Shagala's Story [pt. III]

They found the remnants huddled in the rotting ruins of the old Ridge-Reed camp. The smokehouses stood half-collapsed. The Feast-Song poles, once carved with careful marks for meat, births, deaths, and winter stores, had been hacked and burned by Brekik’s Bone Circle before the march over the mountains. Old Tirt’s story-stump stood empty, its reed-wrapped seat gnawed by hyenas.

Harra-of-the-Shallows still lived.

She came out of the smokehouse with a spear in one hand and a cleaver in the other, gaunt as a winter branch, her fur hanging loose over hard bone. Behind her clustered the remnants of Ridge-Reed: skeletal mothers, shaking males, hollow-eyed elders whose mouths watered at the sight of living flesh despite their shame. The weakest had been pushed back into the smokehouses by those still sane enough to understand danger, but even from within came the wet sound of panting and the scrape of claws on old wood.

The moment the goblins stepped into view, a tremor went through the starving gnolls. They stared at the little green creatures with intensity and swelling need. The Hunger stripped every living thing into portions. Thigh. Belly. Liver. Throat. One old male groaned as if he could already taste green marrow. A gaunt female’s jaws opened, strings of spit hanging between her teeth. Several Ridge-Reed survivors lurched forward.

Shagala slammed one clawed foot into the mud between them and the goblins, threw her massive arm out, and barked, “No!”

The word cracked across the ruined camp like a whip.

The starving gnolls flinched. A few snarled at her, too far gone to understand rank, but Shagala’s mane bristled high and her teeth showed in a smile that promised **** if they took one more step.

“I said back,” she growled. “Not meat. Not prey. Mine.”

Harra’s cleaver twitched in her hand. Her eyes went from Shagala to the goblins, then back again, confused fury flickering through the Hunger’s glaze.

“Why did you bring them here?” she rasped, nostrils flaring, saliva shining along her teeth. “If not for us?”

A shudder passed through the remnants. One old male began to laugh, thin and broken, staring at Rikk like he was already imagining the crack of green bones.

Rikk answered by stroking the hard cock he’d already pulled out from behind his loincloth.

He wasn’t the only one. All of the goblin males had their long green pricks out.

Even under Bane’s Strife, goblins were lusty, opportunistic, equal-opportunity fuckers. Their kind bred well with almost anyone and took a nasty pride in it. But Kikanuti’s hand was on them now, warm and possessive, tugging their cocks toward these towering starving bitches as surely as a leash. The gnolls were not only monsters anymore. Not hated laughing predators in the dark. They were breeding stock.

Harra’s mind snagged on all of it. Prey should flinch. Prey should smell of panic. These little green things smelled of swamp, sex, confidence, and virile seed. They smelled like food, yes, but also like rut. Like heat. Like the answer to a question her mouth and belly could not yet separate.

The starving gnolls noticed too.

Their eyes kept dropping. They tried to stare at throats and bellies, tried to see meals, but those long nasty goblin cocks kept dragging their attention downward. The fat, heavy balls beneath them swayed with every swaggering step, full of something that smelled nothing like gnoll seed. No sour Hunger. No rancid curse. Just green musk, rank and fertile, so thick it made saliva flood their mouths and heat flood their hips.
One hollow-eyed female whimpered, confused, her gaze locked on Rikk’s stroking fist. Another’s tongue lolled from her muzzle as she watched Pem’s balls shift in his hand. An elder who had been shaking with hunger pressed her thighs together and looked horrified by her own body’s answer.

Harra’s eyes fixed on Shagala’s belly, no longer gaunt but full with unmistakable life, then snapped back to the goblins.

“What did you do?” she rasped.

“What Brekik could not,” Shagala said. “What Ragza would never have understood.”

Harra bared her teeth. “With goblins?”

“With goblins.”

The word should have been an insult.

Instead it hung in the air like food, like sex, like blasphemy with a heartbeat.

Harra’s arm shook around the cleaver. “Everything is prey when the Hunger comes.”

“That is Brekik’s lie,” Shagala said. “That is Ragza’s road.”

Harra flinched at the names.

