Part Three

It was as though Aletta had plunged Grubhurst into the ocean itself with her words. “Yes,” he answered.

They looked at each other, girl and goblin, for a span of time that stretched longer than an incense stick. Then, they both sprang from their hiding place without another word, Grubhurst with much more ease. Grubhurst saw the tangled roots catch Aletta’s hair and clothes like monstrous fingers trying to prevent her escape. The roots held her fast, wrapping around fabric and tangling in her damp hair until she had to tear herself free with small ripping sounds. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering why humans bothered with the silly adornments as Aletta struggled through. Bare skin suited him just fine.

“Why on earth didn’t you mention this before?” she snarled as she ripped holes in her sleeves, pulling them free and shaking her ankle. Her dress was now in tatters, the hem muddy and torn. She made a preposterous picture, lying belly-down on the dirt. In the light, Grubhurst could see her face smeared with dirt and sap. Leaves stuck to her hair, and a smudge of green moss marked her cheek.

He glared at her and bared his teeth. “I was preoccupied with other concerns, in case you didn’t notice.”

“And now my family will be eaten by your family while I’ve been sitting here doing god knows what!” she cried. She imagined a monstrous horde of goblins crawling up the side of the beaten ship with the same stealth Grubhurst possessed, stealing into the cabins, and taking bites out of her father’s calf.

“Calm down! They might come for us after all if they hear you.”

Aletta scrambled to her feet with little grace, pulling with her a long tree branch. “Take me to the beach. I can fight off some goblins.”

Grubhurst groaned so loudly, he saw Aletta flinch. “You know I’m one of the smallest of my brothers and sisters, right? And there are seventeen of us, right?” He watched the branch in Aletta’s hand falter. “This is not the time to be fighting goblins. We need to get to the lighthouse figure out the magic.”

“You don’t even know if that’s where it happened! You don’t know magic! I don’t know magic! What are we going to do, put our fingers in the wall cracks and hope there’s a secret portal?”

“What do you propose? You can’t fight off sixteen goblins by yourself. This is our best chance.”

“Oh dear lord, oh dear lord, oh dear lord.” Aletta paced back and forth, and wrung her hands.

Grubhurst stared at her. He didn’t know what that meant, but he was hungry, tired, and growing less and less disposed to put up with Aletta’s histrionics, as he deemed them. His stomach growled, a low rumble that reminded him he'd only had squirrel for breakfast. He huffed and headed up toward the lighthouse. Behind him, he heard Aletta’s pacing stop, and imagined her trying to make up her mind. Her thunderous footsteps soon came as she fell in step beside him.

“Alright,” she said. “Only because we’re unlikely allies now. You want the barrier broken so your family doesn’t starve. I want my family to stay uneaten.”

Now that she had decided, she made no further mention of Grubhurst’s siblings possibly making their way to eat her family. Such a strange, single-minded girl, he thought.

It had been a strange day, Grubhurst continued with his thought. He led Aletta through winding paths up the hill toward the worn lighthouse he had just been that very morning with Prismilla. The path grew steeper, and roots crossed it like gnarled fingers. The smell of the forest changed as they climbed—less loam, more stone and wind. After a hundred years, he daren’t have hoped for any rupture to the mundane ennui that had settled over his life on the island. It was a quietness worn smooth by time. The early years of questioning where his parents had gone, turning over every stone in his mind of gaps he may have missed, had faded. Goblins could live several millennia, but their memories dissipated with the plodding of the years, just as humans’ did; they did not remain evergreen. Until the first cry of “People! A Ship!” Grubhurst had learned to cover dwindling hope with dried leaves, sorrow with stoic perceptiveness. Every day looked the same: emerging from the tunnels to cloudless skies, dispersing across the island to search for an ever-diminishing food supply, no answers.

Now, Aletta, with her story of a mother vanishing into the mist. The timelines didn’t match up, but they wouldn’t, would they, if the old stories were true?

