Chapter 1

The chapter opens with the narrator recalling his first living goblin and first shipwreck, foretelling future disasters: a fallen city, a false god’s betrayal, and the First Lanza’s doomed stand. He sails as a new recruit aboard the leaky troop ship Rain Queen’s Dagger, among many soldiers and too few escorts after a recent sea battle.

They pass through shattered masts, burning firejelly, and floating corpses of kynd and goblins. The narrator notes goblins’ unrotting bodies, their use in training, and the cultivated hatred taught to war corvids.

He spots a living goblin trapped by wreckage alongside a wounded human sailor. A knightly woman urges rescue, but the seasoned captain refuses, fearing a nearby goblin juggernaut. Archers on the troop ships loose arrows; after misses, one strikes the goblin, which rasps in pain.

The shipwrecked woman, bleeding but resolute, crawls across the spinning debris. Despite the goblin’s feeble snapping, she pins it, rips out the arrow, and drives it into its eye, stirring to finish it. The narrator, versed in training-yard and estate cruelties, is shocked by the sudden, intimate brutality.

Cheers rise from the troopmules as the woman waves, stained in green goblin blood. In a final turn, the wreckage heaves and sinks, dragging both woman and goblin beneath. Silence replaces celebration as the narrator marks his first witnessed deaths of both species, concluding that goblins and humans are bound together in death.