Shagala stepped forward through the mud, slow and deliberate, letting the scent of her changed body roll ahead of her: health, pregnancy, musk, gnoll heat carrying the green answer. “You want to eat them because the Hunger has hollowed your skull. I brought them because they stopped it.”

Harra stared at her as though the words had no language.

Behind Shagala, Rikk gave a low laugh and spat into his palm. Vok’s cock stood fully hard now, jutting from his wiry body with rude confidence. Pem rolled his balls once more and growled, “Big bitches look hungry.”

“They are,” Mizka said, bare-faced beside him, mouth twisting into a cruel little grin. “So feed them properly.”

The starving gnoll females shook as the scent hit them harder. Their first instinct was still to bite. To seize the little green men by the arms, crack them open, swallow them down. But Kikanuti was already in the air, in Shagala’s womb, in the goblins’ swelling cocks, in the gnolls’ aching mouths, bending appetite sideways with both hands.

Hunger became suckling need. Saliva became a flood. Jaws unclenched. Thighs trembled. Bellies clenched around the sudden impossible understanding that the little green things were not to be chewed. They were to be drained.

Harra stared at Rikk’s long cock and the heavy balls beneath it as if they were a weapon pointed at her throat.

“What…” Her voice cracked. “What is happening?”

Shagala did not explain further. Not yet. Explanation was for full bellies and clear eyes. She simply stepped aside, but kept her arm half-raised, ready to strike down any gnoll who lunged with teeth instead of mouth.

The goblin males stepped forward rather than back, swaggering and wary beneath their masks, their virile musk cutting through the corpse-stink of the ruined camp.

Rikk went to Harra first.

He was small before her, absurdly small, but his cock was not small at all, and his balls hung fat and obscene beneath it. Harra’s eyes fixed there and stayed, her cleaver sliding from numb fingers.

Without realizing it, she began to bend. Her long neck stretched forward by inches, muzzle lowering, nostrils flaring wider and wider as the heavy green musk dragged her down. The Hunger still wanted to bite, but she didn’t, her mouth open, tongue wet, throat working before she had even tasted him. By the time Harra understood she had dipped low enough for the tiny male to reach her, Rikk was already there.

He reached up, grabbed a fistful of loose fur at the side of her muzzle, and grinned beneath his giant-toad mask.

“Open, dog-mother,” he said. “Eat the right thing.”
Harra snarled.

Shagala’s voice came low and absolute behind him.

“Careful, Harra.”

Harra’s eyes flicked to Shagala, then back to the green meat in front of her muzzle. Her whole body shook. Hunger screamed for bite, but something warmer, stranger, stronger dragged her jaws open without ****.

She dropped to her knees and swallowed him whole.

Rikk’s bravado exploded into a startled squeal. “Ah! Ah! Teeth! Teeth, teeth, teeth!”

Harra’s jaws had shut around his shaft with **** hunger, but not bite-pressure. Her tongue curled under him, huge and rough, dragging him deeper as if her mouth had become a second stomach. Rikk’s hands slapped uselessly at her muzzle.

“She bit it off!” he shrieked. “She bit my cock off!”

Mizka leaned over, peered, and barked a laugh. “It is still attached, idiot. Cum before she changes her mind.”

Rikk squealed as Harra sucked.
She did not know how to be gentle. Not yet. Her cheeks hollowed with savage ****, throat working, saliva pouring around the green shaft and down her chin. Every breath came through her nose in harsh, hungry snorts. Rikk’s balls slapped against her lower lip as she dragged him in and out, eyes wide and wild, not feeding on flesh but feeding all the same.

Shagala watched every twitch of Harra’s jaw, ready to intervene.

But Harra did not bite.

Rikk lasted three frantic thrusts.

His cock jerked in her mouth, and then he came with a thin, terrified wail, pumping hot goblin seed straight down her throat.

Harra froze.

Her eyes went huge.

The first swallow hit her stomach like a coal dropped into snow.

The Hunger recoiled.

She clamped both hands around Rikk’s hips and sucked harder, forcing the rest of it out of him, swallowing every spurt, every rope, every bitter-goblin pulse. Rikk kicked and whined and went limp against her muzzle, but she held him there until his balls gave their last weak twitch.

