Anastacia sat on a large rock, drinking her morning coffee and watched the goblins tirelessly dig up dirt. With the rising sun warming her back, she felt like falling back asleep, but was kept up by the fact that she would roll off the rock and hurt herself if she did. Aside from the goblins, she could see far along the road that led to Valor, but not quite the city itself. If she squinted, she was able to make out a few people heading out of the city, presumably to earn their keep – and then some. Among the people leaving, was a single wagon, that most likely belonged to a merchant or perhaps even someone who had brought a quest to be listed on the guild office’s wall. It was slightly odd because the north gate usually didn’t get much traffic from merchants or clients, since the northern part of the city was mostly just for the adventurers themselves and focused more on services aimed towards them. But there were a couple of places someone could park their wagon in for the night, so it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking news; after all, the dark elf that gave Anastacia the three rings had stayed in the city as well.

Gilbert had once explained the basic layout of the city for Anastacia, and the general gist of it was that the north hosted the majority of adventurers and whatever they needed, the western parts were all about large scale trading of raw materials and food that was then dispersed to the craftsmen and innkeepers around the massive city, the southern areas were largely populated by the guards and their families, and was the closest thing to a normal city Valor had. Some adventurers preferred to operate from there as well, because they were married to a guard, a child of one or had some other relation to a guild employee. The center of the city was restricted from almost everyone but the crystal-horned guild officials, rumors among the adventurers said that it was filled with grand libraries and vaults brimming with treasures, but those that had briefly visited the area didn’t say a word to confirm or deny any of the accusations. In the east, Valor touched a mountain range where it got all its clean water from and those parts were mostly restricted as well, since they didn’t anyone tampering with the water source.

When Anastacia had first heard about the restricted areas, her immediate response was to start planning an expedition to the center of the city to uncover its secrets, but ever since her relationship with the officials had turned to ice over the lost simulacrum, her interest in them dropped significantly. Though she still wanted to visit at least the western and southern parts one day.

During the night, the goblins had dug enough to expose a part of something that looked like a skeleton of a massive snake but was made from the same material as the spike King had broken earlier. Each vertebra was over a meter long and was attached to two rib-like arches that were easily long enough for King to walk inside the ribcage without hitting his head. Whatever the simulacrum hidden there was, it was more likely over a hundred meters long, if the rest of it was roughly proportional to the uncovered part – which was probably the reason Vilja had warned the goblins, just in case they found a way to activate it.

So far, the death count for the digging operation was only five. Anastacia couldn’t think of a way they could have died, so she figured she should refer to an expert, so that the useless deaths could be avoided in the future. She slid down from the rock and started looking for Gobby.

The goblin she had sort of appointed as the chief was easy to recognize from the horde thanks to its headband that made form Anastacia’s hair and the spoon it held on to the critter’s forehead. Many of the goblins had attached random pieces of junk on themselves with bits of string, mimicking the chief, but seemed to understand that the forehead-spoon was something only a chief could wear. She had also started to recognize a few other goblins based on their chosen method of running or items they were carrying around. One of her favorites was a fellow who hadn’t quite figured out how knees work and so it ran around without bending them at all.

She found her right-hand goblin by the castle, where it had somehow gathered a large pile of timber with a pack of other goblins. The logs were way too big for the goblins to move them around, but Anastacia knew better than to question the creatures. “What’s up?” She asked and grabbed a random goblin that was chewing one of the logs, just to have something to play with while talking.

“Goblin make pillars! Hold up the sky floor!” Gobby explained and tapped the log he was standing on.

“Wow… That’s actually pretty smart of you guys.” Anastacia complimented the goblins and dangled the one she had from its arms. “How did you come up with it anyway?”

“Big tree hold up sky, so maybe hold up sky floor too!” Gobby exclaimed and held up its hands. The rest of the group joined him and croaked happily with their arms up.

“The trees don’t… I mean sure, you do you and we’ll see how things go.” Anastacia shrugged and was about to leave for a walk around the camp but turned around when she remembered the original question she had for Gobby. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Do you know what happened to the guys who died during the night? I feel like we shouldn’t be losing goblins to something this simple.”

“Sometimes choke on rocks when dig” The goblin chief explained expertly.

“Have you ever considered not eating the dirt?” Anastacia suggested, but the vacant look she got as a response made it clear that not eating dirt wasn’t in the cards at all. There was always going to be some losses with goblins, no matter what they did, so perhaps she just needed to accept it and try not to mess with the self-regulating nature of the tribe.

The group responsible for erecting the pillars was more than likely doomed to be crushed under them, but the goblin queen just gave them a thumbs-up and let them carry on with whatever they had planned for moving the logs. Though she did cancel her walk and instead remained there to see if she could save even one of them when they inevitably were going to roll the logs over themselves or something.

