As Iberis and his brothers rode the boat down the river, they saw where the earth had split into the inlet and were greeted by the southern sea breeze. The moment the aroma met their nostrils, excitement filled their hearts. Even the goblins who were swimming in the river rose to the surface to take in the smell of home.
The river water bled into the sea, and those on the boat dove into what was now seawater, splashing around wildly and crying with joy at their arrival home.
“Iberis?! No way! Iberis, is that you?!” came a shout. “You’re alive! What’s with the boat?! What happened to all of you out there?! What did you find past the wasteland?!”
“Whoa! They’re back!” cried another voice. “The heroes return!”
“Big bro?! Are you okay?!”
“Ha ha ha! The young’ns are back!”
Some ten or so goblins were waiting at a small hut at the inlet, constructed from driftwood. It seemed they were a search party, and the hut was their base of operations.
Iberis chuckled at the sight of the simple hut—Dias and the people of Baarbadal were friends to the goblins, and they would not care in the slightest that the hut was built on their land, but had the domain lord been anybody else, would things have been different?
As the boat was carried towards the inlet, some of the goblins swam over to the search party. They were happy to see familiar faces—partners, siblings, parents, and children alike. Iberis, however, stayed with the boat. It was his duty as the party’s leader to ensure it was safe.
Goblins hugged one another with relief, glad to be reunited, and some took off past the inlet for the ocean proper to inform the rest of the tribe about Iberis’s return.
“Welcome home!” came a powerful shout.
The voice belonged to a woman, and it was one that Iberis had for a time thought he might never hear again. He smiled brightly.
“We’re home!” he shouted in reply.
Iberis and his friends took their time catching up with their friends and family, then unloaded the boat’s provisions into the inlet hut. With that done, everybody dove into the water and headed for the ocean—for home.
Some swam with everything they had, others let the water carry them, some simply took in the underwater sights of the sky through the sea’s surface, and yet others took pleasure in catching and eating passing fish along the way. Every goblin indulged in the waters they so missed as they drifted to the bottom of the sea and to their village down there.
The goblin village was built into a cave in a wall near the bottom of the sea. It was a sight for sore eyes, and though the light of the sun rarely reached the village, it was still bright with coral and sea shells and decorated with furniture and tools that had drifted there from the surface. The goblins breathed deep, taking in the unique scent of their village, and it was then that they felt they had truly arrived home. They caught up with friends and family in the unique way that they did when communicating underwater, but eventually they all swam to the surface.
Iberis climbed a reef and made himself comfortable upon it, stating, “If we’re going to talk about an adventure on the surface, what better place to have it than the surface!”
Goblin after goblin climbed the reef to join Iberis, though some stayed in the water, floating upon the waves or leaning on stray driftwood. But no matter where they were, all the goblins were waiting with bated breath for Iberis to tell them all about the journey he’d been on. And Iberis was just as excited to give them what they wanted.
“The wasteland past the inlet is a horrid place!” he told them. “It is a place where moisture seems not to exist, a sea of sand where water is unwelcome. It gets in your eyes, in your mouth, and under your scales, and oh how it stings! We lacked the water to wash it all away, and as we trekked on we bemoaned that such an outrageous environment even existed!”
They’d thought back, he said, on what their ancestors had said about never venturing past the inlet. “But the appearance of that strange lizard changed everything! It asked us to step into the unknown, and we answered its call. It was because of that decision that we met with a winged hero—one who darted through the skies as freely as we goblins traverse the seas!”
Iberis’s own excitement had reached a peak. His tail fin smacked against the reef, and everybody around let out a collective gasp. They were taken by wonder, and as they leaned in to learn more, Iberis continued.
“Past the wasteland lie lands of green!” he cried. “Upon that land live creatures that survive on grass! And caring for those creatures is a man—the most powerful of any surface dweller! Such is his strength that he can vanquish a dragon alone! He has fought back the monsters numerous times, and now the dragons fear him! He is Duke Dias, lord of the grassy plains, but he is not just a skilled warrior! He is a man of great character, his soul as clean as the clearest ocean waters!”
Iberis regaled his listeners with the tale of how Dias had helped the goblins when they had been on the verge of starvation, and how he’d praised them for their bravery. That night, he had thrown a most unbelievable banquet to welcome them all to his village.
“We have all seen humans celebrating at the port towns, but none of those parties compare to the likes of what we experienced in the village of Iluk! Wondrous scents filled the air! Celebratory energy captured all our hearts! Smiles were everywhere, and the village was truly alive! To call it a paradise is no exaggeration, for in Iluk Village all races and animals live in harmony!”
Iberis spoke with great passion, and as his story unfolded, goblins emerged from the water with nets filled with fish. It was the men who had accompanied Iberis on his journey, and they passed the fish around. Joy and delight filled the air as a smile grew on everybody’s face. Iberis paused his story and dove into the sea to partake of the fish as questions bombarded him from all around.
Who is this Dias you speak of? What kind of a place is his village? What sort of people call it home? How do they survive?
For each fish Iberis ate, he answered a question. His friends saw how fierce his hunger had been, and they joined him in his feast, making for an impromptu reefside party of sorts.
The goblins were in awe of Iberis and impressed by his courage. He and his brothers had left the goblin home in part because of a mysterious lizard but also because of a longheld promise that stretched back generations. While they had all prayed that Iberis would return home safe with stories to tell, the story he told them was beyond anything they could have imagined.
And so the goblins were lively like never before, chatting with each other and listening to Iberis speak, and none were bored. This was what it meant to be alive for the goblins of the sea, and it was these moments that they all thought of as priceless.
As Iberis continued his tale, the excitement among the goblins only grew, and if one turned their gaze not far from the reef they would have seen the elder goblins listening just as intently, even though they were stubborn and not fond of such boisterous parties.
On the face of it, they were listening because they wanted information about the surface world, but one look at their faces told everyone that they were all engrossed by Iberis’s story. Iberis’s brothers all felt proud of their leader, so they did their utmost to assist him—shuffling fish around, gathering more when they ran dry, and passing out their new haul.
The oceans were unpredictable and the state of them changed often, so the goblins did not often eat to bursting as they wanted to be ready for anything. Today, however, was a special occasion, and so the hunting went on until each and every goblin was plump and full, all of them amazed by this tale of a world that felt straight out of fantasy.
“And then we encountered gods!” declared Iberis. “Gods of incomparable power! One was a baar god that emerged from the earth and slew a dragon with a single strike! The other a lizard god who split the wasteland grounds and called forth the river that now runs all the way to our sea! One man among the Iluk villagers spoke to the gods—Bendia, uncle of Dias...”
The goblins had thought they couldn’t be more excited, couldn’t have been more engrossed in Iberis’s tale, but they were wrong. All of them cheered loudly at the emergence of the gods, and such was their elation that their banquet went on until the sun sank beyond the waves. It left many a goblin in awe of the surface world.