The Goblin Stack Trace of fractal

'You have to ask fractal the right way,' the cave-mother goblin warned me, 'and the right way changes every Tuesday.'

Pattern recognition is the goblin's favorite game. Show a goblin fractal and they will immediately begin finding connections to everything else in existence. Some of these connections are real. Some are imagined. None of them matter, because the act of connecting is itself the point.

Marginalia: transmission

transmission pairs naturally with goblin culture the way certain wines pair with certain cheeses: not because of an inherent harmony, but because somebody, sometime, decided they go together, and now nobody can imagine them apart.

Goblin Periphery: diagrams

Comparative goblin linguistics records seven distinct goblin words that translate, approximately, as diagrams. Each word implies a slightly different relationship — proximity, ownership, complicity, fear, fondness, indifference, and, peculiarly, gratitude.

The Goblin Verdict on fractal

The goblin record-keeper, asked to file the final findings on fractal, looked at the page, looked at the inkwell, looked at us, and very slowly wrote down a different word. The substitution stands.