The ten or so goblins that were nearby started pushing one of the logs with all their might. Of course, they had no chance to actually achieve anything on their own, but that didn’t stop them from trying. Every now and then a goblin would see them and join the effort, until the mass of goblins pushing on the tree trunk weighed more than the log itself, and the tree budged. Slowly but surely, they started rolling the piece of timber towards the throne mound, and as it rolled, the log picked up speed until it finally crashed into the wall the goblins had built and collapsed a part of it. The critters cheered and danced in celebration before moving on to the next log. Anastacia sat down to observe their building techniques for a while and concluded that there was absolutely zero problem solving included in the process. Whenever the critters couldn’t manage something, their solution was to add more goblins until they could. Far from an elegant solution but a working one none the less, and since they hadn’t driven themselves to extinction yet, they probably weren’t going to.

Suddenly her train of thought was interrupted by a goblin that kept staring at her from a couple of meters away while trying to eat its own fist.

“H… Hello?” She said and waved.

The goblin tried to respond but didn’t remove its hand from its mouth first and only mumbled incoherently. It did however point towards the dig site with its free hand.

“Does King need me there?” Anastacia guessed and got up.

The goblin nodded and started shoving its other hand in its mouth as well. It seemed happy with the activity, so Anastacia left it alone and hoped it knew how to breathe through its nose – which was a less common trait among the goblins than one would think.

King had cleared out all the goblins from the freshly dug hole and was waiting for his queen by the edge. When she arrived, he took her hand and carefully helped her down the side.

“So what are we doing? I assume we’re not waking it up, so…” Anastacia asked and walked inside the ribcage of the gigantic simulacrum. The first thing she though was that it’d be a decent sized house if they dug it up entirely and used it as a frame. She would have to bring it up later.

King pointed at one of the vertebrae that had a familiar looking hole in it, exactly like the one on the simulacrum prince’s chest and the ones that operated the doors in the machine fort Anastacia had fallen into; and just like the prince’s, it was empty. Next to the hole was a mark from something that had scraped the surface very recently. It didn’t take much brainpower for the necromancer to figure out that King had tried to hit it with his sword, and it came to as no surprise that the metal sword didn’t have what it would have taken to break whatever stone the simulacra were made of.

“You want to break the poor thing’s spine? I guess it’d be better than having a goblin shove its finger in there and wake it up again.” Anastacia agreed and started to look around for anything she could use. While doing that, she realized that there were no other dead goblins around besides the five they had lost during the night, and since there was no way there hadn’t been more deaths recently, she figured that goblin bones must decay extremely quickly. The necromancer climbed up from the hole, walked over to where the simulacrum’s spine went back underground again and hopped on it. During this, she had found a small piece of bone that probably belonged to something the goblins had eaten and flew it over. She also noticed that the messenger goblin had just choked on its own hands. “Damnit! I liked his attitude.” She cursed and moved the corpse to where the other five were.

Armed with the piece of bone, she hopped over to the vertebrae the hole was in and looked for the right spot. The necromancer placed her weapon on top of the simulacrum’s spine and took a step back. The old mechanisms in the spine creaked as she started to press the bone down until finally the stone cracked under the immense pressure, and the tiny piece of bone crushed its way through the vertebra, shattering it to pieces. “That… was a bit easier than I thought it would be.” She said and did a little curtsey to her goblin audience, setting off a barrage of amazed screams and screeches. “Good job digging this up! When it gets dark I’ll reward you with all the fire you can handle!” She declared grandly and shot up a fireball.

While the swarm of goblins were busy trying to deal with their excitement, Anastacia snuck through the crowd to their ‘castle’ with king. The newly made hole in the wall allowed them to finally enter and see what the goblins had done to the pile of rocks that was the throne mound. The entire area within the wall had been paved with flat stones and clay, and just like the wall, it was surprisingly well made and even had grooves that drained the rainwater to the edges. The mound itself had gotten an upgrade in the form of actual stairs; though slightly uneven, they were easy to climb and seemed sturdy.

“This is a lot better than I hoped, can’t wait to see what they do with the roof.” Anastacia said and sat down on the tree stump that was her throne. “Is it okay if I ask them to dig up the whole whatever is buried over there? It’d give them something to do for a while and we could just check back on them after the whole Mournvalley thing is settled.”

King nodded and sat down on his throne.

“You’ll come with me, right? I really don’t want to go there alone, but it’s too risky to take anyone made of meat.” She asked and held Kings hand. “Part of me wants to just wipe out everyone there, on both sides, but I don’t need any more of them coming after me or you guys. So it’s better just let Coquelicot have the damn thing and hope she keeps her word about not bothering us ever again. The number of necromancers in the world stays roughly even at all times, and with so many of us dying recently, there will be a bunch of new necromancers outside of Mournvalley for the first time in a good while. I imagine she’ll be busy hunting them down for a few years at least.”

Anastacia took out some cookies from her bag and stuffed them in her face while trying to figure out whether she had some responsibilities as the queen or if she should just wait for the goblins to come to her with their problems. The latter seemed like the better option here, since she could also observe and help with the pillars from her throne, if the group responsible for them started working instead of just dancing on the logs. She also had Ivory’s book with her, so if nothing happened, she could just read a few more chapters if she got really bored. But her sleepiness from earlier was making a comeback, and it was time to see how well her throne was suited for napping.