Blackbird was sleeping. Dim envied her state of peaceful repose. She didn’t quite fit into a pony-sized bed and her legs hung off at funny angles. At the moment, there was nothing feline about her at all, she was distinctly equine and utterly lacking in grace. Who held him accountable? That was a tough question. An impossible question perhaps, though it could be said that she held him accountable—but only because he allowed her to.

The thought was almost too much to bear and he physically winced from mental pain.

Standing near the bed, Dim listened to sound of her breathing and watched the steady rise and fall of her ribs. He had grown in power, enough so that he was alarmed by what he could do. She had called it leveling up, but he wasn’t sure what had changed him. It was more than mere experience. The ability to cast The War Maiden’s Absolute Invisibility had eluded him all his life. Over and over he had tried to burn the spell into his memory, and he had, in a sense, at least partially. He could make himself difficult to see—he could dim himself—and that had served him well for the longest time.

But recently, something had changed.

Now, he was giddy with power. He had new limits to explore, new frontiers of magic, new boundaries to push and expand. But who held him in check? Who held him accountable? What kept him from going bad? His eyes lingered on Blackbird’s face and the rapid flutter of her eyelids. She was dreaming and he knew that if he wanted to do so, he could have a look at what she was dreaming about. There was nothing stopping him from invading her privacy. She had no means to defend herself. Even worse, he could tamper with her dreams… he could give her nightmares. He could break down her will through dreams and over time, thoroughly dominate her. The power to do so was his and there was nothing stopping him.

Did he deserve to exist?

“Blackbird…” His voice was as soft as dry autumn leaves blowing about in the cold of winter. “I almost killed some foals tonight, Blackbird. What am I? I had to think about it, Blackbird. The very fact that I had to think about it troubles me. I had their little necks in my grip and all I could think about was the good reasons why I should kill them… as mercy. I wanted to spare them. That was my concept of mercy. But near the end, just as I was about to snap their necks, I thought of you. After that, I couldn’t.” With a shake of his head, he fell silent.

Pained in a strange way, he turned away from Blackbird and headed for the door. He was in desperate need of a good think, some time to clear his head. Somehow, he had to sort out his thoughts before they were his undoing. With Blackbird still lost to slumber, Dim departed to face the ache of loneliness on his own.

Sleep was an elusive beast; ‘twas hard prey to pace when one was weighed down with troublesome thoughts. Truffe’s tower had been seized and the guards—with their weapons sabotaged—had surrendered. The airships had been commandeered and Dim stared out the window, watching as order was restored. This could have been a spectacular bloody slaughter, but Dim knew and understood that these soldiers might be needed in the days to come.

He entertained thoughts of placing them all beneath a geas, but with his current state of mental turmoil, he had no idea what was right anymore, what was moral. Truffe, set ablaze, had plunged to his death and had splattered upon the street below. His death was cause for spontaneous celebration, which had caused a flicker of hope to flare to life, but that quickly turned into alarm when the celebratory mob became unruly. Now, more fires lit the night and there was little that could be done other than allow them to burn.

When the sun rose tomorrow, Gasconeigh would be a different city, and Fancy a different country, one soon to be ruled by an all-powerful emperor. Chanson, for his part, didn’t want to be emperor. With Fancy in disarray, Chanson would have to build his empire from scratch, either through diplomacy or conquest. The other cities would resist. Dim had no idea how bad things actually were, but to hear Martinet tell it, Fancy, as a nation, was no more. Whatever union there had once been was now dissolved.

As awful as it was, perhaps this was for the best.

The shadowlings had to be thriving from all of this. They would be strong, the shadowlings, and if nothing was done to contain them, they would spread out from this city like a plague. Maybe they already had. Dim thought of Martinet’s mistrust of magic and wondered how the flinty pegasus would survive in a world without powerful unicorns and alicorns, where shadowlings and their ilk ran unchecked. Though he sought solace in these thoughts, some sense of consolation, there was none to be had.

A fireball rose into the night and the explosion was so intense that Dim was almost certain that there was a rumble, some tremble in the floor beneath him. Maybe there was, or maybe he imagined it, a sort of fill-in-the-blanks sensory experience. He saw an explosion, and therefore, there had to be further sensory input for the experience to be complete. Dim wondered if there was more that he might do and he was tempted to go out onto the streets.

Behind him, a door opened and an apologetic voice said, “Majesty—”

Thinking of Martinet’s words, Dim winced at the title and felt a powerful sense of discomfort. He did not turn around, but continued to stare out the window, keeping his face hidden from view from the creature behind him.

“—we’ve caught a spy. There’s been some interrogation done, but nothing was learned. We hoped that you might have more success.”

Recovering his stoic mask, Dim turned around, thinking that, perhaps, this was just the distraction he needed. “Where is the prisoner?”

The griffon in the doorway tossed something down upon the floor and it landed with a muffled thump. At first, Dim thought it was a dirty, disgusting doll, but after a moment of intense scrutiny, he realised it was a goblin. A tiny thing by goblin standards, but a goblin nonetheless. Dim had studied goblins and goblinoid creatures as a youth, and even had a collection of pickled goblins, specimens kept in jars. As an adventurer, he had killed quite a few of them, so seeing a living one this close was fascinating.

