The Fed Dark

The blind, bloated thing at the bottom of the Skritch Deep that the warren feeds — older than the Gnash-King, older than the goblins, and grown vast on a hundred generations of tribute in the dark.

No goblin has a word for it that isn't a flinch. It dens at the very bottom of the Skritch Deep, past the thickest ring of lamps, and it does not come up — it does not need to. The warren brings the meat and the coin and the oil down to it, and has for longer than any goblin memory, and the thing has swelled on that tribute into something the size of the king-hole itself: pale as a grub that has never seen light, blind, its hide gone soft and translucent over a bulk that shifts and gulps in the dark. It hunts by sound — by the fall of a coin, the scuff of a boot, the ring of anything that sounds — and what it cannot reach it waits for, because the frightened always bring it closer in the end. The goblins did not make it and do not rule it, whatever the Gnash-King's boast says. They found a mouth already open in the deep, cut with older marks than any goblin hand, and did what the frightened do: they fed it, and called the feeding theirs.