"Wai’... wai’... le’ us tawk... dis f’ust..." Magna slowly raised his tiny body, doing his best to talk some sense into the goblin bent on murdering him.
Seeing that it neither understood a word nor had any intention of stopping, he switched tactics at once.
He tried to bury the fear on his face beneath something angrier, something more defiant. "D-do... yu know... who my m-mama is...? Yu... lookin’ fo’ twouble...?"
He was, quite shamelessly, hiding behind his adoptive mother’s name, though it unsurprisingly didn’t work.
The goblin was already right on top of him, its dagger no more than a split second from spilling his blood.
Magna shut his eyes in terror and waited for death, comforting himself with the thought that perhaps a third life awaited him, that this needn’t be the end after all.
Then a loud bang rang through the cave, followed at once by a wave of heat and warm liquid splashing across his skin.
Bewildered, Magna cracked one eye open, only to find the goblin standing there headless, its neck scorched and still trailing faint wisps of smoke.
As its headless body crumpled to the floor, it revealed what had been standing behind it all along.
Looking toward the mouth of the cave, Magna saw the mother goblin, hand still raised, black smoke curling from her fingertips.
"Geen!" he cried out, delighted, greeting his rescuer, though his relief didn’t last long.
She was in terrible shape. Her whole body was drenched in blood, marked with wound after deep wound.
One of her eyes had been slashed clean through, blinded now behind a jagged scar.
’What happened to her?’
It didn’t take him long to work out that some brutal fight must have broken out among the goblins, somewhere deeper in the cave.
Injured as badly as she was, she still rushed to his side at once, frantically checking him over.
"Lil’ un kay? Hu’t bad?"
It was hard to tell at first glance, the baby was splattered with fresh blood and worse.
Mercifully, seeing nothing but fear on his face, no sign of real injury, she let out a heavy breath of relief.
Without wasting another second, she scooped him up into her arms and turned, meaning to bolt from the cave right then and there.
But she was already too late. The rhythmic thunder of dozens of footsteps came echoing down the corridor, closing in fast.
With no other way out, she realized she was trapped, unless she cut down every last goblin coming for them.
Gently, she set Magna back down on the bed of leaves. "Jus’ wai’ lil’ mo’, den we be fine... kay?"
She turned to face the entrance, and her expression shifted, from something like motherly warmth into raw, ferocious rage.
Her face wasn’t the only thing that changed. Her eyes began glowing a menacing red, her fangs lengthened, her nails hardened into metal talons, and finally, two black horns tore up through her skull.
Magna could only watch, holding his breath, his whole hope now resting on whether this transformed version of her could hold back the pack coming to kill them both.
The first of them reached the entrance moments later, stepping in with a snarl.
A full grown adult, same size as the mother goblin, gripping a chipped, rusty sword.
It raised the weapon and let out a savage howl, ready to tear into whatever lived inside.
"SKREEW...!"
The screech caught in its throat, cut short at once, as a hand tipped in sharp metal claws tore straight through its ribs and ripped its still-beating heart clean out of its chest, all in a single strike.
In her demonic form, the mother goblin slowly pulled back her crimson-soaked hand. She stared down at the heart in her palm, cold as anything, not even glancing at the body as it thudded to the floor, before tossing the thing aside to wait for the next.
’Damn. She’s strong.’ Magna couldn’t even follow her movements with his eyes, she was simply too fast for that.
One moment the enemy was stepping through the entrance. The next, its heart hit the stone floor with a wet splash.
Yet all that power clearly came at a cost. Watching her back, he noticed her whole body trembling now, badly, as though she might drop at any second.
But she wasn’t just some monster living alone in a cave. She was a mother, with a mission that mattered more to her than anything else, keeping her child alive.
Holding herself up through sheer stubbornness, steadying her shaking limbs, she threw herself at the next one through the entrance.
With that same terrible speed, her nails caved in its skull, tearing away a massive chunk of it, splattering brains across the stone walls.
Without so much as pausing for breath, she slashed out at a third goblin coming through the corridor, four deep claw marks tearing straight through its chest and ribs in a single stroke.
But strong as she was, there were simply too many of them.
Before she could steady herself and pull back, another goblin lunged in with a long spear, driving its dull tip deep into her stomach.
"GHHRAA...!"
She wailed, fury and agony tangled together, but she didn’t stop.
With one swift motion, she brought her clawed hand down and snapped the spear’s shaft, ripped the broken tip out of her stomach, and drove it straight through her attacker’s eye.
The rest of the pack crowded the entrance now, taking in the carnage, the lifeless bodies of their own kind scattered across the floor.
For one brief moment, a chilling silence settled over the cave, broken only by the mother goblin’s heavy, ragged breathing.
The pack looked, for a second, genuinely too afraid to attack.
But it didn’t last. They still had the numbers.
And judging by the wounds covering her, it was only a matter of time before she went down.
Realizing as much, one of them let out a piercing battle cry, and at the signal, the whole horde surged forward in a frantic charge.
With reflexes and speed pushed far beyond her limits, the mother goblin cut down everything that came at her, twisting and dodging every blow aimed her way.
But as the seconds dragged on, she was closing in on her absolute limit.
It wasn’t hard to see she was dying.
Accepting it was hard.
With her one remaining eye, she glanced back toward the baby, frozen on the bed of leaves.
Through the fog of his own fear, Magna caught that brief look, and the faint, forced smile on her scarred, pain-wracked face.
Even now, even like this, she was trying to comfort him, trying to tell him, with nothing but that one smile, that everything would be all right.
Deep down, though, Magna knew nothing about this was going to be all right.
Silent tears blurred his vision, running down his cheeks.
He wasn’t crying out of fear for himself, for his own pain or death. He was crying because he was losing her, this goblin who was giving her life to keep him safe.
He felt his whole body shake with rage at the things hurting Green, his chest tightening under the weight of how helpless he was to do anything at all.
Then, through all of it, her voice reached him.
She was speaking words. Casting a spell, even as she held the horde back at the entrance.
"O Eclipse o’ Fadin’ Sun... Darkness that gathered ’fore the First Light... Blind Motha o’ Ash an’ Ruin..."
It was the very same incantation she’d always used to light the fire that dried him off, that warmed the cold cave.
Only the ending was different this time.
She spoke the final line slow and heavy, no longer simply praying to some higher power for a bit of magic, but begging it outright.
"...le’ yer judg’ment come in fgame."