Then Harra pulled back with a wet gasp.
Her mouth shone. Her pupils cleared by half. The drooling madness at the corners of her jaw faded as if wiped away.

She looked at Rikk’s cock, still wet and twitching.

Then at his balls.

Then at Shagala.

“More,” Harra rasped.

Shagala’s lips curled.

“Now you understand.”

The camp broke.

Every starving gnoll lunged, but Shagala’s command cracked across them again.

“No teeth! No blood! Drink!”

The order caught them before the Hunger could. They fell on the goblin males in a frenzy of mouths and hands, glomping onto meaty green pricks with a desperation that looked like **** until the rhythm declared itself. Vok vanished muzzle-deep into the mouth of a skeletal mother who clutched him by the thighs and sucked as if trying to pull his spine out through his cock. Pem was dragged between two gaunt females who snarled over him until Mizka slapped them both and ordered them to share. Ruttik’s viper hood flew off as an elder shoved his shaft between her jaws and swallowed his first spurt with a sob.

All around the ruined camp, gnolls dropped to knees, haunches, elbows, anything that let them get their mouths around goblin cock. Their Hunger turned them into obscene worshippers: tongues dragging over swollen heads, muzzles pressed into balls, huge hands pinning little green hips in place while they drank. Some were too rough and had to be cuffed by Mizka or snarled down by Shagala. Some wept while sucking, confused by the pleasure and the relief. Some came untouched, thighs flooding the mud as goblin seed hit their bellies and broke the first chain of madness.

The goblins did not last long.

How could they? Half of them were already hard from the walk in. The rest were goblins, and goblins were not famous for restraint. Rikk had barely stopped twitching before Vok shouted into the air and emptied himself down a gnoll’s throat. Pem came with both hands tangled in a starving female’s mane, his fat balls jerking against her chin while she swallowed noisily. Ruttik bucked helplessly as the old elder milked him with mouth and tongue, and when he spilled she made a sound so grateful it silenced the males nearest her.

The first wave of madness broke under a flood of goblin cum.

Not enough to cure everything. Not yet.

Enough to stop the biting.

Enough to make the Ridge-Reed remember their own names.

Gnolls sagged back with bellies suddenly warm, mouths dripping, eyes clearer than they had been in weeks. The corpse-stink of the camp no longer ruled the air. It had been challenged by green musk, hot breath, spilled seed, and the first bewildered sighs of creatures whose bodies had finally found a food the Hunger could not twist.

By nightfall after yet another orgy that was as much ritual as it was sex, the ruined Ridge-Reed camp had changed from charnel-house to birthing-ground.

The first madness had been broken by mouths and swallowed seed; the deeper cure had come after, when the steadied females turned from sucking goblin cocks to taking them between their thighs, letting the little green males pump the answer straight into their wombs while Shagala, and Mizka watched. The smokehouses still stank of rot, the Feast-Song poles were still hacked and burned, and Harra’s people were still gaunt enough to count ribs through fur, but their eyes were clear. They remembered names. They remembered grief. They remembered shame. Most importantly, they remembered hunger as something that could end.

The understanding of why this worked, the divine presence of Kikanuti, the Green Blooming, the truth of the Bountiful Fang, did not come in a flash of lightning. It seeped into them over years.

At first, Kikanuti was only a word someone gasped during sex. Then a name old goblin grandmothers half-remembered from cradle-songs and drunk curses. Then a mark painted in green spirals over pregnant bellies. Then the name of the warm instinct that made gnoll females lift their tails to goblin males, made goblin females drink from transformed gnoll slick, made goblin men swagger because their seed no longer felt like a private pleasure but a tribal engine.

And in the place between waking and dream, Kikanuti laughed.

Not cruelly. Not softly either. She was no porcelain saint, no city-temple mother with clean hands and a clean altar. She was a goblin goddess. She loved with teeth. She blessed with bellies. She took what the great powers of Exandria had twisted and made it useful to her children.

She saw Bane’s Strife coiled in goblin blood like a chain around the throat. She saw Yeenoghu’s Hunger chewing through gnoll marrow like maggots through meat. She saw two curses snarling at each other across a marsh and clapped her unseen hands with delight.

A lesser goddess might have healed by separating. Kikanuti healed by tangling.

