Quercus

The sacred oaks that skirt this sloping wood
Are dead–revive their withered roots with blood

War Song, The Poetry of various Glees, Songs. and Company, London, 1798

They call it quercus. All goblins – and only goblins – are born with it, but it can be learned and lost; just like all humans – and only humans – are born with implicit belief in gods, or all dwarves – and only dwarves – are born stonecunning.

It means a goblin’s tie to a particular oak, their heartwood. It means goblinkind’s tie to oaks, and forests of oak, and the animals, plants and fungi of oak forests. It means the soul’s tie to the world tree. It means the spirit’s quality of oakenness. It means the goblin manufacture and trade of all sorts of ingenious galls. It means mastery of “lightning”, by which the goblins call their magic.

Of course, it does not mean all of these things at once. Sometimes, when a goblin walks among the Ten Thousand Stumps, it barely means one of them. But when the blood of a sacrifice gurgles over the roots of a thirsty oak, and a storm brews behind the Grey Mountains, and the martens and magpies are chattering, *quercus *is strong in the air.

But the goblins’ deep ties to oaks are not timeless as they may seem. Many students of history are surprised to learn that the concept of *quercus *arose after the fall of the goblin empire and the logging of the great goblin oak forests that produced the Ten Thousand Stumps. The dwarves and orcs toppled the trees because of the shelter that they provided goblin guerillas, because of the magic the goblins worked through them and because the goblin economy depended on oak products.

But for their part in this massacre, the orcs and dwarves alienated themselves from oaks. Druidic traditions for those races withered and died. Neither orc nor dwarf ever made it that far into the Kingswood again.

Meanwhile, the oak loomed large in the goblin imagination as the symbol of their defeated empire. More and more, to be goblin was to be oak. Crafts that worked with oak grew in prestige; oak-based magic proved destructive against orcs and dwarves; and the feeding of oaks with the blood of dissidents and cowards kept the goblins focused on revenge.

• Quercus may be a goblin construct, a product of ancient trauma, but it is real. All across the north, groves thrive, druids sharpen their sickles, and goblins prepare to take back what was once theirs.

Hooks

• Are only humans born with belief in gods? Are all humans really born that way?
• Can *quercus *be learned by others?
• What is dwarvish stonecunning?
• What are some of the ingenious galls manufactured by goblins?
• How does goblin “lightning” work?