Role

Chapter 1

"It is cursed!" the goblin shaman shieked, as she recoiled
from the squirming infant that had just dropped from its
mother, covered in blood and putrid filth.

The infant was horrifically ugly even by goblin standards, with
pale, loose skin and a narrow, lizard-like face upon which
were embedded tiny reddish eyes that seemed to focus on
everything too sharply. But it was not the baby's
appearance that had troubled the shaman. She had sensed a
curse upon the child's soul.

"Throws it into the pit!" the shaman declared. And so they did.

For days, the child lay in the pit amongst the waste of the
goblin village. It would not die. Four days after casting it
down, the shaman looked in to see the baby had crawled halfway
up the embankment, and she used her walking staff to shove it
back down. Three days after that, the shaman checked to see if
the cursed thing had yet died, but found the child gone. A
man of the village found it, huddled against a tree, eating the
rotting corpse of a squirrel that had apparently died of natural
causes.

It was a sign.

"The cursed child shalls lives," the shaman proclaimed. "I names
this child Grungelglut, mean 'Foul Curse' in tongues of old
ancestors. He shall bees a curse to enemies, yes, as he be
curse to ussses as wells."

The shaman whacked the child with her walking stick, and the
newly christened Grungelglut turned briefly to hiss at her
through already long, sharp teeth.