Dirge for a Necromancer - By Ash Stinson Page 0,24
darkness, and I start to feel them weighing on me. And then I can’t breathe…”
He chuckled nervously. “That’s just…just me over-thinking everything though,” said the goblin. “I do a lot of thinking. You never really realize just how much thinking one can fit into a day until you have a whole day and no way to spend it but to think.”
“Try having a whole eternity,” Raettonus muttered.
“I’d rather not,” said Deggho. “It’s only been a few years, and it already feels like forever. I don’t have any windows, you know. We’re on the interior of the fortress here. Not a single window. Not even a vent hole that leads outside; they all just lead into other rooms. I haven’t seen the moon in years, or the sun either. There are still mountains outside, right? And an ocean?”
“Well, mostly,” said Raettonus. Deggho stared at him for a moment. “Of course the mountains and the ocean are still out there. I was joking.”
“Oh.” Relief showed on the goblin’s face. “I wasn’t certain and…well, at this point, if you told me the only part of Zylekkha that still existed at all was this fortress, I’d believe you. I start to wonder sometimes if I didn’t imagine everything I ever knew before this point. I mean, I think I was once the son of the chief of a tribe of goblins called the Kariss, but I don’t have any proof of that, except my name and my memories. But my memories get sketchier and sketchier every day—everything blends together. I’m not so sure what the difference is between my dreams and fantasies and memories and life are anymore. And my name… Maybe I just made up my name and then forgot I made it up. Maybe I’m not Deggho dek’Kariss. Maybe I’m Deggho sal-Kariss. Maybe I’m not a Kariss at all. Maybe I’m not even a goblin.”
“I can tell you,” Raettonus said, “you certainly are a goblin.”
“Yes, but how can I trust you?” said Deggho slowly. “You might just be a figment of my overactive imagination, inventing someone for me to talk to. I mean, I’ve had stranger fantasies than meeting and painting immortal magicians. I had one just the other day that I was visited by a sphinx with fire for eyes. Oh, that scared me something awful, too, before I realized I was just imagining it all. Maybe I’m imagining you too. There’s no way for me to know. I mean, think about it—when you dream, and you realize it’s a dream, do you ever turn to the nearest person and tell them so? If you do, they just tell you it’s not a dream, and that everything is fine. And then you wake up and… Well, you wake up. It was a dream, after all. You could be one of those people from a dream, assuring me I’m awake when I’m really asleep.”
It wasn’t often Raettonus had met someone who was more pitiful than himself. He really enjoyed watching Deggho flounder about as the darkness took his sanity.
Deggho continued to ramble on as he painted, exposing his fears and wonderings—only about half of which Raettonus actually listened to. Eventually the conversation turned lighter, and they shared jokes and second-hand anecdotes, and Deggho told Raettonus a little about goblin society.
“Centaurs are so high-strung,” Deggho said. “Goblins are much more lax. Kariss spend most of our time playing games of chance with bones or whittling tools and weapons. I was never very good at those things though, so I spent a lot of my time wrangling mounts.”
“Mounts? Like what kind?” asked Raettonus. “Dragons?”
“Gods, no! A dragon would snap your head off in a second,” Deggho said, eyes going wide momentarily. “No, I just wrangled ‘gryphs and unicorns. It’s not so hard—you just have to get a thick leather strap through their mouth so they have trouble biting you. Then you get a choke chain on them, and at that point they’ll usually give up the fight and let you ride them.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then usually at that point, we’d stick them with spears,” Deggho said. “They taste all right, but dragon’s better. That’s why we try to get them to let us ride them to the hunt. It’s easier to take down a dragon if you have a few riders in the air, throwing spears down.”
“Did you ever kill a dragon?” Raettonus asked with a yawn. It was getting very late.
“No,” Deggho said, shaking his head. “I was never a hunter. I just