The Worst Kobold Chapter 1: Storyweaver Interlude #1 - Introduction

Read chapter 1 of The Worst Kobold by Thalaas on NovelPedia.

Good day one and all. I'm the Storyweaver. I'm here to tell you a story that happened years ago, about Fluke. The worst kobold. One might wonder why I'd tell a tale about a kobold who had failed his entire life, but I believe his journey is one we can all learn from. So please, take a seat, and let me start us off... Now then, you probably know what kobolds are. You’ve seen them around your village, your town, your city. Maybe working in the fields harvesting the fall crops or digging a sewage ditch to haul away the local waste. Maybe, if your family is wealthy enough, you have one or more working as servants. They are rather versatile and hardworking critters: gardeners, cooks, laborers and more. But if you don’t know? Kobolds are the small, reptilian-like creatures you see scurrying around in the background of every decent-sized human settlement. At adulthood, they are around two heads shorter than most humans, about the size of a young teenage child. They come in a multitude of colors. Scales of browns and greens, reds, oranges, and greys. Even the odd pink one here and there. They have longer snouts with sharper teeth similar to that of a wolf. They posses long thick tails jet out a couple feet behind them. Most have horns on their head, or protruding ridges of bones around their eyes and forehead. They walk on two legs, but they are a digitigrade species. That means they walk on the balls of their feet with their heels backwards, like that of a dog. Now the kobolds you see around your human society with the runed collars on? Are slaves. Those magical collars around their neck show that they are destined for a lifetime of servitude. Well, most humans wouldn’t say they were slaves. Since they aren’t humans, they aren’t people. You can’t enslave a kobold, any more than you can enslave the chicken that lays eggs or the oxen that pulls your plow. Sure, they can smelt iron for the blacksmith or work the lathe at the carpenters. But they aren’t really people. If we thought of them as people, well, then human society might feel a little bad for their actions. It's just a necessary evil to keep society functioning. Those kobolds you see are just a fraction of all the kobolds out there though. Most of them, the ones not forced to work for the humans, live underground. Their homes are a vast network of tunnels, chiseled out by generations of kobolds that came before them. These underground paths could run for hundreds of miles in any direction deep into the earth. It’s said more than one intruder has snuck into a kobold colony to loot a dragon’s horde, and died of hunger trying to find their way out. They’d end up being eternally lost in a confusing unending spiral. Not the kobolds though, all of them having a near perfect instinct of travelling under ground coupled with a natural dark vision. Many kobolds don't see the sun for months, or even years as they worked down below. Not that they minded of course. They were quite happy to work deep beneath the soil, under their dragon masters, mining out the riches for their powerful lords. Every kobold had their place in this grand machine, on a never-ending mission to improve the empires of their powerful dragon protectors. Well, except for one. Fluke. Fluke? Was just the worst kobold. Just looking at him, you could tell he was wrong in so many ways. For starters, he was incredibly timid. Soft spoken. Always afraid to speak up or show initiative. He always seemed to be trying to make himself as invisible as possible in the thousands of other kobolds around him. Trying to slip between the shadows wasn’t very easy for Fluke, as hard as he tried. For starters? He was massively obese. Most kobolds weighed about eighty pounds. Maybe a hundred, if you were a beefy warrior or muscular ore hauler. Fluke meanwhile tipped the scales at well over fifty thousand pounds. This was just a rough estimate as they had no idea how to accurately weigh him. He was also horribly disfigured. He was three times