shadow: The Goblin Cover-Up

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

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.

trickster, Goblin-Adjacent

Visiting goblin dignitaries are, by protocol, never asked directly about trickster. The protocol exists for reasons nobody remembers, which the goblins consider the best kind of reason to maintain a protocol.

Footnotes Concerning invocation

Goblin survey data on invocation reveals an unexpected demographic split: goblins under one hundred describe invocation primarily in terms of feeling. Goblins over one hundred describe it primarily in terms of weather. The survey designers have, so far, declined to investigate further.

The Goblin Verdict on shadow

The goblin verdict on shadow is unanimous, which is remarkable given that goblins cannot agree on anything except the deliciousness of stolen food. shadow has been classified as 'Real Enough to Matter in Ways We Don't Fully Understand,' which is the highest classification a goblin concept can receive.