Chapter 5: My First Subjects Are Goblins With Union Demands

By the second morning, the fortress had stopped feeling like a murderously haunted pile of stones and started feeling like an aggressively eccentric hotel that happened to have murderously haunted stones in the basement.

Sunlight poured through arrow slits cut high in the black walls, turning dust motes gold. Somewhere in the east wing, enchanted plumbing clanked with the smug confidence of a system that knew it was better engineered than Nate had any right to deserve. The great hall no longer smelled purely of mildew and old curses. Now it smelled of fresh bread, hot broth, lavender soap, and a faint metallic tang that suggested the castle’s anti-intruder defenses had not entirely finished digesting last night’s scavengers.

Nate stood at the long table in the hall with a ceramic mug warming his hands and stared at the glowing blue panel hanging in the air above the tabletop.

DIVINE SETTLEMENT

Claimed Territory: Blackstone Fortress and immediate grounds

Residents: 1

Comfort: 38

Defense: 51

Resource Generation: Stable

Tax Revenue: 0

Pending Tasks: Population growth recommended. Labor shortage detected.

“Yes,” Nate muttered into his coffee, “I too have noticed the labor shortage in my one-man cursed empire.”

The panel did not care. It hovered there with divine bureaucratic serenity while he rubbed sleep out of his eyes and looked around the hall.

It was absurd, really. He had died in what had to be the least dignified accident in modern history, woken up in a fantasy ruin, and somehow spent his first full day becoming the owner of a fortress whose kitchen made perfect crusty loaves on command and whose guest rooms could weaponize upholstery against trespassers. There were still collapsed towers, sealed sections, and enough ominous carvings to fill a heavy metal album cover, but the place had become livable at a speed that offended every contractor he had ever met.

It was just missing one minor thing.

People.

The silence inside such a huge place had a weight to it. When he walked through the halls, his own footsteps came back delayed and hollow, like the castle was listening to him think. His jokes landed badly with no audience except a judgmental gargoyle above the archway to the kitchen. Even the bread felt too good to eat alone.

He was considering whether “accidentally become a frontier landlord” counted as enough of a life pivot to justify having pie for breakfast when the fortress shivered under his feet.

Not an earthquake. A notification.

Perimeter Alert: Unaffiliated lifeforms detected at western gate.

Threat assessment: Low to Moderate

Disposition: Unknown

Nate set down his mug so fast some coffee sloshed over his hand.

“You could phrase that less like a submarine warning,” he said.

His stomach tightened anyway. “Unaffiliated lifeforms” had a bad habit of turning into “people trying to loot his stuff” or “something with too many teeth.” The memory of last night’s scavengers getting flung across a corridor by self-deploying chaise lounges remained both deeply satisfying and impossible to explain if anyone asked.

He crossed the hall at a jog, boots thudding over stone polished clean by magic. The main doors groaned open for him before he touched them. Outside, the morning air hit cold and damp, carrying the smell of wet earth, pine, and the mineral stink that rose from the Blighted March after dawn. Mist clung low across the ground beyond the fortress yard. Crows sat on the broken teeth of the outer wall and watched with professional interest.

At the western gate, just beyond the line where dead grass gave way to cracked black flagstones, a cluster of small figures stood packed together.

Nate slowed.

Goblins.

There were more of them than he first thought—two dozen at least, maybe thirty if he counted the ones half-hidden behind bigger bodies. They were short and narrow-shouldered, with green skin dulled by dirt and hunger to the color of old olive leaves. Their ears were long and ragged at the edges. Their clothes looked assembled from stitched sacks, fur scraps, and whatever had not quite rotted away. Spears made of sharpened sticks and scavenged metal points trembled in skinny hands. One of them held up a pole with a strip of torn white cloth tied to it.

It was the eyes that got him.

Every single face was pulled tight with fear.

Not the fear of something deciding whether to attack. The fear of something already convinced it was going to die and only trying to make the dying quick.

The one in front was older than the rest, or at least looked it. Goblins were hard to age on sight, but the skin around her sharp yellow eyes had gone leathery, and one tusk was cracked in half. She wore a necklace of carved bone tags and stood with a bent-backed authority that made the others angle toward her without thinking.

When she saw Nate on the wall-walk above the gate, she went very still.

Then, to his utter alarm, she dropped to both knees.

Several of the others followed immediately. A child no taller than Nate’s waist buried its face in the back of another goblin’s patched vest.

“Great,” Nate whispered. “That’s somehow worse.”

He reached the mechanism post and told the gate to open before common sense could finish filing objections.

