The Goblin Bride (Beneath Sands Book 1) by Emma Hamm (good short books TXT) 📕

say you eat them. She was just starting to like these creatures. Finding out that they were eating her species would be too much.

“We eat them.”

Oh god, they ate them. Of course they did. She was waiting for this moment and now it was here. She paled quickly, her stomach heaving against the unknown food and the knowledge that everyone who had arrived with her was going to end up in these creatures stomachs. At least the things on her plate were recognizable.

 And then she heard the beginnings of his laughter. She looked at him and saw the head bob they all did. He was laughing at her! She was quick to realize that he had been teasing her and she had fallen right into his hands.

“You are cruel.” She said.

He only laughed all the harder, tossing his head back while his chin jerked up and down.

“And not funny at all!” Jane was trying to hide a smile as she said it though.

He didn’t seem to mind, managing to stop laughing long enough to reach forward and peel off a piece of fish from her plate. A long thin tongue snaked out to slurp it from his fingers, and she wrinkled her nose at the sight.

“You goblins are disgusting.”

“We are goblins. Humans are animals.” He replied flippantly, giving her a wink that he must have seen from one of the miners before weaving his way off through the crowd.

Of course he left her with the plate and no way to speak to any of the goblins around her. It seemed as though men did not change no matter what species they were. She had a very clear memory of a young man doing exactly this to her at one of the parties hidden behind the sand dunes Above.

She felt a soft touch on her sleeve, and was surprised to look down and see the queen.

The creature’s hands were different than the other goblins. She hadn’t noticed until now that the nails were completely gone from her hands. Instead there were merely callouses where they should have been. Jane was curious to know if this was another trait of the females or if it was merely old age that had caused the nails to fall off.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language yet.”

The word “yet” slipped in so easily. She didn’t know when she had decided to give learning their language a try, even though she couldn’t hear all the tones. It even hurt to admit that she was curious about it. But her subconscious knew that she was going to be here for a while.

A smile crossed the queen’s face, creasing the already wrinkled skin. She hardly looked humanoid at all now that she was this old. Jane could clearly see the different shape of her skull and the protrusions of cheekbones that didn’t exactly line up with human.

The queen reached forward, gently pressing her calloused hands against Jane’s cheeks. There were a few words said, though Jane had no way of knowing what she meant. Lost, Jane shook her head and tried to smile back at the curved and aged creature.

The hand traveled down her cheek, following the lines of knots across her shoulder and down her arm until she reached her hand. There something was pressed firmly into the palm, another sharp toothed grin given to her before the old woman toddled away again. Jane wondered how she managed to get around like that. Her gait was uncomfortable to even watch.

Age could cast an unassuming veil over great things. She had a feeling this woman had been magnificent in her time.

A hand rested gently against the base of her spine, and as strange as it was she did not flinch or jump. Even in just this short amount of time she was starting to get used to these goblins touching her. She wasn’t sure if there had been a moment after the ceremony when she had not had at least one hand on her that wasn’t her own.

“Open your hand.”

She recognized Ruric’s voice, and turned to look at him. “Oh you’re back already?”

“Spoke with Micah. Open your hand, Jane.”

Following orders had never been a trait she had inherited. But she did as he asked, looking down to see the crystal that lay in her palm. It was, by standards of what she had seen so far, rather plain.

Black and clear, there was a small hint of blue in its center. It looked like the walls they had chipped away in the mines. Nothing overly special, but pretty none the same.

“It is called Nightbearer.” He said quietly. His claws gently hooked the string running through the stone, drawing it out of her palm and over her hair. “Only found in the deepest of caves.”

He was getting better with his language. She had a feeling he had spent a long time trying to figure out how to explain the meaning of this stone.

“Is this your doing?”

A thrum rumbled deep in his throat as he inclined his head towards her.

“Thank you, Ruric.” Like the others, she was now honored with the one thing that the goblins seemed to have plenty of.

If a goblin could blush, he did so then. His cheeks turned mottled green.

She had no way of knowing how important the stones were to the goblins. As any human likely would have, she simply kept it slid over her head. It was not a question whether or not she would do so. A crystal was nothing more important than anything else, perhaps only in that it was beautiful. To the goblins, the crystals were an acceptance of a relationship. It was an acknowledgement that Ruric would protect and provide for her. And that in return, she would allow him to do so.

Ruric knew this. He also knew that there was very little chance that she knew what she had done by accepting it. Humans did not have the same customs as goblins. But he could hope that at some point