In the forgotten depths of the Porfield Kingdom lay a swamp steeped in perpetual gloom. A thick, wet fog clung to the landscape, a suffocating shroud that muted the world.
Amidst this murk, a tower rose, its pale stone gleaming with a faint, unnatural luminescence against the oppressive gray. To the rare traveler who glimpsed it from afar, it was known as the Ivory Tower, a name both beautiful and terribly misleading.
Travelers would avoid those swamps. Sunlight could not go through the fog, and it was home to numerous magical creatures. Beasts that preyed on humans the same way humans preyed on deers and rabbits. Scavenger crows, dire wolves, murlocs, gigantic spiders, fire antmen...Those creatures could kill knights, not to mention regular soldiers or civilians.
Despite being very late in the evening, several rooms emitted more lights than others.
In one of them, hunched on a stool not fit for firewood, was Gurk.
A goblin of fifteen winters, his dark greenish, almost grey skin showed in the candlelight. He bent over a thick, sinister tome. His clawed hand, clumsy around a stolen writing brush, painstakingly copied the complex symbols. Though two years had passed since his soul was violently grafted into this flesh, the dissonance still screamed behind his eyes.
Memories of another world, one of electric cars and global trade, intruded like shards of glass. His hand jerked. A fat, ugly blot of ink erupted on the precious, coarse goatskin.
"Festering mud!" he hissed, the curse guttural in his native tongue
His brow furrowed, a landscape of green wrinkles. Small fists clenched, knuckles white against his skin. The urge to shriek, to smash the pot, to tear the parchment, was a physical pressure in his throat. He mastered it, but only just, swallowing the rage like a bitter pill. In this place, noise attracted attention, and attention was a prelude to pain.
This body, this life, was not his.
The original Gurk, a creature of simple fears and hungers, had perished in a drainage channel, and Lewis, a soul from a world without magic, had washed into the vacant shell. He retained nothing but his fractured consciousness and a debilitating confusion. Merging with the goblin's residual instincts had granted him the crude language and survival knowledge. Without it, the guttural speech would have been an insurmountable prison.
Yet the price was this relentless, soul-deep ache. Two years later, the pain was tolerable.
Here, he was Gurk. Only Gurk. A sniveling, green-skinned slave in the bowels of the Ivory Tower, property of Apprentice Magus Tyrius. To the outside world, even a slave to a Magus might seem a step above chattel. Those within knew better. It was a sentence to an existence of terror.
A slave's duties were a litany of horrors: scrubbing glassware stained with unnameable residues, mopping floors where arcane symbols were sometimes etched in blood, tossing rancid meat to shrieking wolves in pits, and, worst of all, serving as raw material.
Fortunately, his intellect as a goblin, much superior to the average human, made him interesting in Tyrius' eyes. It was not acknowledgement, but rather, curiosity from his end.
Despair, cold and heavy as swamp water, threatened to pull him under.
Then, a sound. Not from the swamp, not from the tower. From inside his own skull.
[Beep! Biological energy has reached the required threshold. Biochip, serial number XYIPOT53, initiating...]
Gurk froze, a stifled sound catching in his throat.
The Chip. The ghost in his machine, silent for two long years of anguish, choosing this moment of utter wretchedness to stir. After a moment of whirring silence, an alien, melodious voice, devoid of all life, spoke within his mind.
"Host detected. Establishing database... please wait..."
A flicker of awe cut through the fear. It recognized him. This… this thing from a world of science, acknowledging his goblin body. After two years, he had begun to doubt that he had even lived on Earth. But this biochip, sole reminder of who he used to be, proved that he was not just Gurk.