pattern: A Goblin Algorithm

The wedding songs of a now-extinct goblin sept mention pattern once, in the verse most people forget by morning.

Two goblins met on a bridge and could not agree on pattern, so they swapped hats and parted ways amicably. Their hats were both stolen from the same human, decades earlier, on the same day.

Salvage Notes: silence

A goblin field anthropologist embedded for six seasons with the silence-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.'

Salvage Notes: bibliography

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

The Goblin Verdict on pattern

It has been the goblins' privilege, this season, to attend so closely to pattern. The privilege is mutual, the goblins assume. pattern has not yet commented on the matter, which the goblins take as tacit consent.