Zarkhi goblins

The Zarkhi are the blood-species of Clan Zarkhûn, and outside that clan and that clan’s keep nobody has ever met one. When the clan was first read out of a book, Mikhail, whose study is Mól history, had no idea what a Zarkhi goblin was. That was the first thing anyone learned about them.

Clan Zarkhûn

Zarkhûn were the engineers, metallurgists and war-crafters of the Mól Empire. Most of the finest weapons and armor in it came off their forges, and they could turn out poor ones in volume when volume was what a war wanted. The siege engines were theirs. They did not work metal alone: they took their metallurgy to Saytar’s alchemists and came back able to make things neither of them could have made.

They were known for their tempers. Zarkhi blood was said to boil, and the outbursts and fits of violence that came of it were not held against them. They were held to be the reason the work was as good as it was, anger honed and hammered through rather than let out.

Wraithblade Keep was theirs, and the Wraithblade Khopesh that came off its altar is their relic. They made it before the curse was in it.

What They Look Like

Small, and then smaller than that: compressed little bodies under heads too large for them, on necks as thick as a hobgoblin’s, which is where a hobgoblin’s neck would sit if a hobgoblin were a third the size. Hairless, apart from tufts on the forearms and shins that are not quite fur. Ears the shape of a hobgoblin’s but much larger and flopped over to the side. The eyes are what everyone reports first: enormous, out of all proportion to the head, closer to an insect’s than to anything with a spine. The mouths are large too, and every tooth in them is a canine. If there are molars, they are too far back in the jaw to see.

Calm, they are almost endearing. Nobody has met them calm.

They are quick and light and tend to move first in a fight. Their tongue is G’lin, the goblin-kin language, though in the one fight anybody has recorded they used no words at all. Whether they are kin to the hobgoblins and hobbins anyone knows today is hard to tell by looking, and looking is all that has been done.

Campaign Updates

Ten of them were counted in the fight for the map room when the Valiant Few came over the keep wall at midnight. Their weapons were broken swords, axes chipped to ruin, wood lashed together to keep it from coming apart, planks with jagged metal driven through them. There is real ingenuity in that and they are still not good weapons. Their armor was leather and quilting and scraps of metal layered over them rather than sewn or fitted.

They fought far better than the gear suggests, moving in concert, covering one another, closing a door and running rather than throwing themselves forward. That was the sword’s doing. Its curse leaves a residue on whatever it once worked through, and the Khopesh had been gone from those walls for years.

The party subdued rather than killed where it could, because Koa would not have bound prisoners put down and pushed instead for scattering them off the keep. Several died all the same, and the rest were driven off, so they are loose and not dead. Nobody has been back.

Their work outlived them. A pair of Mól calipers carried out of the keep proved, once the dirt was brushed off, to carry a Zarkhûn maker’s stamp, which Hinta recognized on sight.

No Zarkhi is named anywhere, not a chief, not a smith, not one of the ten. How they live, how many there are, what they eat and how long they last were never written down, nor whether a single one of them survives anywhere in Idir outside the keep they no longer hold.