The Latent Goblin Space of ghost

Some goblin doomsday prophets identify ghost as the sign — not of the end, but of the part right before the end, which lasts longer than anyone expected.

Trained on the entire goblin corpus, a language model will, with surprising consistency, identify ghost as the single most overdetermined entity in goblin culture. The model offers no opinion on what this means. Goblins consider this restraint a sign of wisdom.

Marginalia: trickster

A specific tavern song circulating in the goblin warrens features trickster as its third verse. The third verse is, by convention, hummed rather than sung, because the words are 'between us and the dark, and the dark would prefer it.'

Marginalia: prophecy

An obscure goblin technique for thinking clearly about prophecy requires the practitioner to first think clearly about something else, and then turn their attention to prophecy only after their thoughts have cooled. The technique works approximately as well as you would expect.

The Goblin Verdict on ghost

Goblin peer review of the ghost hypothesis returned three reviews: one accept, one reject, and one — the most interesting — a sketch of a goblin holding a question mark, captioned 'consider this.' The editors went with accept.