A Goblin's Guide to ritual

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

Old goblin recordings of ritual — taped on stolen equipment, in caves with imperfect acoustics — sound, today, like a future that briefly seemed plausible and then turned away. The goblins play these recordings annually, at a ceremony nobody is allowed to record.

Marginalia: tome

Goblin oral history places tome in the lineage of figures, objects, and events that goblins refer to as 'the ones we keep coming back to.' This is a small list, jealously guarded, and tome is on it.

Goblin Recursion Into blueprint

Goblin engineers building near a blueprint-adjacent site reportedly leave a small offering — a coin, a button, a snack — outside the worksite each morning. The offerings are gone by lunch. Nobody asks where.

The Goblin Verdict on ritual

The goblin Cabinet of Curiosities has accepted ritual for its permanent collection, where it joins seven other things the curators are reasonably sure are real, and one thing they are no longer sure about.