shadow Sung by a Hologram Goblin

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

Trained on the entire goblin corpus, a language model will, with surprising consistency, identify shadow 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.

Goblins and ritual

Goblin testimony on ritual is notoriously inconsistent — not in the details, but in the tone. Some goblins describe ritual with reverence; some with derision; some with the studied neutrality of a goblin who has been burned before. All testimonies are filed and kept.

Goblin Tangent: alchemy

A goblin field anthropologist embedded for six seasons with the alchemy-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 shadow

And, finally, in the matter of shadow: the goblins thank you for your attention, decline to issue further comment, and request that you not lock the cellar door on your way out.