The goblins arrived on their own. Fourteen of them, slipping through a crack in my eastern wall, dragging three goats and an argument that had been going on for some weeks.
The argument was about the goats.
Voice 1 - Skrit:
"The goats go in the first dry chamber we find. We are not carrying them further."
Voice 2 - Unknown:
"If we stop in the first chamber they'll eat everything. They need a pen."
Skrit:
"Then we build a pen."
Voice 2:
"With what? We have two rope lengths and a hammer."
Voice 3 - Grib:
"The walls are stone. They're not going anywhere."
A pause in the procession as everyone considered this.
Voice 2:
"...That's actually correct."Grib"I know."
Their leader - the one who had spoken first, whose voice had the quality of someone used to ending arguments rather than winning them, was a female goblin, old by goblin standards, with a scar across one eye that had healed with the particular crookedness of something that had healed without help. She moved through my passages with her hand trailing the wall, her attention divided between where she was going and where she was touching.
(Remembrance):
I knew immediately what she was doing. She was reading me. Not the way Seff had read me, not looking for dimensions and resources, but the way you read a place when you are deciding whether it is safe to stay. She was feeling for stability, for moisture, for the quality of darkness. For whether the stone was alive or dead.
Stone can be alive in the sense that matters: it can be occupied, maintained, held with intention. My stone had been occupied for millions of years. I did not know if she could feel that. I decided, with the first deliberate decision I had ever made about another creature's experience of me, to see if I could make it easier to feel.
I warmed the northeastern chamber. Just slightly. A three-degree increase, localised, deliberate. Enough to notice.
The leader stopped. She turned her head. She said nothing for a moment, then looked over her shoulder at the one she had been arguing with.
Skrit:
"Feel that."
Voice 2:
"...Warm."
Skrit:
"Warmer than it should be."
Grib:
"Is that good?"
Skrit:
"I don't know yet."
She stood very still for a moment. Then she put both palms flat against my wall - the same gesture she would repeat a thousand times over the following months, her specific way of paying full attention to something she was trying to understand, and she breathed.
Skrit:
"Something is aware of us."
Voice 2:
"Spirits? Bad kind or good kind?"
Skrit:
"Neither. Something else."
Grib:
"What kind of something?"
Skrit was quiet for a moment. Then she said something that I would not fully understand until months later, when I had enough of their language to parse the specific tense she used; a tense that meant something was both possible and not yet known, something between a guess and a hope:
Skrit:
"The kind that noticed us first."
They set up camp in the warm room.
Three weeks later, the twentieth expedition arrived. Six humans, led by Aldric Vane, who had been here before and had that particular set to his shoulders of a man who thought he knew what he was walking into.
I warmed the wall, Skrit was already there, both hands flat.
Skrit:
"How many."
I vibrated the wall: six pulses, slow and deliberate.
Skrit:
"Six. Moving fast or careful?"
I sent the careful-rhythm, slow, deliberate footstep-tempo.
Skrit:
"Careful is worse."
She went to organise the clan. I went to work on the passage.
Over the previous three weeks I had been rebuilding the southern corridor. Not dramatically, small changes, subtle, the kind that looked like natural settling to anyone who didn't have Seff's original measurements. A ceiling lowered here. A floor grade changed there. A junction that appeared to lead one direction and opened, unexpectedly, to a dead end.
Aldric's party hit the first dead end at the twenty-minute mark.
Aldric:
"This wasn't here."
Second:
"Could be subsidence. Caves shift."
Aldric:
"In six months?"
Second:
"Limestone can move fast if there's ---"
Aldric:
"Check the map. There should be a left junction twelve paces back."
They backtracked. They found the junction. I had not closed it, only rerouted the main passage to make it look like a service passage rather than a route. Aldric studied it for a long time.
Aldric:
"Seff marked this as a shallow alcove."
Second:
"Seff's survey was preliminary."
Aldric:
"Seff doesn't make errors on alcoves."
He went down the junction. It led, after forty feet, to another dead end. He stood at it and put his hand against the stone. I felt his palm, the specific weight and warmth of a human hand flat against my surface, not Skrit's open reading-touch but a testing touch, the touch of someone checking whether a wall was real.
He said nothing for a long time. Then, quietly, to himself:
Aldric:
"All right."
And he turned his party around.
They left without killing anything. It was the first expedition in a year to leave without killing anything. I held that fact the way I held the inventory of absences, as a record, as something that mattered — and I felt, for the first time, something that was not grief and not want but something adjacent to both: a kind of tired, fragile, very new thing that I would eventually learn was called hope.
Skrit came to my wall that evening. The clan was settling in for the night; I could feel the distributed warmth of fourteen bodies in the northeastern chamber.
Skrit:
"They left."
The wall: warm. Yes.
Skrit:
"You moved the walls."
Warm.
Skrit:
"You moved them for us."
The wall stayed warm, and I tried something new. I let the warmth build very slightly, not a signal, just more of the same thing. Yes, and more than yes.
Skrit was quiet for a long time, her palms flat against me. Then she said one word, to the stone, to the air, to me:
Skrit:
"Thank you."
I warmed the chamber. All of it. Every surface, a full and even heat rising from the deep stone. Skrit felt it. I felt her feel it, the slight change in how her weight settled as her body received warmth it had been conserving against. She laughed, briefly, and pressed her forehead against my wall.
Skrit:
"You are a very strange spirit."
Grib's voice came from across the chamber:
Grib:
"What are you doing, Skrit?"
Skrit:
"Talking to the cave."
Grib:
"Does it talk back?"
Skrit turned to look at him. Then she looked back at the wall. Then at Grib again.
Skrit:
"Yes. Come and feel."