After what happened with the mouth, I decided it was best to try my luck with the monsters. After all, being a talking pig, wasn't I closer to them than to humans?

As I moved away from the King's Barrier, the world gradually came to its senses: the chattering heads went silent and became less and less frequent until I was once again walking through a more or less normal forest.

Thanks to my superb sense of smell, I quickly reached the cave where the wild smell of freedom of the green monsters was coming from. I was afraid because maybe they were not friendly either and wanted to eat me alive.

I hid in a thicket of foliage because I decided that I would observe them before taking the first step. After a while, a goblin comes out of the cave and, feeling the sun's rays, wakes up with a horse's yawn.

His gaze falls on a butterfly and he begins to chase it across the small meadow that sat in front of the cave. He is really excited by the flight of the insect, to the point that he laughs and even claps his hands.

Seeing that, I thought that maybe the goblins are not evil and everything I knew about them was just dirty propaganda from the humans. Maybe they were the bad guys in the story and the green monsters were just victims.

I decided to come out of the bush to introduce myself and emerge from the foliage in the least threatening way possible because maybe if I do it quickly, he could think I am an enemy and attack me.

“Good morning, monster friends!”

As soon as I spoke, the goblin shout out a howl of joy and ran wildly towards me with such intensity that I thought it was going to tear me to pieces with its claws. But nothing of the sort, he grabbed me by the hands and carried me into the cave.

During the two hours I spent in the company of the monsters, I came to one conclusion: they are not evil. For a few terrible moments, when he grabbed me and dragged me into the cave and I saw that in the middle was a large bubbling cauldron over a fire, I thought they were going to throw me in and eat me for dinner.

Fortunately it wasn't like that, the goblin introduced me to his three companions and they all shouted with joy and clapped their hands, dancing around me as they laughed their heads off.

Then the monsters set out to find out what I liked to eat, and it didn't take them long to realise that I liked everything: an apple, a piece of cheese, stale bread and cold strips of dried meat.

In the end I ended up with a belly so swollen that it was hard to breathe and I fell asleep on the lap of a belly-scratching monster. If life with monsters was going to be like that, I thought I was going to be the happiest pig in the world.

But every dream has an end, a scream woke me up and I see the monster who chased butterflies entering the cave. He was walking with difficulty and for a few moments I thought he was drunk, but then I noticed that he had half his head smashed in and, as he fell into the mouth of the cave, he was already dead.

I was horrified to discover Lucia at the mouth of the cave. The white armour with the image of a lily of the same colour on the chest was splattered with blood, as was her pale face: from the chin, a little at the mouth, across the nose, a few drops around the eyes, which looked coldly at me.

“Lucia...” I said, trembling with fear.

“So you really are a monster,” she said with contempt.

Two goblins run in her direction, wielding no weapons other than their claws, and Lucia killed them with little effort.

“Don't kill them, they're good!” I moaned, but it was too late: the corpses lay at their feet. The green monsters would never laugh or dance or clap their hands again.

“Good...?” -Lucia murmured, coming closer to me, and my heart broke as I realised that she wanted to hurt me. The mace wept blood and left a macabre trail at every step.

From of the darkness, something shot out and hit him on her left side and a howl of pain erupted from her mouth. It was boiling oil, oil that ate part of his face and blinded her eye, he put his hand to his face and used his faith to try to heal the wound.

The one who attacked him was the last of the goblins, which had in his trembling hands a frying pan now empty of oil. Seeing its attack fail, the green monster barked in an attempt to intimidate Lucia.

She picked up the mace from the ground and with a single blow she ended the life of the last of the goblins. She stared at the corpse of the wretched creature, the right side of its face ravaged by the oil, with a burn that was barely healed by her faith.

“This is your fault, monster...” she said.

“What...?” I replied, stepping backwards until I hit the wall of the tiny cave.

“Sabela also knew that you were a monster...” said Lucia and smiled sadly.

“I didn't even know it until today!” I shouted at her, but she didn't listen to me at all.

“You... your sister... have been making fun of me all my life,” she said, and before I could respond, she attacked me with her mace.

What happened next is not very clear to me. I didn't want to die; I didn't want to hurt Lucia either. But in the end I did it, I did it unintentionally. My friend's arm was paralysed in the air by three tentacles that emerged from my back and, before I could do anything to avoid it, they cut her arm as if her flesh was made of paper and three pieces of flesh fell to the ground.