They
found 5 gold pieces, and one of them said he had leveled up. That was the sum
total of what the Adventurers had managed to gain by slaughtering
Kreet’s entire family. As the youngest member of her clutch, she was
still hiding in the little cubby high above watching the torch bob
back down the passage deeper into the tunnels that were all she
knew of life. Of course, they had expected this would happen eventually.
The life of a kobold was notoriously short and even at her young age
she didn’t really hate the people that regularly came venturing down
into her home.
Usually her family just hid in one of the myriad
tunnels that branched off of the main paths. Before her own family was
wiped out she had seen four other clutches massacred and she’d learned
that was just the way of her kind – oh, they fought back. They always
fought back. She’d heard of other races that had no concept of
ownership, but kobolds were certainly not one of those races! When a Big Person, or more often, Big Persons found the home of a clan
of kobolds, the kobolds would attack without reservation until the last
one was dead. She knew that the top-dwellers considered them evil
because of that.
It was true there was no negotiating with a clan. There was only fight, kill or die. Later she would learn that
there were alternatives, but no one she had met in her short life
understood that. Now they were all dead, and the little box that had held
her family’s five gold pieces lay smashed into splinters, stained red
with the blood of her father. She wept silently, waiting for the torch
light to fade completely from view before she ventured out into the
little space that she had called home. She wasn’t worried about
visibility. She could see in pitch darkness due to the unique structure
of her eyes. But even the flicker from a distant torch would reveal more
than she really wanted to see of what remained of her family. Her
dark-vision would be blessedly monochromatic.
A sniffle escaped
her snout, unbidden. It wasn’t much. Just the quietest of sniffles. But
apparently it was enough. One of the Adventurers was still
nearby and heard it. He had been sitting silently just beyond her
line of sight in the darkness. He lit a torch and she tried to shrink back
again, eyes wide with fear. She knew enough about Adventurers to know
they never stopped investigating till their curiosity was sated. She was
doomed.
The problem with kobolds was not a lack of bravery nor a
lack of intelligence, really. No, the problem with kobolds was a lack of
size, strength and technology. Any average Big Person could kill an
entire clutch if equipped with even modest armor and a steel blade. It
didn’t help that the kobold would be pounding on his knees with her fists or trying to scale his legs to attack more vital bits. Once a
kobold saw red, they would not relent until they were dead – which didn’t
take very long usually. On the rare occasions that a group of kobolds
actually gained enough technology to equip themselves with more than
small sticks and wear anything more substantial than thin cloth, they
could be formidable. But Kreet didn’t live in those
circumstances. She was just one of a clan of kobolds living in an
obscure network of caves in an even more obscure country above.
Security
through obscurity had worked fairly well until now. But she heard the
man below searching for her and she doubted she would see much security once she lost her obscurity. She was beginning to see
red – then a head came into view and she knew her time was up. She didn’t
hesitate. It was in her blood. She attacked.
But, instead of
spending her last seconds scratching at the hair of her fated doom, she
found herself instead inside a cage. She rattled the bars and screamed; but the
Big Person who held the cage just looked at her.
At first she was
happy to see he wasn’t wearing any metal. If she could get free of this
cage, she very likely would be able to actually scratch him enough to
make him bleed – and that would be a pretty significant victory,
especially for such a young kobold.
“Calm down, little one,” the
Big Person said in her language. This startled her. She had never heard a
Big Person speak in the kobold tongue before. She’d never even heard tales of
a Big Person that could talk properly. She looked at the huge head peering into her cage and cocked her head to one side.
The red left her vision.
kreetthekobold 