She pressed goblin seed into gnoll wombs. She brewed gnoll juices into medicine for goblin minds. She took the hyena-women made for hunger and reshaped them into mounts, broodmothers, hunters, walls, and lovers for her precious greenfolk. And then, with the possessive generosity only a fertility goddess could manage, she claimed the gnolls too.

These wargs were not beasts beneath goblins.

These wargs were goblins also.

Different-shaped goblins. Big ones. Tawny ones. Laughing ones with jaws that could break an orc’s arm and cunts that could swallow a lineage.

Kikanuti adored them.

The old Ridge-Reed Feast-Songs returned, but changed. They counted not only meat and births, but seed-pacts, full bellies, riders, mounts, and debts of pleasure and protection. Goblin masks remained, but no longer hid faces solely out of Strife-born paranoia. They became lineage, role, joke, and festival. A toad-mask meant trapper. A heron-mask meant watcher. A turtle-shell meant judge. A moorbounder-snarl meant rider.

The goblin village and the Ridge-Reed remnants became one people in ugly, practical steps: shared smokehouses, widened plankways, larger doors for gnoll mothers, high sleeping shelves for goblin fathers, birthing huts built half in mud and half on stilts. Thrum trained goblin youths with spear and sling until they hated him, then loved him, then imitated him badly. Kwezz rebuilt the trap-lines with cleverness and became insufferable about it. Sekka sang children to sleep in Goblin, Gnoll, and a hybrid singsong full of yips and clicks. Ila turned her broken mating songs into the first Green Hymns. Varka made a sport of carrying goblin riders through the reeds, then tossing them into mud if they held her mane wrong. Kesh watched the night and let no slaver, cultist, Aurora Watch deserter, or demon-mad gnoll cross the blackwater unseen.

The first generation came fast.

Gnolls and goblins both lived hot, brief, fertile lives compared to elves and dwarves. Childhood flashed by. Bellies swelled every season. Cradles filled. The first hybrid daughters were shocking, tall from birth, long-limbed, muzzle-soft, green-gray under tawny fuzz, with heavy ears and gold goblin eyes. The first hybrid sons were smaller, sharper, unmistakably goblin in shape, with quick hands, bright teeth, and a strange predatory grace inherited from their mothers. The pattern repeated.

Again.

And again.

No one understood it at first. A gnoll mother bred by a goblin male bore a gnoll-like daughter or a goblin-like son. A goblin female who had drunk deeply of gnoll pussy and taken green seed afterward bore the same. Female children grew toward gnoll height, gnoll strength, gnoll haunches, gnoll heat turned healthy and governable. Male children grew toward goblin cleverness, goblin hands, goblin seed, goblin lust, goblin quickness. The old shapes did not vanish overnight, but birth by birth, the tribe tilted.

Within twenty years, original goblin females had become honored aunties, mask-mothers, judges, singers, and obscene old meddlers who bragged that they had licked the first blessing straight from Shagala’s cunt. Original gnoll males had become trainers, night guards, fish-haulers, and terrifying uncles. They aged. They died. They were buried in reed mats with masks over their faces and claws full of counting stones.

But no new children took after them.

Every female born carried the form of the gnoll.

Every male born carried the form of the goblin.

By the third generation, the dimorphism was no longer a marvel. It was the way bodies were. Boys were green, sharp, clever, cocky, quick to climb and quicker to lie. Girls were tawny or green-gray, tall, strong, thick-thighed, fierce, hungry in body but not cursed in belly. A boy learned knots, traps, sling angles, seed-pride, and how to sit a moving back without pulling mane too hard. A girl learned claw-work, marsh-running, how to carry a rider, how to choose which male was worth her tail lifting, and how to use her weight like a weapon.

Kikanuti shaped them in the womb and cackled through the midwives.

A daughter kicked too hard? Good. Strong haunches. Strong spine. Make her a mount who could carry three riders through waist-deep bog.

A son came out small and shrieking with clever fingers already grabbing the birthing cord? Better. Give him a rider’s balance, a thief’s toes, a cock thick enough to make his future mount remember why the tribes became one.

A mother bore twins, one boy and one girl? Perfect little joke. Saddle and steed in one birth. A household complete before the afterbirth cooled.