The black iron portcullis rattled upward with enough ominous grandeur to make the goblins flinch. Dust sifted from the grooves. The tribe recoiled as if expecting a volley of arrows. None came.

Nate stepped through into the gate tunnel, hands visible and empty.

“Uh,” he said, acutely aware that he was speaking to starving fantasy goblins in front of the former Demon Lord’s fortress while wearing a clean linen shirt and indoor slippers he had forgotten to change out of. “Hi.”

The elder goblin lowered her head further. “We come under surrender cloth, Black Lord.”

Nate stared. “I really wish that title had not entered circulation.”

She blinked up at him, clearly having no idea what he meant. Her voice rasped like bark dragged over stone. “We know custom. We know old law. We enter domain, we owe kneel. If death, do death fast. If slavery, keep younglings together.”

The words hit him like a thrown brick.

For a second the morning seemed to sharpen around the edges—the mist, the smell of wet rust, the tiny fingers clutching somebody’s belt, the way half the tribe couldn’t stop staring at his throat instead of his eyes because looking a ruler in the face was probably dangerous where they came from.

“Nope,” Nate said.

The elder goblin’s ears twitched. “No… death fast?”

“No death. No slavery. Definitely no separation.” He pointed at the fortress behind him. “What you all need first is food, probably in the amount of a small natural disaster.”

Nobody moved.

They just looked at him with the rigid disbelief of people waiting for the punchline.

One of the younger goblins, all elbows and suspicious eyes, licked cracked lips and whispered, “Poison soup.”

Nate heard it. “Not poison soup.”

Another hissed, “Bath first, then boil.”

“Also not that.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay. I’m doing badly at first contact.”

The elder goblin searched his expression with unnerving intensity. “Why feed?”

“Because you’re hungry.”

She waited.

When no darker answer followed, something minute and painful moved across her face.

“…Only reason?” she asked.

Nate looked at the cluster again. Ribs under rough cloth. A young mother carrying a bundle that turned out not to be supplies but a sleeping infant with green-gray skin and a nose like a button. A goblin boy with one foot wrapped in dirty strips of cloth darkened by old blood. Spears too light to matter. Pride so worn down it had become caution.

“Yeah,” Nate said more softly. “Only reason.”

Silence stretched.

Then the little one hiding in the back let out an unmistakable, heartbreaking stomach growl.

That broke whatever spell the moment had trapped them in. Heads turned. The child shrank. Nate exhaled through his nose and jerked a thumb toward the inner yard.

“Come on,” he said. “If I wanted to kill you, I probably wouldn’t start with carbs.”

The elder goblin rose slowly. “You are strange lord.”

“You have no idea.”

He led them into the courtyard under the watch of crows and weather-worn demon statues. The goblins moved like a herd of deer crossing a road, every flinch preparing for impact. They bunched together around the dry fountain, weapons lowered but not surrendered. Nate noticed that more than half of them kept positioning themselves between the adults and the children. Even terrified, they had formation.

Okay, he thought. Don’t make this weird. Don’t accidentally found a kingdom by offering lunch. Again.

The kitchen answered his silent panic with divine efficiency.

When he pushed through the doors and asked for “a lot of soup, bread, and maybe something not horrifyingly expensive,” the long iron range flared blue under its own pots. Ladles rose from hooks. Cabinets opened and thumped shut. Water poured into a cauldron already steaming. The smell hit a minute later—onions sweating in butter, savory stock, herbs, root vegetables, and roasted garlic rich enough to make Nate’s eyes close for half a second.

Behind him in the doorway, the goblins made small strangled sounds.

“Right,” Nate said, trying not to feel smug on behalf of his sentient kitchen. “Everybody sit, if you want. Or stand. No rules. Except no stabbing in the soup room.”

The soup room, formerly known as the servants’ dining hall, had become bright and warm after yesterday’s upgrades. Long tables had been scrubbed clean. The hearth glowed. Sunlight pooled over stone floors that no longer looked diseased. The goblins hovered on the threshold as if the room itself might bite.

The elder went in first.

It was clearly an act of courage. Her shoulders were rigid, jaw clenched. She approached the nearest bench, touched it like someone checking whether a snake was asleep under a blanket, then sat.

When nothing terrible happened, the rest flooded in all at once.

The room changed immediately. Sound rushed into it—thin voices, nervous clicking chatter in a language Nate didn’t know, the patter of bare feet and patched boots, the wet sniffing of people trying not to smell food too hard in case it vanished. The children stared at the bread basket on the sideboard as if it were a holy relic.

Nate handed out bowls because it was either that or stand there uselessly while his heart imploded.

