Departure of a Nomad

'All them I knew as a pup are dead now' he thought to himself staring deep into the plains stretched down below him.  The wind was chill against his pale skin and he clutched his robes about him against the bite of cold.  It was a clear day and Gathin Manysleeps was alone atop the small cliff that broke above the gentle swell of grass that covered the Green Steppe.  Down behind him, below, lay the nomad camp he called home, and yet in the past years he felt increasingly distant, as if the faces he saw were filled with imperfect memories.

He did not look back, preferring to peer out into the distance where their journey would take them that day, peering into the early morning dawn, the east, the trade cities on the border that were but specks of imagination that he recalled from many seasons back.  He therefor heard the beat of their riding dogs before he caught sight of them sweeping into the camp, scaly paws slapping the ground as they approached like the low rumble of a spring storm.  The camp would get no warning from him, not before the hoard was upon them, not before they already knew.

Clan Klift had grown small over the years, barely over a hundred golbins in all, and the force riding in, dressed for war, were many, at least three times their number in warriors alone.  In what seemed slow motion, the cloud of dust they threw up snaked across the plains toward his people.  Gathin had at first moved to run down, to help, to repel the invaders with his kin.  He had felt a spark of empathy, but his heart did not light.  He was perhaps afraid, surely.  His large ears were pounding with the beat of his small heart, pinkening from their pallid white.  He could almost feel his death if he walked down there, at the end of a long spear, under the claws of a war-trained steed, feathered with an arrow from far off.  Even perhaps burned to a crisp with magic similar to his own, facing some elder clansman thirty years his younger who bent the laws of the world to do him harm.  And in his petrification, he saw empty faces around him, faces he had stopped trying to identify two generations ago.  Their mortality more fit for the blood and violence and clan politics that this battle, massacre, sat in the stream of.

He stopped, watching the wave of enemies sweep in, hearing the shouts finally echo up to him past the thunder of paw on packed earth.  He was above it, identifying for once how tired he was of such life.  Remembering with distaste when he himself had ridden into camps, killing and looting for what he had been told were glory and wealth.  Behind him, miles away lay towns and cities with more riches than a hundred Clan Klift's.  Behind him lay peoples who did not make their living on the suffering of their own kind.  He thought it was fitting, that it was right somehow that the violence and the pain once again returned in a circle, a clan his kin may once have raided coming back to wipe them out.  He thought, as the first tents were set on fire, that he had wanted to burn them down himself, deep down.

That day he sat and watched, the noon sun sitting overhead before the raiders had turned away from their triumph and rode off, saddles heavy with their spoils.  He had seen a few try to flee, riding or on foot.  The outriders for the raiders picked them off easily, stretched around the camp like a net.  Arrows flying true into tiny green figures and their larger green mounts.  Their own outriders had not returned yet.  They were either dead, or unlucky survivors, perhaps not even knowing yet that they were now without family.

It was sunset by the time Gathin made his way through the camp, walking between the burned out shells of his people.  He saw their forms, twisted in pain and disbelief and anger.  Hollow eye sockets of the burned ones seemed to stare into him.  He was alive, and his kin, descendants of his brothers and sisters as he had no children of his own, lay scattered around him, their number reminding him of how many more dead faces he had seen in his years.  This was perhaps the most dead relatives he had seen together, but it was a small drop in the cup of his memories.  His cup of death filled as he walked, bringing back the friends and elders he had respected, the way their faces were eerily similar to theirs in death.

He saw the chief, dead in the center of camp, bristled with arrows, looking a facsimile of his great great grandfather, the chief at the time of Gathin's birth.  It had been a raid like this one, but the clan had recovered.  The camp had been spared the fire that day long passed.  The chief had fallen among standing tents and mournful warriors.  His great great grandson lay in a charred wasteland, the strongest of the clan beside him in death, tears of blood o their faces, not salt.  Only Gathin, shocked at himself, was there to weep truly, to let his eyes release that cup of death and memories.

Come morning Gathin would begin his wandering, traveling to those far off cities of men and dwarves, taking up habits and customs far removed from his upbringing that he left behind.

Before that dawn, he would cry through the night, setting corpses on a pyre and saying the traditional prayers to send the goblin souls on to their reward.  He would watch their faces blacken, seeing the dead of that day and many other days in their faces and the smoke, and the flames that consumed their empty husks.  Gathin would say goodbye to that life in the goblin tongue, muttering each name he could remember that night.  The tears that kept coming would dry from the fire's heat.  The only memory he would take with him into the next stage of his life would be two soot streaks down across his face, tear stained black marks that ran perpendicular down his pale white face.  In the human towns he would tattoo them on permanently, the only thing that he would keep from his youth.