Grubhurst’s glance flashed behind him. He was selfish, he knew. No goblins ever learned to swim. It was why he hadn’t dared to jump into the waves to drag Aletta to shore in the first place. Oh, they stood on the shore at times to catch fish in whatever ways they could manage, but as you may know by now, goblins weren’t the most inventive of creatures either. Grubhursts’ siblings made rough fishing rods with bits of bait, then often ended by squabbling over the bait—an amuse-bouche, if you will. He knew his brothers and sisters would perhaps still be watching greedily from the copse edge at that floundered ship with those delectable humans inside, licking their lips and hissing to each other how best to get there.

The installation of urgency had worked, however. Aletta’s face of determination steeled Grubhurst’s own, and he set his face toward the lighthouse. It stood dim in the distance, and the dark gray of the stone peeked out above the deep green leaves. Now a human walked with him, Grubhurst swore he could hear a murmur ripple in the earth beneath his feet, spread like a slow wave from the lighthouse to them, tilting them toward it. The ground seemed to pulse with each step, a vibration he felt in his bones rather than heard. Whether it was his imagination or not, delirious hope or not, he plodded ever upward. Even Aletta’s loud, panting breaths and clamorous footfalls faded away.

Behind Grubhurst, Aletta was lost in her own thoughts and hopes. The sun was waning now. It cast a bright orange sheen across everything. The light turned the leaves to copper and made the moss glow like embers. She’d never seen sky like this before. As the pair made their way up the mountain, the island’s pervasive damp scent of leaves and tree branches whipped her senses. It was so like Formosa, but also unlike. Formosa’s air clung to people with an oppressive heat. There, the humidity sat heavy on the skin like a second garment, inescapable. On especially hot days, the sounds of buzzing mosquitos and croaking animals could be heard, even above city clamor and street markets. She missed the noisy bustle of her home. Here, the air chilled her skin, and caused it to prickle with discomfort. Gooseflesh rose on her arms, and her wet clothes grew colder as the sun descended. Only in the winter months did Aletta experience such wet coldness, but never with the hush that seemed to smother all natural sound on this land. Even normal animal noises came as though muffled by thick layers of cloth. She wondered that Grubhurst did not notice.

Thinking of Formosa drew stinging tears to her eyes; they pooled until she was soon stumbling along, into Grubhurst’s back.

“Aletta?” The goblin’s voice sounded uncertain. She felt uncertain. She had never wept so much before her family, who expected her to pretend as they did, that her mother never existed, that there was no void where a mother’s nurture should have brought Aletta to womanhood. She had lived twenty-two years, but still felt much like a child.

“Aletta, we’re here.”

She raised her head to take in the sight of a tall, circular building built of stones the color of foggy mornings and stormy seas. The stones fit together without mortar, each one perfectly shaped to its neighbor as though grown rather than built. From their spot, she could now hear the sound of the waves below. The crash and hiss of water on rock carried up to them, rhythmic as breathing. Remembering jolted her back to the present urgency. She realized she was clutching Grubhurst’s arm; the texture of tree bark on her arms and hands soothed her. A giggle escaped her. It’s like hugging a tree, she thought to herself, and pulled it closer to herself.

Grubhurst looked nonplussed. He must think her mad, but he awkwardly maneuvered them through the underbrush to a door half hidden behind ivy. The ivy leaves were thick and waxy, cool to the touch, and they rustled with a papery sound as Grubhurst pushed them aside.

“I’ve never tried to open this door,” he said in a hushed tone.

They stared at it together. The wood was ancient, silvered with age, and carved with symbols neither of them could read—spirals and circles that seemed to shift when looked at directly. Aletta thought she knew why. As she reached a trembling hand toward it, something seemed to suck away the air around them. The pressure changed, making her ears pop as though she'd descended into deep water. An eerie calm settled over their surroundings, and Aletta pulled her hand back, as if struck. She looked at Grubhurst, whose eyes were as wide as hers must be. In the dimming light, she thought he did look an awful like what she once pictured goblins to be: saucer-like eyes with slits for pupils. She shuddered.

“You feel it too?”

Aletta nodded. “It must be here.”

Above them, a stunning white light streaked with purple lit up the darkening sky. The light pulsed like a heartbeat, and the air around them hummed with a frequency she felt in her teeth.

Grubhurst gasped in awe and horror. “That’s never happened. Never.”

