Chapter 5: My First Subjects Are Goblins With Union Demands

Rain came to the Blighted March in thin silver spears, hissing where it struck old black stone.

From the highest balcony of the fortress, Nate watched the cursed land steam like a giant kettle. The plain below rolled away in bruised shades of purple and gray, with thorn scrub crouched low against the wind and dead trees twisted into shapes that looked uncomfortably opinionated. Somewhere far off, something large howled. Somewhere closer, one of his newly installed gutter-spouts gargled triumphantly and blasted a sheet of water clear over the courtyard.

“Still weirdly proud of that,” Nate muttered.

The fortress behind him no longer resembled an abandoned villain headquarters from a low-budget fantasy movie. Lamps glowed warm behind reinforced windows. Fresh banners—plain for now, because he had not yet made the terrible mistake of designing a national flag—stirred in the rain. The courtyard had drainage. The kitchens had heat. The beds no longer looked like they had personally lost a war.

He had a roof that didn’t leak, a pantry that didn’t smell like ancestral regret, and a front gate that had recently punted armed scavengers halfway down the road thanks to a “welcoming security update” he had clicked on without reading closely.

Progress.

He leaned on the stone rail and exhaled into the wet air. For the first time since dying under what had to be the least dignified vending-machine accident in history, he felt almost—almost—like he had a handle on things.

Then the land below moved.

At first he thought it was the rain playing tricks, a shiver through the scrub. Then several hunched shapes broke from the thorny gray and staggered onto the old road leading toward the fortress. Small figures. Many of them. They clustered together in a dark knot, heads down against the weather, moving with the wobbly, exhausted determination of people who had run out of places to go three disasters ago.

Nate straightened.

“Uh,” he said to absolutely nobody. “Okay.”

A translucent pane shimmered into existence beside him with all the tact of a spam pop-up.

Notice: Unaffiliated sapient lifeforms have entered your territory.

Status: Malnourished. Fatigued. Low morale.

Projected Outcomes:

– Ignore them: possible theft, collapse, death, haunting.

– Repel them: minor security gain, major reputation loss.

– Admit them: labor pool expansion, tax base increase, potential loyalty event.

Suggestion: Settlement growth opportunity detected.

“That is an upsettingly cheerful way to phrase refugees,” Nate said.

The window winked at him, unashamed.

Below, the group stopped just outside bowshot range of the gatehouse. Even from up here he could tell they were in bad shape. Too thin. Too slow. A couple of the smallest figures were being carried. One had what looked suspiciously like a cooking pot on its head for a helmet.

His stomach tightened.

Not raiders, then. Or if they were, they were the saddest raiders in recorded history.

He turned and headed for the stairs at a jog.

The main hall smelled of firewood, clean stone, and lunch. The kitchen staff consisted entirely of him, plus a pair of animated brooms who had somehow developed judgmental body language, but a cauldron of vegetable soup still bubbled over the great stove. He had gotten over the weirdness of magically generated ingredients faster than expected. Starvation apparently made ethics flexible where infinite potatoes were concerned.

He grabbed a ladle on instinct, then put it down because that was ridiculous and he didn’t know why he thought he should bring a ladle into a diplomatic situation.

At the gatehouse, the rain drummed on the murder-holes overhead. Nate climbed to the slit window and peered down.

Goblins.

He knew they were goblins because even his very limited fantasy education covered that much, but these were not the shrieking green pinata monsters of game tutorials. They were small and wiry, yes, with pointed ears, broad noses, sharp little teeth, and skin in muted shades from moss-green to olive-brown. But they also wore patched cloaks and rope belts and carried bundles. One clutched a bent frying pan like a holy relic. Another had a baby tied to her chest beneath oilcloth. The oldest among them stood at the front with a spear haft polished smooth from age and use, though the spearhead itself had been replaced by a kitchen knife bound on with wire.

There were nineteen of them that he could see. Maybe twenty, counting the child peeking from behind someone’s leg.

Every one of them looked up at the fortress like it was a judge.

Nate swallowed. “Right. Be normal. Super normal. Very ordinary landlord behavior.”

He opened the little gatehouse hatch and called down, “Hello?”

The effect was immediate and disastrous.

Every goblin in sight dropped to their knees.

A couple hit the mud face-first.

“We surrender!” shrilled one.

“Please eat Grakka last!” cried another.

“I am stringy and unsuitable for roasting!” a third announced with heartbreaking urgency.

Nate stared. Rain splashed through the hatch onto his sleeves.

“That is,” he said carefully, “not where I was going with this.”

The old goblin at the front lifted his head one cautious inch. One eye was clouded white. The other was sharp with the stubbornness of something that had survived on spite. “Mighty dark lord,” he rasped, “we came because the marshlands are dead, the humans burned our traps, the wolves took the weak, and your towers still stand. If you kill us, kill the little ones quick. If you need ditch-diggers first, we can dig.”

The rain made dark tracks down his wrinkled face. He did not wipe them away.

Nate felt something in his chest go very still.

“Okay,” he said. “First, not a dark lord. Second, nobody is getting eaten. Third, we are absolutely not discussing child-execution logistics before breakfast—or, uh, after breakfast. Ever.”

The goblins looked at one another in bafflement.

One of the little kids sneezed.

Nate made a decision with the same reckless instinct that had gotten him killed by a vending machine and somehow qualified him to run cursed real estate.

“Give me five minutes,” he said. “And please don’t attack the gate. It has developed ideas.”

He shut the hatch before anyone could respond and sprinted for the system menu.

The air before him filled with panes and shimmering symbols.

