Gribble's chest heaved as he plunged through the Wild Woods, each gasping breath searing his lungs. The snarled undergrowth grabbed at him, trying to drag him down, but he tore free, leaves and twigs snapping under his pounding feet. Behind him, Grimrock's furious bellows and the clanking of his guards' armor rang in the distance, spurring Gribble to a frenzied pace.  

Thoughts rattled in his skull like dice in a cup. His hut, his sanctuary, lying in ruins. The surge of strange power thrumming in his veins. And the sickening unknown of what came next. They chased each other round and round, a dizzying storm of fear and confusion. Gribble shook his head, tried to clear it. One thought pounded louder than the rest - run! 

"Can't let them catch me," he panted under his breath, the words lost in his ragged huffs. "Gotta get away!" 

He veered around a massive fallen log, nearly losing his footing on the moss-slick bark. Caught himself against a tree, bark biting into his palms. A backwards glance - no sign of pursuit yet. Gribble swiped an arm across his sweaty brow and plunged on, pushing himself harder, faster.

The woods thickened around him as he ran. Towering trunks crowded close, their gnarled boughs knitting into a dense canopy that swallowed the sun. Shadows pooled between them, dark as spilled ink. An oppressive hush draped the air, smothering birdsong and insect chitter, until only the crackle of Gribble's labored breathing and the thud of his heart remained. 

Branches whipped at him, skinny switches that bit and stung. They raked his arms, his face, drawing thin lines of blood, but he battled through the sting, refusing to slow. A stitch jabbed his side, his muscles screaming for quarter as he drove them harder. But the primal need to flee drowned out all else. Grimrock's wrathful visage seemed to loom at his back, the chieftain's eyes burning with a terrible knowing. 

"He suspects," Gribble gasped, a dart of icy fear piercing his lungs. "Can't...let him...find out!" 

His injuries throbbed, the welts pulsing in time with his harried steps, but he pushed the pain down deep. If Grimrock sniffed out his secret...Gribble's stomach clenched. He surged forward with a burst of desperate speed, the breath sawing in and out of him like ragged sobs.

The forest fought him at every turn. Grasping creepers tangled around his ankles. Wrist-thick roots humped from the soil, hidden beneath drifts of leaves just waiting to snag a toe and send him sprawling. Gribble high-stepped over them, searching for safe passage, but the woods were sly. They hid their snares well. He squinted, trying to puzzle out the way, but the gloom swallowed everything beyond a spear's throw ahead. 

Just as he thought he spied a clearer trail, Gribble's foot plunged into a hidden divot. His ankle wrenched, pain exploding up his leg as his knee buckled. He pitched forward with a strangled yelp, arms pinwheeling. The ground rushed up to meet him - smashed the air from his lungs. He landed hard, tumbling into a bed of damp leaves with a bone-jarring crunch.

For a long moment, he lay unmoving. Each shallow gasp burned like fire. A roaring filled his ears. The woods seemed to hold their breath, an eerie hush falling over the shadowed trunks. Even the wind stilled, leaves hanging motionless in the thick air. The only sound was the frenzied drum of Gribble's own heart. 

He blinked up at the dense weave of branches overhead, fought to quiet his ragged breathing. Cocked his head, straining for any rustle, any snap of a broken twig that might betray Grimrock drawing near. But the forest kept its silence, ancient and uncaring.

"Gotta...keep going," Gribble croaked. With a groan, he rolled onto his side, teeth clenched against a fresh stab from his twisted ankle. "Get up. Get up!"

He levered himself to hands and knees with a gasp. The motion sent the woods spinning around him. He grit his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut, and counted to ten. Slower than he liked, the dizziness subsided. Bracing a hand on a nearby trunk, he hauled himself upright, hissing as his bad leg took his weight. The joint had already blown up like a festival balloon.

Gribble tested it gingerly. White-hot needles shot from ankle to hip. He growled a curse through locked teeth, tasting blood where he'd bitten his tongue. 

"Slowing me down," he panted, glaring at his wounded limb like it had betrayed him. But he couldn't just flop here like a landed fish, a feast for Grimrock's mutts. "Keep moving. Keep moving!"