Aletta set her jaw. “Let’s go.” She inhaled, pushed down the butterflies dancing around in her stomach, and shoved against the door.

Any doubt about the magic in the lighthouse vanished when they crossed the threshold. Here, the quiet deepened. It was a silence that pressed against her eardrums, heavy as water, so complete she could hear the blood moving through her own veins. Aletta felt as though they had walked into another world entirely, for though the sun had thrown its last rays over the earth, here a glow lingered that was neither sunlight nor moonlight. The light seemed to emanate from the walls themselves, or perhaps from the air, sourceless and constant. She could not describe it if someone were to ask her what the light was like. She could make out Grubhurst’s silhouette beside her, a spiral staircase before her, yet there was no light source.

Now Grubhurst led the way, treading with care up the steps. The lighthouse groaned as though weary with carrying the weight of many burdens of countless years. Each step they took echoed strangely, as if the sound traveled both up and down all at once. Aletta heard each creak of metal as the two maneuvered their way upward. The air grew thicker as they climbed, harder to breathe, tasting of old magic and salt.

“Remind me why you goblins never came in here?” Aletta whispered. Her voice came out thin and reedy, swallowed by the oppressive quiet. She tried not to think of the glow illuminating their steps as they ascended, as though following them.

Grubhurst didn’t answer at once. When he did, his voice matched her muted tone. “I don’t rightly know. My sister and me like to sit near this place, but never went in. Maybe we distrusted the strangeness of a human made thing.”

“But weren’t you curious? I’d have been curious.” Now that she’d started talking again, her voice steadied. “Now I think of it, I think I’d have liked siblings. Maybe not sixteen. Maybe a brother. Like you, maybe. A sister would have been nice, too.”

There was no answer from Grubhurst. His ears had pricked forward in alarm.

Before too many seconds had passed, Aletta knew why. A humming sound was drifting down from the top of the stairs. As they crept closer, the noise grew louder and louder until it was more akin to the sound of the angry buzzing of a horde of insects. But seemingly from outside, she also heard a strange voice calling, though she couldn’t determine the words.

“Grubhurst?”

He shook his head in response, but gestured for her to stay while he poked his head through the opening to the top. His form disappeared into brightness above, leaving her in shadow. Agonizing moments passed before he said at last, “There’s nothing, but I see runes. Can you read human runes?”

She scoffed. “Do I look like a shaman? Or an archeologist, or whoever does that?”

“It was worth an ask.”

Together, they at last climbed the last step.

Here’s something you must know about goblins. They don’t climb stairs (burrow-diggers, remember?). They don’t engage with humans (except to steal food from their ships when they foolishly dock on the goblin island). If they do encounter a human, they must never, never speak to it, lest they threaten the goblins’ way of life.

Yet there they stood at the highest point of Grubhurst’s island: a girl and a goblin prince, hand in hand.

Grubhurst led Aletta toward the wall of runes. The symbols glowed faintly, carved deep into stone that felt warm to the touch. There, a wall of mist shimmered against it, casting the runes in a veil of blurred symbols. The mist moved like water, flowing upward instead of down, defying nature with each impossible curl. The goblin could not quite discern what they looked like beyond the veil. He was not even certain Aletta was seeing the same thing he was seeing, so eerie and out-of-place did the entire atmosphere appear to him.

“Should we touch it?”

Grubhurst looked at this human girl, who looked back at him with trepidation, but also trust. A warmth bloomed in his chest. Yes, he would have liked her as a sister, too.

Hand still in hers, he reached their fingers toward the mist.

A crash below made them jump apart. Aletta looked at Grubhurst in alarm as thundering steps slowly approached.

“Grubhurst? Grubhurst! Are you up there?”

The goblin in question gasped—a strange sound if you have not heard it before—like gravel passing through a throat.

“It’s Prismilla.”

“Your sister? What do we do? Will she help?”

The steps quickened. Each footfall rang against stone, growing louder, closer. “Answer me, Grubhurst, ungrateful goblette that you are to one who raised you like a mother! I can hear you! Don’t make me come all the way up there! Your brothers and sisters are waiting.” Then, more pleadingly, “This contraption scares me, brother. Come down, will you?”

