Snikk sat there until the moon began to set. Then he did a thing no goblin had ever done. He picked up the broken bell, and with a gentleness that surprised even himself, he placed it on the step of the smithy. He did not take anything. He did not tie a knot. He did not curse.
A broken bell for a world that no longer listened. the last goblin
His name was Snikk, though no one had spoken it in three hundred years. He was very old, even for a goblin, and his skin was the color of a thundercloud. His ears were tattered, his nose a lumpy root, and his eyes—his eyes still held two coals of that dying green fire. Snikk sat there until the moon began to set
The elves had sailed into the West. The dwarves had sealed their mountains against the clamor of a race that no longer believed in the pickaxe’s echo. The dragons had grown still, their bones becoming chalk ridges for shepherds to walk. He did not take anything
Snikk watched them through a knothole in a fence post. He watched the baker’s wife hang her washing. He watched the smith shoe a placid draft horse. He watched a little girl lose a marble in a crack of the road.
And for the world that forgot him.