The Dark

March 25, 103 CY

Zalketh and the other kobolds had been locked in the stone prison for well over a month. The goblins and hobgoblins working for the scary human had taken them from their homes and dragged them to this frightening ruin. They hadn’t been fed often or well, and sometimes, the cruel hobgoblin would pull some of them into the next room for a torture session.

When the door opened, Zalketh could not hep but flinch along with the others, assuming the goblins had returned for more sport. Instead, she saw a large scaled humanoid that Zalketh thought she recognized as a “dragonborn.” Some others stood behind him in the hallway, and though she could not see them clearly, they all seemed too tall to be goblins. She stood in front of her hatchling, the youngest of Trivok’s brood, and said in her native tongue, “You’re not goblins.”
A devil man stepped up beside the dragonborn and replied in Draconic, “No, we are not. We killed them.” It could have just been the devil man’s strange accent, but Zalketh thought she heard a threat in the words, and her eyes widened in fear.
In a quavering voice she said, “And now you’re going to kill us?”

The devil man smiled, revealing frightening sharp teeth, but then he shook his horned head, “No, we came to free you to the waterfall cave. You know your way to that home?”
“We don’t live behind a waterfall,” Zalketh responded, a little confused. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, trying to figure out what the devil man was talking about.
Angered, he shouted, “Warriors live there! They will take you to their home! Far away! Do you know it?!”
Zalketh, hoping to soothe the angered devil man, thought about it for a few moments, before she remembered hearing the goblins talking about a waterfall cave somewhere nearby. “It lies to the south. We can travel with the sun on our left in the morning, and on our right in the evening.”

“You navigate like that all the time?” the dragonborn asked, sounding interested. The devil man glared at his apparent subordinate, and he closed his mouth.
Trying to draw the conversation back on track, Zalketh asked, “So, the goblins are all dead?”
The devil man inclined his head curtly, “Yes, all dead on path to surface.”
“But some remain alive,” she reasoned.
The devil man lost patience again, “Will leave door open. You come out whenever you are safe. We go kill the last goblins now.” Then he spun on his heel and stalked off, the others in his wake.

It took Zalketh several minutes of coaxing the other kobolds before they would agree to follow her out of the prison door. They had all heard the fighting coming from the hallway outside of the torture chamber, and were afraid that the intruders would fail to kill the goblins. But after another minute or so, silence reigned, and they did not hear any goblin voices. She led them past the goblin corpses which the devil man and his companions were busy looting. They moved as quickly as possible for the exit.

...

Splug was sitting on a crate of rations that he had pulled out of the storage room and dragged up to the surface. The ruins of Shadowfell Keep were not exactly inspiring to him as he pondered what he should do next. It was a lucky break to have run into those adventurers. It was luckier that they hadn’t just killed him on sight. Perhaps some of the stereotypes he’d been taught as a child weren’t exactly based on facts.

He thought he heard a death rattle emanating from the opening leading down into the dungeon, and he sincerely hoped it belonged to that fat bastard Balgron. If anyone in the place deserved an agonizing demise, it was that jerk. Still, he wasn’t going to poke his head back down there to check. The adventurers might still change their minds, after all.

Still, he sat there waiting to be inspired in a direction. He hadn’t been lying when he told the dragonborn that he was afraid of being killed on the road. A lone goblin was pretty vulnerable, and he wasn’t exactly sure he could talk his way out of trouble. Still, he felt that traveling without a weapon helped his chances.

He was a little startled a few minutes later when kobolds began pouring slowly out of the dungeon and into the clearing. They looked equally startled to see a goblin and most of them cowered or began to descend the stairs again. “Wait!” called Splug in Common. “I was a prisoner like you. Did those guys set you free, too?”

Slowly, one of the kobold females spoke up, replying in Common as well, “You’re not going to kill us?”
Splug chuckled, “Nah, I got nothin’ against you guys.”
It seemed to take a few seconds for the kobold to process this notion, but then she nodded. She looked back at the entryway and then said, “All the other goblins are dead. Why did the devil man and his followers leave you alive?”
Splug shrugged, “Dunno. Those guys said they would let me go if I told them about the other goblins. I had no love for the others I told them what they wanted to know.”

“And so you survived,” she said. She looked around at the twenty kobolds that had worked up the courage to emerge. “We were told to go to the waterfall cave. The devil man said there were warriors there. I think he meant more kobolds, like us. I’m not exactly sure where it is, though.”
“The waterfall, eh? Yea, I know where that is. Say, do you think you guys are strong enough to carry some stuff? I mean, with the other goblins dead, they’re not going to need the rations… or the ale. We should take as much as we can.”
“That’s a good idea,” replied the kobold, looking around at the gathered kobold escapees. “My name is Zalketh, mate to Trivok. What are you called, goblin?”
“Splug,” he replied simply, extending his hand.
Zalketh hesitantly walked forward and accepted the hand clasp. “Thank you Splug. Show us where these stores are.”

Back to Keep on the Shadowfell