The Bountiful Fang did not smooth them into politeness. She exaggerated. She leaned into the joke until it became anatomy. In every world where the goblin gods had sunk their claws into creation, goblin and warg belonged together: little green riders and great snarling mounts, speed and cunning, teeth and trickery, a shared shape of survival older than any one tribe’s memory. But Exandria had been walled off from that inheritance, sealed behind its own divine history, its goblins left without one of the oldest patterns of goblinkind. So Kikanuti brought it back in the only way this wounded marsh would understand. Not as beasts beneath riders, but as kin remade for the role: the mount would laugh, choose, breed, fight, mother, carry, and command. These wargs would be goblins too.

The warg-pattern emerged first as convenience, then habit, then culture.

Goblin males rode gnoll females through flooded paths because they could see farther from their backs. Then they hunted that way. Then they fought that way. Then the posture worked its way into courtship, festivals, jokes, titles, and family names. A female who could carry three armed males through waist-deep marsh without stumbling was praised as a strong mount. A male who could stay mounted through a two-legged rear, loose arrows, then leap clear and hamstring an enemy was praised as a worthy rider. The words did not diminish either half. They sharpened them.

In battle, they became a nightmare with two minds.

A warg woman would thunder forward on all fours with a goblin man crouched on her back, sling whirling or spear leveled. At the last instant she could rear upright, claws spreading, breasts and mane swinging with the motion, jaws splitting into a laugh while her rider launched from her shoulder to strike low. Enemies raised shields against the towering female and lost hamstrings to the little male. They swung at the goblin and found the warg’s teeth closing on their arm. They tried to run and learned that the Wargfolk were faster in mud than fear itself.

At home, the same pattern held with fewer screams and more jokes.

Females carried males across blackwater when the males were laden with traps. Males groomed their partners’ manes, braided charms into tails, checked claws for rot, patched riding straps, and boasted loudly about how well they could satisfy a mount after a long patrol. Females mocked them, used them, protected them, chose them, argued with them, bore their children, and occasionally threw them into the water when their boasting became unbearable.

Shagala lived long enough to see the shape become inevitable.

Her first daughter, Nakra Heart-Reed, had Nott’s gold eyes and Shagala’s powerful limbs. Her first sons were goblin-like, filthy-mouthed, bright, and insufferably proud of the fact that every woman in the village called them “little sires” before cuffing them for stealing. Sekka’s daughters ran taller than their mother by adolescence. Varka’s sons became famous riders because they were fearless and slightly stupid. Ila’s line carried the songs. Kesh’s line carried the night-eyes.
Mizka became the first Mask-Mother of the new people, bare-faced in private, turtle-shell masked in judgment, vicious in politics, and utterly shameless in reminding everyone that she had been the first goblin woman to taste the cure from Shagala’s body. Harra-of-the-Shallows rebuilt the Feast-Songs into Green Counts, adding verses for seed, pregnancy, riders, mounts, and the sacred act of stopping when full. Thrum Nine-Scars died old, surrounded by goblin boys he had trained and warg girls who had climbed him like a tree since infancy. Kwezz Toad-Cracker’s traps became so infamous that neighboring bandits swore the mud itself hated them.

By then outsiders had started calling them the Wargfolk of Brokenveil.

They kept the name.

The Hunger faded with each generation until it became an ancestral horror, then a cautionary song, then a winter tale told while children gnawed smoked fish and rolled their eyes because old people always made the past sound larger than it was. Bane’s Strife banished. The tribe did not become gentle, but their aggression finally had reason and could abate when the moment called for it. They still fought. They still stole. They still lied beautifully. They still settled some arguments with wrestling, rutting, or knives laid flat across the table. But the old reflex to turn every difference into brutal competition and every hunger into war faded.

In its place grew Kikanuti’s laws, which were not soft but were not evil.

So the two broken peoples became one rude, fertile, dangerous nation in miniature: goblin males and gnoll females, green seed and tawny strength, masks and manes, counting stones and dirty songs, riders and mounts, broodmothers and little sires.

But on that first morning, they were only survivors in the mud, smelling of sex and smoke, staring at the impossible shape of a future none of them had been taught to imagine.