Turning a group of unruly young goblins into disciplined soldiers might be the most challenging task I have ever faced, thought Arnith.

Without Ama's help in translating what he wanted from them, he would have never overcome the most basic of instructions, even so, he had to implement encouraging impacts with the back end of his spear often to keep them in form.

For three nights now he had kept them at it, taking breaks only for food and rest.

In the beginning, Arnith had thought to take a pause after some hours and continue the next night, but the goblins had soon enough begun to find ways to cause mayhem if left untended.

He had realized that he needed them to be not only soldiers but also a cornerstone to build a society on to. These eight would be molded into beings that would keep their decorum at all times and would also expect it from others.

In the first phase of their training, there could be no free time. They would train, work, study, and also rest together.

"Name the first tenet of the Dominion Guard!" Arnith said as he walked behind the line of goblins.

"Serve the Master." The goblins said in unison, though their pronunciation was still haphazard.

Arnith made sure that the first rule he would install into them, made them loyal to him before anything else. It would hopefully keep away any troubles later.

"Left turn!" the goblins turned from a line into a file. Arnith was rather proud of how none of the goblins missed the order and turned in unison. He had spent hours teaching them about right and left on the first night and still at times some of them would be confused about it, but there was no getting around it.

"Name the second tenet of the Dominion Guard!"

"Serve the Dominion."

"Guard rest!"

The unit filed out and sat down in a circle looking outward.

Arnith hoped he was instilling good behaviors in them, he had never been a soldier himself and had only a general idea of what he should be doing.

Mostly they had been practicing movements and such, all the while having them recite the few tenets and base laws he had come up with. His idea was to keep the goblins at constant alertness and instill into them a ready state that could receive instructions at a moment's notice.

Weapons practice would have to start soon, but he was not too worried about it, it would come at its own time. He wanted to have completed a complement of spear, shield, and dagger for at least half of them before beginning. Having the goblins individually proficient was far less important in his eyes, than having them work in tandem. A shield wall would be the greatest edge he could give them over their neighbors.

He had managed to outfit them all with obsidian daggers, the amount of the material they had already was sufficient for that purpose, but they had only enough usable bones for two shields and one spear, which were at present still hardening for another night.

He had made sure that the trainees were present at the making of the equipment, though they had only been partially useful in the crafting since they needed to be shown everything step-by-step. At least the grinding of bone into powder had been easy enough to instruct, so in that time-consuming task, there had been another eight sets of hands to put to use.

Arnith felt that his mind had slipped, and noticed only cause the lull had given one of the youths enough time to start to think that he could whisper to the goblin next to him without the elf noticing.

Arnith stood in the middle of the circle, so it was simple for him to give a light tap with the nose of his boot into the tender area above the pelvis of the foolhardy goblin.

The initiate grunted but fell silent afterward, the lesson was not new to him.

"Name the third tenet of the Dominion Guard!"

"Serve the law."

"Good."

Arnith felt that it was time to stop parading around for the moment.

"Initiates, fall in on me." The elf said and began to walk toward the waterfall.

Nearing the waterfall Arnith noticed that some goblins were working on something next to where the water sprayed onto the cliffside.

Hopper was jumping around while Tokki and the two former slaves were digging a small ditch into the ground.

"Ho there, what are you up to?" Arnith asked as he arrived

Hopper turned to the elf, "The little shrooms are ready. They whisper to me. They say that they are good mushrooms and will grow into big tasty ones if they have water and if they have soft dirt and goblin poop."

Arnith had suspected that the purpose of the shrooms was to replant them, but the way that the shaman had gone over the handling of them, he thought he might have been mistaken. He had also thought that the smaller ones might be some kind of hallucinogenic shrooms that the lunatic wanted to hoard for himself.

"Why haven't we planted them before, surely the less time they are out of the ground the better?" Arnith asked.

Hopper looked at the elf, his head cocked to the side for a moment, before he sprang toward him.

Getting close to his side, Hopper whispered conspiratorily, "I share this secret of greatest goblin shamans with master yes." Hopper took a look around so nobody else heard in. "Mushroom spirits have big self-picture yes, think they are most important of all living things, say they began life and will end it all later when they feel like getting around to it. Too important to move to a new place, think the new home smell wrong, has bad air condition. So shaman needs to put shroom where it is dry for little time, only piss on shroom a little, sometimes."

Hopper paused to snigger at his own joke.

"Then mushrooms know not to whine and will grow where shaman tells them, goblin at the top now, shroom at the bottom, Haha." Hopper finished.

Arnith did not know how to take that, for him it sounded like some ridiculous superstition, but he kept his opinions to himself, at the end of the day, he was the foreigner and what did he know about the minds of mushrooms.

"You are sure, they can grow here?" He asked.

"Yes, Yes, no problem, just make a pond, maybe put some poop in the water sometimes, will work, yes."

Arnith looked at how the three goblins with reasonable minds were making a small channel. Tokki was the only one with a tool, which seemed like a femur bone that had an obsidian ax head tied to it, but the others seemed not to mind going at it with their hands.

The direction where they were going with it seemed to be a small incline in the ground, some fifteen meters ahead.

"Alright initiates, time to work." He said to the juveniles who had been standing a little distance behind him and with the but of his spear, he drew a line in the dirt along where the channel should go. "Start digging."

The youths were a little confused about what he wanted from him, because of the ever-present language barrier, but with the aid of Hopper, they soon were put to the task.

At first, a couple of them tried to use their daggers to help with the digging, but he forbade it, as it would dull the glass.

