My head! It no big enough! Too small for all the ideas and magic. It makes me sad and then it makes me angry and I bang it against floor to move things around. Nobody understand! I see how things be. I know how world works. Smart! Smarter than dark elves, much smarter. They think me a stupid gobbo, but I know, I watch, I learn! They capture me early, when me little snotling, a little underground gobbo, and down they take me, down down down, into their city, and what they want with me? Beatings! Teasings! Tormentings! They whip me and make me carry and then when I nearly dead they give me to old elf with no eyes and he make me his assistant.
Ah, much better. I bring him things for his spells and stir his cauldron. And the smells! The green smoke, the purple smoke, the red smoke, and oh oh oh, the purple smoke! I breathe it in each night as I lean over the pot, and my head swims, my mind escapes my head, and new thoughts come into my head. I start to think-think, not just think. I start to understand. Why. How. The becauses of the world, the how-it-really-be's.
That is when the shadows start to talk to me. I no understand their words at first, but I see them, I feel them, how they notice me and whisper to me when I try to sleep in my hole. First I think I go mad, then I know I go mad, but the shadows, still they whisper, and they tell me that the world is big! I am little, but the world can be mine, if I just listen and do what they say!
So I say OK, and magic! I learn to do little things that only my blind dark elf master do. I start being able to smell magic, hear magic. I wait, because now me super-smart, and I breathe more purple smoke, I let the shadows into my head, and one day, when my master very tired, I let loose the magic of the shadows! And my master fall asleep, and I take his shaving razor and I cut his throat and cut open his stomach and let the shadows inside him out with his blood!
Free! I dance and dance and then I hear footsteps and I run away, and I nearly caught, but me, too smart! That when the shadows send me their best servant, their biggest helper, Groinko the Pig. He waiting for me in the shadows, and as the dark elves nearly catch me I jump on Groinko and we escape into the tunnels, Groinko oinking and me squealing and freedom! It is mine!
We nearly die of hunger, and I nearly eat Groinko, but he give me stink eye and I apologize. We wander for weeks, and one night, sweet air. The upstairs world! I nearly die of fear of the sky, but it don't eat me, so that OK. We creep around, Groinko and me, and finally we find other gobbo's like me. They stupid, not understand all the world like I do, and the shadows don't talk to them, but they like me and I like that.
I so smart, I decide I will help them conquer the world. It is ours! We will cut all the throats of all the masters, and dance in their blood, and when their buildings burn, a sweet purple smoke will rise, and we will all breathe it in and become the masters, and Groinko will oinko and I will sing and power and magic and meat and fire!
