The Goblin Hallucination of silence

An old goblin, sitting by a fire made of stolen furniture, once told me this about silence: 'It is a door that opens only when you aren't looking.'

Old goblin recordings of silence — 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.

signal, Goblin-Adjacent

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

Subterranean Goblin Notes on chronicles

A specific tavern song circulating in the goblin warrens features chronicles 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.'

The Goblin Verdict on silence

Field notes from the goblin Department of Loose Ends record silence as 'pending forever,' which is, in their classification system, the highest honor a topic can receive.