With the addition of the initiates, the work went relatively fast and after an hour there was a shallow pond on the south side of the waterfall.

When the incline became full, Arnith had another, much shallower ditch made to regulate the overflow back into the canyon, so they wouldn't flood the whole area.

After the water level had become stable, Hopper went around the pond and planted the shrooms, just next to the edge, all the while muttering to them.

Arnith was pleasantly surprised by the innovation that the goblins were displaying. Both Hopper's initiative in securing the little mushrooms for planting, as well as finding that Tokki had made a tool without his instruction, made his shoulders relax slightly.

Arnith had felt like he needed to be everywhere at all times for things to develop, but the holding was beginning to have a life of its own.

With the work on the pond done, Arnith led the goblins into the cave behind the waterfall.

Inside the cave, there were now two separate fires going, one was still in the same area as before, near to the entrance to the left side of the cave, next to where the stores were kept. The other fire burned further deep, where the cave began to turn. The addition of the second fire gave the place another dimension in many ways, in addition to bringing some light to the deeper areas, no longer did the cavern seem a shelter of happenstance that lost its life the moment it's few inhabitants stepped out for an errand.

"Greetings Ama." the elf said as they approached the first fire.

"Greetings, Master. The second meal is ready to eat." The young matriarch informed him.

"That is good."

Having two communal meals each night had been one of the ideas that Arnith was most proud of, it gave the holding a sense of time and an order to the tasks that the inhabitants had to accomplish. Time was an abstract concept in the underground, without the light of the sun to dictate the order of the day, and with the absence of any time-telling device, making a community work well together was extremely difficult. Arnith knew that he would need to find a more proficient way to keep time, but having the two meals and then a common sleeping regimen was the best he could do for now.

The meals also had the effect of working well as meetings, with the herding of the juveniles taking up most of Arniths time he could not go and see what the individual goblins were up to at any time.

Arnith commanded the initiates to sit at the fire in a half-circle and began to give out portions to each of them, as he had done at every meal.

He was adamant that the distribution of the portions should be done by him personally if he was present, believing that it would help cement his place in the hierarchy, but also taking the last portion for himself was a lesson in leadership he hoped that they would learn.

After he and the initiates had taken their share, the rest was given out by Ama, as the leader of the lower casts. Arnith had not told her how to go about it, but he was pleased to see that she made a point at Tokki being first in line.

"How much food do we have left," Arnith asked Ama.

"Five more meals after this one, Tokki brings in much meat, but less than we eat."

With two meals a night, it would not last them long, even if Tokki and the two workers kept bringing in as much as they had been, they were at a deficit and in about four days they would run flat.

Arnith knew that they would have to go for another harvesting expedition. He was loathe to bring the initiates out of Brightwater as they were far from ready, but with the extra carrying capacity, they would not have to venture out again so often.

"Two nights from now, we will go out to get more mushroom." He announced after considering their need.

"Tokki, can you see if you can make some more sacks for the trip?"

"Yes, Master." The diminutive goblin answered.

Finished with the meal, Arnith rose and turned once more toward Ama.

"I will take the initiates to work in the back of the cave, for a little while, and then we can begin with the lessons."

"Yes, Master." The matriarch said with a slight bow to her head.

Arnith made a wave with his hand and walked further into the cave, with the trainees following behind.

The young goblins had begun to whisper during the meal and Arnith had let them, as long as they did not raise their voices, but now he shushed them again.

They made their way over to the second firepit. the purpose of this one was to give heat to the bedding area of the initiates, there were piles of dried moss around it for that purpose, but also a small store of the stuff for feeding the fire with.

Arnith fed the fire as he passed by and the light went up in the area by a small margin.

Beyond the sleeping piles, was a vertical cave wall, which was the reason, why he had come here.

Arnith took the but end of his spear and drew two rectangular areas on the wall, the bone made small grooves on the wall, just enough to make the shapes out.

"The task is to make sleeping chambers."

The goblins looked at him with confused faces. Arnith made a note to add some words to the vocabulary the goblins were going to learn later during their study time.

"Dig inside here," he ordered and tapped each area with his spear.

Having had a similar order just a couple of hours before, the goblins soon got to the task.

Arnith stood a little off and observed the goblins at the task, they began to claw at the wall and managed to dig into it slowly.

A few minutes after beginning the task, one of the goblins stepped away and approached the elf.

"Master." The goblin said, with his head bowed.

"Yes?" The elf answered, in an inquisitive voice. This was the first time any of the goblins had initiated a conversation with him.

"Can I bring tool?" The goblin asked, still with his head bowed.

Arnith observed the young goblin, to him they all looked much the same, scraggy haired and scrawny bodies. They all had only loincloths to cover their genitals and the daggers he had issued them with, and with half of their faces covered with masks, it was hard to differentiate between them. This one he saw had one of his ears cut in half but otherwise was much the same.

The elf hesitated to answer, he liked the initiative and the form in which the goblin had asked for permission, but he also was suspicious, he had spent so much of energy, in herding them together and getting them to shut up, that he feared the little trickster might just runoff, to avoid the menial task.

"Go!" he finally said and the goblin fled toward the entrance of the cave.

Arnith began counting in his head, figuring that if he got to a hundred, there would be a need to go look for him.

At fifty-seven the initiate returned, with a rock in his hands. It looked like a round stone, that had been broken in half a couple of times.

The tool was much more effective in breaking apart the cave wall and so Arnith made the initiate go and gather more of them, trusting him to return.

"Name the first tenet of the Dominion Guard!" Arnith began again after a little while.

"Serve the Master." The initiates replied.