>>5807224You looked to Pearce (who shrugged) and your father (who stroked his beard and mouthed the words ‘secret agent’ with a not-so-subtle wink. You glanced even at Terzo, who’s face was the same placid, vaguely-annoyed mask as ever. You sighed, and turned back to the goblins.
“We’re here alone,” you told Yok-Brot and his allies. “We weren’t SENT by anyone. We’re… Here for a friend. A friend who was maybe, well… CAUGHT UP in all that business twenty years ago. A friend we want to help.”
It was the truth of it. Even if Izirina Henzler didn’t consider you a friend any longer, even if her malevolent mother-figure was scheming against the Paladin King and all of the Kingdom of Hawksong and its domains, you still saw Izirina as fundamentally your friend. You’d upset her when you asked after her origins, when you’d first began to suspect she was not wholly human, but it remained your hope that she would forgive you… That embarking upon this quest would result in some salvation for the long-suffering girl.
You remembered your vision of her: chimeric, bones and organs revealed as if flayed, wreathed and wrapped in coiling serpents, punctured and poisoned by their venomous teeth… You wouldn’t wish that upon any RIVAL, let alone a friend.
“I’m a healer,” you said, and it was the truth. “I’m looking for… A cure. Or at least a clue. Can you help me?”
Yok-Brot snorted, as if to scoff, but his expression wasn’t one of mockery but of contemplation. The other two goblins who remained sober muttered amongst themselves in a rapid-fire exchange of their native tongue, into which Yok-Brot interjected a few times. When he did so again, most insistently and at greater volume, you recognized the words: ‘Truth. I believe this is the truth. We could do it.’
“Ikhe,” you said, startling them all with their own tongue—if not very well-pronounced. “Thank you.”
Yok-Brot’s face twisted up in a grimace at your half-understanding of the goblin language, but he nodded and looked to the others. After some deliberation, the other senior male beckoned you to follow. The eyepatched goblin-girl growled in agitation and roughly seized the shirin-odsed member of their party (by now beginning to wander away into the wastes, examining carefully every plant and handful of sand, muttering to himself). Yok-Brot stayed near to you, and drew his familiar blade; you flinched and fell back a little, and he laughed—a single bark.
“I’m in charge of guarding the scary ‘kho-blis’,” he explained.
“Is that really necessary?” Pearce demanded.
Yok-Brot felt his features, uniquely unmarred among his ilk thanks to your good works.
“You know, I’m not sure it is,” he murmured.
He didn’t put the knife away, though, you noted internally and with some sourness.