The first ladleful sent up a cloud of fragrant steam. Thick vegetable stew, really, rather than soup—golden broth with potatoes, leeks, carrots, beans, and chunks of tender meat he had not asked questions about because this was a magical fantasy kitchen and boundaries were healthy. The elder goblin accepted the bowl in both hands.

“If I eat and die,” she said, still watching him, “tribe attacks your ankles.”

“Fair.”

She sipped.

Everything in her face broke.

Her eyes went enormous. Her free hand flew to her mouth. A shudder ran down her narrow shoulders, and for one awful instant Nate thought she was choking—until he realized she was trying not to cry in front of her people.

“Eat,” she rasped.

That was all it took.

The room exploded into motion.

Bread disappeared with supernatural speed. Spoons clattered. Several goblins yelped because the soup was hot and then kept eating anyway. The little one from the yard bit into a heel of bread so fiercely it left half its face dusted in crumbs. The mother with the infant drank broth one-handed and made a sound of such exhausted relief that Nate had to look away for a second.

There was no decorum. No waiting. No calculated politeness. Just the raw and almost embarrassing sincerity of hunger meeting food.

Nate leaned back against the counter and let the kitchen continue its impossible work. Pot after pot refilled itself. More bread arrived from the ovens. The smell of herbs and yeast wrapped around the room, warm enough to make the rain-stained world outside feel unreal.

After the third round, the elder goblin finally set down her bowl.

“I am Grikka,” she said.

“Nate.” He hesitated. “Just Nate is fine.”

Several goblins at the table frowned at this as if he had denied them useful information.

Grikka wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. “Tribe was Flint-Ear once. Now only Flints, maybe. Humans burned lower burrows in the east hollows. Knights took two hunters for bounty. Marsh fever took some. Winter took more.” Her voice stayed level, but her nails dug into the wood. “We heard black fortress lit windows again. Thought maybe old stores left. Thought maybe monster kill us slower than hunger.”

Nate said nothing. There was nothing clean enough to say to that.

One of the younger goblins spoke around a mouthful of bread. “You got jobs?”

Grikka smacked him without looking. “Snik.”

“What? Ask important first.” He swallowed and jutted his chin at Nate with wary pragmatism. “No tribe stays free on charity long. You feed, you expect work or oath.”

“I mean,” Nate said, “yes, eventually? I’ve got a fortress the size of a shopping mall and exactly one employee, who is me.”

They stared.

“Big market-maze building,” he translated weakly. “Point is, there’s a lot to do. Cleaning, repairs, gathering, maybe farming once I figure out if the dirt here is evil. But only if you want to stay.”

A hush fell over the room so quickly that the crackle of the hearth sounded loud.

Grikka’s ears tilted forward. “Stay.”

“Sure.” Nate spread his hands. “I’ve got empty rooms. Actually I have more empty rooms than should be legal. If you’re willing to help out, I’m willing to house and feed you. We can work out details.”

He expected gratitude, suspicion, bargaining—something normal.

Instead, every goblin at the nearest tables looked immediately, instinctively, at Grikka.

She didn’t answer. She squinted at Nate the way a seasoned negotiator might squint at a clown trying to sell state secrets.

“Terms,” she said.

Nate blinked. “Terms?”

“For work.” Grikka steepled her bony fingers on the table. “Hours. Hazards. Sleeping count. Share of finds. Discipline. Child labor.”

Nate had the sudden bizarre sensation of being cornered by a labor organizer in a soup line.

“You have… workplace demands?” he asked.

The younger goblin—Snik—snorted. “You say like surprise.”

Another goblin, broad-shouldered despite obvious starvation, jabbed a spoon toward Nate. “No tunnel collapse duty without timber brace.”

“No acid-muck gathering barefoot,” someone else snapped.

“No waking crew before sunrise-bell unless fortress on fire.”

“Or on spiders,” another amended darkly.

A tiny old goblin with spectacles made from bent copper wire raised a claw. “If cursed idol whispers in dead tongue, all workers stop and fetch supervisor. No touching for curiosity.”

“That one,” said three others immediately.

The floodgates opened.

“No beating for broken tools if tools already rotten.”

“No sending smallest through murder-holes to test traps.”

“One rest day in seven.”

“Communal cooking rights.”

“Maternity work exemption.”

“Teeth compensation,” muttered a goblin missing one incisor. “Very important.”

Nate just stood there while a starving goblin tribe, having inhaled enough stew to regain consciousness, produced what amounted to a collective bargaining agenda.

These are union goblins, he thought, a little hysterically. My first subjects are union goblins.

The strangest part was that none of the demands were unreasonable.