Grubhurst could not but reply, “I will, Pris. Give me a moment.”

Prismilla’s steps did not stop. “Oh, how high up I am! Let’s be down and have some man pies, Grubs. Doesn’t that sound good?”

Girl and goblin threw alarmed looks at each other. Grubhurst saw the rapid rise and fall of Aletta’s chest as she fought to control her panic.

“M-man pies?”

“Yes! Tribthurst and Hubszilla and Pudshurst and oh, I don’t remember who else, managed it, and now the creatures lie tied up and ready for cooking. What good luck we finally have after all these years, eh, Grubs?”

Aletta gave a little shriek. The sound escaped before she could stop it, high and thin. Grubhurst flung a hand over her mouth. A pause in Prismilla’s footfalls.

“Is there someone there with you?”

Grubhurst shook his head with some violence, forgetting Prismilla could not see him. At any rate, his thoughts turned to other matters. Aletta evidently was not one to be muffled, and bit his hand. He let out a shriek of his own, which spurred Prismilla’s steps to fresh urgency.

“Again?!” Grubhurst yelled at the same time Aletta screamed the same word at him.

“I’m trying to help you, crazy little—”

Aletta did not allow Grubhurst to complete his sentence, having preferred to punch him in the nose instead. Her knuckles connected with cartilage, and pain shot up her arm.

Just as he tumbled backwards, grabbing a handful of Aletta’s black hair as he went, he caught a glimpse of Prismilla, her mouth open wide in shock, before falling backward toward the wall of mist and runes.

No wall came to meet his body, nor any solid form to shatter his head upon like watermelon on rocks. Grubhurst instead found himself suspended in a cloud of white, his hand empty. The mist surrounded him completely, cool and damp against his skin, pressing in from all sides yet supporting nothing.

“Aletta!”

No answer came, but Grubhurst heard thin whispers from far off, drifting in and out of his hearing as though upon a wave that came and went. The voices spoke in languages he didn't know, some sounding like wind through reeds, others like water over stones. Aletta’s voice was not among them, this he knew. He grasped at empty air and his legs kicked out, but could find no purchase. The mist yielded to his touch like water, flowing around his fingers without resistance. He cried out for Aletta once more. Hearing nothing, his efforts to find solid ground intensified. A strange thundering sensation came from his chest. Was this fear? Goblins did not know fear, you see. What cause would they have for it?

Gulping deep droughts of air, Grubhurst observed the mist about him to be not of one form as it had seemed when he first fell through, but swirling in different shapes, as though a breeze drifted in the air. If he looked more closely, he might have seen traces of pale color amidst the white. His hand grasped at the mist—for what, he didn’t know, only that it was better than floating in this helpless nothingness.

It was then, a darkening form took shape in the distance. At first it seemed like smoke, then solidified into something more substantial, shadows coalescing into recognizable shapes. It drew closer and froze Grubhurst’s frantic movements as he observed it.

Grubhurst turned his ears forward and squinted at the form. Like a knobbed and bulky, yet truncated tree stump it appeared. But no, as it approached, he discerned two heads. No, two figures, rather than one.

A new thumping resounded in his chest, this time interjected with the impression of a thousand moths beating against his stomach—an uncomfortable light, floating sensation filled his body. He shook with its intensity. Still, he didn’t dare speak a word out loud—not his hope, nor his fear. The remote voices had not ceased, but Grubhurst could hardly hear them now, his ears now filled with a high-pitched ringing that seemed to originate from his own head.

Then, one voice penetrated the noise in Grubhurst’s ears, not because it was much louder than the others, but because it stirred in him a yearning he had all but forgotten. A voice he had not heard since he was fifteen years, truly.

“But the magic went wrong,” it was saying. “They were all meant to have frozen along with time, gone to sleep; all growing things were.”

And Grubhurst was flailing in the mist, swimming toward the voice, his own crying out a word his mouth had not shaped for all that century.

For the voice belonged to his mother.

