Nightcap
A Vignette
The group, looking much like it had been through a thresher, was still stumping painfully through the swamp as evening settled. Finding a sort of solid, grassy island in the mosquito-infested bog, they set up a hasty camp, and went through the motions of settling down for the night.
Visible through the spindly, sickly trees, a full moon waxed overhead – and apart from the shivery light it shed, it seemed to have become a topic of discussion with the adventurers’ goblin guides. At their mention of the “Gobbo-in-the-Moon”, the party necromancer Mato-Eetch saw their rogue — the gangly, shabby, eccentric Gunga Sam — cock his beaked head in the goblins’ direction, with what might have been a glint of amusement in his eyes. As Mato-Eetch watched, the birdman stalked over and joined the goblins’ conversation. As the sounds of the camp quieted and first watch began, the conversation gradually became more distinct …
“… A Gobbo in the moon?” Gunga hooted. “How’d a goblin get up there – or get so big?”
The goblin guides glanced at each other doubtfully. “Don’t know,” said Sparks. “It’s just a story we grow up with.”
“Have you ever noticed that it really doesn’t look much like a face?” Gunga queried. “That’s because it isn’t … but if you look closely, you can see that something – or things – are slowly moving, as if just beneath the surface of the great orb’s glistening reflection. It’s no face – of goblin, birdman, or even human – for it is in truth the enormous egg sac of the sky-spider god Kumo, who’s many-legged progeny slowly twitch and turn in their slumber of eons. At the end of times, it will split, and Kumo’s brood will scuttle forth, to descend upon this world, feast, and grow strong.”
The goblins seemed, to Mato-Eetch, to be twitching a bit themselves, as if suddenly uncomfortable sitting on their hillocks of flat marsh grass.
“Look!” croaked Gunga, waving a taloned hand at the moon above, “Even now you can see them stirring in their long sleep! … who knows what they dream of – or if they dream at all?” The goblins looked, and one of them seemed to repress a shudder. “Ahh well,” the birdman clucked, “I’m for 3rd shift again tonight, so it’s off to bed for me … sleep well.”
With that, Gunga silently ambled off, no doubt to collapse in his revolving rag-heap of a nest-like bed somewhere at the periphery of the camp. Mato-Eetch glanced back at the goblin guides, muttering nervously among themselves, and very awake now indeed … he smirked to himself, and shuffled over to his bedroll to turn in as well. “Job well done, Gunga,” he thought drowsily as he drifted off to sleep. “The guides won’t be dozing on watch tonight!”