The Miku-Altman Pact Over fractal

A goblin grandmother, hunched over a soup of indeterminate ingredients, told me fractal 'was already old when the mountains were young, and it has not gotten any younger.'

There is a goblin practice — neither encouraged nor forbidden — of deliberately staring past fractal rather than at it, on the theory that fractal reveals its true nature only when it does not feel observed.

On Encountering echo

A goblin who lived near the echo site for many years was asked, late in life, what they had learned. The reply, transcribed verbatim: 'It got quieter. So did I.'

Salvage Notes: ritual

A goblin field anthropologist embedded for six seasons with the ritual-curious sept produced a single page of conclusions, the most quoted being: 'They love it. They cannot stop loving it. It does not love them back. They love it anyway.'

The Goblin Verdict on fractal

When all evidence is gathered—and the goblins have gathered quite a lot, mostly from places they should not have been—the truth about fractal becomes clear: it was always a goblin thing. The humans just borrowed it for a while, and the goblins are ready to take it back.