To an outside observer, Aletta would have appeared the very picture of equanimity in her own cloud. Once she realized herself separated from Grubhurst, her first feeling was that of relief. If you’ve ever had a chunk of your hair caught in a tangle of branches, you might understand. Her scalp still throbbed where he'd grabbed her, individual spots of pain marking where hair had torn free. Finding herself suspended in mist with no ability to move did not alarm her as much as you might think. After all, it had been a day of carnivorous goblins and magic lighthouses. She did not, however, wish to remain in such a state while said goblins were presumably preparing to devour her family members.

“Hello?” Aletta called. Her voice echoed as though in a wide cavernous space, though she could see nothing but the fog.

Before panic could set in, the mist changed. Rather than insubstantial shapes, they began to morph into recognisable ones: a building? No, a house; no, her house. The familiar architecture emerged from white like a memory becoming solid—first the outline, then details: roof tiles she knew, columns she’d touched a thousand times. There, the familiar columns forming an outdoor corridor that surrounded the entire home, unadorned. There, the sloping tiled roof she once tried to climb from outside her window, to Aunt Jolande’s dismay. She could smell it now—the particular scent of their home, wood smoke and the jasmine that grew near the door, the damp of monsoon season still clinging to stone. Imagination could fill in the green maples and figs that she loved to climb, to touch.

Aletta gasped. The vision had shifted. The doors flung open to give her a view of the parlor. The hinges made their familiar squeak, the sound that had marked comings and goings her whole life. Her breath hitched. Her eyes blurred.

Aletta’s mother walked the room, her fingertips brushing the wallpapered walls. The wallpaper was faded where sunlight hit it, darker in corners—patterns Aletta knew by heart. Over her shoulder slung a small rucksack. No other soul was there. Was this the moment? Aletta’s heart pounded. How she longed to know her mother’s thoughts, to call out—to stop her.

Another figure materialised from the mist—one Aletta knew to be her father. He held—oh, heavens, he held a babe in his arms—and this time she did not bother stifling the sob that rose from the pit of her stomach. The baby—herself—wore a white cloth, and her father held her with infinite care, one hand supporting her head. Her fingers reached for this illusion—this moment her family was still whole was her whole world—but, too far still.

But now she must hush, for her father’s lips were moving. He gestured his head toward baby Aletta, his face twisted into an expression so far removed from the stoic man Aletta knew. Lines of worry creased his forehead, and his eyes—when had she ever seen his eyes so desperate? Like a distant echo, his voice reached her ears.

“Look at her, Yi-Hsuan. She needs her mother.”

Aletta’s sobs deepened, clawed at her throat until they escaped into the open, and echoed around her. The sound bounced back from every direction, surrounding her with her own grief.

Her mother shook her head. Aletta saw only a fleeting look of anguish before her mother turned away from her father—from her.

“You took me from my people. Now you would tie me down with a child? Let me go.”

“But where will you go?”

Her mother gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder before answering. “I told you the myth of Taipingshan. Freedom may be there, since I couldn’t find it here.”

He approached with tentative steps. Aletta watched her baby self squirm and open her mouth to whimper at the movement. The baby's cry was thin and reedy, the sound of need.

“Don’t go.”

Aletta whispered the words with her father, a clenching in her chest.

The woman called Yi-hsuan shook her head once more, then all but ran out the door. Her footsteps echoed on the wooden floor, quick and desperate, fading into silence.

Through the haze of her tears, Aletta watched Yi-hsuan walk into the mist, just as she always imagined, watched Yi-hsuan make the trek to and up Taipingshan, grope for something unseen in a moss-covered rock wall before her. The moss was thick and springy beneath Yi-Hsuan's fingers, and water seeped from it, trickling down the stone. A white light streaked with purple—the same the lighthouse emitted.

Yet at so pivotal a moment, the light enveloped Yi-hsuan. When it dissipated, Yi-hsuan had been cast several feet from the wall, trembling and pale. She landed hard on rock, and Aletta heard the impact, bone against stone. She stood, approached once more, was repelled again—this time even further. Aletta watched Yi-hsuan clutch her arms to her chest as though burned, heard a careening wail fracture the mountain air and pierce Aletta’s own body like a physical shaft.

The screams echoed in Aletta’s ears, even as the mist and vision both ebbed away, leaving Aletta’s broken sobs the only sound as she lay shaking upon the ground.