Jaw set with grim determination, he pushed off from the supporting trunk. Agony sang up his nerves with every shuffling step, but he slogged on, dragging his throbbing leg as best he could. He fixed his eyes ahead, searching for the easiest path, a route that might spare him the worst of the sucking mud and gnarled roots. 

But the further he staggered, the more alien the woods became. Trunks bulged like bloated corpses, bark glistening in oily sheens. Branches clawed the sky like arthritic fingers, twisting into impossible spirals. A feverish energy crackled between them, the air gone thick and watchful. Gribble's nape prickled. The fine hairs at his temples stood on end. 

"Something's out there," he muttered. "Something old. Something powerful."

Unease shivered through him, a cold trickle down the knobs of his spine. Part of him wanted to shy away, to turn heel and blunder off in the opposite direction. But another part, the part that had always whispered that he was more than just a misbegotten goblin, that part urged him on. He wavered, caught between the two impulses. Then, setting his jaw, he pushed onward, refusing to let fear master him.

With each dogged step, the aura of strangeness grew. It wrapped round him like a smothering cloak, muffling and disorienting. Gribble shook his head, trying to clear the fog from his thoughts. For a moment, the trees ahead seemed to waver like a heat mirage. Then, between one blink and the next, they peeled away, and Gribble found himself at the edge of a small clearing.

He stumbled to a halt, squinting in the sudden brightness. Shafts of wan sunlight speared down between the overarching boughs, gilding the tangled grass in tarnished gold. And there, in the center of the glade, hunched a decrepit ruin. Weathered stones thrust up from the loamy earth like broken teeth, bearded in moss and strangling vines. A miasma of decay and desolation hung over the crumbled walls.

Gribble wavered at the treeline, one hand braced on a trunk flayed silver by lightning. His ears twitched as he listened hard for any sound of Grimrock's approach. But there was only the sough of wind through leaves, the mournful creak of weighted boughs. No stamp of iron-nailed boots, no baying of pursuit. Not yet.

"Probably stumbled right past me, the slack-jawed dundernonce," Gribble muttered. A savage stab of satisfaction pierced the fear knotted in his gut. Maybe he'd lost them after all! 

But he didn't kid himself that Grimrock would give up so easily. The old goblin was too canny, too determined to let his prize slip away. He'd be prowling the verges even now, stubborn as a tick on a dog's ear. 

Gribble needed to keep moving, put as many miles as he could between him and Grimrock's trackers. Every moment he tarried was another chance for them to catch his scent. But something about the forlorn ruin drew him like a fish on a line. It tugged at him, the same insistent pull he'd felt when the first crackle of his power had coursed through his flesh. 

Against his better judgment, Gribble found himself limping into the clearing. The knee-high grass clutched at him as he passed, rasping against his legs like a thousand dried tongues. He shivered, but pressed on, drawn by a mixture of curiosity and that uncanny, bone-deep tug. 

The closer he got to the ruins, the stronger the sense of age and loss became. It hung in the still air like woodsmoke, acrid and eye-watering. Gribble paused at the crumbled threshold, one hand outstretched to trace a nearby carving. Beneath the fuzzy caul of moss, the lines were precise, the cuts as crisp as the day they were hewn. His fingertips tingled at the contact, a frisson of energy crackling over his skin.

"What is this place?" he breathed. The hair on his arms stood up, his whole body gone to gooseflesh. There was power here, so palpable he could almost taste it humming on his tongue - sharp and metallic, like the air before a thunderstorm.

Gribble ventured deeper into the ruins, picking his way over tumbled stones and knotted creepers. Everything seemed unnaturally hushed, the Twitter of birdsong and chitter of insects stilled as if in anticipation. Only the scuff of his halting steps and the ragged saw of his breath broke the sepulchral silence. At the rear of the collapsed structure, a glint of silver caught his eye.

There, half-buried in a drift of leaves, lay a toppled pillar. Faded runes glimmered along its flank, their precise strokes coiled into dense spirals and whorls. An eldritch light seemed to spring from the carvings, as cold and piercing as starshine. 

"Never seen writing like that before," Gribble muttered, but something in him leapt at the sight, like a fish to a lure.

Heart suddenly pounding, he limped closer. Up close, the runes were even more perplexing, the unfamiliar characters twining together into an unbroken skein of quicksilver lines. They made his eyes water, his thoughts muddy. And yet...and yet some primal part of him *knew* them, recognized in them a message of dire import. 

Hand shaking, Gribble reached out to brush the nearest line of script. The instant his flesh met that uncanny metal his nerves came alive, sparking and sizzling like a cookfire doused with lamp oil. He gasped, transfixed, as a surge of eye-watering energy raced up his arm to erupt behind his eyes in a dazzling burst.

In that instant, the forest, the ruin, everything beyond the glimmering runes fell away. A cool, clear voice filled Gribble's mind, precise as a jeweler's hammer tapping out each syllable: 

*The goblin of twinned blood, last of an ancient line,*

*Born to wield a power most sublime,*

*Shall rise from shadow, from hate and scorn,*

*To battle a world-rending storm.*

*The fate of all, from great to least,*

*Hinges on this unlikely beast.*

*Savior or Destroyer, which shall he be?*

*The Lock or the Key to catastrophe?*

*Two paths diverge, two choices remain,*

*Mercy or ruin, loss or gain.*

*Which fork to tread, which way to wend?* 

*On this, all fates depend.*

Gribble wrenched away from the pillar with a gasp, his head ringing like a bell. He staggered back, nearly tripping over a twist of vine in his haste. The runes' glow died as his contact broke, plunging the clearing back into murky dimness, but their message seared behind his eyelids in throbbing lines of silvery fire. 

A wave of vertigo crashed over Gribble, the ground pitching under his feet like a storm-tossed deck. He backpedaled until his shoulders slammed into a shard of wall. Clinging to the moss-felted stone, he stared in mounting horror at the innocuous-looking runes.

The prophecy's words rang round and round his head, a maddening chant of fear and confusion. It spoke of him, Gribble, the clan scrag, the object of a lifetime of scorn and revulsion -- him, and the powers he'd fought so hard to suppress. But what he'd thought a curse foisted on him by cruel fate, the runes named a sublime gift! 

Impossible. He, a savior? A destroyer? He'd never been anything but a misfit, a blot on the clan's honor. How could the fate of worlds rest on his spindly shoulders? And yet, with a dizzying certainty, he knew the words for truth. Some deep, undeniable part of him recognized their portent, felt in them the tolling of a mighty bell that could not be unrung.

Gribble's knees gave way. He slumped against the weathered stones, sliding to the moss-crusted ground. Wrapping his arms around his drawn up legs, he hugged them to his chest as if he could make himself too small for fate to find. But the prophecy's declaration churned in his mind, looping and twisting like tangled yarn.

"Why me?" he whispered to the uncaring woods. "I never asked for this. Any of it."

A dry, humorless chuckle huffed from his throat. He'd wanted so badly to know why he was different, to understand the strange forces roiling in his blood. Well, now he knew, and what a bitter jest that knowledge was! He almost preferred the certainty of Grimrock's muttering, the easy hatred and fear of his power. At least that, he understood. But this talk of prophecy, of a lone goblin's choice tipping the world toward salvation or damnation? It was too much, too huge to wrap his mind around. 

He lifted a shaking hand, scrubbed it down his face as if he could wipe away the uncertainty churning in his gut. Drew a long, shuddering breath of the ruin's thick air, tasting moss and mold and the bright zing of power. Let it out in a rush.

Gribble pulled himself to his feet, teeth gritted at the flare of pain from his swollen ankle. He'd moldered here long enough, let terror master him for too many precious seconds. Overhead, the sky visible through the clearing's ragged hole had deepened to a dusky purple, heralding twilight's steady march. The others would be on him soon. He had to move, injured or no.

Casting a final, wary look at the innocuous-seeming pillar, Gribble turned to limp from the ruins. But though he left the crumbling stones at his back, he couldn't shake the prophecy coiled in his mind. It clung to him, stubborn as a burrsweed, thorny with dire promise.

One thing was certain: his story, the tale of the goblin of twinned blood, had only just begun. What marvels and horrors the next chapter held was anyone's guess. But Gribble of the Wild Woods would be there to meet them, for better or worse. 

The Lock or the Key, Savior or Destroyer. 

Only time would tell which he was meant to be.