“Leave me, so I can conduct a thorough interrogation,” Dim commanded.

“Aye aye, Majesty.” Bowing his head, the griffon backed away, shut the door, and was gone.

Goblins were parasitic breeders with remarkable sexual compatibility. They bred with anything that they could catch—anything—and had greater than average success rates with hybrid pregnancies. If a goblin fucked a chicken, that chicken would lay eggs that would hatch goblinoid spawns. They were uncanny survivors and perhaps one of the most hated of the mongrel species, seeing as how they fucked anything with a pulse.

Dim had burned out whole infestations of them during his time spent on the Grittish Isles.

This one was small, even by goblin standards, maybe about a foot or so in height. It was hard to tell though, seeing as how it was curled up in a miserable heap. Its face was almost catlike, or maybe vulpine. Reptilian characteristics could be seen, including some patches of scales patchworked among its filthy, matted hide. The most defining characteristic it possessed was one single duck foot, meaning it came from a lineage of duck-fuckers.

While it lay on the floor, shivering and trembling, Dim pulled out his pipe so that he might have a thoughtful smoke. The goblin didn’t budge, it didn’t move, it didn’t try to run away. It merely lay there, only now it made pathetic whimpers when Dim set his pipe ablaze. Though Dim was quite disgusted—the stench was nauseating—there was something else that stirred within him, something that felt a lot like pity.

“Are you a spy?” Dim asked, getting down to the dirty business of interrogation.

The creature moaned out the word, “No.” It’s voice was distinctly feminine, soft, raspy, and difficult to hear. “I tell them no. Over and over. But they keep hurting.”

“Right now, things are tense. Spies are expected. If you are not a spy, then what are you doing here?”

There was a groan from the she-gobliness and she rolled over onto her side while clutching her arm to her chest. She hissed between clenched teeth, but Dim did not perceive this as an aggressive act. Upon closer examination, he saw that the creature’s arm was twisted; it appeared to be broken in several places. Right away, Dim knew the cause and understood the previous methods of interrogation.

“Sick of sewer,” the tiny gobliness said while clutching her broken arm. “Too many darklings. Shamans can’t keep darklings away. Came up topside hoping to be pet or something. That all, I swear.”

“You wanted to be a pet?” One incredulous eyebrow lifted and Dim’s stoic mask fell away.

“Me sit in sewer and listen at drains. Topsiders keep pets. Dogs. Cats. Sometimes I watch. Seems like good life. Me many pets in one. Make nice pet. No want to be sludgesider no more. Sick of muck and darklings.”

Puffing on his pipe, Dim studied the miserable creature. So the city’s infestation was bad enough that it was even plaguing the goblins. The ponies and creatures of Gasconeigh liked their pets. And in the midst of all this uncertainty, doubt, and chaos, a goblin lass watched from out of a sewer grate and dreamed of a better life. Strange thing, life. Dim had no idea what to think of all of this, but further cruelty seemed unnecessary.

“You picked a bad time to crawl out of the sewer,” Dim said to the gobliness. “Right now, I think even the pets are dying. I bet those poofy poodle dogs are flammable… but I digress.”

“Darklings get you too?” The gobliness focused her teary yellow eyes upon Dim. “They get us. Make us fight. Kill. Hurt. Shaman salt piles not working. Sewer not safe.”

At this moment, Dim realised that he was dealing with a remarkably canny creature. Uneducated, but not stupid. It was easy to listen to her talk and think she held no meaningful intelligence based upon her speech patterns, but doing so was a mistake. In his own defense, he’d never actually tried to have a conversation with a goblin before, because his previous encounters had all been rather violent ones. A dozen goblins armed with makeshift axes and shivs did not invite meaningful conversation.

“Puke Puddle watch shamans, do what they do, but Puke Puddle get in trouble for it.”

Dim heard the creature sniffle and her dirty tears left a spreading pool of filth upon the floor. He considered her name, Puke Puddle, and wasn’t the least bit disgusted by it. By goblin standards, he was sure it was very nice. He did wonder how one earned such a name, but now was not the time for such questions. Deciding that he had seen enough death, dismemberment, and destruction, Dim determined that it was time to spare a life; he was going to save a goblin.

It was not a decision he made lightly and he wondered if perhaps the strain was getting to him. Nopony saved goblins, as far as he was aware of. They were parasites. They were parasitic creatures that did grievous harm to the natural order and there was nothing good about them. Maybe he was about to make a mistake, but this creature was pathetic. Lost in a forest of questionable morality, Dim heard the words of the Spider Queen echoing up from his memories.

As Thrennog’s creation, you are not what your outsides suggest you are. Be good to those who accept you, Dark One, and be fantastically cruel to those who would hurt or otherwise exploit you. There is no morality except for what you make.

He himself was an unnatural abomination and his continued existence was a violation of the natural order. Martinet’s words also rattled around inside of his skull, forcing Dim to question his own existence, and he worried if he was a hypocrite for thinking bad things about goblins. No doubt about it, he was in a weird place right now, the sort of weird place that drove one to save goblin wretches.

Unwilling to allow the creature to suffer any longer, Dim uttered a command word: “Sleep.”

Author's Notes:

Goody four-shoes unicorns get owls for familiars.

What sort of wizard gets a goblin?