back.

“I’m no headman,” Trinket goes on. “If we had candle clocks, we would burn three more before the fuel for the fire is gone.”

“Can we not burn other things?” I ask.

“Bessil, the warmth of the world is gone. Unless it comes back, there isn’t enough of anything to burn to warm us. You’re a good boy,” he says.

I take his meaning and don’t ask - are we all to die? That blasphemy lingers in the air, like smoke.

When the dark settles in, as everyone is reconciled to, we are more crowded than before. Jimbe and Trinket drag the sofa from the parlor. We scrunch in the table and other things to accommodate. Lianth and Sabill sleep on the sofa, usually with Mrs. Trinket.

Mr. Trinket and Jimbe lay together, companionably, under a blanket and on a rug, on the table, which sometimes seems too rickety for two grown men.

And I squeeze in with the People of the Square, sitting next to the head woman’s sister. It’s to me to keep them warm, keep the blankets and rugs covering them, ask them if they are cold, rub some warmth back into their feet.

Under the blankets, after our meal of roots cooked into a salted paste, I start to talk to the woman in the hat - whose hat I carefully adjusted before we all settled in.

“I saw two goblins in the snow,” I say. “They were frozen solid. The light was burning their skin, even the faint, cold light. Mr. Trinket says they’ll die from the light before they thaw. He says that goblins can thaw and live again, unless they are burned in light. They’ll be nothing but goblin bones when the snow melts.”

I don’t have to ask Mr. Trinket or anyone whether people can thaw and live. I know we cannot.

“And I saw the peasants, dragging three dead, down toward the edge of the world. Did you know that they cast their dead into the sky? They do not leave them for the sky burial or have any ossuaries. They cast the bodies into the deep sky, clothes and all. Sky have mercy.”

I reach up to touch her mouth, in case she wished to answer, but she says nothing.

“Go to sleep, Bessil,” Lianth calls out. “Stop talking to those things.”

Others shift in the darkness, but no one else speaks.

I curl into the head woman’s sister, not sure whether I’ll take more heat from her or give up more of mine. And I leave unsaid the worst cruelty of the passing of the three peasants.

One is an old woman who clutches a harvest doll.

I do sleep, by and by, face pressed into the woman’s shoulder, her scent rich in my nostrils, exciting me, even as a boy. I try to hold onto that scent while I feel the Sailor’s Dream stalk me.

In my Sailor’s Dream I see the goblin as I have never seen a goblin before and as few have ever seen a goblin. Man cannot see without light. Light shreds goblin flesh like knives.

So you cannot see a goblin staring back at you, desperate to suck your eyeballs out and slurp them down, one after the other, to satisfy their only craving.

I see it, now, in dream and again in life. The face is gathered around a pointed snout - not a nose with mouth underneath, as people, but teeth forward and nostrils to the side. The mouth-hole is big enough for its only purpose - to bite and suck out an eyeball.

The eyes are farther back, black, featureless, expressionless, soulless.

The skin of the thing is purple, of course, but only in this light. In full light, goblin skin burns and blisters, turning brown then black, then flaking away. If the light is bright enough, the skin bursts into flames.

This one’s ears are pushed back as it angrily hisses at me, a few ulls up the slope. It hisses at me in anger and useless rage, held at bay by something it can’t understand.

I close my eyes and reach for the tree root that is my last station before reaching the abandoned Plateau of Silence.

I close my eyes because that is the best way to keep out the light of the Sprite - the sickening corruption of that light. For I have no lenses.

I pull myself up, feel around, open my eyes, looking down, seeing my shadow in the light of the sprite. I will not try to repeat what the sprite says to me - one has either spoken to you or you cannot know.

I find my path and look across the ravine at the goblin, one last time.

The only light that does not burn goblins is that of the Sprites and it is the only way to truly look on them.

I hear the goblin scratching at the door and I know that I am no longer in a Sailor’s Dream.

Submitted: August 15, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones