The gods of the bolus lived in a state apart from the physical. For those who do not comprehend the deific waveform of reality, it could be described as an apartment. In this apartment, a man with the head of an eagle sat on something here represented as a couch, his feet up on an ottoman, lazily watching images on what was in essence a TV. Behind the eagle-headed god, whose name was Outeb, was the analog of a kitchen table, on which were two mouse-sized mice, white of fur and clad in robes. They were busy coordinating a full-sized quill to write on a piece of parchment.

Stormhaegan stormed in, as only a storm god can, turning the atmosphere tumultuous.

“I’m back from my walk!” he proclaimed. “Don’t bother getting up, Outeb, I can see you’re comfortable.”

Stormhaegen skirted the bird-headed god of travel to sit on the far side of the couch. He waved a hand at the screen across from them purposefully. The image changed.

“I have urgent business,” Stormhaegan said hastily to his couch companion. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Urgent business?” a voice squeaked. It didn’t come from the vegetative deity. One of the mice had squoken. “Are you finally doing something about my prophesy?” it asked scornfully, “The one at the top of your To Do for a millennium now?”

The images on the screen rapidly shifted as Stormhaegan flicked them by, barely allowing each to register. “Yes, your damned list. I said I would get around to it.”

The mouse huffed and returned to its scribbling. “It’s a miracle the world hasn’t drowned yet. Or frozen.”

“Or melted,” the other mouse added. Outeb watched in stony silence, his beak partly open like an avian filter feeder. Stormhaegen grew impatient, his cosmic power limited by simple disorganization.

“Aha!” he announced. He nudged Outeb and said, “Great advice on the air travel. Missionaries, tactically deployed. Scribb? What am I looking at?”

“It was in the prophesy I wrote for you,” said one of the mice.

“I couldn’t read your handwriting. Footprints were all in the ink.”

The scratch of quill on parchment stopped, replaced with a tense silence. This faded and was followed by a squeaky sigh. “Let me come over there. I’ll walk you through it.”

They scurried to the TV and climbed up to the screen. The two mice studied the moving picture, a sunny desert vista overlooking a great clay cooking pot, a small ugly humanoid in a chef’s hat dancing on an adjacent mezzanine. A reptilian humanoid, its hands bound, was secured nearby.

“That’s him,” one of the mice confirmed. “Your chosen one.”

“That thing in the hat is a kobold?”

A mouse shook its head. “The other one is a kobold.”

Stormhaegen panicked.

“I’m too late! Those goblins are going to eat him!”

“No, no,” one of the mice said, “This is now. When did you send your herald, his guide?”

Stormhaegen scratched his scalp, stirring the clouds there.

“Oh… Yesterday?”

“Then we need to get you caught up. We can squeeze a day’s recap in the few minutes of real time until he makes his appearance.”

The scene on the TV started moving backwards.

****

While a gnome and a hermit crab hunted for shells, millions of other things were happening at the same time. There is nothing particularly unusual or noteworthy about this, as millions of things tend to happen simultaneously all the time. For instance, two snails fell in love after a chance meeting while crawling over a garden pumpkin. A convict was wrongly hanged in front of a jeering crowd. A priceless vase was smashed. A stoic achieved enlightenment, the result of years of study. Someone fended off an attacker using a priceless vase which happened to be at hand.

Few of these things are directly related, with most of them being separated by vast distances. They just happened at the same time, and it’s comforting to know that when one thing is happening, millions of other things are happening right alongside it in a great chaotic orchestra. And one of those, far away from the gnome and hermit crab, was a kobold exploring the desert in which he lived.

A kobold, in appearance, is a small, savage lizard which has learned the twin tricks of using tools and walking upright, which are the unspoken cost of admission the Civil Discourse.

Scribb, is the narration wholly necessary? It’s a bit low quality.

We renegotiated the contract with Armstrong to last until David can take the job.

The civil discourse is like a game. Rules are settled on by committees, which are then put to the test by the players, to the amusement of onlookers who often have some investment in who comes out on top. This leads to further discussion about who hit whom, whether they stepped over the line or not, and inevitable accusations of cheating. These lead to re-evaluation and more rules, and the cycle begins anew. But kobolds choose instead to watch the game from a nearby hill. There may be no popcorn, but they can eat as many bugs as they can catch. They are, however, sometimes hit in the head by the occasional fly ball.

I’ll take that to mean we can’t turn it off.

Quite right. It was part of the deal.

The kobold race populates the wasteland plateau east of the mountains and north of the steppes. Here they organize into tribes, which they fiercely protect. Your average kobold is roughly half the height of an adult orc which, luckily, is often just tall enough to reach the ground. This is excepting a kobold named Punig, who was allegedly so short he needed something to stand on just to get up in the morning.

I can’t wait for David’s contract to start.

Time moves for no god, the stubborn ox.

They also come in a variety of stone- and metallic-colors, their scales being a homogenous hue.

This kobold is named Chicken, in the language of his people, and he is away many days searching for the bounty of the land. Chicken is unconcerned with astronomy, philosophy, and what the civilized world calls "the natural magics.” The world to him consists mostly of the territories he patrols, those being only a small portion of the greater vast and hostile wasteland.

The wastes do not take readily to being tamed and scoff openly at the thought of being cultivated, so the kobolds and some of its other denizens have adopted a strategy of subsistence scavenging. The tactic consists of searching far and often for anything edible or practical. Moderately experienced with this style of living, Chicken has an established route. Going solo, as opposed to joining the rare hunting party in search of big game, there are a few places he knows to check for goods.

He doesn't have much room in his pack, but this is of little import. Naturally curious, Chicken brings back information, whether rooted out of cracks or picked up like a stone on the side of the path. It weighs nothing and there's always room for more.

He checks in with the migratory beasts, notes the weather, and scouts the boundaries of rival tribes, kobold or otherwise. Kobolds, collectively, are territorial in a righteously indignant way, to other kobolds and to non-kobolds alike. News of encroaching tribes could spark war parties. Really big encroaching tribes could spark an intense and immediate urge to pack up and move. None are too righteous or indignant to risk suicide.

In the same vein, Chicken is also interested in finding places to hide, though this information he keeps to himself. A hiding spot is no good if others know where it is. Some of Chicken's forays last for days, and he does not like being exposed to the elements in the dark. Some elements have teeth, powerful jaws, and a knack for moving silently.

When he finds an interesting structure to the rocks, he has made it a habit to investigate no matter the time of day, because it could be useful in the future.

He found one such structure presently, and was wriggling inside the space as cautiously as could be managed. A mere slit in the shattered ground, it was well hidden, being small and interestingly angled. It appeared to comfortably house anything that could fit through the opening. Chicken was testing if he measured up. He had already set aside his pack, removed the stone knife hanging from his waist, and glanced around suspiciously before making the attempt. It was quiet now, but Chicken knew he couldn’t trust the silence further than he could throw it.

The bassy scent of the basalt and quartz accented the omnipresent sandstone dust and desiccated dung as the hot air carried it skyward. Chicken lay half in the hole, half out of it. It stubbornly refused admittance to both halves at once, so he took a moment to rest. He had a piece of charcoal in hand and was marking this new place. Two triangles, touching at opposite points, crossed by a line. Two legs, two arms, a tail, and a distinctly kobold-looking head in profile. It was just a way of saying “Chicken was here”. Satisfied, he returned to fighting the hole.

Half into the twisted about. He tried to come in straight, and then at an angle, all while pulling with his arms and pushing with his legs. His tail curled with the effort as the narrow opening squeezed his chest and the rough stone abraded his scales and tunic.

This last detail went largely unnoticed as kobold scales are particularly tough, much more-so than common lizardfolk scales. In the few circles where these things are discussed, kobold scale toughness is attributed to a thickening over generations, as only kobolds with thick scales survive the rigors of their environment to mating age. This is patently wrong

His color, however, was selected for. To better blend into his environment, Chicken is covered in an overlapping natural mail of goldenrod colored scales. These scales cover him head to toe, from the tip of his triceratops frill down to his short-clawed toes and the tip of his tail.

Accenting this was the slightly lighter color of the scales on the front of his torso and palms, his stubby crest horns, and the claws on his hands and feet.

The tunic he was wearing, and absentmindedly destroying against the rocks, was cut of a salvaged canvas cloth and lined with fur. The lining was done inexpertly, but clearly with purpose.

Frustrated, he pulled his upper half out of the hole and frowned at it.

"I know I can fit. You're going to let me in, even if I have to force you," he said to the obstinate just-too-small hidey hole. It merely gaped at him.

He picked up a comfortably shaped rock and started to widen the hole with it, pounding against the most offending parts to smooth them down. After several minutes, sending chips of stone flying, he brushed away a poke in his side and set his rock down to try again to enter the hole.

There was another poke in his side before he could get his head in.

Behind him were two curious goblins, one of which was using a blunted dagger tied to a pole as part-time spear, part-time pokey stick. They had been watching him with idle bemusement, barely having to sneak up on him in his severely focused state.

"Oh, hello," he said, grinning nervously. “I wasn’t supposed to see any goblins until tomorrow. You don’t think you can let me off with a warning, do you?”

After a brief scuffle, Chicken reflected on how the sound of his banging must have attracted them. The goblins dragged him away with his arms bound uncomfortably in thick twine.

The pair spoke frantically to each other in gobbledygook along the way. Once, they turned their attention on Chicken, spitting foul gibberish at him, making him wish they’d just hurl stones instead. Gobbledygook, the language of the goblins, is the most unpleasant language spoken on the bolus, often compared to the experience of pouring acid in the ears. The blank stare won from him after the verbal assault told them that Chicken didn't grok the language.

The first chance he got, Chicken tried to get the rope between his teeth, but the goblins noticed and shouted at him. After that, the troop did not stop until they reached their destination, which was just before nightfall. Chicken could see a crude fence corralling boulders. These boulders had obvious signs of habitation strung between them.

"Do you smell smoke?" Chicken asked, "I think I can smell cooking from here." The goblins didn’t hear, or didn’t care.

The group had, in fact, arrived at the goblin camp.

His captors shouted and gibbered at a perimeter guard before heading on past the tall and spikey fence and deeper into the goblin camp.

I don't like the look of those skulls, Chicken thought to himself as they passed through the open gate. They hung from the posts like large white grapes, clustered and sun bleached, in random assortments of race.

There were few structures inside the perimeter, with most of the goblins sleeping or loitering guiltily among the boulders. If they weren't loitering, they hustled about with a nervous energy.

Chicken could hear talking, or maybe fighting, going on around him. It was hard to tell the difference.

There were a few lean-tos here and there. At the center of the fenced in area stood a full-sized leather tent, but even this was dwarfed half again by the great clay pot next door.

There was scaffolding around the pot for someone to get to the top, and it was propped up over a roaring bonfire. This bonfire was pulling double-duty to also light most of the camp.

Chicken gawked at the size of the fire and noticed that the activity going on was largely focused on gathering fuel. He couldn't see a goblin not carrying something dry and flammable. He watched a few huck their load into the flames before turning around and trotting off for more.

He realized with dread that this pot was where his captors were taking him.

They surprised him by stopping him at the tent first, whereupon another goblin emerged with much pomp, given the circumstance.

Casting aside the tent flap, this goblin gave Chicken an appraisal like a fashionista would give someone wearing last year's clothes. He felt like a squished bug under this goblin's regal and judgmental gaze.

Clearly outclassed by this arrival, his guards jabbered nervously, a stark contrast to the belittling tone they had given the perimeter guard.

The regal goblin wore the nicest of scrap clothing, with a chef's hat featuring prominently on his head, giving him an extra foot of height. The poof at the top was level with Chicken's eyes.

Chicken mustered his guile.

"Thank the gods," he said, his voice petulant and filled with entitlement, "Finally, someone in charge here. Listen, there has been a big misunderstanding."

He envisioned himself as a bereaved chieftain as he spoke, supplementing his confidence.

He switched to a more complacent tone, with a sense of bargaining in his words.

"If you let me go now, there will be no repercussions. We can look back on this and laugh."

The guards, unfazed by his act, cut his chuckle short by pulling him down to his knees with an "oof", killing the moment.

He looked the goblin in the face, yellow eye to yellow eye. He expected the goblin to reach out and move his head side to side, but all it did was lean in and sniff deeply. The head chef yammered decisively and both guards acknowledged. Chicken would do for the occasion. He was goblin handled up the rickety scaffolding, restrained through his thrashing.

"No! Please! You don't want to eat me! I'm not very tasty!" he shouted, all composure lost.

The goblin had already gone back inside, dismissing the issue. From up on the adjacent landing, Chicken could see into the bubbling brew. It was grey with swirling wisps of green, like rusty mercury, and occasionally an eyeball or piece of chitin or some gizzard or such would bob to the surface. The smell of the tincture climbed in his nostrils and settled in, watering his eyes and making him gag.

Chicken had once come across the carcass of a coyote in a sealed crevice after a rockslide, the creature having succumbed to a broken back after some time. It had died in the relative cool of a watering hole, and instead of desiccating in the sun, it served as food source for the tenacious fungus which grew there. The damp, dead air of that coyote’s tomb, unearthly and sickly with the accelerated decay caused by the culture of fungus was a smell Chicken would never forget. That smell was this smell’s younger brother. With a hint of chicory.

A whack to the back of his legs told him his captors wanted him to sit, which he did, and they tied his already bound hands to a pole jutting from the slapdash.

"You're not throwing me in there yet?" he asked hopefully, but then added, "Maybe you want to chop me into pieces first. Though to do that you'd have to descale me, I guess. I dunno, really, I've never eaten kobold, myself." His train of thought ended with a pitiful shrug. “I’ve got them right where I want them. Everyone knows the hero always escapes the cannibals when they’ve got him spitted over a fire. I just need my trusty blade.”

He realized he had no trusty blade.

“My loyal sidekick will come through for me, at least.”

No one came to mind.

“My legend simply can’t end before it started. I’ll keep my mind off it until my daring escape.”

All night long, Chicken's mind wandered in and around unpleasant thoughts while he waited to be made into Chicken soup.