Territory Management

Residents: 1

Guest Capacity: 4

Emergency Shelter Capacity: 0

Available Structures:

– Barracks Wing (Ruined)

– Servants’ Annex (Ruined)

– East Storehouse (Collapsed)

– Auxiliary Kitchens (Locked)

“Emergency shelter,” Nate said. “I want emergency shelter. Now.”

The menu flickered, recalculated, then displayed a new line with indecent smugness.

Settlement Feature Unlocked: Humanitarian Housing

Convert suitable unused structure into basic communal shelter?

Cost: 180 mana, 40 stone, 25 lumber, 12 textiles

Bonus: Residents admitted during inclement weather gain +12 initial trust

“Yes. Yes, obviously yes.”

The fortress hummed under his feet.

Somewhere in the east wing, old hinges screamed, dust billowed, and magic flowed through dead architecture like hot blood through numb fingers. Nate felt the cost leave him in a sudden dizzying tug, a pressure behind the eyes and under the skin, but it passed quickly. A second window appeared.

Upgrade Complete: Servants’ Annex restored as Rainward Dormitory

Features: bunk beds, heated floor channels, lockable footlockers, wash trough, vermin wards

Designer’s Note: Everybody deserves a dry place to sleep.

Nate blinked. “Did my broken god-skill just become morally supportive?”

The system declined to answer.

He went to the kitchen, loaded bread and three entire pots of soup onto a trolley he had also conjured yesterday because it felt wrong to own a castle without at least one dramatic rolling cart, and steered it back toward the gate with the help of two disapproving brooms.

“I know,” he told them. “This is not sanitary emergency management. I’m improvising monarchy.”

By the time he reached the courtyard, the goblins were still kneeling in the rain. Not one had moved.

That somehow made it worse.

He hauled open the inner gate lever. Chains clanked. Ancient counterweights groaned. The outer gate began to rise in a controlled, ponderous ascent.

The goblins flinched as though expecting crossbow bolts.

Instead, warm light spilled over the mud, followed by the smell of soup.

For a heartbeat nobody did anything.

Then nineteen goblin heads turned in perfect horrified unison toward the cauldrons.

Nate stood under the gate arch, rain misting in behind him, and lifted both hands.

“All right,” he said. “Ground rules. One: if anyone stabs anybody, we are going to have a really annoying conversation. Two: there’s enough for everyone, so no biting. Three: please come inside before somebody catches pneumonia or whatever the fantasy equivalent is.”

No one moved.

The old goblin slowly rose to his feet. He was even smaller than Nate had thought, hunched from age and burden, but there was dignity in the way he planted the butt of his spear into the mud and leaned on it. “No tricks?” he asked.

“I mean, I have very little experience with hospitality,” Nate admitted. “But no malicious ones.”

A younger goblin with one ear torn half off whispered, not quietly enough, “Maybe soup poison.”

“Then why smell good?” whispered another back, scandalized.

The baby on the mother’s chest made a tiny grabby hand at the steam.

That settled it.

The old goblin bowed his head once, curt and formal. “I am Snik, ash-speaker of Broken Fang. We enter under your mercy.”

“Nate,” he said. “Uh. Owner? Temporary ruler? Building superintendent? Still workshopping titles.”

Snik stared at him as if this were either profound demonic trickery or mental illness.

“Right,” Nate said. “Come on.”

The first goblin to cross the threshold did so with the care of someone stepping onto the back of a sleeping dragon. He was all sharp elbows and suspicious yellow eyes, and he had an empty sack slung over his shoulder. He glanced at the gate, then at Nate, then at the soup. The smell hit him. Nate watched the exact moment hunger overruled terror.

The goblin’s throat worked.

“Bowl?” Nate offered.

The goblin accepted the wooden bowl with trembling hands.

Nate ladled soup. Potato, onion, carrot, thick enough to count as emotional support. The goblin stared into it as though expecting divine revelation. Then he took one sip.

He made a sound so raw and desperate that every other goblin surged forward at once.

For thirty terrifying seconds Nate thought he had accidentally triggered a food riot, but Snik barked something in Goblin that cracked through the rain like a whip. The crowd froze. A line formed with military precision so startling it would have impressed airport security.

“Children first,” Snik snapped.

The mothers shouldered ahead. Then the elderly. Then the wounded. No shoving. No grabbing. Just hollow eyes fixed on the food and bodies held together by discipline more than strength.

Nate’s chest tightened again.

He served until his arm ached. Goblin after goblin took soup and bread, then retreated under the archway to eat in fierce, silent concentration. Steam rose around them. Rain dripped from ears and noses. One child tried to climb into a cauldron and had to be extracted by an older sister with practiced efficiency.

By the time the last bowl was filled, the courtyard had grown strangely quiet.

Not because the goblins were relaxed. They weren’t. Their eyes still tracked every wall, every shadow, every movement of the gate. But the animal edge of starvation had dimmed. Warmth was beginning to reach their fingers. Color returned, faintly, to pinched faces.

“There’s a dormitory ready,” Nate said to Snik. “Dry beds. Wash area. We can talk after everyone gets settled.”

Snik was midway through his own soup. He stopped. “Beds?”

“Yes?”

“For us?”

“Yes.”

“Indoors.”

“That’s generally where beds go, yeah.”

Snik looked down at the bowl in his hand as if checking whether reality had soured while he wasn’t looking. “What is the price?”

“We’ll get there.” Nate hesitated, then added, “Preferably before I accidentally reinvent indentured servitude.”

Snik’s one good eye narrowed. “You speak in curses, landlord.”