Vashti Valant: Slave of the Goblin

Concealed in a cocoon of silence on a bosky prominence overlooking the human village, Laya cocked her bow and awaited her prey. To her goblin enemies, the elf woman was known as Nemesis—or sometimes, even more crudely, as Cock Kicker, because of her habit of taking out goblin warriors while they attempted to rape their battle captives.

This time she stalked the most audacious target of all. Akraz the Terrible, the Goblin General himself.

Once their pants are down, they’re all the same , Laya dismissed the slight frisson of fear she felt. I’ll take him out while he’s fucking, as I did with all the other rutting goblin beasts . She slung her bow and quiver over her shoulder. Just so long as Hunter can marshal these human farmers to fight long enough to keep the rest of his army off my back .

With the exception of her friend Hunter, Laya did not place much confidence in humans. Even now, she could hear their rustlings and whisperings from the other hill. Of course, her elven hearing was superb, but goblins too had excellent hearing.

“Why do they not come?” growled one of the human men. Clovis, she recalled, the leader of the village. He was a farmer trying to be a fighter.

“Quiet. Patience.” That terse command came from Hunter. A human orphan raised by elves, Hunter knew as well as any elf how to be still, even if the other humans did not.

The human village in the valley below them looked peaceful enough in the gentle glow of moonlight. As the minutes built into another hour, even Laya began to fear that Akraz the Terrible was too cagey to fall into her trap. Though he was a brute of a goblin, Laya had learned the hard way not to underestimate his cunning. When it came to war, he knew his business.

Laya mulled over her failure to ignite passion with Hunter. It was not indifference, but fear that made her freeze. Or was it because she did not fear Hunter that she felt nothing in his arms? She gripped her bow all the more tightly. The Seeress had been right. Only by confronting her fear could Laya overcome it. Tonight I will do it , Laya promised herself. Tonight, after I spring my trap, I will make one of the goblin brutes suffer what Taniya suffered all those years ago. That will free me from the fear—and the fascination—of them .

Clouds drifted across the moon, darkening the valley. The goblins at last made their move.

On the other hill, Clovis gasped. He’s never seen real goblins before , Laya reminded herself. To him, they are but stories told by his grandmother on Harvest Eve.

“I thought they would be smaller,” Clovis nearly whimpered. “Little, twisted creatures, with teeth like raccoons. But these—these look just like real men!”

Some humans made the same mistake about elves, thinking that elves were diminutive, cutesy creatures like bunny rabbits, instead of the tall, slender race of demi-human they were. If Clovis harbored any such misconceptions, however, his first glimpse of Laya had cured him of it. She stood taller than Clovis himself, though her build was much more delicate and shapely. Like many elves of her tribe, her long, pale gold hair held a touch of green, while her jade green eyes sparkled with specks of gold.

Hunter must have taken pity on the farmer. Instead of shushing Clovis, he replied softly and grimly, “Look more closely. They have the size of men, but they are more than men.”

As the goblins began to pour into the defenseless village, setting fires as they ran, the flames cast their silhouettes into sharp relief, revealing their powerful chests and ghastly, beastlike faces. A human wrestler or blacksmith might aspire to the muscles that every goblin male casually displayed. Not even a hyena would envy a goblin’s snout.

With a shudder, Laya remembered another distinguishing feature in which goblin men were more than men. As if it were yesterday, Laya saw the tiny woodsy elven hamlet she had lived in as a girl. She saw the goblin horde overrunning it, burning and smashing, just as this army was doing now. But the scene in her mind played at double time, speeding forward to when the goblins had slaughtered all the elven warriors, and rounded up the young women, girls and the sweetest-faced boys to entertain them for the rest of the evening. Their battle chieftain had taken his first pick, then the others had squabbled over divvying up the remainder of the prisoners. One gargantuan, ugly fellow had grabbed both Laya and her best friend Taniya by the hair and dragged them off into the still smoldering ruins of a tree house to abuse them.

Both girls had just entered puberty, which, among elves was usually a long, luxurious length of decades of giggles, shy stolen kisses and gentle explorations with other young elflings.

The goblin warrior had stripped off his armor. Nothing in her sheltered life prepared Laya for the sight of his bulging thews or the huge, protruding male organ that met her eyes. For a frozen moment in time, Laya forgot all else and her first experience of desire, unasked for, unbidden, unwanted, coursed through her veins like wine. Then all was shattered, ruined, tainted. Pure terror shoved desire aside when he forced the throbbing, oversized member into Taniya’s mouth. Sobbing with fear, Laya used the moment of his distraction to run away into the woods.

Later, self-loathing at her own cowardice mingled together with that image, and haunted Laya’s nightmares for a century.

Even though Laya’s escape allowed her to warn the other elves about the goblin attack, she never forgave herself for abandoning her friend. The elves from neighboring hamlets rallied and counterattacked the goblins, wiping out the beasts down to the last man. Many of the elven prisoners had been rescued. But not Taniya. She had been so brutally used they found her dead, blood between her legs, bruises mottling her breasts and thighs.

Like many of the survivors of that night, Laya became a dedicated goblin-hunter. She took a new name, Nemesis, and swore an oath of celibacy until the distant, unknown day her self-imposed task could be completed. It was easy to foreswear intimate relations and other distractions that a warrior could not afford. For her, sex became twisted by what the goblins had done to Taniya. Male had become a hyper-masculine but unspeakably brutal goblin more-than-man.

Only the Seeress had seen the truth. That for one moment, after the goblin male had removed his clothing and stood there, gloriously muscular and stupendously endowed, but before he had ruined it by his cruelty and force, Laya had been fascinated by the sight of him. She had been aroused.

Oh the shame of it.

But the Seeress had told her what to do. Laya had to turn the tables. She had to take control.

The goblins had looted and burned most of the village’s small cottages by now. The brutal beast-men grabbed the women out of the houses and forced them all together in the cobblestone clearing by the well at the center of the burning village. There were no human men or children among them. The women wailed in fear.

“Those bastards are about to dishonor the women,” Clovis whispered too loudly, his desperation growing. “We must move now!”

Hunter kept the human leader in check, but Laya felt a tug at her heart. This was the hardest part of the plan, using innocent women as bait. Even if they had volunteered, Laya knew they had not really understood the danger. However, nothing else would distract the goblins long enough to close the trap.

Officially, the purpose of her trap was to kill the goblins’ wiliest leader, the Goblin General, Akraz the Terrible. He had risen rapidly in the ranks of the dark army and the elves knew him to be the most dangerous of all Zathstragomal’s evil minions. In addition to killing Akraz, Laya had her own plans to take a more personal captive, but she shared her private scheme with no one. Except for the Seeress, none of the other elves would approve of fighting the goblins with a taste of their own fare.