Cold.
It was a first thing he experienced.
The icy air rubs over the skin which was not his own. Krim was drifting in the consciousness that was caught in pieces of memory and perception till something sharp shot at the back of his eyes and woke him up.
He opened them.
Darkness.
Not black, but gray and misty, as it were, light fighting to live. Water came trickling down jagged stone over his head, and every drop reverberated in the narrow cave. There was the taste of moist air, metallic, and something much less pleasant.
A foul stench.
Rot.
Sweat.
Old blood.
Unwashed bodies.
The scent struck him such a great way he gagged.
"What--!" he made an attempt to speak, but the result was a croak of guttural roughness.
"...Griiik?"
He froze.
That wasn't his voice.
He stood up, but to his dismay, his hands were shaking at his weight.
His balance felt off.
Too low down against the ground, too light, too... not right.
In a bid to stabilize himself, he held out his hands to the dim light which was coming out somewhere deeper into the cave.
Small.
Thin.
Clawed.
And green.
"...No. No, no, no."
The beat of his heart became faster and it sounded as though it wanted to break. He looked down at himself. His body, his skin, his size.
Short limbs.
Lean, wiry torso.
Green from head to toe.
And..
He paused.
With a slow, almost fearful look he peeped down.
"...You've got to be kidding me."
The thing between his legs was, proportionately,... wildly out of place, in an animal barely three feet in height. It was not sexual--it was disorienting, absurd and physically worrying.
He poked it with a claw.
Still there.
Still too big.
Still very real.
"Griik!?"
(Why is this the one constant through reincarnation!?)
He felt panic--crazy and mad.
With a wallow of a rough cave-wall he scrambled back. The motion startled one of the animals lying next him.
A goblin.
A little green ugly goblin, with long ears and a lumpy nose. It squeeked with the itch of the belly, and rolled to scratch again. Another goblin somewhere in the cave gave a loud grunt and dripped on the ground.
Four of them.
No--five, he thought, as his eyes focused.
Everyone was lying around in his dishevelled heap.
All stinking like anything he had ever smelled.
All... his kind now.
He put a clawed hand to his head to endeavour to compose himself.
Okay. Stop. Think. What's happening? Did someone drug me? Kidnap me? Mutate me? Am I hallucinating?
And the stone floor and the smell and the feeling of this strange body all were too real.
Another goblin snored. Loudly.
and thereupon, without much thought, a slight intuition pulled him. As a whisper on the back of his mind.
He trailed, not knowing, in need of explanations.
Status.
Than, his vision was distorted a moment and a small projection came before his mind. Weak, pale, hardly beyond a hint of information.
Name: Krim
Species: Goblin
Just two lines.
But they were enough.
The truth slammed into him.
Cold. Heavy. Unmistakable.
I reincarnated, he said to his own mind--but he instead said another guttural croak, griiik.
The term reverberated within him conclusively.
Reincarnated.
Into a world he didn't know.
Into an animal that was the lowest of the low by the standards of humans.
A monster hunted for sport.
An entity not much more than a wild beast.
His breath shuddered.
This is real. I'm not dreaming. I died... and woke up as a goblin.
The cave in which he was enclosed seemed even smaller. The water dripping is more vehement. It is less palatable to smell. All the details that lay upon him sank in at once.
He clasped his hands in the ground and won the ground. And whisper slowly in his mind.
"Okay. Calm down.....
...
Fantasy stories are written about this by people all the time"